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the-conversation-pod · 8 months ago

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Let's Go, Lesbians! (A Japanese GL Episode)

And we're back! This week we're back with @ginnymoonbeam to talk about Toxic Yuri in Chaser Game W and Food Yuri in She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat. Join us as we talk about pouring champagne on your ex's head, slapping your mean boss and her big ass red outfit into next week, choosing yourself over your cruel family, becoming the best gay you can be, and marshmallow parties.

Also, because we did not talk about it in the recording, we want to repost Rina Sawayama's Chosen Family song because this scene was so powerful in SLTCSLTE.

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Timestamps

The timestamps will now correspond with chapters on Spotify for easier navigation.

00:00:00 - Welcome 00:01:15 - Introduction 00:02:45 - Chaser Game W: A Flop 00:18:31 - She Loves To Cook, and She Loves To Eat 00:23:14 - SLTCSLTE: The Women 00:34:18 - SLTCSLTE: Yako and The New House 00:39:17 - SLTCSLTE: The Food and Nagumo 00:43:02 - SLTCSLTE: Depictions of Intimacy 00:50:53 - SLTCSLTE Ratings and Outro

The Conversation Transcripts!

Thanks to the continued efforts of @ginnymoonbeam as transcriber, and @lurkingshan as an editor and proofreader, we are able to bring you transcripts of the episodes.

We will endeavor to make the transcripts available when the episodes launch, and it is our goal to make them available for past episodes (Coming soon thanks to @wen-kexing-apologist). When transcripts are available, we will attach them to the episode post (like this one) and put the transcript behind a Read More cut to cut down on scrolling.

Please send our volunteers your thanks!

00:00:00 - Welcome

NiNi

Welcome to The Conversation About BL, aka The Brown Liquor Podcast.

Ben

And there it is. I’m Ben.

NiNi

I’m NiNi.

Ben

And we’re your drunk Caribbean uncle and auntie here sitting on the porch in the rocking chairs.

NiNi

Four times a year we pop in to talk about what’s going on in the BL world.

Ben

We shoot the shit about stories and all the drama going into them. I review from a queer media lens.

NiNi

And I review from a romance and drama lens.

Ben

So if you like cracked-out takes and really intense emotional analysis…

NiNi

If you like talking about artistry, industry, and the discourse…

Ben

And if you generally just love simping…

NiNi

There is a lot of simping on this podcast…

Ben

We are the show for you!

00:01:15 - Introduction

Ben

And we're back. This week, we're talking about lesbians, finally! And we brought a friend along.

NiNi

Say hi Ginny.

Ginny

Hello!

NiNi

Ginny is here with us and we are going to talk two Japanese GLs, Chaser Game W and She Loves to Cook and She Loves to Eat.

Ben, what did you think, like, sort of overarching about these two before we delve into the nitty gritty?

Ben

I thought Chaser Game W gave us a lot to anticipate early on, and unfortunately went in the direction we did not want it to go. Ended up being kind of a mess toward the end? I did not end up walking away too happy with it.

With She Loves to Cook and She Loves to Eat season 2, this time we had twenty 15-minute episodes and they had things to do and say with that time and I have a lot of things to say about that show. [laughs]

NiNi

Ginny, what are your overarching thoughts about these two shows?

Ginny

I had high hopes for Chaser Game W because I always want more toxic lesbians. [NiNi laughs] I want to see the girls get to be messy, I want to see complicated dynamics. And I did really enjoy the first couple episodes, but it kind of felt like the characterizations really fell apart as the series progressed, which was a big disappointment.

She Loves to Cook and She Loves to Eat was a delight. Every time I sat down to watch it, my heart was full and happy and warm.

00:02:45 - Chaser Game W: A Flop

NiNi

We always go from worst to first on this show, so let's start with Chaser Game W.

Ben, what is Chaser Game W about?

Ben

Chaser Game W is about a team of women at a game development studio in Japan who have been contracted to develop basically a demo for a GL adaptation, by a Chinese company named Vincent. It gets complicated by their project manager from the Chinese team, who clearly has beef with one of their team members and just spends most of the early show fucking with her because she's mad that they broke up in college. And then a bunch of other shit happens that is kind of weird.

NiNi

Okay, that's a hell of a description [laughs].

Ben

I'm sorry! Like, it starts off being a show that looks like it's playing into the complex dynamics about workplace power and possibly sexual harassment, and then kind of loses its way because it wants to be this mess of a story about lesbians with families and the difficult choices they have to make, and where do the husbands and children fit in this, and how does this play into career expectations? Bosses who might also be queer but evil queers?

And it's not necessarily a very coherent experience. There's a lot of ideas that sound good when you describe them to people, but in practice really weren't that satisfying to watch. This was not the Japanese GL experience I was hoping for.

NiNi

Ginny, what about you? What are your thoughts on Chaser Game W?

