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dangermousieKurosagi continues to be so good as to make it almost criminal for this thing not to have a sequel. I have only 6 eps left and am dreading the fact there won’t be more.
Ep 4 wasn’t as good as 2 or 3 (or 5), but it was still a fun, solid ep.
And OMG! Kurosaki got outwitted. Which I liked as it would be unrealistic for him never to get beaten.
I found the Older Swindler that Kurosaki went against rather interesting. In some ways, he is similar to Kurosaki (he goes after big corporations because he hates the anonymity and corruption) but he is more venal and a lot better balanced. And the Old Man pitting the two against each other for amusement’s sake, to see who’d win. CREEPY.
The Old Man really freaks me the HELL out. I don’t think anyone other than![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
meganbmoore will get the ref, but he really reminds me of Ni Jinyi from Saiyuki. The same unruffled creepiness and being smarter than everyone and just making my flesh creep (does that make Kurosaki Kougaiji? Hmmmm). When he actually invites Tsurara in again (by ordering from her shop) and gives her pickles and talks to her about Kurosaki, it’s really like a spider with a web. And Kurosaki can just stand there and seethe and watch through the glass and not go in. I seriously just want to yank her out of there. But OMG. The look on Kurosaki’s face as he sees Tsurara with the Old Man. Yamapi really is amazing.
Yukari really needs to get a copy of ‘Girl, he’s just not that into you.’ When a guy almost runs into his apartment on seeing you and slams the door as you are in mid-sentence, not to mention groans ‘she came’ when he sees you, he just might not be interested, you know? But OMG. How much do I love that he doesn’t the close the door right away when Yukari is talking about Tsurara because he is interested in learning more (and Yukari’s reiterating that Tsurara means everything she says is actually quite crucial as she showed sympathy last ep and will go quite a bit further in the next). He is hooooooked. YAY.
But my favorite scene in that ep was Tsurara telling Kurosaki about her father, how he always disappointed and ran away and then came back and they were happy that he did but instead he just took Mother’s hospital money and left. And his reaction is ‘why tell me?’ because he is still doing his best to be prickly and she tells him ‘I just felt like telling it.’ Heh. Take that, emo boy! You can run but you can’t hiiiiiide. You are doomed to have a friend. Or maybe hopefully more.
It’s interesting that she tells him that. Part of it is her trying to explain herself to him. But another is sort of a fairness thing. It’s an exchange. She knows something so incredibly personal about him, so this is a gift of something equally painfully personal about herself.
Another thing I loved? The bit where he comes home and finds her struggling with grocery bags and her soup has fallen out and he actually picks it up and brings it over and puts it by her. And it’s such a huge step for him, to initiate any contact, however minimal. LOVE.
It’s interesting, because both Tsurara and Kurosaki are a product of their fathers. True, Kurosaki’s trauma is several exponential degrees huger than Tsurara’s, but still, they’ve been shaped by the shortcomings of their parents and their personalities are a reaction to that: her father is a weak crooked man who has an easy life while her mother works hard and Tsurara wants to remedy injustice which is a reflection of injustice of her family life. His father goes psycho and stabs the whole family to death as a result of being swindled, so Kurosaki tries to get revenge in order to stave the feeling of powerlessness and to vindicate the family.
And so we get ep 4.
But then we get to ep 5 and I think it’s my favorite Kurosagi ep so far. In fact, if I metaed everything I liked about it, I’d just be discussing every scene, step by step.
The end of ep 5 killed me dead. OTP! OTP! OTP! OTP!
Ahem.
But to go back to the beginning.
Old Man is seriously freaking me out more and more. He isn’t even cruel because he relishes it, he is cruel like a child with a toy, because he is bored. In this ep, he tries to get Kurosaki to destroy Tsurara’s father and he clearly knows that the swindler he sics him in is Tsurara’s father. And he knows Tsurara is Kurosaki’s sole link to humanity and OMG. He is a bastard. Even his assistant asks him ‘Isn’t it too cruel.’ GRRR. Hate him and he totally creeps me out. I think I won’t be able to watch the actor in anything else without freaking.
