| This past week my sister made me watch Ao Haru Ride, a shoujo romance following Futaba Yoshioka. The story is mostly about Futaba trying to figure out why her former crush/childhood friend Kou Tanaka (now Kou Mabuchi) has changed so much in the last few years, among a few additional underdeveloped plot lines. My sister has this show as one of her favorite anime, however I couldn’t help but be completely bored while watching it. The biggest cause of this was the main romance. After the first few episodes I had no feeling of wanting the 2 romantic leads to get together, which is a big problem for a romance anime. I feel like a strong romance show/movie always has at least one thing that makes me feel like the 2 leads are destined to be together. For example in A Silent Voice, Another example that I like is from Kaguya-sama: There was nothing special about the 2 leads in Ao Haru Ride, though. From what I can tell the only reason you might want these characters to get together is that they were childhood friends. For me the lack of a good romantic hook made it feel like the most basic childhood crush, and eventually a wish fulfillment of that crush turning into a relationship. However this boring romance reminded me of a romance in another show, Araburu Kisetsu no Otome-domo yo, which I actually really liked. In this anime the main romance is (once again) between 2 childhood friends. Both shows also have a love triangle, and extra plot lines with the friends of the girl main character. But most importantly, both of the main romances have no interesting reason for the characters to get together beyond the fact that they are childhood friends. But the thing that makes these romances different is how they relate to the themes of their shows. Meanwhile, Araburu’s themes center around teenagers discovering sex, which works very well for the romance. Both characters come to terms with their emerging sexualities and start dating. Through their trials of getting into their relationship they learned more about their sexual feelings, and it is clear that their relationship will also allow them to learn more. Because of this integration into the theme of the show, the romance in Araburu is a lot more interesting. While I don’t feel that the characters really have their own interesting reasons for wanting to get together, the way their relationship develops along with the themes of the show does make me want to see them together. The romance in Ao Haru Ride might seem to have similar theme integration, but there really isn’t. Kou does have character growth which is in line with the show’s themes about social life but his decision to not be edgy is purely a personal development and not something really connected to the romance like in Araburu. The romance doesn’t cause Kou to grow, but instead Kou grows to cause the romance to happen. Because of this I found the main romance in Araburu much better than in Ao Haru Ride. It is still a little boring for the reasons stated already, but unlike Ao Haru Ride, Araburu also has several other well-developed story lines with other characters which all explore similar themes to the main romance, turning the friend group made of side characters in Ao Haru Ride into more actual main characters. These extra story lines are really what make Araburu much better than Ao Haru Ride, as we get to see multiple other characters go through unique and interesting issues, and each story overlaps with the others. What makes this even more impressive is that both of these shows have the same number of episodes (12), but Araburu was able to pull off multiple interesting arcs and Ao Haru Ride almost completely failed at giving any characters other than the main 2 any interesting development. Because of this, Ao Haru Ride failed both at delivering an interesting romance and also keeping me engaged with other story lines. Basically, if you’re going to do the boring childhood friend romance, you have to add on other stuff to make the story interesting. Araburu does this with multiple other characters having developed arcs and integrating the romance into the themes. Ao Haru Ride doesn’t do nearly as much, leaving just the boring romance. |
| Personally, I haven't seen Ao Haru Ride, but I'll keep this in consideration if I ever do watch it. ^-^ |
| Enjoy! |
siuol_sward said: Personally, I haven't seen Ao Haru Ride, but I'll keep this in consideration if I ever do watch it. ^-^ i wouldn't recommend it but if you find anything that i missed about the main romance you should post it here lol |
| I remember watching Ao Haru Ride several years ago, probably sometime either in 2014 or 2015, back when I was first getting into anime. Even at that point in my life, a point where every anime I watched felt like a god-tier show, Ao Haru Ride frustrated me. I don't care enough about the show to remember why. It should speak volumes that I do not remember a single thing about this show except how annoyingly "cold" the lead male was and how overly, obnoxiously obsessed with said guy's circumstances the lead female was. This is all coming from someone that is absolute rom-com trash. For some god-forsaken reason romance anime has always stricken my fancy and I go out of my way to watch a good amount of them. This only leads to disappointment every time, as there are not a lot of dedicated romance anime that are actually good. The ones that ARE good, however, continuously bring me back to the genre in the hopes of finding that gem. It just takes shuffling through heaps of garbage to find, unfortunately. |
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