Kaguya-sama: Love is War (2019)

2019 has been a fairly very talked about year when it comes to animated TV series. One of the most influential manga's fifth adaptation, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind (part 5), continues from 2018's winter season, multiple popular shounen manga series are getting their adaptations such as Fire Force (Soul Eater author's current work), Dr. Stone (shounen post-apocalyptic series) and right now we have Ufotable's (known for Fate/ series anime adaptations) Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba airing weekly as well as My Hero Academia season 4 and Seven Deadly Sins: Wrath of the Gods (season 3) anime series of extremely popular shounen manga airing in the fall of 2019. So it's clear without a doubt that this year stands out merely from those weekly shounen series adaptations alone (most popular manga magazines in Japan), but there are other stand-out and much talked about series that have been airing and will air in 2019 such as the second season of One Punch Man (admittedly the hype has died down massively in comparison and the adaptation is not living up to the first season in quality), Attack on Titan season 3 part 2, The Rising of the Shield Hero, Dororo (remake adaptation of one of the legendary Osamu Tezuka's works) as well as an adaptation of a very popular seinen manga series, Vinland Saga, coming up later in 2019 for a whole 24-episode run. I'm interested in how Wit Studio will handle that adaptation for sure.

The reason why this post exists however is because I've wanted to check out the more highly acclaimed romance series for a while now as I don't dislike romance in the series I read i think it's important to get a taste of what people like to see. I've been reading Domestic na Kanojo (taboo romance manga) and 5Toubun no Hanayome (one dude meets five identical sisters) and I'm looking forward to Chihayafuru season 3 and Fruits Basket to air. Just last week I asked for recommendations and people mentioned this romance-based series that aired just earlier this year and that's what we're here to talk about today.


Kaguya-sama: Love is War by A1-Pictures is an adaptation of a romcom manga by a very similar except longer name Kaguya-sama Wa Kokurasetai - Tensai-tachi no renai zunousen, or in English, Kaguya Wants to be Confessed To: The Geniuses' War of Love and Brains, created by Aka Akasaka. A-1 Pictures and I go a long way. They usually adapt series that have great original material such as Ace Attorney, Magic Kaito 1412, Black Butler, Erased, Seven Deadly Sins and many others tend to get filler endings with contrived writing, really bad animation and off-character designs as well as very, very rushed pacing, adapting over 100 chapters a season, for SDS for example. So I've never thought that A-1 is the ideal studio that I'd want to take over any of my favourite series, but sadly, they seem to mass produce a decent amount of anime every year, which I assume is the reason for their low-quality series. They sometimes do have an eye for what is a well written plot to adapt in order to pull in audience though.

However Kaguya-sama is one of A-1 Pictures' best adaptations ever when it comes to what a group of animators can do to enhance the original series.

This narration-heavy story starts off by introducing the watcher to the concept of what this series will be about: when it comes to the ideology of the show, two people who love each other are technically constantly at war with each other as relationships, according to the narrator, consist of a person who reigns supreme and controls, in other words a "winner" and a person who becomes a "loser" and obeys the winner.
Although that type of over-the-top introduction and the hype from the series' fans calling it the "Death Note of romance" might make you feel as if this show will have some supernatural mind games or heavy drama, there is literally none of what you'd expect. The first episode of the anime surely shows some potential to showcase psychological aspects well, but the show dusts that off right away and stays a simple romantic comedy series about a limited cast of characters in a limited setting.

Shuchi'in private academy is known to be one of the more special academies in Japan with a long-lasting history going back to the era of nobles and samurai. Nowadays the academy works to graduate the children from rich families so that those children will grow up to become the new leaders of Japan.
In Shuchi'in academy the school assets and love lives of the students are being handled by the student council, which our main characters are part of. 

Kaguya Shinomiya is the character that the show is based upon so we can assume she's the main character, however there are two equal characters in this show that can be called the main lead and the deuteragonist. Kaguya Shinomiya is the vice-president of Shuchi'in academy's student council as well as the daughter of a man named Gan'an Shinomiya who is a multi-trillionaire. As a person with such heavy family history, Kaguya has trained to be multi-talented, perfecting the art of many different subjects from music to martial arts, and became known as a so-called genius in the academy. 

However there is a person who Kaguya has not yet surpassed when it comes to exams.

