A quick summary: The three main girls work to achieve their dream of being professional musicians, struggling with a lot of trouble that comes with this life, family issues and later on the social disorder caused by the authoritarian government. This seems like a great premise, but the reason why I gave the story a 3 is because how things solved in the end. I came to watch this expecting nothing but a feel-good story, but when things actually got serious I started to pay more attention to the plot.
After using Angela as the main antagonist for most of the series, in episode 18 it's clear that the final villain will be Valerie. With both Angela and Tuesday having suffered abuse from their mothers for their entire lives, the idea that they (and Carole and a lore of other artists) could sing about breaking free from this is amazing, but as soon as you see what it's done with the person this song is dedicated to, it loses all the impact. Too bad, since it's one of the best songs in the show.
Basically, after the journalist Kyle came up with information that could take down Valerie's presidential campaign he asks Spencer and Tuesday for help, and the siblings decide to take the lawful good route and ilogically suggest that their mother is a good person and is only being used by her manager Jerry. It would be reasonable if something like this turned out to happen ONLY in their heads. Valerie has done so much shit to establish her as a villain since the first episode, may I remind you she locked Tuesday at home for her entire life and forbid her of playing the guitar, then we see her kidnapping her daughter using brute force to lock her home again, she does her entire campaign based on hate and planning to deport back Earth refugees such as Carole and she is like that for 23 episodes.
Then in the last one she does a 180º and suddenly agrees with Spencer's plan to reveal that the bombing of the nuclear power plant was Jerry's idea and blame it all on him. She gives up on her campaign and somehow now she is proud of her daughter being a famous musician, singing songs against her for the entire world to hear. THIS ENTIRE THING HAPPENS OUT OF NOWHERE. She even says that she "never agreed" with the things she said, once again, blaming it all on Jerry. Yeah, friendship is magic, it can even retcon what happened some episodes ago.
Talking about the characters, this series has great ones, and others not so much. Starting with the protagonist, besides this show being called "Carole & Tuesday", it's Tuesday the one to get most focus and relevance, unfortunately. This cute, adorable and likeable girl turns out to be a bad protagonist, intriguing us with useless plotlines that give her little development. The worst ones might be when she fell in love with Kyle and when she over-concerned about Cybelle. She is not hateful, just a bad character to have the focus she gets, working better as an ally for Carole. This adds to the fact that her best-written scenes are when she is with Carole.
Carole, however, is a great main character. She is loveable, determined, cute, looks a lot smarter and actually had to struggle to get where she is at. Because she has to live in Tuesday's shadow she is somewhat relatable, and it's awesome how she is humble and doesn't care about being underrated, she just wants to have fun with Tuesday while seeking their dreams. And it's loveable how much she cares about her. A shame that she gets to receive the least focus, as her only plotlines (her father and Ezekiel) are very brief.
The third one is Angela, this series' wild card. Being the girls' rival for most of the series, with the focus she gets you expect her to "change to the good side" at some point, but it doesn't happen, because she isn't defined by the people who try to control her. She is her own person and the best-written character in the anime, and also the one who suffers the most. When her abusive mother died and her manager got arrested, she had no one but herself to keep on the pursuit of the grammy, while Carole and Tuesday had each other, Gus, Roddy and a lot of other friends.
Even dealing with the loss of loved ones, depression, loneliness and drug-addiction she still goes to sing at the grammy, which she won, fairly. In the end she overcomes it with Tao and Katy Kimura's help. Her development is realistic, and so is her reason to finally join Carole and Tuesday in the final concert. She surely deserved to have her name in the title of the show, but I'm not complaining about it.
About other characters, Tao is probably the greatest of the supporting cast. Since his first appearence he gives a cold villain vibe, being almost robotic, but it's all explained and we have a great plot twist. Not only he doesn't want to replace Angela with technology (as it was hinted), he is using his knowledge of AI to help her improve herself and give her greatest. At some point he confesses that since he was a child his emotions "faded away", but it changes when he is around Angela, he smiles and seem more humane, really caring about her.
And when the government starts messing with him, he has to leave Angela for her own safety, sadly appearing one last time to say goodbye, risking his safety just to see if she is okay. Tao also gets to protagonize an episode, dealing with Angela's stalker, once again risking himself to save her life. The badass as he is, he also takes down his enemy Schwartz before leaving in the end.
Gus is another great one, being a great mentor and somewhat a father figure to both girls. He is funny and wacky sometimes, but he is also smart to take the girls out of contracts that would be bad for them. For his backstory he reminds me of Dave Grohl, main lead of Foo Fighters, one of my favorite bands.
And Roddy, well... He is kind of there, right? Besides being there to help the group, he works for Ertegun and does a lot of stupidity, being useless most of the time.
