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Zettai Kareshi

28/06/2008

Some girls can dream up an ideal boyfriend: his looks, his personality, his hobbies, etc. But only one girl, Riko, gets her ideal boyfriend delivered to her in a box. And he comes with a user manual.

In this summer’s drama, based on the Yuu Watase manga of the same name, 絶対彼氏(Zettai Kareshi — Absolute Boyfriend), Riko (Aibu Saki) gets essentially tricked into a trial of the company Kronos Heaven’s robot, designed to be the perfect boyfriend of the customer. Riko selects physical and personality attributes for this boyfriend-to-be — apparently her ideal boyfriend looks exactly like Hayami Mokomichi — and a few days later a large box shows up in her apartment.

At first Riko is creeped out and annoyed at this robot following her around everywhere, and saying awkward things like, “Hi, nice to meet you. I’m Riko’s ideal boyfriend. I love Riko!” causing interesting conflicts at work and in Riko’s social life (especially when Riko’s “friend” Mika falls for robot-boy). Of course Riko attempts to keep the fact that he is a robot secret, and only those closest to her eventually discover the truth.

This picture is misleading, because Hayami Mokomichi never actually looks like a robot in the show, but here it is nonetheless:

The subplot is that Riko really wants to be a pastry chef, and eventually earns the chance to go to Paris to study, along with other (human) love interest Soshi (Mizushima Hiro), who has to fight for attention with a robot for 11 episodes:

This was by far the best role I’ve ever seen Mizushima Hiro in — his character was well-developed in his outward coolness, stemming from his dissatisfaction in the direction his family’s company was going, and his undying, but subtle, and not overly persistent devotion to Riko. He also took rejection rather well, given the odd circumstance of finding out that *your* dreamgirl has just turned you down for a robot.

Throughout the show, Riko struggles with her own feelings towards Naito (the name she gives to robot-boy) — she wants to feel unattached, but somehow can’t bring herself to give him up in any of the situations where he may be taken away from her.

Naito himself is also an interesting character. Being essentially a beta-version of a robot boyfriend, he is certainly not bug-free. He doesn’t have very good battery life (and has to recharge every night in the bathroom), he often overheats, and is programmed so well to love and protect Riko that he puts himself in a lot of danger, which can be seen as a positive or a negative attribute. His architect, Namikiri-san, often shows up to do maintenance or fix a bug, and is himself shocked at certain things — like when his hard drive is wiped, and yet he still remembers Riko, or does other things that were certainly not programmed into him — a lot of machine learning was going on anyway, with new words that aren’t in his internal dictionary, but emotional growth was certainly also going on.

However, interestingly, the show didn’t take the robotic emotion thing too far. The characters essentially treat him like a human (even though, as stated many times throughout the show, he was “just an appliance”). They don’t even really remark about the potential breakthrough in robotics that’s going on here (besides the architect, Namikiri-san, of course). Without being too silly or too serious, the robot character was important for what he was worth, but not the complete center of attention, or the real hero, which would be Soshi of course. Zettai Kareshi was cute and well-done, and totally avoided falling into its potential Pinocchio slump — definitely worth watching.

663 Comments

Spontaneous Canyon Climb

12/06/2008

Sometimes, you go to Red Rock Canyon, just to hang out, play with Sim while David climbs…. and you end up climbing a rock. Oops. I didn’t mean to, I swear.

Belayer below!

Topped out on the climb, and this was my view.

Haven’t fallen to my death yet. Still alive and kicking, standing on a ridge well enough to take cell phone pictures of myself.

All climbing equipment, courtesy of Summer.

Victory!

392 Comments

graduated from the cubicle aisles

10/06/2008

After approximately:
(15 minutes / day) * (14 days) –> the parking lot.

Thanks to the instruction and support of a huge chunk of firmware!!

311 Comments