If it’s a series about manga, or making manga, or just manga in general, I will usually check it out, and that means Kore, Kaite, Shine (Draw This, then Die) made the list. From the premise, it seemed like a pretty interesting series, but once I saw the first episode, my expectations of this show changed. Were they changed for better or for worse?
Let’s go!
First Episode Synopsis
Ai is a girl who is a bit of a loner. She can’t seem to make any friends, and she has a touch of social anxiety. Because of this, she has a very active imagination where she imagines a cat as a ninja hopping from building to building, and a jump rope as a scary, sharp-toothed mouth threatening to eat her up. One day, she notices a bookstore that rents out volumes of manga. There, she comes across a single-volume series called Robota and Pokota. When she reads it, she realizes that the characters are very similar to her. Despite it being a single volume that was canceled, it becomes her favorite book, and for the next seven years, she constantly rents it every single day.
Because of her vivid imagination, she imagines Pokota alongside her. The first episode is titled What Would a Manga Protagonist Do because that is what her imaginary Pokota asks her every time she comes across a situation where she would normally run away. Those words, and having Pokota there (even if just in spirit), give her the courage to start turning her life around. She makes friends, jumps into action when a fellow girl loses her painting, and just enjoys her new quality of life.
That is, until her teacher catches her reading the manga in class. She reprimands her and takes the manga away. She even goes so far as to tell the bookstore to never rent it to her again, saying that manga are filled with lies and can never be a form of respectful entertainment. This sends Ai home devastated, but she won’t give up. She searches for used copies of the manga online, but they are too expensive for someone like her to afford. Then, she notices that the manga author, who went on a multi-year hiatus, is coming back and will be at a comic event in Tokyo.
Ai sneaks off and heads to the big city, all for the chance to meet the author who changed her life. When she is next in line, she notices that the author… is her teacher!
Worth Watching?
YES – The premise for this show simply said:
Kore Kaite Shine is set in Izu Oshima, an island 120 kilometers south of Tokyo. The story centers on Ai Yasumi, a high school girl who loves to read manga, and learns about the joy and pain of drawing her own manga
At least, that’s what it says on AniList.co. So, you can imagine my surprise when I went into his episode and witnessed everything that was presented. Yes, it’s a bit “cartoonish.” Yes, it is way more lighthearted than I would have thought it would be. Yes, the teacher is way over the top in her strictness, almost to a comical level, but my god… I didn’t expect this show to hit me in the feels as it did.
Ai isn’t really a complex character. In fact, one might say that her hallucinations of imaginary characters could be a bit of a concern, but you quickly realize that it’s just the coping mechanism of a girl who is tired of being alone and wants to change, but doesn’t know how. She attaches herself to her favorite manga series so much that it inspires her to try to break through her own shell.
Even if Pokota isn’t real, the fact that she relates to the character so much that just imagining him gives her the courage to do things like talk to others, help others out, and have some semblance of being a normal girl like everyone else, is kind of heartwarming. One might write her off for being a bit mental for imagining manga characters while in high school, but this is a series that has stayed with her for seven long years. She trusts the messaging in that series, and because of that, she understands the value of manga and how feelings, lessons, and stories are conveyed through that medium.
It inspires her to want to make manga herself, and instead of being in pure shock that her strict teacher was the author of her favorite manga, she broke down and cried tears of joy. She no longer cared that this was the same person who threatened to take her favorite series away from her. None of that mattered because the person who, quite possibly, could have saved her life was sitting right in front of her. That is how much Robota and Pokota meant to her, and the emotions conveyed in that scene really drove that home.
Obviously, there is much more to Hoshino-sensei than meets the eye. We get a very short glimpse into a possible reason why she hates manga (and I’m willing to put money on it being her getting canceled after just one volume). But it wanted me to see more. Ai is just a pure character that you want to root for her… to take those feelings that manga gave to her and translate them into a story for the world to enjoy… and to use that story to show her teacher that manga does have a place in this world.
This first episode changed my expectations from the synopsis, overcame my hesitation, and then blew me away. Excellent first episode… and I encourage you all to check this one out.
