This was a very light contemporary Japanese series about two best friends who move from a small town to Kyoto to pursue careers as geisha. One meets with considerable success and begins what promises to be an artistically successful career. The other falters, then pivots to a caretaking role as a chef that she finds personal validation in. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
forestofglory watched it and seemed to have some fun with it, and so I thought it'd be okay sick-day stuff.
It's a pleasant show, though not one I necessarily recommend. The dialogue is often very naturalistic in a way that can be slightly annoying. The wider cast of characters could be more clearly established. How distinct are the personalities of the non-main maiko? When Glasses left the house in the final episode, it took me by surprise because I didn't feel we'd sufficiently built up to that. Where was her growing disquiet in earlier episodes?
The production team chose to reveal the central house-mother's daughter's issues slowly, but with access to only the subtitles it took me considerable time to figure out who this sourpuss even was and what she was doing here. The revelation of the source of her personality issues came a bit late for me. I've seen anime structurally play out character development in a similar way, but in a lot of cases I assume that comes from serial production and the various retcons it can entail. That's really not something one should actively build into a nine episode miniseries. It's not suspense, it's a sort of pointless 'hidden information' estrangement from the processes of characters' decision-making.
Even knowing her whole deal doesn't quite explain her several low-key attempts to socially sabotage the other teen girls she lives with by giving them passive-aggressive, insidious bad advice. 'Wah, my parents are so divorced'--child, please. None of your peers had anything to do with that. A degree of acting-out makes sense for this misanthropic teen, but after that it just feels like she's the story's designated source of low-level conflict. I also felt like her mother's romance storyline could have been resolved a touch more thoroughly. (Unless 'the moon is beautiful' was supposed to have done that, but I thought their problem was Never Marrying, not a lack of comically oblique love-declarations so cliche that even I know them.)
I did like what the senior sister's storyline suggested about people you're with, but who you're not necessarily in love with. I'm kind of turning over the grandmother's statement about people who send others' off and people who are sent off, as whole personality types/life-paths.
It's not a gay narrative per se, but the relationship between the two main girls is the only one that matters. The bartender says something to the new-maiko girl about unrequited love, but I'm not sure what torch she's supposedly carrying. Is it for baseball boy, who has a thing for her cook best friend? That got hinted at a couple times, but I'm not sure why the bartender would know anything about it.
They made cream stew at one point, which looked interesting. Man this girl was big on fresh, in-season vegetables. Japanese cooking is so technically stripped-down, it can be intimidating on account of it. I wondered why she wanted some stupid bread machine until I remembered she probably didn't have an oven, just that convection microwave she uses for the bread pudding.
forestofglory watched it and seemed to have some fun with it, and so I thought it'd be okay sick-day stuff.It's a pleasant show, though not one I necessarily recommend. The dialogue is often very naturalistic in a way that can be slightly annoying. The wider cast of characters could be more clearly established. How distinct are the personalities of the non-main maiko? When Glasses left the house in the final episode, it took me by surprise because I didn't feel we'd sufficiently built up to that. Where was her growing disquiet in earlier episodes?
The production team chose to reveal the central house-mother's daughter's issues slowly, but with access to only the subtitles it took me considerable time to figure out who this sourpuss even was and what she was doing here. The revelation of the source of her personality issues came a bit late for me. I've seen anime structurally play out character development in a similar way, but in a lot of cases I assume that comes from serial production and the various retcons it can entail. That's really not something one should actively build into a nine episode miniseries. It's not suspense, it's a sort of pointless 'hidden information' estrangement from the processes of characters' decision-making.
Even knowing her whole deal doesn't quite explain her several low-key attempts to socially sabotage the other teen girls she lives with by giving them passive-aggressive, insidious bad advice. 'Wah, my parents are so divorced'--child, please. None of your peers had anything to do with that. A degree of acting-out makes sense for this misanthropic teen, but after that it just feels like she's the story's designated source of low-level conflict. I also felt like her mother's romance storyline could have been resolved a touch more thoroughly. (Unless 'the moon is beautiful' was supposed to have done that, but I thought their problem was Never Marrying, not a lack of comically oblique love-declarations so cliche that even I know them.)
I did like what the senior sister's storyline suggested about people you're with, but who you're not necessarily in love with. I'm kind of turning over the grandmother's statement about people who send others' off and people who are sent off, as whole personality types/life-paths.
It's not a gay narrative per se, but the relationship between the two main girls is the only one that matters. The bartender says something to the new-maiko girl about unrequited love, but I'm not sure what torch she's supposedly carrying. Is it for baseball boy, who has a thing for her cook best friend? That got hinted at a couple times, but I'm not sure why the bartender would know anything about it.
They made cream stew at one point, which looked interesting. Man this girl was big on fresh, in-season vegetables. Japanese cooking is so technically stripped-down, it can be intimidating on account of it. I wondered why she wanted some stupid bread machine until I remembered she probably didn't have an oven, just that convection microwave she uses for the bread pudding.
