Not if Gojou goes for Juju. I would.
Not if Gojou goes for Juju. I would.
Peace.
Episode 7
Featuring the biggest twist of the season...
----------
Marin's natural eye color.
Cute little stay home date. I do enjoy that this series continues to subvert my expectations in a low-key and natural way. It really is similar to a lot of the highly praised romance series (before they invariably sour on focusing too much on side characters).
Wakana's skills are developing naturally, though I was a bit surprised he did the majority of Marin's makeup and not just the parts she wasn't good at. But now that makes a lot more sense with the hina doll faces improving. He's aiming to meet the expectations of the recipient, and putting more care into it accordingly.
Marin isn't quite as disastrous a cook as cliché would predict, and she continues to have weird hangups, like the color contact thing while completely missing the fact that she was very prominently showing off everything below her neck.
Let me guess, the big-little sister is into lolis...
I do see a lot of complaints elsewhere about the translation of Marin's lines. No idea where those people are coming from, Marin's speech patterns are very corrupted like gyaru are supposed to. You can very obviously hear her butcher words this episode that any anime fan should be able to recognize.
Such an annoying cliche, so I'm happy it's absent. Too many manga treat cooking like it's rocket science. Gojou wasn't expecting Marin to be a bad cook, either, per se, he's just worried about the composition of her dishes.Originally Posted by Ryllharu
A little something found on Discord
43A03733-F3E2-4FB3-BA81-5BDA1A3F8750.png
All the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral, or fattening. And then: Golf.
It didn't occur to me that she was not, in fact, albino- I'm so used to taking anime hair and eye color as a given. Good for Sono Bisque for addressing that in a fun, lighthearted way that remained grounded.
Dem studio fees,though. I'm glad that his practice with life size outfits benefitted his doll painting ability. Gramps is right. More perspective and experience will benefit your art. Until the end segment with giga-imouto, this almost made me forget it was going to be a harem or thereabouts.
I'd be a fool to miss how it serves the target audience and appeal of the show, but Marin really is a manic pixie dream girl. Outgoing, unjudgmental, passionate about otaku-adjacent hobbies, kind, aggressive about what she wants (but not too aggressive), spunky, attractive, sexually unguarded, and gyaru all in one. And she's in wuv. Say what you will about waifu culture, but at least those have a few different flavors. Even her one 'flaw', cooking, is hand waved as a cute little room-to-grow thing. This is hardly new in anime, and she is still a joy to watch, but, aside from not being an actual hina doll, she appears like she was written specifically for Gojou's benefit. Not complaining, just noticing due to how little they hide it here, and I hope it is cashed in at some point for a dramatic breakdown or something down the road... Who am I kidding- that's not gonna happen and this will continue being a sweet saccharine rom-com that pretty much everyone enjoys.
I wonder if the season will bring sour girl back...
All the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral, or fattening. And then: Golf.
Doesn't she have more flaws? Her first flaw was an utter lack of cloth making ability. She also can't really do her own make-up, despite being a gyaru. She showed distinct lack of vision in shopping for supplies, not being able to judge things Gojou immediately spotted despite Marin being the expert on her favourite games/series. Food is just one of her flaws. She's perfect for Gojou in the sense that she's really proactive, which is pretty much the only way they could become friends in the first place. It will probably be necessary, as well, for them to be more than friends at some point, should it happen. So, if she wasn't written specifically for Gojou at the very least that much, we wouldn't have a story to begin with.
For some reason Marin could very well have a sad backstory arc. Or at least some context explaining her overthetop attitude, mood and style. It feels like she needs attention.
All the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral, or fattening. And then: Golf.
I would argue she is in fact, not a Manic Pixie Dream Girl despite being called out as one on TVTropes: the place where actual literary and film analysis goes to die. This trope in particular has been rejected by the person who coined it because it is so often misused to describe personality types and not the stock character.
There's three key points to the stock character archetype: Eccentricity (check), static in the narrative (false), and no goals of their own (false) or a one-off goal that serves the development of the male lead. Manic Pixie Dream Girls exist for the character development of the male lead character. They serve as a purpose, not a person. They're a plot device. You can replace them with a pet, a baby, a McGuffin, a natural disaster, or a windfall and the story doesn't change at all. They are one-dimensional characters who don't exist without the male lead, and often disappear as soon as the male lead's character development or redemption is complete.
Marin exists as a person without Wakana. She tried to do it herself, but failed. She's interested in anime and trying to get her friends interested in the current parody-Precure long before the two leads directly cross paths. The central plot device here is HER GOAL, and Wakana is benefiting from the interaction. He is not using Marin to fulfill his own dreams, it is mutual aid. Even within the plot construct, she interacts with the world outside of Wakana (Juju knew that Marin followed her on social media). Marin isn't instantly enraptured with Wakana either. Theirs is a business relationship that develops into deep infatuation on hers, the opposite of the usual trope, and still stands as nervous anxiety on his side.
