English Dub Review: Rinshi!! Ekoda-chan “Episode 11”

Finally, external evidence that music bros really are the worst.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Ekoda-chan is dating again. She’s come to a steak restaurant with another guy that treats her poorly. The man du jour’s particular flavor of sucking consists of him blathering on about his own music career. It looks like Ekoda-chan stays with this guy, despite his career going nowhere year after year, because he’s really cute. She starts to run out of patience however when he shushes her so that he can hear a song better. It’s the final straw when she starts casting the two of them as a famous musician and his side-piece in his head.

She tries again at a bar, but she isn’t having much better luck. Rather than dating a musician, this time, she’s dating a super-fan. When he isn’t condescending to her about her supposed lack of sophistication when it comes to all things music, he’s chronicling his own journey through the various types of guitar music. He name-checks a few pedestrian bands and subgenres of rock music, all while Ekoda-chan continues to roll her eyes. We don’t see her leave the date, but we have more than an inkling about how it ended.

In the final shots of the episode, Ekoda-chan goes out in her own neighborhood, empowered by no longer being tied down by these dead weights masquerading as men.

Our Take

One way storytellers can align an audience with their protagonist is by pitting their hero against someone so repugnant that the protagonist is all but irrelevant. The audience hates the antagonist so much that the hero could kick a puppy, and we would still be rooting for them. This week’s episode of Rinshi!! Ekoda-chan managed to find a villain so heinous that no one could possibly identify with them: a mansplainer.

Hobbyist spaces are beset upon daily by hordes of overconfident men with inflated senses of self. These men love nothing more than to explain their encyclopedic knowledge of whatever useless ephemera they’ve staked their free time and self-worth on to an unsuspecting woman. The only condition for such “benevolence” is that said woman never presume to know more than the explaining man, and that she should speak as little as possible. This is a feeling many women face in communities as disparate as geek media and auto repair, lawyers and waiters alike are condescended to in this manner, and this week’s episode has done a stellar job in articulating that feeling.

I like music as much as the next person (maybe even more so), but I will be the first to admit that the pursuit of it can attract some of the worst mansplainers in the greater hobby universe. They don’t have the same reputation for xenophobia that, say, videogames have, but recent albums by Camp Cope and Courtney Barnett, among others have painted a clear picture of what this sort of treatment usually looks like. This week’s episode does a stellar job of illustrating this particular pernicious kind of a douchebag. I’m not sure if this is more or less surprising given the episode was created with a lot of music and input from a male guitar rock duo.

Director Kobayashi Osomo seems to be a big fan of J-Rock, because not only does he include the aforementioned duo, but he hired Koshoji Megumi, another musician, to portray Ekoda-chan this week. He also includes her producer as a sound engineer and for additional voices. This results in a roundtable discussion rather than the usual dry interview, and our elderly interviewer is nowhere to be found. The group is also filmed just after a meal. The message they hope to convey is one of youth and vitality, a rock star energy to go with their music-focused episode. But as the interview goes on, I find they do exactly the opposite.

I’ve often commented on the dissonance between the Ekoda-chan segments at the top of the episodes and the extended behind-the-scenes interviews that come afterward. I’ve commented on the maleness of the directors who attempt to tell a female story, and how that is sure to cause not only blind spots but to provide an entirely skewed picture to anyone whose first interaction with this franchise is this adaptation. I’ve also noticed that none of the women involved in the series seem to relate to Ekoda-chan as a person. Their privilege has kept them from sex work and the general precarity of a late capitalist economy. This is likely to be less relevant because, as I’ve previously mentioned, their performances are dubbed over. What I haven’t mentioned is age.

Ekoda-chan is a twenty-four-year-old woman. She has likely gone to college, so she graduated only a few years before, and faced a gig economy that has refused to provide her with enough to survive, let alone fulfill her. None of the people involved in making the show seem to have any sense of what that is like. Now, I’ll admit this is a non-unique issue. How does anyone make a television show (a necessarily expensive endeavor that only a select few are allowed to work on) about failure, authentically? For the most part, these stories are autobiographical. Often stories about failure reflect their author’s own down on their luck periods and gain their resonance in the specificity of the portrayed experiences.

This is not the case for Rishi!! Ekoda-chan these are people asked to adapt comics not made for them in a time well after any sense of poverty they understand has been transformed into a mess. As one of the musicians said during the interview “my big break came thirty years ago”. I don’t think there’s a more succinct way to put it.

There’s only a single episode of Rishi!! Ekoda-chan left. The series, up until this point, has had no larger sense of arc or anything that really gives a hint about what will happen from episode-to-episode, so I have no predictions. I just know without a doubt that this has been a long three months.