Ginny

It did seem like it was setting up to have some messages about not only the sexuality components, but also things about women in the workplace and being a mother and balancing those expectations… dealing with sexual harassment… all of that. But it didn't end up saying much that was meaningful to me about it, it just was like, ‘these are issues!’ If you try to draw any kind of conclusion from what the show is doing, you end up with some really messy messages.

The way that the evil queer boss came in was so funny to me. One of the selling points of this show is this strong femdom, woman in power exacting humiliation dynamic. But halfway through the show, we're resolving the relationship between the two women, so Fuyu, our previous femdom power boss, is not going to be that anymore. So we have to bring in a new one — and it just did not work for me.

NiNi

It was the dom getting dommed. It was like an inception of domming. It was a little strange. There were definitely some Chinese-Japanese dynamics in there. I don't have the cultural competency to pick up on entirely what they were doing, but it was pretty clear from the way that the show was operating. I don't know if it's stereotype, but it was clear that there was something going on there; my cultural competency in this area is not enough to figure out exactly what was going on there.

Ben

It was kind of weird seeing a Japanese show complaining about unrealistic expectations of Chinese developers? This is not a uniquely Chinese problem.

NiNi

I feel like it being set in gaming almost didn't matter to that side of things? They wanted to have this difference the show sees in working cultures be stark and to say something about that difference. But the supposed center of this, aside from the game and the development of the game, is a relationship between Fuyu and Itsuki. It's an extremely convoluted central story that just seems to serve as an excuse for why Fuyu, when she comes back to Japan, hates Itsuki so much.

The writing feels slightly unnecessarily complicated, but I actually rather enjoyed quite a lot of bits of this. I enjoyed, for example, the direction. I thought the camera was very assured, I thought it was very clear. I don't know if this is an original story or if it's coming from manga, but the direction is very very clear to me. I really enjoyed watching the camera move. The shots are really effective. But the story itself? It's not like I thought necessarily that… the story was badly told? I'm just not sure that it was the story that I wanted. Where we're going in the beginning with Fuyu, a mean lesbian comes back and is mean to her ex-girlfriend, I felt like, okay, that's where we're going. And then, suddenly, Fuyu is married and Fuyu has a daughter and there's all this stuff around the husband and Fuyu’s feelings, or not-feelings, about the husband. It got a little muddy.

But even with all of that, I think I probably enjoyed it more than you guys did. And I think part of the reason is that I binged it? So I didn't sit with a lot of these feelings or a lot of the confusion for very long.

Ben

It was not a fun week to week watch. As it started to deviate and get lost in itself, it was not fun to be like, 'oh right, this is where we were, all right, let's go and see how this week goes. Ohh… no. Okay.'

You asked about whether it's original or an adaptation. It is an adaptation. The original work is about power harassment, but I believe Itsuki’s character is a man? A lot about the show made sense once we realized that it was not an original queer story being adapted. A lot of it felt really tacked on to justify the drama and not really something that the writing really contextualized or dwelled on, at all.

Ginny

There were a lot of big character turns and big decisions made without a lot of grounding in why this character would make this choice. Once the mystery of their past is explained, you do understand why they reconcile suddenly, but then all of their choices afterwards just felt baffling to me. I'm not getting any kind of character journey. The show is like, well, this happens now, and then this happens now, and then they do this thing that you didn't expect. And I want to know why!

NiNi

I… feel like in some bits I was cottoning onto it, and then in some bits I was not. For example, when Itsuki starts to take care of Fuyu’s daughter, when she comes over and realizes that the husband's left and her daughter needs taking care of. I followed that bit of the character journey. I understood in some ways why, when the husband came back, Fuyu felt maybe guilty?

There was also, like, a little thing which I was really surprised didn't go anywhere. Early in the show the husband was video chatting with, I think his mother. And she says something like, 'you know, you have to be good to Fuyu. You're so lacking, and she is with you anyway.' that made me think that their marriage was lavender? I genuinely thought that they had some kind of arrangement or agreement — and then to find out later down the line that the husband actually was in love with her and was jealous of the thing that she had with Itsuki? That came out of nowhere for me. And then everything that followed on from there kind of didn't track, almost.

Did either of you get that feeling initially from the husband and were surprised or was that just me?

Ginny

My sense was that the husband had been perceived as not a good marriage prospect. Probably it was not earning a lot of money and had other loserish qualities or something. So my sense from the conversation was that that was what she was talking about. I certainly didn't ever get the sense that he was in love with her, exactly? Even when he's upset, it felt more to me kind of about pride. You can't have your wife sleeping around. That's an embarrassment. I don't think there were any deep feelings in that marriage.

NiNi

I don't even think either of them really had extremely deep feelings for their daughter. Like I think Fuyu loves her daughter, but in a distracted kind of way, almost? The only depth of feeling that I felt anywhere was between Fuyu and Itsuki, and even that was tied up in all this anger and bitterness and guilt and whatever else. That's a direction to go in for sure, but it really didn't make me understand why they wanted to be together, and then why they decided not to be together… and then in the end, why Fuyu comes back out of nowhere.

