Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle LN: Volume 1

Ach ja, light novels are an interesting medium, for they tend to be very meta-textual works. They barely exist on their own, but along either the works that inspired them or simply along themselves instead. Light novels don’t simply come into existence, they are written as such, regardless where they fall into the never-ending circle of original, derivative and subversion. It’s like an endless discussion, each commenting on the works before and around them.

Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle, as a work of art, is interesting to me, mostly in the sense how it relates to my, to be frank, fairly limited perspective on the well-established formula for stories about a boy in highschool living out his adolescent days and enjoying the innocence of youth… or more concretely, the stories about some no-name loser eventually finding himself surrounded by beautiful girls and engaging in RomCom shenanigans in a juvenile display of self-indulgence.

I don’t think it would be fair to say that Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle, or even the author Hiromu by extend, hates the RomCom light novels, whose set-ups feel artificially created in a lab to hyper focus and target a certain kind of person, mostly because the story itself acknowledges the nuance in why some people consume and enjoy certain stories and simply pointing at the pathetic teenager, or worse, adult, reading his escapist fantasy slop will not encapsulate the entirety of the problem. I do however feel a certain kind of frustration with them coming from it. Like it is neither the content or the fantasy being criticized, but the presentation and self-image of their characters and readership.

Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle (Is there a good short handle for this series?.. Chiramune sounds dumb) is about the performance of popularity, or more specifically, popularity as performance. This isn’t just limited to the fact that we are following the “popular kids” for a change, but that every interaction, relationship and theme is fundamentally viewed through the angle of this societal soft rule. Though soft in its nature, the story treats popularity as something a lot more tangible and important to the daily life of these high schoolers. It is something that is constructed, maintained and deliberately upheld. And most importantly, something that holds power, because the people believe in it.

“Saku Chitose from Class Five is a total man-slut shithead”. Personally, I wouldn’t call him such abusive remarks and just label him as a simple whore. Now, this comment might come off as a bit harsh, given that the first one is explicitly stated to come from his dear haters as some rather ineffective jabs at his ego, but I think it has merit, if only not in the way it was intended to.

Chitose, to a certain extent, is the logical conclusion such an environment produces. He is the charismatic hot guy, whose looks will get him ahead, the jock, whose former days still give him credit in the present and the de facto leader of the popular group, almost calling all the shots on his own. It is this image he so carefully crafted that not just makes him a hypocrite, but more importantly, makes him also look like one to anyone who does not buy into his style of superficial kindness, even when the general notion of popularity is acknowledged and respected, as seen in part by the otaku group, Atomu and his posse and most clearly by Kenta himself.

It is not that hard to fall for Kenta’s pessimistic rhetoric. As long as one does not get shoved into extremes, I think most readers are realistically closer to Kenta than Chitose by default, might even agree with some of his points and see the whole situation as a twisted attempt to pull a Cinderella story through sheer insistence and misplaced confidence in a system whose directive is entirely vibe-based. And for how well Chitose is able to refute the accusations Kenta threw his way, there is one he never answered to, because he couldn’t: Chitose, the popular kid, does not care about Kenta, the shut-in. From Kenta’s point of view, Chitose even just talking to him is an insincere gesture, further undermined by the fact that he was indeed asked by a teacher to deal with him and no one else bothered. He is not spoken to as an equal. By all means, Kenta has the right to be angry… but so does Chitose, because despite everything, he still heeded the call to action, broke down what physically separated Kenta from the outside world and is willing to listen to the truly pathetic ramblings of an entitled boy.

For what it is worth, Chiramune is rather good in making sense of the hypocrisy of its characters, even when it is seldom spelled out directly. Kenta was guilty of the same things he accused Chitose of and used it as a defense mechanism to justify his own isolation and reaction towards getting hurt. On the other hand, Chitose plays the role of the friendly and responsible class president, because, despite his own outward cynicism (low-key Tsundere behavior, really) towards this presentation, at the end of the day, he truly enjoys being helpful to other people and likes being liked by the people around him, whether they are friends or random folks alike. Not to pull out Maslow’s funny little triangle, but he too has his reasons to build up walls around him.

The difference between the two is in how their attitude materializes. Chiramune is not shy about justifying being self-serving with the intention of feeling good about yourself. Chitose is living his best life right now, even outside the whole popularity framing. He has great friends and is happy with himself and his place in the world. On the other hand, Kenta went from a functional otaku to becoming a stereotypical one, hates himself and the people around him and is literally stuck in a prison of his own making. As such, it is only thematically fitting, that Chitose is getting Kenta out of his room in the same way he got into it… metaphorically speaking of course, he does not defenestrate him.

