Ai Yori Aosh #1: Faithfully Yours (DVD)

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According to Geneon´s own website, "Ai Yori Aoshi" translates to "True Blue Love," which is pretty much what this show is all about. There are a five episodes on this disc, titled "Fate", "Supper", "Separation", "Living Together", and "Old Friend".

The story begins with a blue haired girl wearing a kimono standing alone, lost, in a train station. A college student returning home helps her find her train, and even offers to take her to the address she´s trying to find. When he asks why she wants to go to that particular address, the girl tells him that her fiancé lives there, a man so wonderful that she feels blessed to be born in the same world as him. Too bad the address she has leads to an empty lot, a nicely humorous break that took me by surprise. Up until then, the show had been unrelentingly romantic.

Of course, the college student, Kaoru, is who the blue haired girl, Aoi (whose name can be translated as "blue") has been looking for this whole time. Although he only vaguely remembers, they were engaged when they were children. Since then, Aoi has worked hard to become what she hopes is Kaoru´s ideal wife, as she is hopelessly in love with him. As for Kaoru, he has cut ties with his abusive family and tried to create a new life for himself. This is somewhat of a relief to Aoi, who feared that he left to get rid of her, but it also creates the main problem in the show. As the only child of the rich and powerful Sakuraba clan, Aoi´s parents will only let her marry someone of equal station. While a son of the Hanabishi clan is more than suitable, because Kaoru ran out on his family, he´s now just another starving college student.

The first three episodes on this disc where rather good. They develop the main characters while giving good reasons for them to fall in love. While I will kill anyone who dares suggest this in public, love stories are my favorite kind of story. However, there are several major pit falls that a love story can fall into along its course, and there are signs of some of them in the last two episodes.

In episode four, Aoi´s mother relents and allows Aoi and Kaoru to live together in their summer mansion, but they have to pretend to be only landlady and tenant in public. That wouldn´t be so bad, but they have to stay under the watchful eye of Miyabi, Aoi´s nursemaid. Miyabi´s character is the equivalent of nails clawing down a chalkboard to me, a flat, cut-out character who, with only the thinnest of explanations, opposes the two lovers being together.

The fifth episode hinted at the possibility of the absolute worst element a love story can have, a romantic rival. A member of Kaoru´s Photography Club returns from abroad. Her name is Tina, and like pretty much every other American girl I´ve seen in anime, she´s blonde, wears short shorts, has large boobs, and is accompanied by fiddle music. And they say Americans are insensitive, ha ha. While Tina has not showed much interest in Kaoru yet, there´s already been one situation where Aoi could have gotten that impression.