Romance Is Code for Limited Bromance; Hatsukoi LLP Closed for Business
Yes, a it is a Hatsukoi Limited wrap-up post. I actually was writing a longer, more theory-type thing, so maybe that’ll come later.
Girl’s Side: Bad Luck Party plays the Takemoto card.
Guy’s Side: RIUVA fires back, saying there’s a Takemoto card to be played. And girls to play said card.
[But actually I think TJ was the earlier of the two, so whatever.]
My side:
Hatsukoi Limited is definitely a great visual treat for the male mind. If you can get over that you’re drooling on 14-year olds, that is. I mean, it’s kind of unfair isn’t it? What kind of 14yo is a knockout like Kei? The other four girls, sure, they are reasonable approximation of reality. And 14yo can have boobs, too. Big ones. But the complete package like Kei? That’s just “lol animu lolicon” nonsense.
Yamamoto is indeed a bombshell, and I think while she’s fine and all, the problem with her is that the source material left her out to dry. Or rather I should say Rie Tanaka’s performance was wanting, and the source material didn’t get into Yuuji Arihara. You can’t have a romance without revealing the other guy’s schtik, so her story was stillborn. Too bad! And as much as I hate to say it, Tanaka tried for the noutenki kuudere and it just didn’t work with the story for me. It is probably caused by the lack of source material, but it made the Yamamoto part of the story a little boring.
Still, the anime went above and beyond the manga in some cases. One example of that came to me in the last episode. I might have missed it earlier on, but while Yuuji is the “sisucon” archetype, he played it like a normal, righteous manly sisucon type. It’s like the stereotypical overprotective American dad that chills on the porch, late at night, to supervise the teenage daughter’s boyfriend’s behavior. Usually with a shotgun or a Louisville slugger. I guess it’s A-OK if you’re dad, but the 3-year-older brother probably qualifies to some extent. Ayumi is still just 14 after all. Anyways, what drew that point home was how he was relatively resolute about the ordeal between Ayumi and Monster-kun. Contrary to his initial attitude from the first episode, Yuuji realizes what was going on and took a stand against the gentle beast in the final episode.
Heck, the middle school trio is a parallel of the high school trio that found themselves on the train, carrying out their duties as older brothers. [And all it needed was Yuu Enomoto…]
I mentioned earlier about the gender role reversal that’s at the heart of this thought experiment. I think it’s partly why this show is so attractive to me in concept, that it’s ultimately about girls doing constructive things to catch their fleeting first loves, like what the guys are also doing (oddly enough).
And what is up with people looking down at the guys in Hatsukoi Limited? I think there is one generalization I’m willing to pin my name on, and that is far majority of popular anime and shows worth watching earn their badge through strong, careful characterization. And the guys in Hatsukoi Limited exactly that–carefully crafted, strong characters. Strong meaning they are distinctive; they may stand in as generic archetypes; they may even be kind of shallow (like some real 14 year olds), but they are each standing on their own. In fact, this is why you can play the Takemoto card at all! Alpha or omega, neither applies in these relationships to the extent that some may exaggerate.
Here is a revised theory: a guy’s “romance” for anime is like an Ernest Hemingway novel. It’s not one about melodramatic Korean idols; it’s one about solitude, the sea (hopefully involving fishing) and the wild, about the subtle, unmentioned internals and not so much the external. It’s a little Zen Buddhist, maybe. On the other hand, this is just about never the case for any anime written for girls. How can you do it with a running internal monologue? Using techniques from both genre categories, Hatsukoi Limited takes a balanced approach; Chikura’s story is probably the most exemplary instance of Hatsukoi Limited’s philosophical stance on explaining things, despite being an outlier from the group. The story explains the relational subtlety and the wrinkles in Chikura’s emotions pretty clearly, yet managed to be pointed and concise. It holds its own notion of mono no aware, so the term goes.
And what’s a more suitable topic for that than that feeling for first love?
To contrast Chikura’s episode with a Makoto Shinkai narrative probably does well to show just how much more verbose (perhaps even too verbose) and illustrative Hatsukoi Limited is, but that is a necessary thing for its target audience.
And that is what I don’t quite get. What is its audience? Dumb guys like me? Sure. But why do girls like it too?
For the tl;dr, I think of it like this: Shallow male characters will always fail, where as shallow female characters will only sometimes. Ultimately, I think the anime for Hatsukoi Limited gambled on the latter and it surpassed the manga in creating believable, romanticized (if flat) male characters. Is that it?
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What about OTOKO NO ROUMAN, like some enka song?
Something like that?
Definitely needs the other Enomoto. I hope she’ll be featured in an extra ep or OVA along with the missing Yamamoto story.
I have this weird quirk in that everytime the viewpoint and inner monologue changes to “female” this anime feels shoujo-ish. After all, how many other harem series have a girl as its main character? It helps that the mangaka is female. Still, shounen romance is almost always in the male viewpoint which makes some other series rather bland, especially in the inner thoughts department. A guy’s thoughts (in manga bubbles and squares thingy) would primarily consist of “she’s cute” or “what kind of weird fanservice situation am I into today?”. On the flipside, a girl’s thoughts vary on so many levels, and it makes all the difference.
Then I realize about how Hatsukoi Limited breaks these harem rules by having deep and insightful thoughts by the “guys” themselves. For a rare time in anime would we see into what a guy is supposed to think (realistically) instead of those shallow harem thoughts. “Otoko no rouman” indeed.
Ah, very good point. In Chikura’s episode we see the same thing with Sogabe’s thoughts, as simple as they were…
[…] deep at times when it’s not caught up with trying to appeal to the drooling fanboy (as omo correctly points out). Share and […]
> And what is up with people looking down at the guys in Hatsukoi Limited?
Well that’s just silly. Other than that they each represented different stereotypes I thought they were just fine - nothing like your usual harem lead trash.