There is a certain dualism throughout the entire story of the novel: If you want to either approach or be approached by other people, you need to genuinely try to understand and perceive them as more than just what they want to show you. On the other hand, dragging the ones around you down will only make you feel miserable in the long run. Call it a basic lesson in empathy, but this is what the climax was about. It is not about the epic takedown of your former social group, but the friends one made along the way. It is Kenta realizing that Chitose is more than just the popular person he made up in his head and Chitose realizing that under all the otaku filth lies a fun person to hang around… Okay, it is also about the epic takedown of your former social group, I guess.

This finale can only exist in the boundaries set by the story it provided throughout. It actually tells you to be as vain as you want, to just get fit, dress well and get your petty revenge, only to unsurprisingly pull the rug out from under you, when every feeling of hatred has long lost its spark and embers. Yet, the way it goes through the motions is almost like parody of parody. Kenta’s former friends don’t acknowledge popular-ish Kenta, ignore all the hot-boy aura he farmed and otherwise disregard what worked for everyone else. Popularity is a performance and Kenta just got booed off stage, only for Chitose to turn from jobber to lead talent and flip the script by deconstructing the antagonists and the character our boy was saved from degenerating into. The audience clapped, the curtains fell and the true main actor got his encore.

Saku Chitose feels isolated by his performance. After all, where does his attributed power come from? He wants to pride himself by being this helpful and reliable guy, yet needs to confine in his own friends for a simple solution, the only reason he can sit at this one table at lunch is because no one dares question why he shouldn’t and despite most of the girls not minding having him as their boyfriend, he gets rejected by the one he loves. For fuck’s sake, Chitose is the kind of guy to look up towards the stars at sunset and muse about the moon, while thinking about sweets and nostalgic summers long gone by… I have disrespected people for less.

Thus concludes the part of the post, in which I try my best to make sense of it all. It is now time for some actual slander ^^.

Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle committed the gravest sin imaginable… making me have opinions about it. With a week of distance and having written everything I have to say out of my system, I think I can finally admit to myself that I kinda hated reading this novel. Like, for as witty as the writing is at times, Chitose is so fucking obnoxious to the point it truly was not funny to me anymore. And this should be saying something, considering what and how I have written this post until now. Even when I agreed with what he was yapping about, I still wished he would just shut up.

Part of this surely comes down to my own school experience, in which the idea of “popular kids”, as in Chiramune, didn’t really exist. Groups? Sure and of course there were some people generally more liked than others, but I certainly never thought of there being a structure and hierarchy to it. This is only anecdotal and I almost have no doubts that the social climate in Japanese schools is different, but it is hard for me to see the appeal of the series or comprehend why it is as popular as it is. From my point of view, it is really generic with its only distinguishing feature being that Chitose helped out a guy instead of a cute girl. The rest is still an overpowered hero protagonist surrounded by eye candy. Are so many people either interested or concerned about how they are perceived by others in such superficial ways? If I need a series about teenagers utterly overanalyzing social situations, then Kaguya-sama is right there.

It also doesn’t help that, for as strong as its thematic core is, the story doesn’t really have anything else to offer. The character writing can be good, when it is there, but this was basically just the story of Chitose and Kenta and everyone else, with maybe the exception of Yuuko, was kinda just existing in the peripherals. Seriously, I essentially had to fill in the gaps in the characters with tropes based on the illustrations myself, because the story gave me so little to work with (RIP to either Kaito or Kazuki, who didn’t even get one). And don’t even get me going with how three of the girls' names start with “Yu”. I know that reading on an E-Reader made it inconvenient to flip to the illustrations at the front, but for the first chapter, I basically didn’t know what character was talking, because they were so unremarkable.

I am aware Chiramune is in no position, where it can just introduce a new girl every volume and focus on that one, because otherwise the idea of this tight group of friends falls apart, but the utter lack of focus also surprised me. Yuuko adorns the cover of the novel and is kinda introduced as the “main girl”, but there is zero appeal in the actual story and if there is not supposed to be a “main girl” in this series at all, then why the focus?.. Unless one simply needed a girl, in which case my point still stands. What I also wished for would have been a proper foil, which can challenge Chitose in his thinking. Kenta served this role at first, but he eventually became a total yes-man and otherwise the closest there is would be Asuka, who’s only there in the prologue and epilogue respectively.

I really wanted to like this series. Partly to make up my dislike of Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian and also because I never really got around to check out Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki, despite quite enjoying Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night. Maybe I should also just stay with the time proven classics, like My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU. I am still very much interested in the anime adaptation, though now having read the first part, my expectations for it are rather low. Simply striving for something functional will not be enough to deliver on the one thing it has really going for it. I don’t require a Makeine, but even the relatively polished Alya struggled with properly adapting its story.

So yeah, that’s about it. I am still unsure about whether I will continue reading the series or drop it indefinitely, so I will keep it on hold for the time being. It is not like I have something specific in mind for what to read next, but I could really go for something more light-hearted and comedic, like the newest volume of KonoSuba, which has been collecting dust on my shelf for two months already.

Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle (ePub) is available on BookWalker.