Miyuki Shirogane is the show's deuteragonist and a young man known for his exceptional intellect and wisdom as the person who scores the best in mock exams out of anyone in Japan, always getting maximum points and the first spot. Unlike Kaguya, Miyuki is not as well versed in multiple different talents, however since he is the greatest academic, Miyuki Shirogane's exemplary behavior was what earned him the spot as the student council president itself.

Both Miyuki and Kaguya are very prideful people who would never date anyone below them and not under any circumstance be the person who would make the first move if they were to get into a relationship. The story opens up with both of them pridefully assuming that the other would come and ask them out, but that never happens and in the first chapter half a year already passes by without anything happening. That time steel's their resolve so that they only want to focus on forcing the other confess them. That is the war between lovers that the show promises, but is it handled that well? Ehh. Not really.

The show is about the so-called mind games in which Kaguya plans a certain situation out and prepares it in which she will try to trick Miyuki to acknowledge her/ask her out/say he loves her in even the most ridicilous situations, and Miyuki also tries to think ahead on how to counteract and make Kaguya to ask him out instead or say she loves him or such. As the storytelling in this show is mostly episodic, you can instantly tell that this type of writing would get old and fast. And it does. The student council's secretary, the big-breasted Chika Fujiwara, is what usually breaks the mold and turns the planning the two do upside down and sideways, however Chika does that far too often so that gets tiring as well. Aside from Chika there is really only one more notable side character called Yuu Ishigami, a computer-savvy student who fails grades constantly. Yuu Ishigami appears rather late into the show since it's only 12 episodes but the episodes he appears in tend to be the funniest out of them all. The comedy of Kaguya-sama is not that great in general. There is an episode focusing on grade-schooler level wiener jokes and it excuses those jokes by saying that Kaguya's dark humour is grade-schooler level. It's kind of sad and bland to watch and the original mind game aspect of the lovers also seems to quickly lose its oomph just couple episodes in, the story becomes a pretty shallow romcom that doesn't lead anywhere.

The anime itself feels like it's been done by Shaft. The presentation of this show is very good. Character models look decent but the clever ways of showcasing what's going on are the best aspects of this show. The framers transform and many different styles of wide variety are used in quick succession to make almost everything that happens in the show look and sound much more interesting than they actually are. The soundtracks are fine but nothing special. The voice actors are okay and they handle some comedic scenes well.

The worst aspects of this show that really make watching the mere 12 episodes of it tiring for me is the lack of substance, the cast of characters and the settings in which the story takes place. For an episodic story, it seems to only pull jokes or try to do tricks instead of setting up a real short-story. I did not feel any presence of life from majority of the episodes and they seemed The pacing of the show felt off for me on many occasions.
When I say that the cast of characters is what make the show tiring for me I mean that I personally did not like any other characters than Kaguya, Miyuki and Yuu. And if I did try to find someone else, there was barely any left. This show lacks characters heavily. You'd expect every episode to show one-off and overarching characters but the show only focuses on what's going on around the main cast - and what is going on around, is not much and that brings us to the third point.
I have a problem with the characters being sold to us as geniuses that play mind games when they don't act like ones and act more like the shy teenagers that they are rather than the mind-controlling geniuses that they wish they were.
The settings of this show are bland at best. Majority of it takes place in the student council room, dealing with the exact same characters doing similar types of jokes that have to do with romance. For an episodic series I really do loathe when the setting stays the same with how easy it should be to change it around.

Thus it's clear that basically all the problems of Kaguya-sama come from the original manga series instead of the anime adaptation by A-1.

To wrap this all up, as I mentioned Kaguya-sama reminds me of Shaft's Nisio Isin works in how it spams dialogue and presents itself, making it seem like there's a lot going on in a frame, but those moments are mostly used for gags and there is rarely anything to talk or theorize about, it's essentially mindless fun. It is not a downright bad anime, the animation studio does many favours for the original series to make it more bearable for me, and people who care more about superficial aspects such as presentation rather than anything with substance can understandably love this show quite a lot, as there is a huge fan base for this series. However the show is not something that I'd expect from what sells itself as the "Death Note of romance."

The Seed of Hatred

Although it was not in my plans, I've been in the limbo for a while (today it's been a good two months) due to so much happening in the real life but I'll say that this book did not help the case of me keeping the weekly reviews up. I was in conflict; I just did not want to skip a review of this one for two reasons. First reason being that it was a reread and it'd feel like a waste of time to reread something and plan to write about it and not do even that, and second reason being that for some reason I just can't find any in-depth information about this particular book on the net.

