Which brings us to the anime adaptation of Paradise Kiss. The final emphasis is on her growth from a teenager who shaped her identity based on her mother’s desires to a successful adult woman able to make hard choices without regrets. Though Yukari has moved on, she keeps the important memory of that time in her heart. George goes to New York with his childhood friend Isabella, for whom he’s been making gender-affirming clothes since they were small and Yukari continues her modeling career in Japan, eventually finding a supportive husband in her one-time crush Hiroyuki. In the end, they make the decision to go their separate ways, knowing that their lives were forever changed by their time together. Though Yukari makes a last, half-hearted plea for them to work things out, neither is willing to give up their goals to follow the other person-and they’ve both grown enough to realize it would do nothing but make them unhappy. They admit that they’re both trying to make each other into an ideal rather than growing together as real people, and that they fight more often than they don’t. Those worries grow, until on New Year’s the two manage to have a frank conversation. “Wait, if I’m on a pedestal, and you’re on a pedestal, then who’s flying the plane?” As Yukari sits silently through Kaori and George’s argument over his future, her internal monologue fires on all-cylinders: she chastises herself for acting jealous and cruel to Kaori because of her own insecurity, and eventually slides into wondering if George only sees her as a sex object. And second, Yukari must confront the fact that being George’s lover is not the same as being his partner. First, the reader is forced to reassess the implicit biases of stories about “pure” heroines and shallow or “bitchy” rivals, because suddenly the person cast in the latter role is a character we’ve spent the entire story empathizing with. The impact of Kaori’s appearance is two-fold. Except, of course, that Kaori isn’t the protagonist of ParaKiss. Kaori’s appearance sparks a familiar scenario, where the plucky heroine gives the male lead the unvarnished talking-to he needs in order to become a better person. I remain convinced that Kaori and George actually became friends because of the mutual bi disaster vibes she has yet to recognize, honestly. #PARADISE KISS PROFESSIONAL#And when she hears the news that George might be giving up his dream of becoming a professional designer, she’s the one who comes running. #PARADISE KISS SERIES#Everything about her screams “protagonist of a shoujo manga”: she has a short, practical haircut compared to the long or ornate hairstyles of other women in the series she’s a scholarship student at a fashion school noted to be loaded with nepotism and she earned George’s genuine respect and interest after turning down his playboy advances. Their relationship troubles come to a head beginning in the penultimate volume, when ParaKiss introduces Kaori, a friend of George’s who had been away studying abroad. But they bring out the worst in one another too, with miscommunications growing into huge fights or digs into old wounds. Yukari embraces her inner strength and chooses a professional career as a model with George’s frank and unfettered presence beside her, and George confronts the emotional vulnerability he’d hidden behind a flirtatious, flighty exterior. Theirs is a tempestuous relationship with extreme highs and lows. Key to protagonist Hayasaka Yukari’s journey is her relationship with Koizumi George, the visionary designer who drew the other members of the Paradise Kiss label together. One thing I’ll say for AniKiss: it’s still maybe the most successful case of translating lush, extravagant costumes from page to screen. Sadly, the subsequent versions of the story erode the focus on the protagonist’s agency that make the original so special, serving as a prime example of how different framings can tell the same plot and lose all of the effectiveness. Its enduring popularity has led to multiple reprints of the original work, as well as both an anime and live-action film adaptation. The deceptively simple story cuts straight to the heart, and its exploration of gendered issues has held up shockingly well in the 25 years since its initial publication. It’s also one of manga’s greatest coming-of-age stories, following a studious teenager who gets roped into modeling by a group of fashion students and finds something she feels passionate about for the first time in her life. Paradise Kiss is the work of Yazawa Ai, known as the queen of josei manga, and is perhaps her best-known series alongside the epic-but-unfinished Nana. Spoilers for the Paradise Kiss manga, anime, and live-action film. Content Consideration: Discussion of toxic relationships.
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