Of Swords and Parasols

So, most of the dorama portion of my f-list seems to be doing "top 10" lists.  calixaand lesbiassparrowtold me to, so I shall, though it's possible that several I hope to watch soon will shake it up. No pics or MVs from me though, I'm afraid.

I was sold on this one when forgottenpolish said she was starting a new dorama that sounded a lot like "Wallflower"(they have a similar weird girl/pygmalion concept, but Nobuta certainly isn't the ripoff I've seen others call it)

Nobuta is about a guy named Shuji who goes through school acting out all the things that will make him popular, even pretending to date the most popular girl in school(notes that Shuji is the only one pretending and he hasn't bothered to fill Mariko in, and gives him the first of many well deserved whacks upside the head).  He's bored silly, but figures it's worth it, as everyone likes him and he never lacks for "friends."

One day, however, 2 things happen to make that change.  The first is that Akira, a cross between the class clown and the class loser sees through his bull and decides he's either going to be Shuji's real friend, or make him see what a jerk he is(or both).  The second is that he goes to the willow tree he touches for luck every morning, and finds that it's been moved because of construction.  There's a girl there, Nobuko, who tells him what happened to it, and that she was going to hang herself from the tree before they took it(not the best thing to hang oneself from, she knows, but she thought it looked otherworldly because it was almost over the water and it swayed in the wind)

When Shuji gets to class, he finds out that Nobuko is his his classmate.  Nobuko gets off on the wrong foot with the school bullies, as the teacher makes one of them move back to her own seat so Nobuko can have the seat she'd been using.  The fact that Nobuko is so shy she's almost catatonic and is almost literally incapable of standing up for herself doesn't help.  The bullies put flowers on her desk(meant to honor a dead student) hose her down in the bathroom and slam her against lockers when she won't apologize for...well...breathing...

When Shuji and Akira realize just how bad things are, they embark on a secret project to "produce" Nobuko and turn her into a popular girl, reasoning(fairly rightly) that the only reason the bullies get away with treating her that way is because she's essentially a non-entity, and they name the project "Nobuta"

The makeover/production is a running theme in the show, especially when Nobuko joins the school's TV/media club, and efforts in that area, as well as Shuji's attempts to balance his 2 productions-Nobuta and popularity-provide most of the humor(and most of the "whack Shuji upside the head" moments)  The real focus, however, is the difference between fake friendship and real friendship.  Shuji thinks he has a lot of friends, but he knows that all he really has is appearances, but no substance.  if it wasn't for the Nobuta production, Shuji would spend the rest of his life remembering high school as an extremely boring, two-faced experience, Nobuko probably really would have committed suicide(she was in a very, very bad place the first few episodes...) and Akira would have remembered it as fun, but when asked about his friends, would have gone "that guy who..." "there was this one girl who always..." etc.  Instead, they end up finding the only people who could ever convince them to let their true selves out in public.

While there's a fair bit of "liking" going on, the chief focus is friendship and being yourself, which is why the ending not only doesn't bother me, but it also makes me happy, while a more conventional ending would have annoyed me

Incidentally, I was slightly hard on Shuji.  He's not mean or a jerk, and is a pretty nice guy.  He just hates being lonely and does whatever he can to avoid it, and he disgusts even himself.

And now, picspam


And now I believe it is time to start the Kingdom of Heaven extended edition