Daijoubu

Someone of more more mature years than myself once told me that in finding a mate it is important that the two partners should be well matched intellectually. If one of them needs intellectual stimulation and the other is too superficial, there will no doubt be trouble later on. This seems a wise consideration in the world of practical match-making, but the world of shoujo has its own rules. In that world, stupid girls are inevitable the heroines and make up for their stupidity with appropriate amounts of energy, attitude and determination. Usually that energy is focused on useless guys who are smart, rich, rude, arrogant and often abusive. In the world of shoujo, such pairings are natural and inevitable. Oh, those foolish heroines! But they are fun to watch and laugh at, so it’s all OK.

So in this shoujo story, there’s a girl named Kotoko whose fantasies focus on marriage with a particular guy at school. She’s in the class with the lowest of the low, he’s in the class at the top, with the high achievers. I don’t get it, though. Don’t students in Japan have to pass exams to get into High School? Therefore the geniuses and the non-geniuses should be in totally different schools, not just different classrooms, right? Anyway, Kotoko’s attempt at a love confession is rejected almost before she can utter it. She is dejected but realizes she was a fool to have pined after someone who is a jerk. I guess she should move on to someone else, the end. Oh no, its shoujo, so forget reality! Fate will bring them together in the same house, when her own home collapses and she and her father must move in with his old friend, who happens to be the father of the jerk who’d rejected her!

Kotoko has bunch of loserish friends who seem kind of cool, actually. They like to have fun and one of them’s a guy who likes her and who even saves her father’s life using tremendous strength to rescue him from a collapsing house. This act makes no impact on our stupid girl at all. My preliminary analysis must therefore be that these shoujo girls prefer guys who are rude to them and reject them, rather than guys who openly express their admiration and perform heroic acts.