Aggretsuko

I haven't had much luck finding movies I particularly want to watch on Netflix recently, and going to the theater is, for obvious reasons, not an option at the moment (even if there was something I really wanted to see). I have three or four TV series saved to watch, but instead skipped past all of them to watch an animated show about an accountant who deals with stress by doing death metal karaoke.

That's pretty much what the show is. Retsuko works in the Accounting Division of some company. Her boss is a sexist (literal) pig, her mom is trying to make her get married, she's not sure if she even likes her job or what she wants to do with her life. She struggles with asserting herself, so she stops at a karaoke place after work and screams out her frustration and all the things she wants to say to people there.

Definitely not an impulse I'm familiar with or anything. I don't even like death metal.

Both seasons involve Retsuko falling head over heels for a guy (different guy, not the same guy twice), before coming to the conclusion they don't mesh well with her. One doesn't put anywhere near as much into the relationship as she does, and the other is doing too much, or devalues the things that are important to her. There's a best friend character at her job that's clearly got a crush, and is I think supposed to have a little Punk in him, judging by glimpses we see of him outside work, but nothing's happened on that front so far.

That's the common theme, is how many of the characters are hiding something behind their professional facade. Retsuko ultimately befriends two women who are pretty far up there in the company hierarchy. Almost every time we see Retsuko see them at work, they're striding down the hall together confidently, entirely composed. Then they go around the corner and Director Gori admits walking like that is really painful, or she breaks down sobbing because Retsuko turned them down when they invited her for a post-yoga meal. Retsuko might be hiding a whirlwind of fury, but everyone's got something hidden for one reason or another.

(Now that I've typed that out, I'm really curious what Retsuko's friend Fennuko is hiding. We haven't seen much of her outside work.)

I spent a lot of time eagerly anticipating when Retsuko would actually cut loose on her boss or his ass-kissing lackey, or whoever it was that gave her grief. Which is why my favorite episode was the 7th episode of season 1, when she gets into a face off karaoke battle against her boss after he figures out she filed a power harassment complaint against him. Who hasn't had a boss they wanted to tell off brutally at least once? I've been pretty fortunate in regards to bosses, but even so, there are times I would like to scream at them until they were blown through a wall.