Koi No Chikara eps 5-7

Jobs in jdoramas are a tricky thing. The audience needs to see and easily understand the difficulties of a job. It needs to be exciting without getting too technical. There needs to be an easily understood and exciting challenge for the protagonist to overcome and the goal needs to be visible. That's why there are so many medical shows. The challenge is to save lives and medical complications are something that the audience are familiar with. And what is more exciting than saving people?

Moe~~~~~~~~!

Advertising jobs are another favourite of jdorama writers. There's fighting for projects and doing advertising campaigns like in Love Generation and Last Christmas. Its easier to write than say civil engineering where the challenge would be building strong foundations or how to build a retaining wall. Basically with advertising in jdoramas, its easier to fit it in the script since there's more variety than a typical salaryman job and there's an artistic end result to show for it.

I know where I'm going when I visit Japan besides Akiba....

However, Koi no Chikara really stumbles in regards to the advertising part. Its such a vital component of the show because it is about them fighting from the ground up as a small advertising firm. The natural up thing was pretty stupid. They spent whole night stressing about which fonts and colours to use for the words 'natural up' and in the end it looks like crap. Then they stress even more about some stupid letting of balloons with certain seeds in them and make it such a big deal.

I'd love to hear that from a woman as hot as her. :)

Pride in work is one of the hallmarks of jdoramas and I enjoy it when they exaggerate the skill needed in even the simplest of jobs. However in Koi no Chikara, I just don't see what they are so stressed about and the end result is so unimpressive. If this were a show about cooking, they can have characters talk about how incredible the food tastes etc etc. But releasing balloons? Designing a crummy poster with the words 'natural up'? The problem is, its all visual and there's no way to have characters talk about how grand it is. They have to convince the audience that it looks tough or that Nukui is actually a good advertising designer by showing some actually good logos.


Worse is ep 7 where Nukui is asked to copy paste someone else ads for a year long contract and they make a big issue over it when the company is in dire straits. All they are asking for is for Nukui to photoshop some images together and put in some words. Isn't the purpose of advertising to create ads for products that according to the client's wishes? The client is paying the bills and the client has the final say. The little that Nukui has done has not shown me his skills in advertising. The only thing he has shown is that he knows how to use photoshop.

Don't remember her in Hotman so that means I have to rewatch it!

Its unfortunate that the job part in the last few episodes is bad because the rest of the show is good. Its classic jdorama cliches done well. The beats, the dialogue, the side story, its all predictable but fun. If Taiyo to Umi Kyoushitsu taught me anything, its that there is always hope. 4 more episodes to go and fingers crossed a better ad from Nukui & Co.