It's all muddled and mixed for me, especially the closer that we get to the end. But like I said, I don't think that I had as bad a time with it as other people might have.

Ben

I had a very bad time. [Ben and NiNi laugh]

This show was aggravating. We've been talking about this a lot on the show lately about how much work we think we should do for a show to like, meet them emotionally, where they're trying to take us. There are times when either the writing or the performance doesn't necessarily get you all the way there? And you kind of have to just feel it for the show. But this show just does not feel complete. There are a bunch of ideas that are fine on their own, like, ‘and then she comes in here and then she pours a fucking champagne on her head.’ That's an unhinged lesbian behavior that I have seen happen in person! So like, I totally believed that.

NiNi

Oh yeah.

Ben

But then Fuyu’s turn where she’s suddenly nice to other women in the company that they're in and stops being a huge dick to the other moms, that just doesn't really track? Like, what changed in that moment? I don't really know how we went there. They had her suddenly start being nice to them so they could be on the same team against Big Red.

NiNi

I'm so mad that you called her Big Red, but it kinda works. [Ben and NiNi laugh] I'm not gonna call her anything except Big Red now.

Ben

I did not remember what her character name was. Her name was Big Red.

Ginny

That's her name now, yep [laughs].

Ben

Like it was funny when Itsuki was like, 'Fuck off, Big Red' and knocked her ass down. [all laugh]

All these moments are like, well, that was amusing on its own, but it doesn't really come together as a coherent story unto itself. There’s this huge branching point later on where it's basically the supporting cast trying to seduce a guy to give them information to save the game, and that's happening separately from the drama with Itsuki, Fuyu, Fuyu’s husband, Big Red and all the drama going on there.

NiNi

I want to talk a little bit about the actual game development plot, because that stuff was wild. They're preparing whatever they have to do to develop this game, and along the way they're going through literal sexual harassment. There's a point in time that they're trying to get information from this artist. And this guy is a caricature of a sexual harasser, like at one point there are five of these female game developers in his house, and they're literally peeling this guy off of each other as he gropes them. And I'm just like, is this normal or is this exaggerated? I don't even know?

Ben

Actually, it felt like most of that was actually normal.

NiNi

That is terrifying.

Ben

The drama with the team felt pretty straightforward for me. You had women in the team having varied responses to the sexual harassment. One of them was like, 'I will absolutely not compromise myself and use sex to get ahead' and another one was like, 'I will, I got this for us.' [Ben and NiNi laugh] I thought that was fine. I didn't mind there being a character who is willing to use men's desire to advance her goals and her team’s goals. I liked that it wasn't required only for her to do that, that there were other people who didn't want to do it that way accomplishing things for their team. The up and down of, ‘is this game going to get developed or not, the expectations of our client keep changing, it seems to be for reasons well beyond us and other drama’ — that felt fairly normal for trying to get any sort of major creative endeavor with the expensive team off the ground. Most of the game development stuff tracked normally for me. Even the whole plot line about poaching talent and then dumping talent: that is a real problem right now. That sort of stuff mostly tracked for me. I wasn't that fussed about the game development stuff and the workplace conditions that they were working under.

It was the stuff about Fuyu and Itsuki's relationship and the motivations around them romantically, and other characters’ reactions to it, that is where I struggled the most with this. It wasn't a show that left you in a cool place at the end of an episode and picked up in a great place with the next episode. Spending two months watching this was not a great experience.

NiNi

I think my rating’s definitely going to be higher than you guys, so I'll go first.

Ben

Okay.

NiNi

I'm gonna say 7. To me, bits are cool and I can follow generally where this is going, and the bits that I thought were weird were not offensive. It wasn’t very good, but it wasn't terrible.

Ben

Ginny?

Ginny

I gave it a 5.5. 6 is my mad-I-watched-it threshold. Anything 6 or higher might be very bad, but I'm not mad I watched it. Below a 6 I'm kind of mad that I watched it. That's where this one landed for me.

Fuyu was very beautiful, and I did enjoy watching her every week. But when that's the nicest thing I have to say about a show, it's not good.

Ben

It gave this a 4. It is not recommended. I don't think this is a good lesbian story. I don't think this is a good game development story. I don't think it's a good workplace story. It is a mess. This was developed by the same person who made His the movie, so I am very confused how we ended up with something that absolutely failed on the queer front like this. I do not get it. When this show was confused, it lands on the wrong side of the coin a lot. And it felt like at the very last five minutes they were doing a shit ton of clean up. I don't think this show is worthwhile.

NiNi

That's gonna land us somewhere in the 5ish range overall?

Ben

Round it down, because it sucks! [all laugh] It gets a 5 from The Conversation.

NiNi

So that is officially a chop.

00:18:31 - She Loves To Cook, and She Loves To Eat

NiNi

All right. So we're gonna leave that behind and we're going to move on to She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat.

