Chitose is in the Ramune Bottle – Episode 1

What’s it about? Chitose Saku is a popular guy and a model student, eager to start a new school year with his group of friends. His idyllic routine is disrupted when his teacher asks him to convince a shut-in classmate to come back to school.

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After reviewing a few premieres with endearing female protagonists, I now must balance the scales and write up an insufferable male lead. I never even watched Spongebob as a kid, yet in my mind I could hear, crystal-clear, that one fish yelling “oh brother, this guy STINKS!” at least ten times in this extra-long episode. Thank you, memes and pop culture osmosis, for providing the perfect reaction soundbite for whenever Chitose Saku speaks.

To be clear, a main character being unlikeable is not necessarily a criticism in and of itself—dare I say many stories have unlikeable or polarizing characters on purpose, to explore certain themes, to create a certain tone and tension, to generate satisfying character development, or just to stir the pot and keep things interesting. No, Chitose being an arrogant, annoying little shit is not inherently bad writing. But the way the story contorts the universe around him to give him everything he wants with no conflict and no consequences, and to trap the audience in his condescending perspective… that’s what takes this premiere into the realm of poor craft.

Now, how does Chitose and the writing around him suck, you may ask? Conveniently, the best way to demonstrate this is to talk about how the show handles its numerous poster-girls. And I do mean numerous—we meet a lot of characters in this premiere, most of them pretty high school girls who are glommed onto Chitose for various as-yet-unexplored reasons. Chitose makes multiple jokes about how they all want him so bad, and each girl responds in her own way, though usually with some degree of flirtation, because they’re not even being shy about their crushes on him. On one hand, that’s sort of refreshing, and dare I say the joke-flirting between some of them is kind of fun. There’s a bit of genuinely snappy, cute banter among the group that makes it feel like they could all be true friends, but is it immediately undercut by the way Chitose talks about these people in his internal narration.

He refers to his male pals as jocks and simpletons, and he introduces his female friends through the lens of how attractive everyone thinks they are—as in, “oh yeah, when me and the boys are chatting and casually objectifying the girls in our class, her name comes up as one of the hot ones.” These mental notes about everyone’s relative fuckability—interspersed with a couple of extra details, like oh, that one’s on the basketball team, and oh yeah, that one’s really nice—are the first things the audience learns about these characters. It’s a nasty way to think about people who are supposedly your friends, but it’s also a wildly misogynistic way to introduce the main female cast of the story. This is the most important information about these fictional people, the framework through which you understand them. And the whole episode is anchored in Chitose’s point of view, so these girls are given no interiority or voice in the story of their own. We’re stuck looking at them through the filter of his patronizing perspective, trapped in an internal monologue that oscillates between musings about the springtime of youth and crude comments about his friends’ boobs.

The girl who gets the shortest end of an already short stick is Asuka, an eccentric figure who we meet reading poetry by the river (and Chitose can immediately clock who the poet is, which translation she’s reading, and quote some at her, because he’s so worldly and smart). The others at least exist in the context of a class and a broader friend group, implying that they have other relationships and other stuff going on outside of their relevance to Chitose. Asuka, meanwhile, appears alone, and seems to have sprouted from the riverbank solely to woo Chitose with her quirky antics and deep intellectualism… and to get her white school uniform shirt wet, of course.

I kid you not, she goes on a monologue, unprompted, about how noble and self-sacrificing Chitose is. And for why? Genuine question, what has he done to impress her? She at least had her manic pixie moment where she helped some kids and was all cute about it, which I can understand catching his attention, but what is Chitose bringing to the table apart from a metric ton of smarm?

We’re told that Chitose is popular, and smart, and cool, and loved by all—except for his nebulously defined “haters,” who mostly seem to be mad at him for being popular, smart, and cool, and monopolizing the attention of hot girls they feel entitled to. As I said, some of the friend group banter is kind of fun, and I do get the sense that Chitose has a bit of natural charisma, but the storytelling fails to convince me why this guy is the center of this high school universe. I would make a joke about how obviously everyone only likes him because they can’t hear his internal monologue, but his external monologue also sucks and he frequently says gross, inflammatory things to the girls out loud, too.

For the best/worst example: the episode treats us to two different scenes of him riding a bike with a female friend on the back. In one he makes a joke about how he should suddenly brake so her boobs squash into his back. She initially tells him off, but also ends the day declaring that his flaws don’t make him any less hot. In the other, he doesn’t need to make a joke about braking, because she cuddles up to him and squashes her boobs into his back unprompted. His crass joke is instead about how the whole neighborhood is going to see her panties with how her skirt’s blowing in the wind. Her response is that she doesn’t mind, because I guess she’s just so carefree and cool like that—but don’t worry, she follows this up by declaring that she only has eyes for Chitose, so you can rest assured she’s not like, actually making herself sexually available to anyone else.

He’s rewarded for his crudeness towards them both because he can do no wrong and they love him sooooo much. It’s weird and gross, and also strangely repetitive. You couldn’t have picked a different form of transport, at least?

I could go on—I haven’t even mentioned the other main male character, who is a shouty stereotype of an overweight, sexist, shut-in otaku who calls the girls “skanks” from “Chitose’s harem” because he hates women and can only speak in pop culture references—but I think you get the picture, and I’d really love to extract myself from Chitose’s headspace. Given the way this premiere treats him, and the way it treats the way he treats the people around him, I’m willing to bet this is not the catalyst for meaningful coming-of-age character development and he’s just going to stay, stagnant in his supposed perfection, like this for the whole series. Why would he change when he’s already the best dude ever and every hottie in town is already stuck to him like chewing gum, reduced to a paper cut-out of herself and giddily rewarding him for every awful thing he does and says? It’s lazy, self-congratulatory storytelling that no amount of pretty animation can add depth to. You can get in that Ramune bottle and stay there, buddy.