Arcueid has her Marble Phantasm, but Steve Jobs has some tricks too.
When I was watching Tokimeki Memorial: Only Love last year, I thought it was an amusing romantic comedy from a guy’s angle. This Tokimemo anime is a classic Konami franchise adopted to be about dating and romantic stuff. What distinguishes it from most other romantic stories is the complexity of human interaction required from the protagonist’s point of view. It follows a simple paradigm:
Guys are mysteriously simple.
Deep and complicated stuff that we see in shows like Hachikuro is really exclusive to the realm of josei and shoujo dramas. A man who lives to save up what he owns for the woman he loves? That’s pretty epic manliness. And a higher standard than most people who’d even set themselves even if they think about it clearly. It’s not to say the more common form of love is inferior, but more like Mayama is really awesome…for a stalker.
Anyways, all of that is about 5 levels too high up compared to your high-school first-love scenario that I’m enjoying through Kimikiss. All in all, it’s a shounen romance done right. It’s done so right, in fact, that at times it seems really pedestrian and boring. But at the same time, it’s so much fun to see such a charming execution of puppies playing with each other.
That’s right, they’re all puppies. The guys are simple, but the girls are simple too. Well, they’re not so simple at first glance–yet it all boils down to that cutsy wubby stuff that is made of pink and high school proms …in the 60s.
It’s a reality distortion field. How you buy in to Kimikiss or not is a matter of how good suspension of belief works in the context of Kimikiss anime’s construction of its setting and atmosphere.
There’s a reality distortion field of a wholly different sort in Tokimemo Only Love. It’s the one that you may be familiar with if you’re a fan of Kawaii Jenny! or some other nonsense like … well, nonsense. MUSUMET? Not that bad I think. It’s just that everything is so shiny and exaggerated to the strength of the medium that is anime drama.
The end result, however, is not flattering. Perhaps it’s foolish to take any anime of this caliber seriously but it’s hard to do it when the chicken plays a plot hook. Well, take no offense True Tears fans I guess.
The masters behind Hachikuro is behind Kimikiss, and it shows, let’s just say that much.
January 24th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
I own a fucking mac, maybe that’s why I hate Kimikiss. I see through the lie. I guess my attention span is just too short – about halfway through the second ep of kimikiss I was so boredtthat I opened a second window of gelbooru and started looking for porn o the series, because if nothing else it’s got cute girls. But that’s all I saw – it wans’t sweet, it wasn’t funny, it just WAS. And I couldn’t handle that =_=