Ben, give us the synopsis. What is She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat about?

Ben

Okay, let me be much nicer now because this is one of my favorite shows now. So, [laughs] She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat is like the lesbian neighbor of What Did You Eat Yesterday? We have a young woman who's a programmer. She feels like she's like late 20s, early 30s. Her name is Nomoto. She runs like a food account on Instagram, and whenever she's in a bad mood and needs to work through some stuff, she ends up making too much food, and she has a small appetite, so it goes to waste. She has a neighbor who is a taller, bigger woman, and on a whim one night she invites her over to share food with her. And this is the beginning of their friendship that eventually becomes a more serious relationship.

Second season picks up with twice as many episodes, and boy did they need them. We spend this season with Nomoto and Kasuga befriending their new, younger woman neighbor. Nomoto becomes a full-time employee at her work and develops a more reliable friendship with Sayama. She also befriends her Twitter friend Yako, who is basically one of us. She loves her stories, she loves her little food, and she loves hearing about other people's drama and poking them to get their shit together. I love her so much.

It was a really delightful season watching these two grow closer, figure out what their relationship was going to be, and develop that into more as they dealt with some of their real personal and professional issues. I really, truly loved the season.

Ginny, you were fairly recent to watching this, so you watched the first and second season basically as one dedicated viewing experience. What was your experience engaging with this for the first time in the last month or so?

Ginny

It was very fun. I did this as my unwinding as I was moving in with my girlfriend who is the loves to eat in our relationship, where I'm the loves to cook. So it was a lovely experience. The two seasons flow so seamlessly into each other. Season 2 picks up right where season 1 left off so I'm kind of glad I did it this way. I think I might have been a little frustrated at the end of season 1, especially having to wait and not knowing if we'd get more, because they don't entirely confirm their relationship by the end of that? It's understood that they're very important to each other and they have this very meaningful place in each other's lives, celebrating holidays together, but they don't even start to have conversations about what their relationship is until we're a little ways into season 2. So I'm glad that I got to watch it all unfold as a single story.

So many details of, just the way that that develops between them felt so realistic to journeys that I've seen between two women who are close friends and realize that they might have romantic feelings for each other. All of the angsting you do about that, and the 'what does this mean' and the 'what does it even mean to love someone romantically instead of as just this very special, most importantest friend in the world,' — just so many little details were perfectly done and extremely relatable. It was just gorgeous.

Ben

NiNi, since you watched the first season and angsted with the rest of us about whether or not it was going to come back, and whether or not that second season was gonna be good, what were your overall impressions of the second season after you walked away from it?

NiNi

I loved it, but I knew I was going to love it. I had some angst in the middle of the season that we're probably gonna get to, not bad angst. Just, ‘oh, I wonder if they're doing this thing that I think that they're doing.’ But I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I love so much how the show expands in this season. The first season is very tightly focused, mostly on Nomoto and Kasuga, whereas this season expands outward to show you some of the other people in their life and show you them developing their relationships with these other people, some new, some not. I always love stories that show you the life that these people are living. So I thoroughly enjoyed this season, had a great time with it.

00:23:14 - SLTCSLTE: The Women

Ben

There were a lot of presentations of various women's issues that played out this season. Do the two of you have particular storylines that you especially enjoyed, or connected to?

Ginny

I love Nagumo's story. I think the one I connected to most was probably Kasuga, but I thought bringing in Nagumo as someone who could receive some mentorship from these two women and also [laughs] kind of help coach Kasuga through her feelings revelation, and relationship transition… it was a beautiful relationship and a wonderful addition, and the way that her character brings a different perspective on the whole nature of food and communal eating was also just a gorgeous touch.

Ben

What about you, NiNi? Did you have a particular plot line that you enjoyed or connected to?

NiNi

We got some stuff on the fringes about Sayama trying to date and looking to potentially get married, realizing and talking to Nomoto that she can't get married if she wants to, and then that leading Sayama to think about whether she even wants to get married. That resonated in a particular kind of way. It was a quiet little side runner, it didn't take up a lot of space in the story, but it did hit me. We end the season without really an answer from Sayama on that, but the fact that she started thinking about it? That resonated with me, for sure.

Ben

What I love about Sayama as a straight character in this narrative is: queer people don't fit the heterosexual mold, and loving queer people forces you to reckon with why we don't. And then that can often open up things for you, as well. I really loved her apology scene with Nomoto. Recognizing that her working through her own ambivalence about marriage is dismissive of the fact that it's not even an option available for Nomoto.

Ginny

You also have Kasuga's coworker, who's older and is getting a divorce after her children have grown up. Getting a divorce is extremely liberating for her. It really does show this kind of 360 view of heterosexual marriage not necessarily being right for all heterosexual women.