There is that scene where Kurosaki calls the cop in on a swindler and the cop goes: ‘You actually want us to catch you. You actually want someone to stop you’ and Kurosaki says nothing and a light bulb goes on in my head. Because OMG. So true. He just wants to stop but he can’t.
But now I want to talk Kurosaki/Tsurara!
The scene where Kurosaki tells OM that Tsurara is nothing to him. What’s not to love? He is saying it in order to protect her from OM as he knows OM is mainly interested in her because of him. I think his own denials to himself about the fact that she is something to him are getting weaker and weaker and more and more desperate. He tells her during their fight/talk at the window that he and she inhabit different worlds and it’s true, but it strikes me as a last-ditch desperate defense. He tells her he will destroy her father, and it’s sort of a lash out and push people away before they abandon you and/or hurt you strategy, but of course he ends up doing nothing of the sort and instead scares the guy straight.
He actually ends up letting her father off, when he wouldn’t even do that for his friend. I don’t think he set out to let him off (though the fact that he didn’t know he was swindling helped) but when faced with it, he couldn’t wreck another family, especially not Tsurara’s (when he finds out whose father it is, you can see he is reeling). I love the symmetry of them contemplating the pictures of their families at the same time. And his walking on the street and seeing Tsurara, all exhausted from looking for her father, doing the pinky swear with the little kid. OMG. The look on his face.
OMG. I love that bit in the beginning where she realizes she loves him. She is doodling a little cartoon of him in her notebook and she overhears Yukari on the phone with some other girl who is trying to figure out if she likes this random guy and Yukari is basically asking her three questions and telling her to draw a circle if the answer is yes. And Tsurara is being absent minded. And she hears ‘Does your heart race when you are around him?’ ‘Do you always want to contradict him?’ ‘Do you want him to understand you?’ And she looks down and she’s drawn three circles. EEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!! There was screaming in my house.
Also, apparently, she’s a girl who’s never been kissed. And never been in love. Evil dorama, you should remedy that immediately. Come on, the boy needs unwinding badly. And I don’t think he’s ever been in love before either, he’s too messed up. I know there is no kissing on this show and that is pure evil. Unless they were worried that those two had crazy chemistry just with the eye locking, so if they kissed the celluloid would combust.
I love the bit where she comes home shortly after her little revelation and sees him sitting with the cat on the stairs and randomly talking to it ‘Do you like me?’ (btw: he is hot, angsty, and loves cats. That’s like THE fictional boyfriend right there). And she hides before he sees her and in part it’s because her heart is beating fast (eeeee!) and because she wants to observe him a bit unobserved, but a part is because she wants him to be able to stay relaxed a bit longer, not have to put the shields up again.
After she finds out about her father and he won’t tell her where he is, they have this brutal fight and he tells her that her naïve thinking only creates more swindlers and more victims and he is lashing out at her because he hates what he is doing and he is so sure she will hate him. And she finds that notebook with the doodling and destroys the cartoon she was drawing of him. Eeeek. The thing is, he wants to push her away before he loses her, but she isn’t pushable and she isn’t loseable. He just needs to get that.
And the scene where she finally finds her father and sees him with Kurosaki and Kurosaki is letting him off and telling him he should make up to his family blah blah and the look on her face is radiant. And then Kurosaki sets out to walk off and he sees her and he freezes, looking as guilty to be caught as if he was doing something horrible.
And then there is that scene near the end, after all the commotion when he comes back home and he sees her, standing in the yard, smiling at him and saying ‘Welcome Home.’ And OMG. The look on his face. It’s this disbelief and emotion he doesn’t want to feel and a tiny bit of hope and it’s such a mixed mess.
