#mimasaka

Shinomiya challenges the way he relates to people. This chef’s attitude is self-centered and ruthless, until Soma helps him be more open to the suggestions, companionship, and even the slow growth of others.

Mimasaka challenges the way he relates to failure. This chef believes that one humiliating failure destroys someone passionate for life, until Soma proves him wrong and Mimasaka understands that to fail is merely a stepping stone.

Hayama also challenges the way Soma relates to failure. Here is a chef who genuinely is better than him, and who works hard to be so. Soma attacks him time and time again, but always with respect and admiration. When Hayama forgets what made him passionate about cooking in the first place, Soma is there to remind him.

Kuga had position, reputation, and manpower, and Soma has to find a way to get around that. Kuga’s also an introduction to—

Azami, and the entire Central arc. While he challenges Soma with many the same things as Kuga did (he did take over the school), what he really challenges for Soma is how much our protagonist loves his little diner as well as the right for people to be creative and fail. This villain scorns that great possibility must also account for great failure—what must be put into practice are the ways that are failsafe, and the resulting food are only to be given to those who appreciate it (so a very homogenized, snobby way of gourmet). To an extent, this is also Erina.

Tsukasa is fascinating (and there is still a lowkey part of me that still thinks he should’ve been the endgame villain). He is cooking at its peak, but at the top where he was, there wasn’t any joy. He keeps scrounging to find a way to be an arbitrary version of “better”, or to hold on to the lie that Azami tells him: there is an objective scale “best” cooking and he still as farther to go; in that, he challenges Soma by purporting that homogenized way of rating food. (The more interesting way to have used him is to challenge Soma’s view of what it means to reach the top, but ah well that’s another meta.) He is beaten by Soma and Erina’s creative way of cooking that doesn’t conform to that homogeneity, and how they seem to truly find joy cooking that way.

Asahi is….

Uh…..

I don’t know.

What the series seems to be trying to make him be is a magical, god-like power that challenges Soma’s belief that it’s hard work and failure that leads you to cooking glorious dishes (if Sanzaemon’s “I believe in training” and Asahi’s rant that ‘he doesn’t need failure because he’s such a great chef’ is to be believed). But that’s also Mimasaka….? Inferiority complex and all. Like, it is so like Mimasaka that the series literally pointed it out when Soma, irritated, said that Asahi was just like him (and he’s right dammit).

What they could have done with him – what I thought they were doing with him when his full backstory with Joichiro was revealed – is that he could have challenged Soma’s idea of what success even means. Asahi’s bitterness towards Soma seems to stem from that Joichiro “chose” Soma over him. In his twisted mind, if he proved he was better at Soma in cooking, he would have shown Joichiro that he was wrong.

That isn’t true. Joichiro’s not going to stop loving his son just because Asahi is a better cook. What Asahi could have represented is the idea of success vs love, especially since the biggest message the series keeps pushing for is that the secret to becoming a great chef is dedicating your cooking to someone you hold dear. After a certain extent, your food’s success can only be measured by how much you bring someone that you love joy. Asahi, who keeps taking and taking and taking, doesn’t appear to have anyone he loves; he clings to Erina and Erina’s mother because they are the closest he can get to an arbitrary objective standard. He won’t and can’t ever be satisfied, and that would genuinely be an interesting mirror for Soma to see himself in—someone lost in the depths of ambition, forgetting what cooking even meant to him.

They’re definitely not doing that route, though. They’re doing “magical gifts” vs “hard work”, I think.