Marin is a false one, possibly even a deconstruction of one. She's introduced in exactly the type of situation the stock characters do (literally flung through the air for absolutely no explainable reason), but almost immediately diverges. The series begins by intentionally showing us none of Marin's thoughts, and she does appear as a MPDG in all the expected ways. That trajectory stalls when she realized she had led him to almost kill himself meeting a deadline she never expected him to meet, crushed when she wears the outfit for that first time, and then completely implodes the moment Wakana unintentionally confesses to her. The narrative has switched to now use them both as co-leads.
Marin has depth that we're only starting to learn about now, and not the ones that follow the anime clichés. The show very deliberately switches to her perspective when Wakana and his grandfather are talking shop about the Shizuku-tan outfit and it tunes out all of the dialogue between them. Contrast everything since then to the measuring scene, the shopping, the strolls outside, any of the appearances at school and so on.
And all of this is hinted at in the OP. It's still one of my favorite parts where she's too engaged watching the parody-Precure in the morning doing her makeup, then frantically trying to straighten her hair with tears in her eyes. The at-home visit cements this also, Marin the gyaru is as much of a construct as any cosplay.
Last edited by Ryllharu; Tue, 02-22-2022 at 04:22 PM. Reason: restructured.
Oops. I conveniently forgot about all of those flaws, and considering their necessity to her life's obsession, they are severe. I retract my statement. I guess the lovey dovey Marin screen time these last two episodes bleached out all of their prior interactions when I was thinking about her infinitely desirable qualities.
Interesting, well put, and a good read. I sold her short and she is more compelling in a wider view lens than I viewed her through. I think what threw me was old the Roger Ebert description of such a "movie creature" as “a girl who is completely available, absolutely desirable and really likes you.” I always emphasized the concept as simply a manufactured appeal that would not or could not exist through naturalistic happenstance- a wish fulfillment not too dissimilar to any other power fantasy that anime is full of, given the target audience. But as you said, there's more to it than that, and to dismiss any attractive character being more interested than I would expect in a boring seeming other comes off as... incel? What have I become!?!?!?
That she's not (a pixie) is probably the reason I'm still enjoying this.
I always feel like her wuv scenes were kind of half forced due to her personality being so extra forward on purpose, being gyaru and all that, not holding back and being honest with herself. I wouldn't say being in love with love like some middle schooler, but she's really making herself fall in love with Gojou. Just like she's in love with her favourite characters. Juju might be a stock tsundere character, but she's still holding herself back more realistically (from my cultural point of view).
Whether Marin is a dream girl or not is up to personal preferences. Gojou actually needed to win her over with his sewing skills and dedication. There are about a million harem series out there where the (seemingly loser) MC needs to do absolutely nothing to get a new girl every other chapter. In fact such an MC might be trying his best to push the girls away but they still keep appearing and multiplying. Gojou here, however, is actually tall and handsome, has something worthwhile (even professionally) he's focusing on, which alone is an attractive feature already. He can make brand new high quality clothes from scratch, which is a relatively high level skill. He can also cook well. If he wasn't so shy and insecure, he absolutely wouldn't need a dream girl to appear out of nowhere. In the end, however, this is not based on a shoujo/josei manga (it's seinen), so the main dude can't be a love master. That's just how it goes.
Wait, is Gojou handsome?
If he is, no matter how antisocial or weird he is, he'd have girls approaching him at school. I think he is just average looking.
Peace.
I always assumed he must be since he didn't even look much different in Marin's wuv vision. Normally when you see a scene from such a love-love pink-coloured perspective, the man is turned into looking like a prince or at least more like a shoujo manga male MC. But of course it's hard to say since characters in anime all tend to look good, unless they specifically must look worse, like a two-bit villain. So, maybe he's meant to be average looking. He's tall, though.
That's why I assumed he was average looking. A tall guy with a good build AND a handsome face WILL attract attention, in anime or IRL.
Peace.
Not if they never talk to anyone else out of fear of rejection like he did.
Literally zero friends in middle school, and part of the go-home club.
Girls will still at least try to talk to him, not ignore him completely.
The aloof bad boy is a trope for a reason.
To add, no one has ever commented on Gojo's looks. It stands to reason that his looks are average and therefore not worth mentioning.
Peace.
He doesn't do any sports and is at home all the time that also doesn't seem to care about buying clothes for himself. How "good" can he be looking.
A healthy diet only gets you that far.
He is a tall, nice dude. Certainly nothing special.
I lol every time she calls him ", my dude."
They really cranked up the emotive animation and cuteness this episode. Especially during the beach scene. It was fun to watch and had a good chemistry. Episodes (scenes) like this elevate an entire series.
Episode 9
- - - - - -- -
Behold the unbelievable B holder.
I feel like the nonlinear timeline worked better in this anime adaptation than in the original manga. Or maybe it was just because I knew it before. Nevertheless, even though Shinju isn't exactly the kind of character I prefer, even if it's partially because I keep forgetting how young she is, just like Gojou did, this episode was quite good. I was heartwarming to see how excited Juju was to see her little sister cosplaying for the first time, with such high quality to boot. Juju's own first cosplay was nothing to write blog posts about, but now that she's such a high profile cosplayer, I reckon she couldn't help but be bothered by a low quality cosplay.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