And then we get the scene at the end. Which killed me. Because they are at that hill he likes and she thanks him and then asks him, sounding both agitated and defiant and completely open: ‘Why do you have to be so contradictory? Why do you help victims too?’ and continues with ‘Why does my heart beat so fast? Why do I want to argue with you? Why do I want you to understand me?’ and they do the patented intense stare and then she says: ‘I like you.’ And looks straight at him. Oh. My. God.
The girl really is fearless and open to be able to do that. LOVE. I wonder how he’ll react. He wanted her to move when she merely expressed some interest in him. And now he is a lot more human but this is a whole different thing. I can’t wait to see. Because the staring. And the looks on their faces in that scene just kill me.
In between watching Kurosagi, I dled the first part of Satomi Hakkenden. I am not going to start it until I finish with Kurosagi but I checked to see whether the files got joined OK and OMG. It is so amazingly WHAT I LOVE. I mean, historical fantasy with sword-fighting? YES. A story about 8 warriors with supernatural powers who have issues and fight to save the kingdom? YES please. This is the closest I’ve seen to a live-action Fushigi Yuugi and guess what? Takizawa Hideaki is in this one as the main character. Takizawa Hideaki Takizawa Hideaki Takizawa Hideaki Takizawa Hideaki!!!! With long hair, and issues and a sword. I am DEAD. One of the random bits I spot checked had him being taken care of as a result of some wound/illness/whatever and SO HOT. Seriously.
I know his OTP in this one is played by the girl who is playing Kame’s OTP in THnK and now, all she needs is to act opposite Yamapi to get the triple crown of jdorama hotness (at least the junior version. I think Takuya Kimura and Takeshi Kaneshiro are probably a bit too old to be romantically paired with her). I mean, talk about luck!
So, my dorama watchlist is set: finish Kurosagi, then finish KMSD (I finally got replacement discs), then Satomi Hakkenden, then Pride, then Nobuta Wo Produce. After that I’ll watch some kdrama (My Girl most likely) as a change of pace.
There goes my lunch break, spent typing. I am going to really lose weight at this rate.
Ep 4 wasn’t as good as 2 or 3 (or 5), but it was still a fun, solid ep.
And OMG! Kurosaki got outwitted. Which I liked as it would be unrealistic for him never to get beaten.
I found the Older Swindler that Kurosaki went against rather interesting. In some ways, he is similar to Kurosaki (he goes after big corporations because he hates the anonymity and corruption) but he is more venal and a lot better balanced. And the Old Man pitting the two against each other for amusement’s sake, to see who’d win. CREEPY.
The Old Man really freaks me the HELL out. I don’t think anyone other than
meganbmoore will get the ref, but he really reminds me of Ni Jinyi from Saiyuki. The same unruffled creepiness and being smarter than everyone and just making my flesh creep (does that make Kurosaki Kougaiji? Hmmmm). When he actually invites Tsurara in again (by ordering from her shop) and gives her pickles and talks to her about Kurosaki, it’s really like a spider with a web. And Kurosaki can just stand there and seethe and watch through the glass and not go in. I seriously just want to yank her out of there. But OMG. The look on Kurosaki’s face as he sees Tsurara with the Old Man. Yamapi really is amazing. Yukari really needs to get a copy of ‘Girl, he’s just not that into you.’ When a guy almost runs into his apartment on seeing you and slams the door as you are in mid-sentence, not to mention groans ‘she came’ when he sees you, he just might not be interested, you know? But OMG. How much do I love that he doesn’t the close the door right away when Yukari is talking about Tsurara because he is interested in learning more (and Yukari’s reiterating that Tsurara means everything she says is actually quite crucial as she showed sympathy last ep and will go quite a bit further in the next). He is hooooooked. YAY.
