Comic Girls – 11

「人生のピークがきたんです」 (Jinsei no Peak ga Kitan Desu)
“My Life Has Reached Its Peak”

It’s finally happened; Kaos got a draft accepted! After countless rejections and abababa’s, Mayu was pleased with the one draft of the four she submitted that was the closest to her own concept. It was easy to predict how Kaos would get her breakthrough by faithfully adapting the experiences she’s had living in the dorm and essentially creating the Comic Girls manga, which gets meta the moment you think that what she experienced and adapted into manga format is what we’re reading/watching with the series. Yet with all of the suffering that Kaos has been through in order to get to this point, it’s highly rewarding to see her get to the point that she’s been waiting to reach all this time. As episodes pass by with Kaos’ morale hiccuping with every rejection or failure, they aimed to get the audience emotionally invested in her victory. By the time Mayu was deeply upset about Kaos’ plight and urged her to keep on going, it cemented how important it is that we see Kaos in a good enough state of mind to collect all of lessons she’s learned up to this point and translating them into the ethos of which of her strengths she should stick towards. Instead of trying to apply her style, humor, and mindset towards those around her, the empowerment she finds to create the best chapter she can is to play up what makes her a fun character that is quirky, frantic, and cute.

What got Kaos to the threshold where she could see what exactly she wanted to do came from the list of careers that the girls had to come up with for what they would want to be after they are finished with school. Everyone in the dorm is still infatuated with being mangaka, but each has a different perspective on what their ideal back-up career would be. Rukki’s seems to be the most out-there as she figured she would like to teach at nursery schools if she were ever tired of making manga, mirroring Ririka’s decision to quit manga to run the dorm in spite of not seeing the positive reviews of her old work. Koyume also had a fall-back career, but hers was to work for her family’s business at their bakery. Although Rukki’s career pattern is an anomaly for the other characters who are otherwise confused about where they’d want to be if manga didn’t pan out, Koyume’s fallback is at odds with Tsubasa and Kaos’ goals. Tsubasa is the one girl who is absolutely devoted to manga and will not do anything else no matter what because, unlike Koyume’s 2nd option, working for her family is the last thing that she would ever want to subject herself to. Kaos’ choice is more out of general confusion as she likes manga so much that she didn’t even consider working for her parents’ sweet shop, let alone anything else that would involve stepping out of her comfort zone. By the end of the episode, she’s still unsure of what kind of path she would want to take, but by then, she was elated by getting her manga accepted as an insert enough that she couldn’t think about anything like a fall back.

The inspiration Kaos received to put out a chapter good enough for Mayu would end up coming from the notes she found from other alumni from the dorm as they were clearing out the leftover items before they move out. It is really something that Comic Girls would go the route of having the characters accept the dorm being taken down right around when they moved in, and that there wasn’t a long, stretched out arc about how they’re going to put up a fight against authority figures to convince them to change their mind. There’s still an episode left, but it’s remarkable that the series is willing to leave us on the note of accepting that things and people change with time, and as nice as it would be if great times lasted forever, it’s more important to reflect on them and keep them in mind as fond memories because otherwise, you won’t get to appreciate some of the good things about living in the now. Although Ririka looks at her time at the dorm as a student and mangaka fondly, she finds herself to be in a good place now that she has peace of mind about where she’s been at in life in as a mentor for the girls. The dorm’s closing is definitely unfortunate and it will surely make the next episode a tear-jerker if they have to bid farewell to it and separate, but from the path the show’s going, the girls are surely going to stick together and its closure doesn’t mean that they would have to sever ties.

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