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fzzr · 1 year

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Working!! is the Perfect 8/10 Anime

Now that I wrote On Rating Anime, and "Perfection" I'm going to talk about an exception to that approach. My definition of a 10/10 anime is one that is Perfect In Every Way That Matters. Working!!, also known as Wagnaria!!, is unquestionably an 8/10. It is also, in its own way, Perfect. Working!! does not want to be one of the Great Works Of Art, but it does have Something To Say. Over the course of three seasons and a special, it manages to deliver on multiple stories about love in many forms while never losing sight of the fun.

Working!! is a 2010 comedy anime about an ensemble cast of weirdos who work in a family restaurant called Wagnaria. It is based on a 4-koma (four panel) manga of the same name, so episodes are mostly a collection of shorter scenes with only vague continuity between them. The larger continuity of the show is carried more by the development of the relationships among the characters, as opposed to the twists and turns of any plot.

Characters

It's an ensemble cast, so here come a lot of names.

Popura "Poplar" Taneshima - Female, 17 years old, high school student, part-time waiter. Popura is short enough to be mistaken for a middle schooler, and definitely has a complex about it. She is unfailingly positive, hard working, and just wants everyone to get along.

Souta Takanashi - Male, 16 years old, high school student, part-time waiter. Takanashi is a guy who really, really likes small things. He works at Wagnaria specifically because the diminutive Popura asked him to and working there lets him be around her. Both of Souta's parents are generally absent due to work, so he lives with his four sisters as one of the more functional members of the household.

Mahiru Inami - Female, 17 years old, high school student, part-time waiter. Inami has extreme androphobia, to the point of physically attacking any man who gets within a few feet of her. This is exacerbated by the fact that she is physically very strong, despite her slight build. Despite the obvious disadvantages of this quirk when interacting with the public, she does her best at her job. As the only male waiter, Takanashi is the primary victim of her reflexive violence. For seemingly obvious reasons, Inami is largely estranged from her father.

Kyouko Shirafuji - Female, 28 years old, manager. Kyouko does the absolute minimum necessary to get by, and is more than willing to exploit her position to her advantage. In practice, that mostly just means feeding herself off the restaurant's supplies, to the chagrin of most of the staff. Her apathy is not absolute, and if shenanigans genuinely threaten the stability of the restaurant she will step in.

Yachiyo Todoroki - Female, 20 years old, floor chief. Yachiyo worships the very ground Kyouko walks on. She blatantly enables Kyouko's sloth, and jealously guards against anyone else taking up more of Kyouko's attention than is absolutely necessary. She also carries a katana at all times, while completely oblivious of how intimidating this makes her.

Jun Satou - Male, 20 years old, head chef. Jun is very capable but has trouble communicating anything not related to work. He has a crush on Yachiyo that is extremely obvious to anyone with an ounce of social intelligence (so, barely 1/3 of the cast, and certainly not including Yachiyo herself). His height and stoic manner make him somewhat intimidating, and he uses that to keep things around him (partially) in order.

Hiroomi Souma - Male, at least 20 years old, sous chef. Souma is outwardly pleasant, but is very perceptive and willing to exploit the things he knows about people to get them to do what he wants. Luckily, all he usually wants is small favors around work.

Hyougo Otoo - Male, top head of the restaurant. He is rarely present, as he is often abroad searching for his long-missing wife. When he is in town, he is very subject to intimidation from the frankly terrifying female staff and rarely pushes back on any shenanigans.

"Aoi Yamada" - Female, allegedly 16 years old, waiter. Yamada is clearly running away from home under a fake name. The very forgiving Otoo has allowed her to live in the attic of Wagnaria in exchange for her working as a waiter. Unfortunately she is clumsy, self-important, and generally a pain in the butt.

Summary

The first season of Working!! is dedicated almost entirely to meeting the cast and coming to understand their relationships. It is a comedy at all times, with most of the humor coming from the wackiness that results from very weird people interacting in different subsets and situations. There are many sources of chaos and humor - Yamada causing problems accidentally, Souma causing problems deliberately, and generally all the fun that comes from the wild interactions that follow from the quirky staff of Wagnaria.

As the show goes on, relationships slowly but surely develop. Takanashi and Inami, forced together by circumstance, come to develop feelings for one another. This is very hard for them to recognize, because Inami is still likely to respond to being startled by Takanashi in any way using force. In the meantime, Satou's feelings for Yachiyo only intensify. Yachiyo's fixation on Kyouko make him feel that any approach will be doomed from the start, but with the unsolicited help of other staff members they inch ever so slightly closer together.

Parallel to the romantic plots, the various separated families begin to be pulled back together. These storylines contain the spoilers, so I'll be oblique. At first as we learn about the Inami, Takanashi, and Yamada families, we find that we mostly don't learn about them. For their own reasons and in their own ways, the characters manage to step around exposing those parts of themselves to each other. Yamada is forced to reconnect when her family comes looking for her. Otoo's wife re-enters the picture, but for humorous reasons she is blown back out again. Inami's father is hesitant to re-emerge, but it is clear that he has something to apologize for. Finally, Takanashi's active efforts to avoid talking about his mother become abruptly very understandable when we meet her.

