Just today, it was announced that Toyoda Minoru contributed a recommendation to the latest volume of Futari Bus. I don’t know how much difference those make – I suspect they do marginally help, and the bigger the name the better. Given how much I love Futari Bus I certainly hope so – the first one it got was a mutual with Someone Hertz‘ Yamano Ei (I like that series a lot, too). Toyoda isn’t someone on the level of Horikoshi Kouhei, whose rec for his former assistant’s Under Doctor undoubtedly made an impact. But he is well-respected by fans of romcom especially.
Why? Well, because his Love Roma is one of beloved romcom manga of the last few decades. Casey W. left a couple of very interesting comments on last week’s post, talking about how Toyoda expressed frustration with Love Roma never getting an anime (me too). What seems to have happened is he decided to listen to his editors and go with whatever he thought had the best chance to sell – and Kore Kaite Shine is the result. Not only did it get him his anime, it got him a Manga Taishou too (which still kind of puzzles me if I’m honest). So I think one can only say mission accomplished.
Toyoda deserves it, so I’m legit happy for him. That said, Kore Kaite Shine lacks the spark of genius he’s capable of, because I truly believe he’s writing outside his comfort zone here. The manga love is genuine, for obvious reasons. And the Teshima-sensei (again, a Love Roma character) flashback material is top shelf. But in order to grab the commercial swag, he’s created a sort of CGDCT utopia where males basically don’t exist and chucked in yuri undertones which frankly feel very forced. It’s perceptible that he’s performing here, trying to satisfy a perception. And to be fair, it’s clearly worked by any reasonable measure.
Now, with all that said, what KKS does have in addition to the manga love is a sort of unpretentious genkiness that can be quite winning. And this episode absolutely adapted my favorite stuff from the manga. I discussed this in our Manga Taishou Podcast Episode, but the bit where Fujirmori-san drew a manga telling her mother all the things she was afraid to say was absolutely superb and powerful. It was a real shining example of what manga can mean to people, especially teenagers. Genuinely inspiring and moving, for me the best moment of the entire series.
This ep also contains my favorite gag of the series, when the Man-ken goes to Tokyo for Comitia (Ai’s second time, of course – she’s a regular Edokko now). Sachi (who’s usually too much for me in anime form) keeps gawking at anything and everything and exclaiming “Tokyo is amazing!!”. When Tessie informs her that in fact their hotel with the tabihoudai breakfast is in Chiba (because she couldn’t find a cheap enough place in Tokyo) Sachi exclaims “Chiba is amazing!!”. What can I say, I LOL’d when I read it. And if anything it was even funnier here, because you could tell she shouted it almost defiantly.
Apart from that, this episode has a lot of Hikaru being just wrong in very funny ways, which certainly helps. She’s my favorite of the kid cast, hands down. The Comitia stuff is kind of inside the beltway – the reverential way Teshima says “you get a wall space” (highly prestigious, only for big sellers), the way Ai and Kokoro blithely suggest printing a thousand copies of their doujinshi. I also like what Hikaru says about liking honest manga over technique, and why Ai’s scribbles appeal to that in her. It’s an episode that handsomely shows off all the things about Draw This that I like – I just wish they all were.