Ben

I think it's notable that when they show multiple older women working at this grocery store, they're all like, 'mm-mm, divorce was the right call for me, because I don't think it's right that I'm expected to take care of my husband's family and everybody else does nothing, and that's gonna be my entire existence.' And I love how explicit she was, she told Kasuga straight up: if you were my own daughter, who I do have, I would tell her the same thing, and I would say please live your life. Do not sacrifice your life for a bunch of other people who do not appreciate what you want for your life. Because Kasuga decided to sever ties with her family, because they did not respect her and they wanted her to just take care of them, and sacrifice anything she wanted for her life. It was really lovely that the show went out of its way to be explicit about that.

NiNi

Since we're already sort of diving into it, let's lean into that storyline. Kasuga left home a long time ago and decided to live her life. Kasuga has a brother who is the favored child, but Kasuga’s brother does nothing. Now Kasuga's parents are older and ill, and her grandparents are older and ill and need taking care of. And so Kasuga's dad has started looking for her now. He's like, 'Well, you're not married, whatever you're doing isn't important, you gotta come home and take care of everybody.' It only comes to her doorstep because her aunt gives her father both her number and address, because 'oh, you’re a family, you shouldn’t not talk to each other.' Her aunt thinks she's doing the right thing, but this is definitely not the right thing for Kasuga. Kasuga's father has never appreciated her as a person, has never cared about her as a person, has only focused on his son. And now he wants Kasuga to take care of him essentially until he dies. Kasuga really struggles with this. She wonders, is this my responsibility? Is this something that I have to do? Is she a bad daughter if she doesn't do this? What does this mean for her? Fujita tells her, 'Look, if you were my daughter, I would tell you do not go. You don't have a responsibility to give up your life for somebody else.'

All the conversations that Kasuga has with her father, she has them in her car. She does not talk to him when she is in her house, her safe space? She does not speak to her father in there. When she has decided that she's not going home, not just not going home, but never going home again, she sits in the car and has the conversation where she tells him, 'I'm not ever coming home. Don't contact me again.' And then she goes from the car straight to Nomoto. And Nomoto gets so furious on her behalf that she starts to cry. She's like, 'I can't believe that this man made you feel this way about yourself. He's a horrible person.' Basically, everything that Kasuga needed to hear, she got from Nomoto in that moment.

I am an eldest daughter. I have a fantastic relationship with my family. And any caregiving I do is of my own volition, and I am happy to do it. It is still tiring. It is still exhausting. Even when it is received with gratitude and happiness and love, it is hard to do. If you have to take care of people who don't care about you? You can feel like you're dying. I am certain about it. That expectation being placed on you is hard enough. To do it for people [who] do not love you — because I do not think Kasuga’s father loves her — is impossible. And so I had a lot of feelings about it while it was happening, but watching her say, 'No, I am not going to just let go of my entire life and everything that I want for this person.'

And then to have Fujita tell her, 'if you were my daughter,' which releases her from that burden of thinking about her mother — because that's the other part of the guilt that she's feeling. Not necessarily guilt towards her father, but the fact that if she doesn't come home, her mother's gonna have to do all of this. And she thinks about her mother all the time. It's just, it's so much. It's so deep. It's so intense. It's so delicious. And it's not what you expect to get out of a story that's told in little 15-minute episodes! It really isn't.

Ginny

I'm also an eldest daughter and feel so much of that. I spent my childhood, really, like Kasuga, very aware that there were a lot of things I was expected to give up. The way that that sinks into your brain… you just feel like, 'I am worth what I can do for people.'

What struck me the most in that conversation with Nomoto when Kasuga first tells her what she's done, is Nomoto begs her to keep living her life here where she's thriving, and to keep being happy. Through their whole relationship, Nomoto has taken such joy in Kasuga’s love of eating and just celebrated that this gives you pleasure and you're taking pleasure, and that's a wonderful thing. And in this moment, she kind of expands it to Kasuga's whole life. And she says, please don't ever go somewhere where you can't thrive, where you can't feel joy, where you can't feel loved, and yourself. To hear someone say that? I think I did cry in that scene. You need to hear someone say that. Someone who grew up like Kasuga needs someone who loves you begging you to take care of yourself and to do what brings you joy. The heart of their relationship and what draws them together is how deeply Nomoto celebrates Kasuga taking care of herself and being taken care of and experiencing pleasure. It's beautiful.

Ben

I really enjoyed the way that continued in the whole strawberry debacle.

NiNi

[laughs] The strawberry thing. It was so funny. [Ginny laughs] It was so cute, too. It was really cute. This is after they've started dating, but their relationship hasn't changed very much. And so she asked Nagumo, is there something that she should be doing? Which I found adorable.

Ginny

It's so real.

Ben

It's funny, too, because Nagumo admits she doesn't have much experience either [Ginny laughs], and is like, 'You could, like, go do things you both like doing? Together? That sounds right.' [all laugh]

NiNi

It’s so funny. And that's when she sees this flyer for the strawberry picking. And she's like, 'Oh, okay, I like strawberry picking. I should ask Nomoto to go strawberry picking with me. That's like the kind of thing that people do when they're in relationships, right?'

