Livewatch Thoughts: Kei x Yaku
Episode 1
This show is doing exactly what I need it to do right off the bat (thank you @dangermousie but also why did I let you tempt me into a live airing show with only one episode out!?!??)
First off we start with sickly sweet couply nonsense and then devolve right into the **MurDer**
Con, right off the bat is yes, we are gonna fridge a girl to get some man angst and motivation. Its going to be the premise of the show. Perfectly fine if that isn’t your thing (it’s an annoyance in my book) so warning in advance - and the fridging is violent and shown pretty early on and repeatedly.
Pro is that the character work going on is exquisite. Shiro is a young Yakuza boss shown in bed with another man. Everything about him screams danger and he weilds a sultry sexuality like a weapon, always calculating. Ichiro is an undercover cop tasked with getting close to him - but also desperate to solve the case of the missing girl - his mentor on the force.
The air between the two positively crackles with intensity and it is so. very. very. gay.
The show is revealing so much, in expert and interesting ways, about our characters. We are given a fight montage and instead of just violence, we are given a host of backstory on Ichiro in a course of stream-of-consciousness flashes revealing him in ever more disturbing layers.
And then there is Shiro’s dangerous and callous disregard for his own well-being that seems less fatalism and more assurance of his own capabilities (but also a healthy dollop of fatalism).
**mild spoilers** I do appreciate that we aren’t going to mess around with a fake identity/ betrayal/ lies story-line right off the bat. Shiro is just too smart for it, reading Ichiro like a book, and too cleverly manipulative. (The bit with Shiro using his watch to make Ichiro lose his fight but then, honorably, not making him satisfy their bet in order to get info out of Ichiro is so incredibly rich a characterization.)
So, instead, when they meet at the grave of the missing officer - Ichiro’s mentor and Shiro’s sister - they enter a partnership eyes-wide-open. They decide to work together fully knowing what they other is because they both want to solve The Murder.
This is what I want. A team-up that fulfills my competence kink of a well-matched pair that are equally dangerous in their realms. I don’t think it an accident that the end of the opening fluffy montage, when the soundtrack switches to a more dangerous theme, our protagonists are shown, matching step for step as they stalk forward together.
