Revenge Anime: the Skip Beat effect

If the person I loved asked me to ditch everything and move to Tokyo, I would be on the first plane out of here! I'm a hopeless romantic, hopeless being the key word here and Kyoko from Skip Beat is no different. When her childhood sweetheart, Shou, leaves to become a rock musician, he asks Kyoko to come with him.

Anywhere Shou would go, Kyoko would surely follow. Giving up school she worked numerous jobs supporting Shou as he reached for his dreams, doing all these things as an expression of love for him. All until the day she finds out that he simply invited her along as a sort of personal servant. Yeah, Shou's really that horrible.

Overhearing the conversation, Kyoko rightly loses it and as she is being chucked out the building, Shou says that if she ever wants to get back at him, she will have to enter the entertainment industry and become a star like him.

And this is where the real story starts. Kyoko wants to be an idol out of revenge, but she is so hurt by Shou's betrayal that she loses her ability to love others. Despite her many failures, Kyoko eventually gets her first break and learns about how to survive in showbiz and understands how important it is to love yourself.

Skip Beat takes the traditional 'boy verses girl' storyline and gives it a very interesting twist. Kyoko is not the lovey dovey heroine that you find in all girl's shoujo manga, but show's what would happen when the love runs out, something that doesn't really appear that much in manga, when I think about it.

I must admit, I really hated Shou at first, but after I got the Skip Beat bug and read the hundred or so manga chapters out there, I'm finding I really like him. (This blogger quickly dives behind the sofa before people chuck cyber rocks at her.) Perhaps I'm just a fangirl who likes J-rockers or maybe I can understand Kyoko's idealised notion of love. But even naive girls have to grow up sometimes. Kyoko eventually realises how tough the world is but she doesn't give up no matter how many times she fails.