Ben

'That's, like, a food thing. She likes to make food. This might be fun!' Kasuga doesn't really say what she wants to do, she just hands it to Nomoto and is like, 'Hey, I thought this might be fun for us to do' and Nomoto’s like, 'Oh, yeah, that sounds great. We can maybe go vegetable picking and then make some stuff afterwards.' And Kasuga doesn't really speak up about what she maybe wanted.

Late in the day Nomoto realizes Kasuga maybe wanted to go check out a restaurant in the area, and wanted to maybe do strawberry picking instead. And Nomoto ends up feeling so bad about this, feeling like she was not really receptive to what Kasuga actually wanted, and like she was steamrolling her. This plays out across almost two or three episodes, but the culmination is Nomoto saying very clearly to Kasuga, 'I want you to be selfish with me. I want you to feel like you can want things and express them. It's really important to me that you are doing the things you enjoy.'

Ginny

And Kasuga admits that that's hard for her. Another moment that rang so true for me, for both of them.

Ben

So much of their relationship is Nomoto getting intense pleasure [laughs] out of watching Kasuga enjoy herself.

00:34:18 - SLTCSLTE: Yako and The New House

Ben

I'd like to talk about my favorite character of the season.

NiNi

Ben wants to talk about Yako. Let's go.

Ben

Yako is the best thing that has happened to BL and GL in the last two years. [laughs]

NiNi

She's really just like us. [laughs]

Ben

No character’s been a better audience stand in than an asexual lesbian enjoying her wine and her takeout, watching gay movies with other girls, and then hearing about their relationship drama and giving completely reasonable advice by just asking questions.

Ginny

Best life.

Ben

I love her so much. She is everything that I am trying to be every day. [NiNi laughs] And she's good at it! [laughs] She never tells anybody, 'Just do it.' She's just like, 'What are you feeling? How do you feel if you don't do it? Well, there you go.’

And then they have the curry party? That looked like so much fun. They all go over to Yako's house and meet her properly. Nomoto and Kasuga take Nagumo with them. And they make a bunch of different curry, and naan, and some fancy juice, and they have themselves a good-ass time. And this leads to Yako becoming friends with Nagumo, and she ends up becoming a confidante to Nagumo as well. She recognizes after the girls reveal they're gonna move out that somebody should check on Nagumo, who has probably gotten used to having two really reliable neighbors who care about her, and how Nagumo might be anxious about saying, like, she misses them and still wants to see them. Even as Nagumo admits, moving out is the right call for them, I love that Yako gave Nagumo space to admit that she was a bit bummed that she was gonna not be living next to two solid friends anymore.

I love Yako so much. She is in competition for blorbo of the year.

NiNi

Yako has the best ideas for parties, too, like the first time she had the watch party with Nomoto, they've both got snacks and drinks, and they're talking about what they've got for their snacks and their drinks and then they watch a lesbian movie and they cry. [Ben and Ginny laugh] It’s so good. Literally, Yako is really just like us.

The only thing I'm sad about in this entire season is that Sayama hasn't yet become a part of this whole little group that they have, but she will. I know she will.

Ben

They just moved in together. They got a big space. There's room for Fujita and Sayama to show up for another party they're gonna have. These two could host all six major female characters at their new place.

Let's talk about the new place while we're here. Where…?

[all laugh]

NiNi

Go ahead. I know you want to.

Ben

I love Kasuga. I love everything about her. I love her big chair, I love her big bed, I love her big TV. I need to know where these things are going to go in the new space. [NiNi laughs] Nomoto is totally fine to just use her iPad as her fill-in device for all of her tech needs and entertainment needs. I understand Kasuga. When I moved out, I got myself two big-ass TVs! I need to know where this goes in their new space.

NiNi

[laughs] Doing it real big, right?

Ben

Mhmm! Her car real big. Shoes real big. TV real big. Everything real big.

NiNi

We can talk a little bit about the new space. It looks really good. I like the way that it feels like both of them, which is exactly what you want in a place where you’re gonna be moving in together. But can we just talk about how U-Haul lesbian it is of them to get together and immediately start talking about moving in together?

Ginny

Hang on, they started talking about moving in together [Ben laughs] and then got together. That was the order! [NiNi laughs] They were like—

NiNi

That is true, that is fair.

Ginny

—'I’m gonna move.'

'Oh my God. I can't bear the thought of you leaving, but I understand why you have to.'

'Well, it's okay ‘cause I was going to ask if you wanted to move in. Also, are we in love with each other?'

Like, that was the conversation. [NiNi laughs]

Ben

'And we finally picked a place to live. Do you wanna make out for the first time?'

NiNi

[laughs] And the other good part of it is that before any of this, they somehow adopted a child together.

Ben

Right?

Ginny

Yeah! This all tracks. This is all very typical.

NiNi

Mmhmm. This felt like the correct order of things for lesbians.

