"You May Dream..."

I was never a huge fan of romantic comedies in anime, but in some form or another I’d had cause to stumble across a number of them.  It could hardly be helped; when I was getting into anime, two of the big, big classics were Tenchi Muyo! (go on, pick a continuity, it hardly matters) and Ranma ½.  The former is perhaps the progenitor of the harem comedy, and the latter is a confusion of so many criss-crossing lines of affection that it makes the Gordian Knot look about as complex as the bow you tie in your shoelaces.

Most romance comedies operate according to a fairly narrow formula.  Usually there is a Boy, and he is in love with a Girl.  Typically, the Girl is completely unaware of this even if she is close to the Boy.  However, she may be unaware that he even exists, or she may merely tolerate him.  The Boy is often a useless, hapless geek; his personality isn’t so much illustrated for us as it is sketched in broad strokes.  He’s usually well-meaning but clueless and largely ineffectual.  He has a habit of saying and doing the wrong thing.  He will be idealistic, to the point of being painfully naïve in some cases.  He will, in short, be a generically “good” person, but one lacking in all real interest. 

This is deliberate.  However generally positive it is, his personality will remain bland, utterly devoid of any sharply specific traits.  His interests or hobbies, if any, will be something that the intended audience can relate to, but will rarely (if ever) become points of real interest to the story at hand.  His appearance follows in this trend.  The reason for this is quite cynical, really, and it is the exact same reason that so many heroes of role-playing games (of note: Link, Crono and Adol, just to name a few) have no distinct dialogue.  The Boy is meant to be a stand-in for the audience, and anything specific to his personality will only (in theory) detract from the audience’s ability to put themselves in his position and live out his experiences vicariously.

The Girl, by contrast, is also often very moderate in her personality.  She is attractive, but modestly so; a girl-next-door type.  She is strong-willed, but not usually temperamental (with the notable exception of ire directed at the Boy, explained below).  She often has some prior connection to the Boy; “childhood friend” is a popular one.  If (inexplicably) there are multiple contenders for our hapless hero’s affections, then the one, true heroine of the lot will be the “Goldilocks” of them all.  Neither too much older or too much younger than the Boy (so as to avoid accusations of predation on one side of the equation or the other), not too forward in her advances (we don’t want the story to end in episode five, after all), not too wild in her personality (just wouldn’t be appropriate, and would mess with the delicate idealism of our Boy), or too shy (we don’t want the Boy to become more useless and socially awkward, now do we?).  No, the Girl is the one out of all of these who is just right.

The one consistent trait most of these heroines share is a sort of bizarre antagonism, a tendency to willfully misinterpret every single one of the Boy’s actions in such a way as to be detrimental to any possible budding romance until near the end of the show.  In this way she serves as both the ultimate goal of the Boy, and the source (either by direct action or by circumstance) of pretty much all real conflict in the story.

I got tired of this formula after a while.  It’s not so bad in shows that are about something else, and have a romance plot going on as well as whatever else is happening in the narrative foreground.  But the structure of most of these romance comedies is so rigidly formulaic that you really do only have to see one to see them all.  There are exceptions, of course, but they only serve to emphasize the truth of the rule.  And the structure of their plot is also distressingly routine.

The show opens with the Boy falling in love with the Girl in the first episode.  Much of the middle is spent watching the Boy confront his various insecurities and personal obstacles, with the final episodes focusing on a tighter narrative arc, which usually involves the Boy preparing to confront the Girl with his feelings.  “Happily Ever After” is almost a foregone conclusion.

It isn't as if I watch a lot of these shows, but I was pretty much done with them for a while.  Thankfully, there are exceptions.

In the winter of late 1999 or early 2000, I was busy struggling through college, not as much because I found it difficult, but more because I found it difficult to care.  “Ennui”, I think they call it.  I was doing a lot of Not Studying; I think that if I could have majored in Not Studying, I would have.  I'd have made the Dean’s List, no problem.

I had found a group of friends who were into a lot of the same things I was – video games, Magic: the Gathering, manga and anime – and they provided an all-too-convenient outlet for my burgeoning slackerism.  Honestly, I probably would have found another outlet if not for this group of friends (at least one of whom I still maintain contact with).  What they mainly enabled me to do is more successfully enjoy myself while busily avoiding the responsibilities of college life.

In those days, most of us were still buying our anime (and most other videos) on VHS.  DVDs were available, but scary and newfangled (and expensive).  This was also before always-on broadband connections were the norm; dial-up was the rule, not the exception.  So fansubs of anime were also available only on VHS.  What you did was, you found a group (usually by way of the slow and clunky late-90s internet) that was fansubbing anime, sent them blank tapes and a list of requests, and probably they sent them back to you.  Eventually.  And what you got was a copy of a copy, so the video quality was shot all to hell.

These were dark and troubled times.

One of my friends had recently acquired the first few volumes of a series that was just making its way through the fansub community, called Kareshi Kanojo no Jijyou, and known as KareKano for short.  Or, for anime heathens like myself who still think mainly in English, His and Her Circumstances.  I was asked if I would like to go over to his house late one evening and watch it.  I said why not.

I only got to watch four or five episodes, but it left a strong enough impression on me that, some few years later when The Right Stuf International decided to bring the series over to the U.S., I snapped up the DVDs as soon as I could.  Having watched the whole series from start to finish a couple of times now, I feel like I have a better perspective on what makes it so good.

You see, the people behind His and Her Circumstances know something about relationships that the people who write most of the romantic comedy nonsense in anime either don’t know or won’t admit.  The people behind His and Her Circumstances know that as much effort as it takes to screw up your courage and tell the one you love how you feel, it takes even more courage, patience, effort and strength to make a relationship work.

