KONSHUU | Volume 54, Issue 5.5
THE KAGUYA-SAMA ANIME IS TONY T.
Writer
2nd Year, Intended Economics and Data Science
Can’t wait to see audience reaction to the Kaguya (Ice) arc. On a technical level, the anime adaptation of Kaguya-sama wa Kokurasetai: Tensai-tachi no Renai Zunousen is an almost one to one direct adaptation of the manga source material. Though it occasionally skips a few chapters and plays with the sequence, each segment of the adaptation is an almost verbatim reading of the original text. Despite this, as someone who has been following the manga and its author, Akasaka Aka, since before Kaguya’s inception, the anime completely misses the whole point of the manga. Dareisay, the manga’s core appeal, at least for me, is completely gone in its adaptation. This becomes abundantly clear even without watching the anime. The opening for the first season, “Love Dramatic”, is a fairly competent song in the sense that it was pleasant for me to hear divorced from the show’s context. However, Love Dramatic absolutely does not fit the tone of the series. The repetition of the line “Love is War” may seem fitting to Western audiences, as the Western title of the series is Kaguya-sama: Love is War, but it holds little value in the series’ original context other than highlighting an increasingly irrelevant gimmick to the story. The romance “wars” are what generally popularized the anime, giving it an easy one-sentence tag for people to explain to others. However, the series consistently calls to the absurdity of these interactions, and downright omits them later on. As of the final draft of this article, the series has reached chapter 242, and this aspect has not had a meaningful presence for almost 100 chapters. Beyond that issue, there is the obvious fact that Love Dramatic singer Suzuki Masayuki has a voice indicative of the general expectation of jazz. The song is definitely better off, but there’s a certain lack of awareness given the entire series focuses on the misadventurous love lives of teenagers. This could be part of the overall memetic tone and audience that the anime adaptation has attracted; under that interpretation, then, this anime misses the genuinity of Kaguya-sama’s overall messages. Perhaps this could be fitting for the stretch of 45 chapters that the first season adapts, but in a sense, this gives the complete wrong tone for the franchise as a whole, something that I believe the showrunners of the first season should have been aware of. One could say that an opening does not need to represent the tone of an anime, yet this one actively supports an interpreta-
tion of the series which I deem inaccurate. On a similar note, while I have very few positive or negative things to say about Kaguya’s first ending, “Sentimental Crisis”, I cannot say the same for the famous (infamous?) “Chikatto Chika Chika”, which plays at the end of the third episode of the first season. Immediately becoming a hit Internet meme as soon as it aired, my issues with this ending are somewhat similar to the aforementioned problems I levied towards Love Dramatic. Embellishing something of a post-ironic tone and following, the “Chika Dance”, as it is famously known, once again runs contrary to the series’ inherently sincere feel, in spite of being a comedy. Given how that contradictory feel is what I love from Kaguya and Akasaka’s other work, ib: Instant Bullet, it should be no wonder as to why I don’t particularly care much for what is likely the most famous part of the Kaguya anime, as well as the aspect which increased its popularity in Western anime circles after the first two episodes were mostly only seen by existing manga fans in said circles. On a similar note, Chikatto Chika Chika pushed the character of Fujiwara Chika as the most prominent character of the series, in spite of her having the least importance out of the main cast. As a whole, though this is probably the most important part of why Kaguya as a series has an audience to begin with, this special ending embodies much of what makes the adaptation unpalatable as someone who gave the manga a 10/10 against an average manga score of 5.02.
In terms of the Kaguya anime itself, the most immediate difference between the manga and anime is the presence of an omnipresent narrator. Just like Chikatto Chika Chika, this disembodied voice is likely one of the most popular things that propelled the anime adaptation to its current level of popularity. At face value, it is a direct adaptation of the numerous square bubbles of narration present in the original. As someone who enjoys the manga’s narration, the anime’s narration is a clear example