00:39:17 - SLTCSLTE: The Food and Nagumo

NiNi

Okay, we need to talk about food.

Ben

Okay.

NiNi

Because Ben started talking about the curry party and I got excited.

Ben

I got hungry, I need to go make food after this. [Ben and Ginny laugh]

NiNi

We didn't even talk yet about the takoyaki party. I am not a huge fan of takoyaki, but that looked really good.

Ben

All right, as we go into the food, let's talk about Nagumo's eating disorder, because I think that this is one of my favorite food plots in a food show in a long time.

NiNi

One of the things about these food shows is that it's about the communal experience of food. Nagumo has a social anxiety disorder where she can't eat in front of other people. The way that this is brought to the surface, and then the way that Kasuga and Nomoto figure out how to include her in the communal experience without trying to force her to eat or making it an anxious space for her where other people are eating… There's something about Kasuga that just reads incredibly reliable from the off. So when Nagumo first meets Kasuga, she very quickly gets very comfortable and feels like she can tell this woman anything. And Kasuga is just so forthright and so understanding about things, that when Nagumo tells her, you know, 'I really can't eat in front of other people,' the first thing she asks her is 'oh, well, can you drink something? Can I make you a cup of tea?' And that sort of becomes a jumping off point for the way that they interact when they're having these communal experiences around food, and the way that Kasuga explains to other people for Nagumo, but without giving too many details of Nagumo's private business. The way that these women make a comfortable space for her to still have the community of meals together without forcing her to eat, drives Nagumo to say, 'I want to go and get myself treated because I want to be able to eat with these women, because I care about them.'

Ben

I really love the arc of that. In a show about two people bonding over food, they met somebody who they couldn't necessarily do that with right away, they had to work into it. And I love the way that they slowly built that out — like the donut party was so satisfying.

NiNi

Donut party was fantastic.

Ben

There’s the donut party. There's the marshmallow party.

NiNi

Don't get me started on Nomoto and her, like, zoning out thinking about Kasuga with these marshmallows. [laughs] It was almost erotic but not in a male gaze erotic kind of way. She's got a comically large number of bags of marshmallows in Nomoto’s mind that she's hugging to her, and then she starts eating the marshmallows with a smile on her face. [laughs] All this is happening in Nomoto’s imagination and I'm just like, 'Yes, girl. Yeah, I understand what is happening to you right now.' [laughs] She's zoning out thinking about Kasuga and these marshmallows and I am cracking up. I'm having a whale of a—Oh, it's so good.

Okay. I'm gonna get over Kasuga and marshmallows, but [laughs] not immediately. So good, so funny. No notes.

00:43:02 - SLTCSLTE: Depictions of Intimacy

Ben

You had a little bit of hesitation in the middle of the second season. Do you want to talk about that on the show? And do you feel resolved by the way they played it out?

NiNi

Not resolved, but more… comforted, I guess. Part of the agita, I think that I was having, is that I was working through myself. Yako and Nomoto are watching these lesbian films. Yako is introducing Nomoto to these lesbian movies, and they're watching them together. And Nomoto is saying she's watching these movies and all these women are so passionate, and she knows that she likes Kasuga in a romantic way, but she doesn't think that she has these passionate feelings like these women in these films. That's when Yako tells her, 'Well, you know, I'm asexual, this is how I feel about these things.'

And in the middle of the season when this is happening, I had a bit of a moment where I'm just like, okay, is it that they're doing this purity thing where it's fine to be a lesbian if you don't have sex or sexual feelings? It was something that I was worried about. I think it was a little bit of burden of representation stuff that I was maybe putting on the show? That I felt like it was important to show female sexuality as being good and okay and fine, and not to wrap female sexuality and women loving women up in this thing of it being somehow chaste and pure. That was something that was coming from my own thoughts about it. There's not a lot of ace spectrum rep out there in terms of media and dramas in this field, so intellectually I felt like, oh, well, this is fine. But emotionally, I was having a hard time with. Intellectually, I'm like, okay, yes, if it is that this is an ace lesbian story, this is fine because there's not a lot of representation of that, either. But then I was also, like, feeling that even if it was ace lesbian representation, it was being done in this weird binary where you're either sexual or you're not, when acespec is just a whole spectrum of things. I was getting tied up in my own feelings about a lot of this, and it was giving me a little bit of grief and a little bit of gripe.

But when we come down through the season and come down towards the end of the season, it starts to feel more like a journey of discovery, of Nomoto figuring out what labels that she would apply to herself that make her feel comfortable with the relationship, and understanding how she feels about Kasuga and in what ways they want to proceed with their relationship and the things that they want to try or not try, and having those conversations with Kasuga, as well. And that eased me in the way that I was feeling about it. I fully admit that I got tied up in my own feelings about this, because it didn't have anything to do with what the show was doing. It works out well. I feel comfortable and comforted by the way that the story goes down through to the end. I'm good with where they've decided to take Nomoto, and Nomoto and Kasuga’s relationship, and where they have hopefully paused, not stopped.