But my favorite scene in that ep was Tsurara telling Kurosaki about her father, how he always disappointed and ran away and then came back and they were happy that he did but instead he just took Mother’s hospital money and left. And his reaction is ‘why tell me?’ because he is still doing his best to be prickly and she tells him ‘I just felt like telling it.’ Heh. Take that, emo boy! You can run but you can’t hiiiiiide. You are doomed to have a friend. Or maybe hopefully more.
It’s interesting that she tells him that. Part of it is her trying to explain herself to him. But another is sort of a fairness thing. It’s an exchange. She knows something so incredibly personal about him, so this is a gift of something equally painfully personal about herself.
Another thing I loved? The bit where he comes home and finds her struggling with grocery bags and her soup has fallen out and he actually picks it up and brings it over and puts it by her. And it’s such a huge step for him, to initiate any contact, however minimal. LOVE.
It’s interesting, because both Tsurara and Kurosaki are a product of their fathers. True, Kurosaki’s trauma is several exponential degrees huger than Tsurara’s, but still, they’ve been shaped by the shortcomings of their parents and their personalities are a reaction to that: her father is a weak crooked man who has an easy life while her mother works hard and Tsurara wants to remedy injustice which is a reflection of injustice of her family life. His father goes psycho and stabs the whole family to death as a result of being swindled, so Kurosaki tries to get revenge in order to stave the feeling of powerlessness and to vindicate the family.
And so we get ep 4.
But then we get to ep 5 and I think it’s my favorite Kurosagi ep so far. In fact, if I metaed everything I liked about it, I’d just be discussing every scene, step by step.
The end of ep 5 killed me dead. OTP! OTP! OTP! OTP!
Ahem.
But to go back to the beginning.
Old Man is seriously freaking me out more and more. He isn’t even cruel because he relishes it, he is cruel like a child with a toy, because he is bored. In this ep, he tries to get Kurosaki to destroy Tsurara’s father and he clearly knows that the swindler he sics him in is Tsurara’s father. And he knows Tsurara is Kurosaki’s sole link to humanity and OMG. He is a bastard. Even his assistant asks him ‘Isn’t it too cruel.’ GRRR. Hate him and he totally creeps me out. I think I won’t be able to watch the actor in anything else without freaking.
There is that scene where Kurosaki calls the cop in on a swindler and the cop goes: ‘You actually want us to catch you. You actually want someone to stop you’ and Kurosaki says nothing and a light bulb goes on in my head. Because OMG. So true. He just wants to stop but he can’t.
But now I want to talk Kurosaki/Tsurara!
The scene where Kurosaki tells OM that Tsurara is nothing to him. What’s not to love? He is saying it in order to protect her from OM as he knows OM is mainly interested in her because of him. I think his own denials to himself about the fact that she is something to him are getting weaker and weaker and more and more desperate. He tells her during their fight/talk at the window that he and she inhabit different worlds and it’s true, but it strikes me as a last-ditch desperate defense. He tells her he will destroy her father, and it’s sort of a lash out and push people away before they abandon you and/or hurt you strategy, but of course he ends up doing nothing of the sort and instead scares the guy straight.
He actually ends up letting her father off, when he wouldn’t even do that for his friend. I don’t think he set out to let him off (though the fact that he didn’t know he was swindling helped) but when faced with it, he couldn’t wreck another family, especially not Tsurara’s (when he finds out whose father it is, you can see he is reeling). I love the symmetry of them contemplating the pictures of their families at the same time. And his walking on the street and seeing Tsurara, all exhausted from looking for her father, doing the pinky swear with the little kid. OMG. The look on his face.
OMG. I love that bit in the beginning where she realizes she loves him. She is doodling a little cartoon of him in her notebook and she overhears Yukari on the phone with some other girl who is trying to figure out if she likes this random guy and Yukari is basically asking her three questions and telling her to draw a circle if the answer is yes. And Tsurara is being absent minded. And she hears ‘Does your heart race when you are around him?’ ‘Do you always want to contradict him?’ ‘Do you want him to understand you?’ And she looks down and she’s drawn three circles. EEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!! There was screaming in my house.
