Mildly Engrish, yes, thanks for asking

A while back, I wrote an article about how true shoujo (girls’) romance shows, replete with shiny sparkly slow-motion pans of blond-haired pretty-boys, were lacking compared to the Marmalade Boys of years past. They seemed to be slowly fading out of favor; whether it was overcrowding due to more male-orientated “moe shows” (less of a genre and more of a giant classification) or simple dissapearance due to change of taste, I was unsure, but the fact was, they just don’t make romance stories truly aimed at just girls anymore.

With some coincidental genre-talk crossfire going on around other places, combined with my following of 2007 hit Nodame Cantabile, I began to think a bit again about the status of girls’ romance. Nodame Cantabile definitely had the feel of a show that could masquerade as being such a type of show, yet it also was decidedly different from the typical fare that occupies the genre. And what of KimiKiss? It’s a show that, despite being so much ’seen before’ material, defies classification by typical means, being neither guys’ harem nor girls’ romance.

These may be but two shows but to me they signify pretty clearly the direction that romance shows are heading. They may not be as popular as they used to be, passed up in favor of more pandering harem shows (not indicative of the harem genre as a whole, I must note) or the ever-strong action / mecha favorites, but what’s left in the romance corner is truly a distilled and refined version of what both guys and girls have come to love in love stories.

Maybe I’m biased. KimiKiss and, more recently, Nodame Cantabile have been two exceptionally strong and balanced anime, not straying too much toward any major cliche or fan-pleasing trap. What really intrigues me about these shows is that - at least in the case of the former - they’ve drawn a varied mix of audience, both male and female, which I thought was pretty rare. Visual novel type-romances like Clannad or Da Capo tend to turn off female viewers with heavy-handed harem or sad-girls-in-stuff elemetns, while magical girl-type romances like Shugo Chara and Nanatsuiro Drops lean too far towards the straightforward and sappy side for guys. Naturally, there are exceptions, especially in anime-blogger land where people aren’t afraid to think different, but KimiKiss surprised me with how much fervent discussion and praise it’s recieved from just about everybody.

Especially since, at first glance, the formula of KimiKiss seems like the kind of thing you could take out of a “school romance 101″ book. Take one girl, energetic and cheerful, who just transferred into her old high school. She lives with her childhood friend, who she jokes around with and teases a lot. And at school, she meets a stoic, but soft-hearted guy who slowly but surely falls in love with her. How exciting - but wait! She’s conflicted, as she suddenly experiences feeling of jealousy when the childhood friend - someone she thought was just that - goes out with another girl. Who to choose?

Or, take a guy, much the same build as the first, except perhaps more brash and outspoken. He mopes around wishing he had a girlfriend, until one day, a cool emotionless girl randomly kisses him. Score, but wait! He’s friends with a girl on the same sports team as him, and she just might sport feeling for him after all. Who to choose?

If you deconstruct it and take it as its lowest level in stereotypes, it definitely shows KimiKiss as something less than it truly is; the first situation is straight-up girls’ romance, and the second straight-up guys’. Nothing incredibly exciting. Yet, when you put these two situations together and add a little glue, it works great. How?

Likewise, analyze Nodame Cantabile. It’s a show about a serious and critical male music student with great conducting ambitions, the manic and strangely unique female pianist he meets, and all the cast members in between. So, who’s the audience here, or even the genre? It’s incredibly tough to tell, as both genders score major points here. The story revolves around the male character - score one for the XY chromosomes - but he’s a handsome bishonen-type idolized by all the women - leaning towards the XX. The strange cast, full of pseudo-traps, fangirls, and otherwise distinctive people, contains character types that, lacking in moe and, sometimes, sanity, seem to fall towards something seen in a girls’-orientated show. But the strangely dramatic past of the male lead, and the way in which girls just magically come on to him in a non-fangirl way as well, seems to tilt it back towards the male side.

And undoubtedly there’s more, as well as stuff falling squarely in the middle as well. Nodame Cantabile and its audience really can’t be classified as a single genre - it’s slice of life yet romance, romance yet comedy, comedy yet drama. It almost is like some of its characters in that it’s ambitious to be everything, to do it all, and in mixing two different styles and elements together it creates a concoction that just might be strangely pleasing to both.