Ginny

I understand that feeling completely. I feel some kind of meta regret that the two lesbian shows we’re talking about, the horny kinky concept one was bad, and the very chaste, ace spectrum one was good. I would love more horny kinky concept lesbians that are also actually well done. But as you said, that's not a problem with this show as it is just sort of with the bigger media landscape, and the show is giving also voice to really important, very representative experiences.

I love where they land on the question of physical intimacy, because I was wondering what they were going to do having gotten so far into the season. They hardly ever touch each other. There is this sensuality in their relationship around food, and I don't think it functions as a metaphor or a substitute for sex — it's just a different kind and source of pleasure that is important to their relationship, and that's so cool and I love it! But I love where they end up on the question of touch. Kasuga saying, 'yes, I would like to try things out one by one with you.' That's such a lovely way to say, we don't know where this ends. We don't know how we're going to feel about it, but we trust each other enough and we want to explore together at whatever pace feels right for both of us.

Ben

I am less concerned, I think, with certain styles of Japanese shows delving into onscreen depictions of sex and sexuality because of the space those shows fill. Zenra Meshi, What Did You Eat Yesterday?, and this show. The ton of sensuality in the food stuff supports the thinking around sex and intimacy, and I'm really glad they had the hug and kiss scene to make sure that we didn't skip that? But I don't necessarily need to see it in the show, in the sense that I'm okay with just confirming that it's gonna happen, or it is happening. What I do need NHK and TV Tokyo to figure out is: how does the cast of this show meet the cast of What Did You Eat Yesterday? There has to be a way to get these two stories a crossover.

NiNi

It does feel like there needs to be a crossover between these two stories. The new place that they've moved into, I'm pretty sure it's in Shiro and Kenji's building, like it has to be. That's the only thing that makes any sense to me in my head. [laughs]

What you were saying about seeing it on screen, it's not necessarily that I need to see their physical intimacy on screen, or whether there is physical intimacy on screen. I just need to understand, I think, if it was something that they were even gonna talk about or discuss, or if it was something that they wanted or not wanted. I think that it's fine for me for them to have the conversation and say, 'Okay, let's figure this out.' And if that lands upon them not being physically intimate that's fine, if it lands up on them being physically intimate, that's fine, but I think what I was worried about, and maybe I shouldn't have been, was that they were not going to talk about it at all.

Ben

I'm very glad that they had a conversation about it before they moved out, and established that it is something that they want, even if it's something they're gonna have to figure it out.

NiNi

Most definitely, but let's move back to the part where they're moving into Shiro and Kenji's building, because I feel like somehow that has to happen. And I feel like somebody needs to slip Nishijima and Uchino a note that says, 'Hey. Y'all are good at making stuff happen. Make this happen, too. Find a way.'

Ben

It's just difficult because it's an NHK adaptation versus TV Tokyo and I don't know how that plays out because one is a for-profit broadcaster and the other is explicitly a public entity.

NiNi

Figure it out. [Ben and NiNi laugh] I don't care if it's a movie, I don't care if it's a special, I don't care what it is. They need to figure this out, because there's no way that these two shows are not existing in the same universe. They have to.

00:50:53 - SLTCSLTE Ratings and Outro

Ben

I think that's it. This show is excellent. I guess we should rate it. Let's go around.

Ginny, you're newest to this. What's your rating for this?

Ginny

I gave season one a 9 and season two a 10. Season one felt a little incomplete to me, but season two sewed it up. If I was rating them together, I would give them a 10 as a single experience.

Ben

What about you, NiNi?

NiNi

Why you even asking me? You know my answer. This is a 10.

Ben

It's a 10! 10s across the board. Go watch it right now and then when you're finished, go show it to a friend, and then make them show it to a friend. I'm not even kidding. This is excellent. This is going to have to get a new supercut for me on the show. I’m gonna have to mention this every goddamn recording we do after this. [Ginny and NiNi laugh]

NiNi

It's a good thing Ginny's here because now she goes, she's like, okay, so I'm looking for What Did You Eat Yesterday? and then She Loves to Cook, She Loves to Eat.

Ginny

Making notes.

Ben

It was really just so lovely. One of the things I really enjoy in my queer stories is realistic and believable-feeling friend groups around them. It's really important for me, not just that I believe in the integrity of the couple, but also the integrity of their network. And I really like when queer friend groups grow as a result of two other people finding something in each other, that was really important for me. And it's why this particular show is so special to me. I really love this show, so much. Please go watch it.

NiNi

And with that, that's all she wrote. That is going to wrap us up, say bye to the people.

Say bye Ginny!

Ginny

Bye!

NiNi

Say bye to the people, Ben.

Ben

Peace.

#chaser game w #she loves to cook and she loves to eat #tsukuritai onna to tabetai onna #japanese gl #gl series #ben and nini's conversations #the conversation #lgbtq #podcast #spring series #spring 2024

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