Most series have the main characters falling in love at the end of the story.  There is an unspoken assumption that from here on out, it’s all wine and roses, perfect and idyllic.  His and Hers doesn’t think much of this idea, and it doesn’t think much of the formula, either.  It shows us how an actual relationship between real people works, and how two people who are committed to each other get along over time.  It shows how people change and grow.  It knows that saying “I love you,” that choosing to commit to someone isn’t the last, climactic choice you make in a relationship.  His and Hers knows this is bullshit, in point of fact; it knows that this is the first choice you make in a long, long series of choices, many of which are subtle and unrecognizable as such until you’ve already made your decision.

What His and Her Circumstances knows, in short, is that there is far more that can trouble a person in a relationship than can trouble a person who is merely trying to be in a relationship, and that logically, far, far more comedy can be wrung out of the former situation than the latter.

So we start off first with our heroine (because this is a shoujo series rather than shounen), Yukino Miyazawa.  She is just entering high school (in Japan, this makes her about the same age as an American high school sophomore), and is focused on doing her best and taking the number one spot on all the exams.  She wants to do everything in her power to be popular and well-liked, and she is well on her way to doing exactly that.  She's smart, kind, talented in her studies, in sports and (at least nominally) in the arts.  She pays attention in class, and all her teachers admire her.

She’s also a total fraud.

You see, the problem with Miyazawa is that she wants the attention and the praise purely because it feels good.  At home she’s pretty much a slob.  She exercises to stay in shape, but otherwise lounges around in sweats all the time and does basically nothing but study in order to get outstanding grades on homework and tests.  She is practically a stranger to her own family, and in a typical middle-class Japanese home, that is hard to do.

Part of what she’s been studying so hard for is the chance to debut in her high school with the number one spot, top score overall in the entrance exams, and she is confident she has it in the bag, too, right up until she looks at the grades and sees that, no, someone else has done that.

His name is Soichiro Arima.  Like Miyazawa, he is well-liked by everyone, intelligent, and excels athletically as well.  Unlike Miyazawa, he seems to be completely genuine and sincere about who he is.  His realness begins to make her feel self-conscious and insecure about the tremendous façade she has erected around her own life.  And so begins her desperate, obsessive mission to crush him in the exams, to prove that she is better than he is, and to erase the insult of coming in second place in the entrance exams.

If this sounds a little crazy, understand that:

1. This is all taking place in the Japanese school system, and

2. This is the sort of shoujo comedy anime where and sanity is neither required nor particularly encouraged.

Now, the thing about Arima is that he has some secrets also.  He has pressures acting on him, and when he uncovers (quite by accident) Yukino’s great charade, it occurs to him that she would be devastated if he revealed this secret.  The possibility of blackmail crosses his mind…

These are just the first couple of episodes, mind you.

From here the story careens this way and that, introducing new characters who have an effect on Miyazawa and Arima’s relationship, but also taking time to explore the newer characters as well, uncover their own quirks and habits and conflicts.

What I like most about the show is the characters themselves.  They feel like real people; not necessarily people you would actually know (though never having gone to school in Japan, maybe these people are more realistic than I think?), but they behave like real people might if you put them in this situation.  They aren’t here to feed you some tired tripe about how you have to face your feelings, how you absolutely have to tell the person you’re in love with how you feel, etc., etc.  Or rather, it does these things, but in a way that feels real.  You wonder what might happen if things don’t turn out well, and you feel at times as if this is a real possibility.  The main characters don’t always act in admirable ways.  While they rarely do anything really bad, there are often times when you feel the urge to smack your forehead and ask aloud why would anyone ever say or do what the character just did?  (Of course, the answer is that audience perspective, like hindsight, is 20/20.)  At times, I felt nervous or embarrassed on behalf of the characters.  While I don't like feeling that way, to me, it's also a mark of good storytelling, that I can be made to care about characters so much that even though they don't exist, I feel bad for them in a very real way.

His and Hers was animated by Studio Gainax, the same people who, not long prior to this, had wrought havoc upon the world with Neon Genesis Evangelion.  It is difficult to imagine a pair of works more utterly divorced, thematically, than these two.  Their budget for His and Hers was laughably small.  Amazingly, they managed to turn this into a strength, making use of a number of inventive visual techniques and sight gags to express the emotional highs and lows (not to mention the emotional whiplash) of the characters.  At least half of one episode features paper cutouts of the characters; whether this was done purely for its own artistic merits, or as a cost-saving measure, I’m honestly not sure.

In the end, I think the only things I feel like I can really complain about with this series is the way it ends.  Rather, I should say the way it fails to end.  It seems to come to sort of an ellipsis, though I suppose this was always going to be the way it had to be.  The manga His and Her Circumstances was based on is one of those long-running shoujo series that would be almost impossible to consistently keep in animation.  Especially with a studio like Gainax, who certainly would have quit at some point to do something else weird, experimental and absolutely bananas.  Still, they could have done better than they did.  Part of the problem is that the director, Hideaki Anno, either quit or was bumped off the project toward the end, and a different director took over (the cause was artistic differences with the original manga author, I believe).  It isn’t that the new director was bad, really, so much as they (I don’t even recall this person’s name; this is how little impact they made) didn’t have the sense of direction and focus that Anno did.  The result is that the last few episodes have a sort of limp and listless feel, and then the show just kind of rolls to a gentle halt.

It’s not common that I get into something this overtly shoujo.  I think the only other anime I’ve really cared for that went this deeply into the shoujo category was Revolutionary Girl Utena.  And that show was so thick with meaning and turgid with symbolism that I can’t help myself; I love it completely and without reservation, and never mind all the pink, and the roses, and the fruity cars, and shirtless posturing by pretty men.

Long story short: Go watch His and Her Circumstances.  You'll thank me later.