Tao and Gus set an example of how the secondary characters can be good and how the show could be better if they had more focus than some others that we have to endure, like Tuesday and her brother. Spencer was a good background character in the first half, but as soon as Valerie starts to become a major problem he becomes totally useless, never doing anything to stop her besides often saying he "did everything possible" and even when he decided to work with Kyle he continued to be useless and deserved to have been called by him as an useless rich kid.
Still a shame that their mother arc was poorly done, because the anime was capable of writing it well, like they did with Dahlia. Like Valerie, she imprisoned her child in her ideology, forcing Angela to follow her mother's dreams and was violent with her. She digs her own grave being stressful and abusing Angela until she revolts, causing her a heart attack. She does ask for forgiveness in her death bed, but she was still the same, not magically changed just so Angela could have a happy ending.
However, the biggest problem with this show for me is the queerbaiting.
If you don't know what it is look it up, it happens often. People love to say that Carole & Tuesday have great LGBT representation and diversity, and with the second one it sure is. We have a black and a latin main characters and a lot of others, like Crystal, GGK, Ezekiel, and also have asian ones like Tao (?) and Cybelle. This makes the character design outstanding comparing to 99% of other anime, where there are no black characters, everyone is white-skinned and non-japanese people (like americans) are represented as white, blonde people with blue eyes.
Though, the LGBT representation is ridiculous. We have characters who are openly gay, lesbian or trans, and they are all terribly represented. Either they are irrelevant side-characters or villains.
I already talked about Angela's trans mother Dahlia, but we also have Cybelle, a girl in love with Tuesday, who is a total creep and injures her. The non-binary mermaid sisters were funny to watch, still they were shown as reckless and violent and were forgotten after the talent show.
It's nor clear if Ertegun is bisexual, but is he is, then it's just another one on the list as he is a total asshole for the majority of the anime, and lastly we have Desmond, who despite not being a villain he is still creepy as hell, calling the girls to his house just that they could see him "die". The only decent person out of this might be Gus's ex-wife, who hardly appears and you might as well forget that she existed.
Literally EVERY ONE OF THEM IS AN ASSHOLE. There is not one good character in this that is good or decent. They're either psychos or cardboards.
And the most terrible case of this are Carole and Tuesday themselves. Before talking about that, one thing that I love about this show are the songs, they are so much well done and always fit with the show, and their lyrics ALWAYS reflect the moment our characters are living. "Someday I'll Find My Way Home" talks about Tuesday running away to follow her dreams, "The Tower" reflects Angela's depression and how she feels lonely, and so it goes.
However, most of the songs of the main duo talk about love and romance, and about their relationship. Carole and Tuesday met in the first episode feeling a strong connection with each other, often referring to that as an encounter determined by fate.
They care a lot about each other, live together, sleep together, take baths together and have a relationship that clearly goes beyond friendship. As an example, when Tuesday was kidnapped by her mother, all she thinks about is how much she misses Carole and that she is the thing that matters the most in her life.
And what about the lyrics of their songs? They often refer to each other as soulmates and meant to be together, saying things like "Kiss me before the sunrise", "My love found a place", "You picked my heart right up and mended", "You're my only way out" "You were the missing puzzle piece" and I could spend the entire day just mentioning it. If you doubt, go check it out on genius.
"Are they obligated to be together? Can't two girls be just friends?" Obviously they can. Years ago there was a cartoon called "Hi! Hi! Puffy AmyYumi" about two girls that make music together and are great friends, and if their songs talk about them, they refer to their friendship and no more than that. Compare their lyrics to Carole & Tuesday's Whispering my Love, as an example. Also compare their relationship btw and say that I'm forcing just because it's two girls again
With this amount of development to Carole and Tuesday's relationship (that is greater than what we get with 90% of the canon couples in almost any anime) it's so stupid how the show forces them to be straight and say they are "just friends". If that was the idea, why the hell did they construct their relationship like this? If one of them was a guy they sure would have established a romance in like, episode 3, and would end with them kissing and being together.
While Valerie was a problem only in the last episode, the queerbaiting lasts for the entire series. They weren't censored like other shows, since they had the freedom to show a lesbian kiss and do a lot of LGBT characters, they just chose to ruin a great anime with heteronormativity. For them it's more reasonable that Tuesday falls in love with a guy she is just met and is 20 years older than her, just because he also uses a PAPER NOTEBOOK (could there be a worse reasoning to a romance than that?) than to have feelings for the girl who is right next to her and cares about her the most.
Interesting enough, the director in this is the same guy who did Samurai Champloo in 2004, and back then he made an episode with an openly bisexual character who had focus and was represented well. With this you might think that 15 years later and with a "more free" streaming platform as Netflix that if LGBT people were to be brought up they would be well represented. But that wasn't the case. So I don't believe that it's Shinichiro Watanabe's fault, but that something or someone might have gotten in his way from producing his work.
And that's it, I guess. It was a good anime and I would recommend it to someone with really low expectations, and I would watch a season 2 if they ever make one. Still, it repeats a lot of cliche that can't be ignored.