Now this ‘you got your Reese’s in my peanut butter; you got your peanut butter in my Reese’s’ situation is quite strange to me, if only because logically, the mix of subtle tropes and styles of approach from two distinctly different romance anime types should spoil it all. I should hate all the ’squee’ moments of Nodame Cantabile, and female bloggers should hate the way in which Eriko comes on to Kazuki (or, alternatively, Mao to Kouichi, but everyone hates her for that now). Yet, for both, it ends up working, the styles reinforcing instead of destroying each other.

As Kyon says, “Why? Naze?”

Both of these shows share a tone that many shows - romances, as we’re on this topic - lack these days, something that can really pack a punch to any viewer, and that is the “down-to-earth” feeling of them. I enjoy my harems with astral projections, magical elf-eared girls, and sword-wielding flaming deities, but it’s much trickier for a ’suspension of disbelief’ show like this to connect with the viewer, the strongest weapon that any anime has.

Despite having slightly unrealistic premises or character archetypes, Nodame Cantabile and especially KimiKiss in practice actually have some of the most realistic characters and stories yet. Maybe this is because nothing really ‘happens’ in these kind of shows. I mean, there’s no evil threatening to take over the world, no impending crisis, no one’s dying of magical AIDS, nothing. Both are just stories of high school and university students living their normal lives together; their normal lives may contain some interesting events, but one gets very much that sense of ‘it could be you or me’.

The characters, much the same; Kouichi and Yuumi’s idealistic first-love relationship, Kai’s struggle to understand and communicate women, Mao’s conflict between the easy and hard ways out, Chiaki’s hard-nosed and uncompromising drive, they’re all realistic portrayals that reflect the ways of thought that actual people go through. They make mistakes and fall down; sometimes they get up, sometimes they get kicked on the ground, but in the end you get a sense of growth of the character as they fight through their tribulations, as opposed to many shows where the change is “OK, now I don’t love him as much as before because I had to let some other girl win”.

This emotional development is something that we see occasionally in the finer visual novel adaptations - ef had great insights, Myself;Yourself and Shuffle! might surprise you - and it’s pulled off brilliantly in these two examples of more straight romance as well.

In the days of past, many shoujo romances survived off of melodrama - the soap operas of shows like Marmalade Boy staggered the mind with love triangles in which everybody was connected to someone else, and possibly their non-blood-related sister. The ‘evolution’ that I stated of in the lead-in is the a somewhat lighter, more personal feel to these kinds of romances. There is more of a focus on the ’self’, a character development that goes beyond getting over relationships and romantic urges, the slice-of-life elements are played up a bit more, the show as a whole feels a bit like a candid video, where there doesn’t always have to be an impetus to be doing something out of the ordinary, but rather, simply making slow progress towards a goal, seen or unforeseen.

Quite simply, the slow-paced, down-to-earth girls’ romance has become something that can really be enjoyed by both genders, with not a heavy leaning towards any one form of pandering. And I commend it for that; just like the harem genre itself, there will always be extremes at any one end of the scale, but largely the content of the shows is drifting towards a more wider-appealing middle ground, the mystical jack of all trades that can create a heartfelt story that appeals to any budding romantic.

-CCY

(Yes, technically, KimiKiss is a visual novel adaptation as well, but it really doesn’t feel like it in the typical ‘harem’ connotation of the word. It’s about as much a harem show as NanaDrops was an ero-show.)

(At this point, Yuumi >> Mao, which…bodes poorly for me. Jury is still divided on Asuka vs. Eriko. The jury must also note that there is a disproportional amount of dirty Kimikiss artwork on Danbooru, which probably proves a large part of this editorial wrong.)

If you liked this post, try...

• March 5, 2008 -- My Show Is Better Than Your Show, March Madness Edition
• February 27, 2008 -- 20/20, Perfect Visions: KimiKiss
• February 20, 2008 -- Super Tuesday, brought to you by KimiKiss (18-19)
• February 14, 2008 -- Anime Diaries: In-character humor and romantic recommendations for Valentine’s Day
• May 7, 2008 -- The Otaku Girl Archetype and a painfully serious reflection on living the anime life

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 8:59 pm and is filed under Analysis, KimiKiss Pure Rouge, Nodame Cantabile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.