I think I watched ToraDora! at a formative age and now expect and want all my two-dimensional “bitchy” girl characters to be explored in empathetic detail, and to grow beyond their issues. But because the show doesn’t answer it, it’s just frustrating. If the show had actually done what I thought it was going to do and answered that question, I would say this was intentional and a neat way to keep setting up her character. Once more, it’s a scene that makes you ask “wow, you are awful-why are you like this?” The scene where she’s hanging out with Chizuru in the karaoke bar is genuinely tense and skin-crawly, as she basks in Chizuru’s lack of agency and flaunts her own power. When Mami does return, she flexes her villain muscles once more: she discovers Chizuru’s secret and rents her out as a power play, knowing full well that she now has the capacity to ruin the Fake Dating illusion that has propped up the central plot so far. In fact, Mami packs them back up, zips the suitcase tight, and drives off with it in the boot of her car never to be seen or heard from again. None of the exciting themes or topics suggested in my first post get unpacked. Where I had presumed that the beach trip mini-arc was setting Mami up to be a recurring character and our central antagonist, she actually vanishes from the series until the very last episode. The answer to all these questions is a hard “no”. Will he, across the story, dismantle the pedestal that he had placed this ordinary-and actually quite nasty-girl on? Will this juxtaposition between Kazuya’s expectations and harsh reality be used to explore the cloying concept of The Perfect Relationship and prove to him that there is no such thing? Will her villainy ultimately serve a spicy and intriguing narrative purpose? The audience gets to see that she is not, in fact, the dream girl that Kazuya thought she was. When she’s introduced across the first three episodes, we get this potentially intriguing picture of a multi-layered, strategically two-faced young woman who seemed to potentially pose as the villain of the piece. You may recall that Mami was one of the factors of the show that really, initially, compelled me. For maximum efficiency, let’s break this down by character, since a lot of the issues seem rooted in that area. I’m going to go through and return to the ideas I felt the show was playing with in my previous post, which was written four episodes in, and explore how they did not actually come to be and why I think that’s such a bummer. Yes, those shows exist in the same category now. If I can write a post about how much Riverdale annoyed me for sucking me in with a cool premise and then going off the shits, I can certainly write one about Rent-a-Girlfriend. But it’s worth returning to the scene of the crime and unpacking what exactly went so wrong, from my own perspective as a viewer (and I imagine this is perspective shared by more than a few people). It’s clearly not made for me, and that’s fine. Which, again, is why the show’s dedication to not doing any of the things that I suggested could be really interesting, is so very annoying.ĭo I take it as a personal slight that a show did not cater to my wants? No. I maintain that the first few episodes genuinely compelled me, and genuinely presented a space in which to play with some really interesting ideas. Now, this is not me “walking back” my previous reviews or analysis. Given that I wrote that big post speculating on Rent-a-Girlfriend’s potential, it feels like I should return to it and perform a post-mortem of sorts. Especially when you wrote a very public article telling people that you reckoned it had potential. A story that seemed like it was going to be good, held promise, wormed its way into your imagination and your heart… a story like that turning out bad gives you a unique kind of injury. You may have your gripes with it, but in some greater sense it will glide away from you like oil and water. If a story-be it a book, TV show, movie, video game, what have you-is just bad, you can let it slip from your mind. There is a special sort of sting in disappointment.
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