Also, apparently, she’s a girl who’s never been kissed. And never been in love. Evil dorama, you should remedy that immediately. Come on, the boy needs unwinding badly. And I don’t think he’s ever been in love before either, he’s too messed up. I know there is no kissing on this show and that is pure evil. Unless they were worried that those two had crazy chemistry just with the eye locking, so if they kissed the celluloid would combust.
I love the bit where she comes home shortly after her little revelation and sees him sitting with the cat on the stairs and randomly talking to it ‘Do you like me?’ (btw: he is hot, angsty, and loves cats. That’s like THE fictional boyfriend right there). And she hides before he sees her and in part it’s because her heart is beating fast (eeeee!) and because she wants to observe him a bit unobserved, but a part is because she wants him to be able to stay relaxed a bit longer, not have to put the shields up again.
After she finds out about her father and he won’t tell her where he is, they have this brutal fight and he tells her that her naïve thinking only creates more swindlers and more victims and he is lashing out at her because he hates what he is doing and he is so sure she will hate him. And she finds that notebook with the doodling and destroys the cartoon she was drawing of him. Eeeek. The thing is, he wants to push her away before he loses her, but she isn’t pushable and she isn’t loseable. He just needs to get that.
And the scene where she finally finds her father and sees him with Kurosaki and Kurosaki is letting him off and telling him he should make up to his family blah blah and the look on her face is radiant. And then Kurosaki sets out to walk off and he sees her and he freezes, looking as guilty to be caught as if he was doing something horrible.
And then there is that scene near the end, after all the commotion when he comes back home and he sees her, standing in the yard, smiling at him and saying ‘Welcome Home.’ And OMG. The look on his face. It’s this disbelief and emotion he doesn’t want to feel and a tiny bit of hope and it’s such a mixed mess.
And then we get the scene at the end. Which killed me. Because they are at that hill he likes and she thanks him and then asks him, sounding both agitated and defiant and completely open: ‘Why do you have to be so contradictory? Why do you help victims too?’ and continues with ‘Why does my heart beat so fast? Why do I want to argue with you? Why do I want you to understand me?’ and they do the patented intense stare and then she says: ‘I like you.’ And looks straight at him. Oh. My. God.
The girl really is fearless and open to be able to do that. LOVE. I wonder how he’ll react. He wanted her to move when she merely expressed some interest in him. And now he is a lot more human but this is a whole different thing. I can’t wait to see. Because the staring. And the looks on their faces in that scene just kill me.
In between watching Kurosagi, I dled the first part of Satomi Hakkenden. I am not going to start it until I finish with Kurosagi but I checked to see whether the files got joined OK and OMG. It is so amazingly WHAT I LOVE. I mean, historical fantasy with sword-fighting? YES. A story about 8 warriors with supernatural powers who have issues and fight to save the kingdom? YES please. This is the closest I’ve seen to a live-action Fushigi Yuugi and guess what? Takizawa Hideaki is in this one as the main character. Takizawa Hideaki Takizawa Hideaki Takizawa Hideaki Takizawa Hideaki!!!! With long hair, and issues and a sword. I am DEAD. One of the random bits I spot checked had him being taken care of as a result of some wound/illness/whatever and SO HOT. Seriously.
I know his OTP in this one is played by the girl who is playing Kame’s OTP in THnK and now, all she needs is to act opposite Yamapi to get the triple crown of jdorama hotness (at least the junior version. I think Takuya Kimura and Takeshi Kaneshiro are probably a bit too old to be romantically paired with her). I mean, talk about luck!
So, my dorama watchlist is set: finish Kurosagi, then finish KMSD (I finally got replacement discs), then Satomi Hakkenden, then Pride, then Nobuta Wo Produce. After that I’ll watch some kdrama (My Girl most likely) as a change of pace.
There goes my lunch break, spent typing. I am going to really lose weight at this rate.