Hate Begins at Home (1967) is a mystery novel with slight thriller and romance elements created by the semi-known English children’s literature writer Joan Aiken, an author whose family were writers. The story of Hate Begins at Home tells the tale of two people, the antagonist’s side which tells about a successful and known violist being harrassed by others, and the protagonist’s side, a tale about a tragic young girl who is living in a place which she hates, the girl experiences extremely traumatic events and supposedly gets a depression with amnesia. The story replays some new events in the same manner as the first traumatizing event and it tries to be sort of symbolistic. 

The prologue of the story begins with a nervous man named Harry Lupac looking out the window inside a building in an unknown place. Lupac is waiting for a girl whom he is... about to murder. He simulates their incoming dialogue inside of his head, preparing for their fateful meeting inside the cottage. Aside from couple of mentions about what type of person Lupac is, the reader has no idea who he is waiting for or about what his motivations are for wanting to murder someone. The reader of course even has no idea about who he even is. The prologue fills the story with questions, however it does not flow very well in the overall story, as it's just a part of a chapter which happens much later, it's the build up to the last part of the story. 

The real story sarts up with the book’s first chapter, with a girl, a 17-year-old Caroline Trevis, sneakily moving in the woods, going towards a small shack in the forest while looking behind herself. What waits for her is a run-down apartment with a man named Tim Conroy, her hidden boyfriend who is studying for incoming exams. Caroline and Tim live their lives alone but both of them have their problems, Tim's is that his father, the owner of a large scale business that has to do with drilling and oil, is very ill, and Caroline's problems include her style of safe upbringing in a place where her mother simply wants her to marry a rich man as Caroline is not really 'good for anything else.' 

Caroline and Tim get caught by Ms. Trevis, Carinney's (what Tim calls Caroline) mother, while they are inside the run-down apartment known as Whistle Cottage. The situation, because of Ms. Trevis, leads them to forcingly getting married to each other as soon as possible. Tim's and Caroline's plan was to marry after the finals, so that Tim gets to study in peace, but no, all the pressure will come at them in waves at the same time. The wedding day gets changed on the spot as well due to Ms. Trevis, and because of the sweaty weather and Tim's father getting another heart stroke, the wedding itself is like a living hell to Carinney who takes all the negatives of the situation in an accepting way; all to get away from home. 

The Trevis manor, the Woodhoe House which exists in Woodhoe has long since seen its better days. It’s now a dog kennel that Ms. Trevis keeps up and her two children, Caroline and Hilda, take the dogs out for her. The family has a butler, the poem-loving old and very unhygienic Hudson and their cousin Flora, an old penny stretching lady who lives in he same house. 

Some years go by and Caroline gets a baby, young boy whom they named Punch Conroy. Caroline and Tim live they wanted off-screen from the reader’s, but their traveling gets announced in the news which are read by Ms. Trevis, Hilda and Flora, the usual Woodhoe House residents, that is. Year, two, three go by once more and the Conroy family travels to an oil drilling area in Bertha that is working under the name of the Conroy company, and that’s where their happiness leaves them as during a car accident where neither Tim nor Caroline were in the car, the young Punch dies. The entire story transforms and Caroline finds herself in a hospital bed, unable to remember anything, thinking she’s been kidnapped, then, soon, she finds herself in a cold-looking area filled with doctors, psychiatrists and the like. Caroline got an amnesia and a slew of other mental problems, and she was sent to live in to the place she hated the most, with her mother, sister, cousin, Hudson and the dogs. The problem with Caroline is not that she hates the people she lives with, but the style of living itself that happens in Woodmouth.  

Caroline, broken, forgetting, easily manipulative. Now she lives again with her family as her husband Tim is working full day in Ras al-Abdan, keeping his family business going, trying to forget what happened to their little boy. He gets letters from Caroline which are very shocking to read, and from Hilda, which keep saying that it would be better for Caroline’s mental health if Tim weren’t to visit her, so that things would balance out at home. In the family house, the Woodhoe House which exists in the area of Woodmouth and near the run-down shack where Tim and Caroline used to meet up in (that shack is named Whistle Cottage, by the way), Caroline takes care of her mother’s dogs along with Hilda who has been sneaking out recently, meeting up with famous people. Hudson, their very unhygienic poem-loving butler is the only one who somewhat cares about Caroline, but basically hates everyone else. Hudson honestly did not get as much characterization and fleshing out as he deserved, sadly.  

