Skip Beat! 25 (END) A quick final note on Skip Beat! - I hadn’t planned to post about it but after some second thoughts realized I had to say something. Skip Beat was one of the shows I anticipated most last fall because of the manga’s lofty reputation. I’m a shoujo-holic - I love even the worst shoujo manga adaptations (Itazura na Kiss anyone?), so seeing the gorgeous shoujo character designs on the Dark Moon poster and reading the ravings of “Kyoko-sama’s” many fans all over discussion boards had me foaming at the mouth for this show. Did it live up to my (admittedly overblown) expectations? Yes and no. I had problems with the pacing from the start - scenes of Kyoko’s exaggerated inner world seemed to drag on and whole episodes would pass with very little plot progression. I was intrigued enough however by the characters and premise to read the manga - which, as I’ve mentioned, I found vastly superior. Skip Beat has a great spin on the classic shoujo romance narrative. While it employs loads of genre cliches (like the forgotten childhood friend trope) the whole thing is kind of disrupted by the personality of Kyoko herself and her quest for revenge. Even when her flightiness pisses me off, Kyoko remains a fascinatingly unique shoujo heroine. She’s angry, jealous, vengeful, and formidably talented. Her strengths come from denying her own servile nature, not wanting to be loved, and selfishly exploring her acting talent as a way of defining her identity in opposition to the people she grew up serving (Sho, customers at the inn, her mother). Even the romance between Kyoko and Ren is unconventional, because wherever the archetypal “good boy / bad boy” dichotomy appears in the shoujo world, everybody knows the bad boy ALWAYS wins. This is shoujo gospel. And I ain’t complaining, because I love the bad one most of the time. But Ren is decidedly the good boy next to Sho. To have a tough, talented heroine paired with a gentle, supportive male lead really flips the trope on its head. And I feel like that’s a good thing. It’s a shame that this adaptation had a bit of trouble conveying its wicked source material. Not only did the long interior monologues of the manga not translate too well due to the way they were paced, the story wasn’t adequately fit to the 25 episode season either. It ended on an abruptly awkward note, only a few episodes into its most interesting story arc. If only less time had been spent on those sluggish early episodes maybe they could have animated the entire Dark Moon arc instead of cutting it short right before it climaxed, leaving so much unresolved. As it stands we’ll just have to wait for an as-yet-unannounced second season. I’ll be looking forward to it.
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