A Different Kind of Foil

Working!! does something a bit unusual with narrative foils. Instead of character foils, it has contrasting relationships. The initially doubly oblivious Inami-Takanashi relationship is contrasted with the unidirectional Yachiyo-Satou relationship. Otoo's quest to reunite with his wife contrasts with Yamada's efforts to avoid reuniting with her own family. In the later parts of the show, Inami's estrangement from her father is compared to Takanashi's disconnect with his mother. These contrasts are Working!!'s secret sauce when it comes to telling its stories about love.

The Inami-Takanashi and Yachiyo-Satou comparison lets it examine developing and recognizing romantic love. Here are multiple ways people can come to develop feelings for each other. What sort of obstacles might they face? What keeps them from recognizing the feelings they have? What are the consequences for their other relationships as things change?

The Otoo and Yamada contrast is about separated families. For Otoo, separation is a matter of circumstance rather than choice, and both of them make great effort to reunify. On the Yamada side the separation is only desired on one side - the other seeks reunification just as intently as Otoo does. What is it that makes returning someone home a matter of persuasion instead of simply finding them? Why and how might someone want to change their family circumstance, and how far would they go to achieve that? How do separation by chance and choice feel different?

The parental relationships of Takanashi and Inami are the most serious part of the show - it's very possible to argue that their parents emotionally abused them. Since these are stories about parents and children, they are largely about control. For Inami, where is the line between raising your child in the way you see fit and manipulating them abusively? For Takanashi, how much control of a child's life trajectory can a parent exercise by fiat?

Never Drop the Smile

Now, with all that heavy business about broken families and whatnot, you may be wondering "hey, is this one of those comedies that actually turns into a drama later and isn't as fun?" To that I am pleased to respond in the negative. Working!! manages to stay funny even through all of that. The way it achieves this is simple, yet genius. Every place a dramedy would have a dark or edgy reason some family fell apart, Working!! has a funny one.

I don't want to spoil all the jokes, so I'll just share one: Otoo is looking for his wife, who disappeared years ago. A darker show would have it be that she ran away, or he did something that pushed her away which he now regrets. But no, he's looking for her because she's lost. As in, her sense of direction is so bad that she has also been trying to get home for years and cannot find her way back.

Conclusion

Score: 8/10. This is a show that wants to be a light and fluffy and comfortable, and it does that to a T. What makes it the perfect 8/10 is that it does that while simultaneously exploring love from many different angles.

Recommendation: You should watch Working!! Yes, you. The power level requirement is nominal, and if you have ever struggled with acknowledging or expressing your love for another person (romantic or otherwise) you will find a way to connect with it. It's also just a lot of fun all around.

Comparisons

Toradora! is the greatest love story ever told, and it happens to be a romcom with a violent tsundere main girl and an extended cast of weirdos with a lot more going on than it seems. Working!! thus stands in the shadow of Toradora! in a few ways. The plot-signifcant cast of Working!! is larger than Toradora!’s, which means the show doesn’t give the core relationships as much time as they might otherwise have - but if it didn’t have a cast of weirdos, it wouldn’t be Working!! Toradora! actually does have to yield to Working!! on one point - the explorations of parental relationships. For Toradora!, it comes up in only a few arcs, whereas in Working!! it weaves through whole seasons and is much better integrated into the last minute will things fall apart twist.

Saekano, well. Instead of turning up the dial on romance, it turned it up on the other themes, and on drama. Season 2 of Saekano and of Working!! are nothing alike. And yet… in the Saekano movie, it brings all the weirdos together and has all the shenanigans fall together in just the right way to make the ending happen. Working!! does that too, particularly in the special. The difference is it never loses sight of being a comedy. It teases being a little dark for a moment here or there, but it never actually makes you worry. The degree of contrast is part of what makes Saekano an amazing show, but sometimes you just want a comfy time and that’s what Working!! does best.

Shakugan no Shana, like Working!!, turned up the volume on romance in season 2. Going into season 3 and the special Working!! managed to keep the volume going up at a gentle pace, while Shana dropped the romance almost completely and decided to be an action show again. They end up not being comparable, but I at least wanted to acknowledge the parallel.

Dog Days is also not quite a fair comparison, because it doesn’t have an ending (the ones above all do). Dog Days is extremely light and fluffy, even more so than Working!! Dog Days unfortunately falls into the harem trap of never wanting to wrap things up or even really move things forward. It also has a massive cast, and most of the show is just mixing them up into different subgroups to see how they bounce off each other. When it does do a very-lightly-dark section, it doesn’t actually make full use of its cast. The shenanigans were fun, but they didn’t mean anything. In every other show listed above, even Shana to some extent, the shenanigans retroactively justify what might have seem like wasted time because they are tied together in the end.

Final Thoughts

Working!! is a tough one for me. I really like it, but I have to acknowledge that it's not as ambitious as 9s like Oregairu or Monogatari nor as technically excellent as 9s like One Punch Man or Fate/Zero. Among my 8s, it is certainly one of the ones I recommend the strongest due to what I would consider its near-universal accessibility and appeal.

#anime #working!!#not every romcom is basically toradora #all the good ones are though #original post

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