The ‘normal’ days in Woodmouth were not to last for long as three more deaths would happen in the story, all surprisingly enough in Woodmouth, and one of them happens in a mysterious way to the reader. I won’t be spoiling about the other deaths too much but the third death is basically this story’s only real mystery, and I can’t say it’s anything hard to guess, but atleast it’s more than nothing. The reader basically has to have an idea about what kind of characters the culprit is to understand why they killed that person. But aside from the later deaths I can tell about the second death (death after Punch's) which led up to the beginning of the events that would lead to the fated meeting which was mentioned in the very first page.  

 Harry Lupac is a quickly rising young musician, a violist who has the press and all the girls yearning for his attention. Harry has ‘jumped’ according to the press, meaning that he’s come from a country with war or alike and supposedy left his sisters behind. That is what they write at least, it’s never actually confirmed what his past really is like, though. Anyway, Despite his career choice, Harry is a person who absolutely hates people who pry into his personal dealings – marriage for example is impossible for him, as is simply telling others where his house resides. Terrible for Harry, fate were to have it that one day as he’s speeding with his car through the tunnel of Woodhoe Bottom, a jump boy jumps in front of the road, and boom, dies instantly to the impact. Although Harry does not know it, Caroline saw the whole event happen right before her very eyes as the young boy, House assistant Gladys Vernon’s son Garry, about five years old, ran in the road while wearing the clothes which Caroline had given Gladys - in other words Garry was wearing Punch’s clothes. For Caroline, the illusion was perfect, if for just a second. It was almost as if she saw her child die once more, as happened during that one day when she arrived at that flaming car, and she also blames herself for making Garry run away from her and jump right to the road where he got hit by the car of Harry Lupac, who did not notice Caroline who was standing up in the cliff. 

The book actually sells itself by telling the reader that it 'reveal the real murderer in the very first page ('reveal' happens in the very first sentence actually),' as well as claiming to have more of a mystery behind the story than just what it superficially claims. Well, it does have aspects of that, yes - things that the reader has to think about to figure out - but overall the "mysteries" are sort of unoriginal, the motivations are really unrealistic and they should have fleshed out Lady Trevis, Caroline's mother, more as she plays a large role in the story, and it's never brought up well enough (thinking about what happened to Caroline and the culprits, it just was not explained enough to be realistic even if I understand why they did their silly things).  

Hate Begins at Home has one similar problem with another book called In the Name and Blood by Ilkka Remes that I’ve posted about here. That is that they start the story in a way that is special due to the style of presentation with the writing style. That style should have kept up from the first chapter until the last, but it ends with the first and the rest of the story is bland and cliched nonsense for the genre. I bet Remes noticed how much harder it is to actually put effort that he just created that first chapter to lure people in only to drop them back into the sea again. Though unlike with that book which only contains a neat first chapter, the story of HBaH opens up with a pretty strong start as a whole. I am not sure what to say about the book as it really was kind of mediocre. I’ve reread the book once for this review as I read it before in 2016 and could not remember much. I think that the beginning with Punch’s death and Caroline’s trauma is kind of well handled, for sure, but everything else from Lupac to the main events of the story and the real mystery behind the scenes were kind of poorly written, boring and uninspired, to say the least. At the end of the story there’s a moment where the narrator goes through Caroline’s inner thoughts which is actually kind of neatly handled as well in my opinion as the whole story goes a full circle for the ending – but it goes a full circle for far too many times, just for example the first apartment mentioned in the book, the Whistle Cottage, plays too much of a role, as well as Garry Vernon’s death happening in front of Caroline while he was wearing Punch’s clothes... I just think that Joan Aiken went too far with the intentional similarities between the events that happen to Caroline for me to swallow this story. The characters were also not realistic enough, or unrealistic enough for me to care about them, they were just bland with attempted quirks to them (like how Hudson brings out a poem or two all the time he says something).

In short: I acknowledge that the beginning and ending of the book had some strong parts to them to think about but they did not last long and overall the story as a whole, all things considered, was honestly and simply put just bad. I think that the amount of time that it took me to finally just sit down and write about this one tells more than enough about how I just could not be bothered to spend my time thinking about Hate Begins at Home.