Sprout First Impressions

Decided to take a look at Sprout and while it is not knocking me off my feet I will probably watch it when I can when I have time to kill.

To say the least I am not really impressed with this series. Mostly because I feel I have seen this all before and done better. This is about as standard and generic as shoujo (girls') romances get and it does not seem to really add anything unique to it.

Not to mention the main character Ikenouchi Miku, played by Morikawa Aoi, is not the kind of character I feel any desire to support. She is very much a typical teenager, thinking that the world revolves around her and her problems, and seems to spend a large amount of time daydreaming about her "destined one", who is really some stranger that helped her out once.

Honestly I would love to see a series play with this trope to have the "destined" person be someone that the main character not only does not end up with, but would not want to in the first place. But unfortunately that will not be this series.

Even though I do tend to worry about Chinen Yuri's acting skills he is not so bad so far. Of course this is not a challenging role by any means but he does not come off as wooden as I have seen him so I am willing to think he may have actually improved. There is not much to say about his character, Narahashi Souhei. He is your typical nice guy (though thankfully not a Nice Guy) and that is just about it.

While I loved Lewis Jesse in Shiritsu Bakaleya Koukou I cannot get myself to care for his character in Sprout. Of course a good portion of this is because he is stuck as the "cool" guy with playing Katagiri Hayato. This means he has to pretend to be emotionless for the most part and is the trope I really hate in shoujo romance stories, the asshole that the heroine will somehow have feelings for. Thankfully it is pretty transparent that even if (though I am almost certain this will happen) Miku ends up in a love triangle with Souhei and Hayato she will end up with the nice guy over the jerk which is actually the reverse of what usually happens in these stories.

I kinda feel sorry for Souhei to be paired up with Miku as he does seem like a genuinely nice guy. And I fear for whatever reason the story will think up for why he will be eventually breaking up with Miyuki to be with Miku instead. Because really this series is that transparent. And Miku is pretty self-absorbed, which makes sense since she is a teenager but it rarely makes for an endearing character.

Probably the real reason I will keep watching this drama is for Hashimoto Ryosuke's character, Takigawa Naoharu. The character is pretty much Miyata Toshiya but with a pretty face. He has the highlight of this episode and makes watching another one worth it as long as he shows up.

Other than that there is also the eye candy that is Fujii Shuuka. Tanaka Juri and Yasui Kentaro may have small parts but they are not bad. In fact I would take a drama about Miku's friends over Miku already as they seem to actually have interesting personalities.

This is very basic shoujo fare and I do not expect to be surprised by anything that happens in the drama. It looks like even for the genre it plays it safe with being as generic as possible for the most part. In fact I would say that Hasshi's character is the only thing that is stand out about it.

But as generic as it is it is not what I would consider bad. Boring if you know the tropes well and most likely forgettable, but not bad.

Tokyo Dome City Illumination event

So today was the Tokyo Dome City Illumination event today, which was the beginning of Tokyo Dome City's holiday light displays being lit during the evenings. As I didn't go there as one of the Hey! Say! JUMP fanclub members that were selected to come, I wasn't actually sure when this would begin today. So I decided to just come by after school and stay if the event hadn't happened yet. I ended up being lucky that I ended up at Tokyo Dome City about fifteen minutes before 6 PM. But as I was walking towards the stage area at Tokyo Dome City I passed by the Dome itself and saw the lines the girls selected to be near the stage were lining up to get in order to begin heading over.

It was rainy all day, and while it let up quite a bit near the start of the event it began coming down pretty bad near the end, so I ended up getting rather wet as I didn't want to block the view of anyone behind me I didn't pull out my umbrella and had to rely on my hoodie to keep me dry.

I first just found a place on the second floor of the Tokyo City Dome mall area and found a place that I could see a bit of the stage. I stayed there until the first part was over, which was just some MC talking for a bit. There was a break and during this break I took the chance and went down to the ground floor and actually found a spot along the railing separating the selected fans and the other viewers there. I had a good view of the stage and I took a picture real quick before they began the main event.


Arioka Daiki, Yamada Ryosuke and Chinen Yuri were introduced and they came out singing NYC. They had four Juniors back dancing for them, but I only recognized Otsuka Yuya amoung them. I couldn't hear much of what was said because the fangirl screams were so loud. They all had really nice winter coats on, with Yamada in red, Chinen in green and Daiki in blue. But I was happy to notice that Arioka talked quite a bit. In fact he and Yamada easily talked the most of the three. They had the crowd eventually yell out 'Hey! Say! JUMP' and lit up the lights. The lights are all a part of these really huge structures. I took a picture of one of them as I was leaving to show you kinda what I mean.


But after the lights were turned on I did catch what they were saying right after, which was just saying how 'awesome' and 'pretty' the lights were. They then performed Yuuki 100%, which the Juniors left after performing. The HSJ trio stayed on stage as the lady doing the MC led them in showing some of the other lights around the Tokyo Dome City area that couldn't be seen from the area the stage was in. Then they brought the news photographers on stage and took photos of the three with the crowd as the background. After that it was an interview with the trio getting asked questions about what they thought about the lights and various topics about Christmas.

At the end the three huddled together to decide on what to yell out together to the crowd. They messed up the first time and had to do it a second time. Then they left the stage and that was pretty much the end of the event. I headed home soon after as I have homework to do and I was starving.