Okay, I finished Love Through a Prism, and I’m sitting with very mixed feelings.
There is so much I genuinely loved. The art style is stunning. The way light, colour, and painting are woven into the emotional landscape is beautiful. The melancholy and the longing works. As a story about art and fragile dreams, it really touched me.
But my history-obsessed brain could not fully relax.
The London we are shown feels almost like a romantic utopia. Cosmopolitan. Refined. Artistically enlightened. A space where talent transcends class, where foreigners are warmly integrated, where friendships flourish without friction. And yet this is early 1900s Britain. The Empire is at its peak. Colonial domination is not peripheral to this setting, it is central to it.
Framing London as a soft aesthetic heaven while completely detaching it from imperial violence feels deeply unsettling.
It becomes even more uncomfortable when you think about Peter, the Indian character in the friend group. We never learn where he comes from, what his position is, or how he navigates imperial hierarchies. In a period structured by racial domination, his presence feels symbolic rather than historical. The near absence of racism within this cosmopolitan circle of friends reads less like harmony and more like erasure.
The same applies to the Japanese heroine studying abroad. Historically, it is not impossible during the Meiji or Taishō era. Art was becoming professionalised, and some mobility through talent did exist. But the academy in the show feels almost utopian in how easily class and gender barriers dissolve. Structural racism, institutional sexism, and the exclusion of many women artists are barely touched.
Even World War I follows this pattern. The focus remains on romantic sorrow rather than on the brutality of trench warfare or the mass deaths of working-class men and racialised soldiers. I was also uncomfortable with the subtle romanticisation of aristocracy. The idea that nobles “lost something” during the war feels uneasy when we remember who was actually sent to die in overwhelming numbers.
Honestly, I think the story might have worked better in a fictionalised setting. A made-up England and a made-up Japan would have allowed all that beauty and emotional depth to exist without brushing up against very real imperial histories.
Despite its tenderness and elegance, Love Through a Prism romanticises a moment when both England and Japan were imperial powers. And that tension never really gets addressed. It is a beautiful story. But my love for history makes it impossible for me to ignore how politically incomplete it feels.