I can’t go on watching Last Friends

Ummmmm… about Last Friends… I, err, got to thinking eh, and I realized that err, maybe I’m not quite thaaaat desperate to learn Japanese just yet? Like, it’s not supposed to be torture, right? There’s a glimmer of a good idea behind the how, but the actors just can’t get the job done. I’m talking the main two, the Michiru actress and the Sousuke guy. That Nagasawa girl has only 3 expressions: happy bunny, sad bunny and confused bunny. Pathetic. As for Sousuke, he’d be okay if he’d just keep his bloody mouth shut. He makes a decent creepy-abuser guy (though story-wise it was stupid to have his character come out in full-swing right at the start but whatever) but as soon as he opens his mouth he just blows it all way.

So, I’m not going to suffer through any more of this show. 3 episodes is more than enough. For now I’m just going to rip the audio from each episode – waste not, want not – and listen to it or something. And I’ll skip over all the domestic violence bits because they’re dumb and unnecessarily overwrought. The writers should have watched more Lifetime TV or something, they’ll show you how it’s really done (just kidding). At least then they would have had the decency to attempt to explain why Michiru puts up with Sousuke’s nonsense, and no, “her father was a drunk” doesn’t cut it. I mean, the two of them are already dating when the show starts so we have no idea how they met, or what she sees in him or anything. BS. It’s like the writers opened up a manual which said “abusers behave like this” “abused people behave like this” and so they went with it and expect the watchers to play along.

Alright then, so Michiru is stupid (she certainly looks it), fine, but is her stupidity infectious or something? I mean, why would Ruka and Takeru of all people cover up for Sousuke as well? “Oh it’s nothing, nothing happened here,” when both of them are lying on the floor with Takeru standing over them with a chair? They only just met him that day, why make up lies to cover for him? BULLSHIT. Thanks for reminding me why I avoid j-dramas, Last Friends!

Next up… I need a cleansing break. I managed to get a fairly decent cam of Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea. It’s been a while since I watched a cam anyway, lol. I’m almost hoping someone will get up and walk across the screen halfway through, hehe.

J-drama

It occurred to me recently that perhaps I was giving Japanese dramas a bad rap. That I wasn’t giving them enough of a chance, just because stuff like Tokyo Love Story was dry and wooden and terribly, terribly acted doesn’t mean all j-dramas are equally terrible. I mean, Oshin was good (bloody good), Sensitive Samurai was good too. Who knows, I might chance upon something else I liked.

That’s what I was thinking when I started downloading j-dramas from the fansubbing group JPSEEK. If you’ve ever been to their site, you’ll know they sub stuff…in Chinese. Which I speak very little of. I can’t even find my way around their website; I have to use Tokyotosho. Why get the Chinese subs and not just raws, you ask? Simple, because raws are HUEG LIEK XBOX. Even English subs average about 400mb per episode, as against around 250mb for jpseek subs. I don’t have the internet speed for that, I average about 20kb/s IF I’m lucky, so huge files are a luxury I don’t have. Plus I’m only going to delete them when I done, so no need for super-high quality or anything.

And so, with that established, I started with Last Friends. I consciously stayed away from any reviews/previews/summaries. In fact I didn’t even know what the series was about, and I liked it that way. So with one episode out of the way… it’s pretty bad. Yah, cheesy, pretentious, overly melodramatic, badly-acted… pretty, though. I think I could get through this. I think I’ve built up some immunity over the years by forcing myself to sit through crappy anime like Shuffle!, Maburaho and School Days (guilty pleasure, but I couldn’t do it again), and if I can watch those then Last Friends should be a breeze, right? The actors are plastic enough that I can pretend they’re just anime characters anyway. But seriously, what is it with j-drama and long, dramatic pauses in the dialogue? It makes things really awkward, if you ask me.

Anyway, a j-drama episode a day on top of my reps, sentences, reading and radio-listening is just what I need to kick my Japanese learning to a new level. It’s been 10 weeks since I started All Japanese All The Time* and I’m definitely seeing results!

*and over 6 years since I started learning Japanese…