Women in Buzzer Beat

I love Buzzer Beat - it's an exemplary, feel-good romance story that focuses mostly on the price of chasing your dream. I wanted to analyse this drama in particular for it's portrayal of women because, when I watched this for the first time at about age twelve, I never particularly thought that I loved the women characters. It's actually a little sad that I tend to leave rom-coms a lot nowadays thinking that I loved the male lead and couldn't find anything in the female lead's personality that I clung to. Buzzer Beat certainly stands out for having a great male lead, since men in drama who are empathetic and openly compassionate are sadly few and far between. But I think I now hold my affection for the women in this show. Let's take the three most important women - Riko, Natsuki, and Mai - and look into why I thought they were so interesting.

Shirakawa Riko (played by Kitagawa Keiko)
Riko is the female lead we needed, because I don't know about others but I think watchers of drama need validation that being a messy person with messy feelings is okay. The acting field has always been, and probably will always be, dominated by beautiful people setting up unrealistic expectations about romance and alienating ordinary people from the much more complicated truth. I'm personally attached to Riko because she doesn't feel like an ideal, a beautiful girl miles apart from me whose love story is something no person could ever experience at the same magnitude. She's gorgeously imperfect.
  She would rather not wear a bra at home, she never tidies, she can't cook very well. But these alone don't define her, because the writers of Buzzer Beat understand that people are different outside than they are at home.She wants to be beautiful and attractive - yet, I would argue Riko chooses Naoki over the 'perfect' Kawasaki-san because she is comfortable being both her public and private self around him.
   Unlike so many awful heroines, who are only characterised by a desire for romance or a fixation on a crush, Riko has a whole world outside of her love life. She's desperate to survive as violinist, but just can't meet ends meet, so she stays afloat with two part-time jobs and practices in any spare moments. People discourage her left and right, but she hesitates and juggles and pushes forward.
   Riko tells us that it's okay to be a ball of feelings and not know what to do with them. She acts on impulse, which she often regrets. I would argue that most of the conflict between her and Naoki occurs because she is spontaneous, and he doesn't know how to be. Regardless, I think it's her most admirable trait - I constantly replay the moment where Riko effectively stops a basketball to scream at Naoki for not playing to the best of her ability. She's empowered with an enormous courage to stand out from the crowd, even when that's against 'common sense', and that's how she manages to eventually excel as a violinist.

Nanami Natsuki (played by Aibu Saki)
Natsuki is complex, but I'm sure that she is often dismissed as just an irredeemable whore. I'm not defending the way she cheated on Naoki and broke his heart, but I do want to think about why she did what she did and what it says about her.
  Natsuki is drastically different around Naoki than she is with her hook-up Yoyogi. My theory is that this is because Natsuki doesn't have any sense of self. She plays whoever she thinks the person wants to see.
  In front of Naoki, Natsuki is the epitome of the perfect woman. She embodies the stereotype - the devoted, demure and dainty maiden. She evokes Naoki's desire to protect, when in actuality she doesn't need any protecting. In front of Yoyogi, she's rough around the edges - I don't think for a second that this is Natsuki's 'true face'. I think she acts out to release the stress from keeping up appearances in front of Naoki, and notes that this is the kind of woman Yoyogi wants.
  As far as I can tell, there is no one significant in Natsuki's life aside from her lovers. In stark contrast to Naoki's lively family and Riko's safe dynamic with Mai, Natsuki lives all alone in a somewhat impersonal flat. Buzzer Beat never shows us or alludes to the idea that Natsuki has any family or close friends. Perhaps it's loneliness and desperation for company that drives her to adapt herself to who she thinks her boyfriends want to see?
  Natsuki is not a whore. She's not just a stereotype. She's a woman with no self-worth and a complicated set of demands for the people around her. She wants to feel loved, to feel wanted. Naoki's delicate love isn't enough, but when Riko starts to like him, she suddenly wants it. She doesn't care about Yoyogi, but when he turns his attention elsewhere, she feels wronged. In short, Natsuki doesn't know what she wants because she doesn't know who she is. I find her sympathetic, because her ending sets her up to make the same mistakes again.

Ebina Mai (played by Kanjiya Shihori)
Sadly, to some extent, Mai is a comic-relief character. Her arc is amusing in motion, and distracts from Naoki and Riko's angst-ridden relationship. She also bares some traits of the classic best-friend character. Mai, like that character, supports Riko and listens to her. What differentiates her from this lazy character type is that no insight is ever given into their own life, and their friendship is never repaid. Unlike that character, Mai doesn't exist to care about Riko's problems and has her own arc.
 Mai is far more invested in the idea of romance than Riko is, and pro-active in her search for a boyfriend. She's very conscious of what society's standard for women is and is very eager not to deviate far from it (for example, being shocked whenever Riko ventures outside without make up), Mai loves her very unique identity. I love how much Mai is enabled with herself - that is, she's constantly striving to be her own brand of special. She loves her clothes her music, the way she expresses herself in general.
  Mai's shortcomings, much like the other girls here, fall in relationships. Mai holds an enormously high standard when it comes to men - to illustrate this, the man she is interested in for the first half of the series, Utsunomiya-san, is a gentlemanly type she puts on a pedestal. These two have nothing in common, but she doesn't care at first. Mai holds the illusion of the perfect man in high regard, wanting to be treated like a fairy-tale princess rather than an equal. Watching Riko fall for Naoki instead of the wealthier, maturer Kawasaki-san baffles Mai. She has been mislead about the nature of attraction; you can't force yourself to be attracted to someone because of their attributes, because they have what is takes to give you an easy or comfortable life. It's something far more ambiguous. Mai's character development, therefore, is that she lets go of her unachievable expectations. Her fixation on control relinquishes a little - she allows herself to be dependent on someone else for a change. And yes, that's okay! She accepts the heart of the adorable Shuuji-kun and accepts that perhaps fairy-tales are best left in the books they came from.

The women in Buzzer Beat all feel like real people, and I love that. They are all closely tied to the theme of "perfection" and have something different to say about what that word means, but ultimately prove it doesn't exist and that's fine.