Finished Love Shuffle rewatch
The level of craft in this is awards-worthy. It seems like a magnum opus, the the creators had to have spent years developing. Every script is chock-full of wordplay, running gags, and excellent monologues, all consistent with and further building on fascinating characterization, and all within strong episodic structure. Every shot is meticulously framed and timed, and the show's comedy chops are second to none. Recognizing a lot of the comedy techniques only made them funnier, and helped me finally get a few more. (And the running gags! It's unbelievable how great the running gag work is. Really next-level shit.) And that characterization! This just might be the most perfect use of 1-cour (10 eps) to fully develop and evolve 8 very different characters. The show explicitly explores all of their relationships with each other, (that's 36 different dynamics) and uses all of those relationships thematically. Anime rarely handles large ensembles with grace, and western live action is always chasing more episodes, so it lives in the slow burn. But with the confidence that comes with having a predetermined length, Love Shuffle maxes out its conservation of detail with style. Favorite Luv-Sha: Reiko Actor evaluation: Though Kanjiya Shihori (Mei) and DAIGO (Yukki) have the most thankless characters, Yuriko has the hardest acting job, as Kairi. And unfortunately, I dont know that she should be playing stoics. Kairi only comes to life when she's allowed an actual attitude to play, and before the back half, we didn't get much of it, to maintain the character's enigma. Pity. Everyone else is hands down 5 stars. I feel like a lot of people on Tumblr will resonate strongly with Yukki's particular brand of awkward, possibly even headcanon some forms of representation in his portrayal. Content warnings: A lot of anime and Jdrama takes the subconscious stance that micro-aggressions don't matter in the grander scheme of plot-based actions. This is how you'll find people defending characters in ecchi series as strong female characters, etc. So there are a lot of gender essentialist throwaway lines in this, which the show doesn't acknowledge, because overall, the characters are happily doing their own thing with full agency, albeit within the cultural environment. (For example, there's a little of taking the "women compete against each other" power structure for granted.) There's some potentially icky age gap stuff. Mei and Kei start dating when Mei was in high school, and Kei was either in college or graduated college. Kairi is 19, and Ojiro is definitely way past that. Given that the age of adulthood in Japan is 20, these could count as statutory rape, unless you go with age of consent, instead. (Doesn't help that Kairi is played as infantilized in a few scenes.) But it doesn't bother me too much because the fact of their characterizations show that the troubling power dynamics that make age gap tricky are not present here. The worst part of the show is a bit where they play the "Depraved Gay" card. There are bits where I think the show was trying to mitigate that, laying the seeds of the "not really!" reveal, but there are other bits that play it straight, and it feels lazy for the writing to play those. It's one step up in severity from the gender micro-aggressions, and when you add the cultural baggage, I'm not sure the respect it gives the bisexual character otherwise is enough of a counterweight, unlike with the female characters. None of the above is enough to stop me from declaring Love Shuffle the best RomCom media I've ever watched, next to Geore Cukor's Holiday. It's definitely the best RomCom TV ever. Just a fantastic show. Also, I've had fucking Fantasy stuck in my head for about 16 hours now. Yay, panda.
