Skip Beat Anime

With the drama coming out I wanted to get a feel for the story before diving in so I went and watched the anime version of Skip Beat. I absolutely adored it, until the very end. How they thought that was a good place to end it is beyond me, but I will rant about that later. 

The plot line revolves are Sho Fuwa, Ren Tsuruga, and the lead female Kyoko Mogami. Kyoko was Sho's childhood friend and is madly in love with him. She quits school after middle school and moves with Sho to Tokyo so that he can pursue his singing career while Kyoko works many part time jobs to pay for the apartment that they live in. Kyoko soon finds out however that Sho is just using her as a maid and has no feelings for her at all. Kyoko swears to get revenge, but there is no way to do that except to enter Showbiz herself. Through her strong will and frightening atmoshere when it comes to Sho Kyoko makes it into the LME company which is the rival of Sho's and also where Sho'd rival Ren is the main star. Ren takes a disliking to Kyoko when he finds out she is only acting for revenge, but as the story progress becomes a mentor to her and soon the two are helping one another with their acting roles and personal lives, though Kyoko, being younger and always seeming to get on Ren's bad side, is more sneaky about it then Ren is.

I love Kyoko. I love her so much! I love that she has this dark side, yet can still be light and airy when she is truly touched. I never found her annoying like I have with a lot of other anime lead females and I was able to relate to her because her character wasn't one sided. Her personalty switches so rapidly that it is comical, yet I know people who's mood changes just as fast so it isn't quite in the realm of fasntasy. I loved that she just didn't sit around bitching or waiting for someone to save her, but for the most part took her life into her own hands, but still could admit when she was wrong. Her character was one that you could easily laugh at as well as love.  

Kanae Kotonami is the other female that is prominante in the series and also becomes likable in her own right. After an initial triumphs over Kyoko she is also sent to the Love Me section. Though she wants nothing to do with Kyoko she is soon drawn in by her character and they become unlikely friends. I like that there is a rather serious and calm character to mellow out Kyoko's extremes, but Kanae still had out bursts of her own. The two characters balanced each other out wonderfully.

Ren Tsuruga is probably one of the few male anime leads that made me love him without me even noticing. I didn't even realized I liked him until things were so unresolved in the end. It isn't that you hate him while the chow is progressing, but it is such a gradual progression from him just being a character to you actually liking him that I didn't even notice it. He isn't really all that different then the other lead males, but there was just something in this story line that made me really care for him, at times more then I cared about Kyoko. Maybe it was because he was so guarded and reserved or maybe because he was rather mean to Kyoko, but really it was for her own good. I can't really describe it, but I really liked his character.

Sho Fuwa, unfortunately, is not really in the series all that much, but from the few times we see him his personality becomes clear. He is childish and selfish and you can't help but grow to hate him as much as Kyoko does because we follow her through out most of the show. My favorite episodes of the series, however, where when Sho and Kyoko interacted at his promo shoot. It let the watcher get into his head and see exactly what was going on, not just what Kyoko thought about him. I wish he would have been in the series more often, but then again it was cut off rather abruptly. 

Overall it gets a 3 out of 5. It would have been so much higher is not for the ending. They built up so much tension that was never resolved and left to many lose ends that I literally felt like punching a wall. They followed the manga so closely, which is still ongoing, but ended before resolving all the problems that were introduced. Even the romances, or budding romances, were ignored. It made me so upset that I am not reading the manga to see what happens because they ended in the middle of a story arch. I don't know why I was so surprised though, the manga is usually always better then the anime, but ending in the middle of a story arch....really. It is worth a watch and is fun, but just be ready for a disappointing ending.