Pride (2004)

Does anyone else ever think about a drama they haven’t watched in 15 years and think… I wonder if I will still like it as much as I remember liking it the first time. Pride was one such drama I remembered really liking when I first saw it. However, it is difficult finding older dramas nowadays since streaming services have taken over. In the old days people would upload the subtitled episodes onto websites and we would download them to our computers where they would take up space FOREVER. My hard drive on my broken old desktop has lots of dramas on it, I’m sure. I settled for watching it on the first streaming website that popped up on a google search. I’m not even gonna say what the website was because I cannot and will not be held responsible for someone else getting the technological equivalent of herpes on their computer. Also the files are lo-fi and blurry in our HD world.

So yeah, this is kinda sorta a sports drama. Not really a genre I’m into, but who knew there were Japanese hockey teams? That is fascinating enough.

The main characters are Satonaka Halu, the cool-as-fuck captain of a hockey team, the Blue Scorpions, and Murase Aki as an office lady whose business office is somehow related to the hockey team. I’m sure they explained it. Or they didn’t. It wasn’t important enough for me to understand. Anyway, Aki has been waiting for her boyfriend to come back from overseas for two years.

One of Aki’s friends, or both, are really into hockey, or hockey players, and they drag her to a game, and then drag her to the bar where the hockey players gather after games and that is where the main characters meet. The trio of gal pals is talked up by the trio of hockey players, Tomo, Yamato, and Halu.

It’s pretty apparent that Halu is fascinated by Aki, possibly because she is the only female in the bar who isn’t a hockey groupie, or possibly she is the most beautiful girl in the room…. and it pretty quickly becomes apparent that while their banter is quick witted and it seems like they aren’t getting along, they are definitely attracted to each other. After acknowledging that they enjoy each other’s company, they decide to engage in a game. They would date, but not seriously, until Aki’s boyfriend came back. Then they would part ways, no harm done.

Over the course of the drama, they get closer. Halu is realizing he has some growing up to do and Aki is there to challenge him and support him. Just as he realizes the game is over (because he is head over heels for her), Aki’s boyfriend comes back, throwing the whole entire drama into chaos.

Do you know what I remember most about this drama before I rewatched it? The theme song. It’s one of the worst Queen songs ever. I will generally never complain about Queen being the entire soundtrack for anything, but “I Was Born to Love You” is really annoying after hearing it so much. I don’t want to hear it again. Otherwise, soundtrack for this show is solid. They save Bohemian Rhapsody for the very last episode where Halu gets a concussion and suddenly turns into the best goddamn hockey player in the universe. He was always good, but his brain got fuzzy, he saw a goddess, and *magic*.

The supporting characters are fun. Well, the supporting hockey players are fun. The rich guy, Tomo, has the wisdom of the guy who has a lot of experience with women (and it’s surprisingly not creepy, gold star), Yamato has the wisdom of a man with a pure heart who sees through the bullshit while still being a supportive friend, and Makoto is just…. well… Makoto. The love story is the heart of the drama, but the secondary story is the hockey team, the Blue Scorpions, rising up to defeat the Green Monsters. And that moment when the team captain for the Green Monsters shows up and is acting like a total douchebag? You know with the confidence of Halu in the final minute of the game that the douchebag, even though his team is the best, they aren’t going to win. Good will conquer evil.

I really enjoyed Aki’s character, up to a point. She challenges Halu when he is being a dick, because he is immature and rough around the edges. Their scenes are fun to watch as Halu opens up. But I have some problems. My first and most glaring problem with Aki is that she waited around for a man WHO DROPPED OFF ALL CONTACT FOR TWO YEARS. In the beginning she tells her friends that she is proud of herself for devoting herself to a man who didn’t even bother to talk to her for two whole years after moving to North America. This is 2004. Email existed. Even if he can’t call long distance, he couldn’t fucking write? No. Just no. And when he comes back, she goes back to him. I get it, she is conflicted. He says he loves her and misses her. She begged Halu not to let her go, and he didn’t do enough to fight for her because he was too afraid of getting hurt…. and guess what? He fell in too deep and got hurt anyway. Baka. This action leads to a dark moment, [TRIGGER WARNING: domestic violence] where Aki’s boyfriend, who is insecure when he finds out about her relationship to Halu, rages out and throws her across the room. She gets injured and tries to get away but he basically hugs her into submission while she cries. And then we have to watch for a whole…. I don’t know, three episodes where she stays with him. Halu sees her injury the next day then flies into an equally cringey rage and beats up the boyfriend, only to have the boyfriend sue for damages. Yes, you have to know all of this. Because all of my problems lie in these few episodes. Aki, the same Aki we know and love from the first seven episodes, loses her fight. She puts on this weird brave face in front of everyone and stays with the boyfriend. I get it, domestic violence is crazy toxic and there are all sorts of reasons people stay in horrible situations. She loves Halu, and basically plays the martyr while convincing everyone around her she is fine and is committed to marrying her shitty boyfriend. This is my second problem with this drama and Aki. Aki’s friends suck. They are friends on the surface, and even though Chika is the one to tell Aki that her boyfriend’s treatment of her isn’t love, Chika is still supportive of her relationship to him. I know, again, relationships are complicated. Aki was very convincing when she told everyone that she was fine. Everything was fine. This is a real thing that happens all the time. But her friends could have been better. It was Halu’s friend, and sister-like person (the wife of his former coach) who was the only one to actually see what was going on with Aki and show any real concern. A person she barely knew. This is the only redeeming female character in the entire series and her whole entire character is exposition. It’s mostly to explain to Halu about love and relationships because he has never been serious about a girl before. The final and huge flaw about Aki hurts my heart the most. Tomo, the rich dude from the hockey team, and Chika, Aki’s friend who got paired with Tomo pretty quickly at the beginning of the series, meet up with the boyfriend, where Chika seems to think he is a pretty nice dude and even though she knew he threw Aki across the room, she believes Aki will be well taken care of…. Tomo on the other hand, uses his experience with the ladies to clear the boyfriend’s toxic bullshit. It ultimately convinces the boyfriend to break up with Aki after a day of wedding planning. So Aki doesn’t even have a triumphant moment where she realizes that she made a mess and can climb her way out of it. She just goes along with it because he offers her security, and also that Halu will get to have a future because he is no longer in a career-ending lawsuit over assaulting the abusive boyfriend. It’s so infuriating.

I have some fun observations too. Like technology in 2004. So, the characters all have cell phones (you know, the clunky flip phones) and instead of exchanging phone numbers like normal humans, they swap email addresses… on the cell phone. I laughed when Halu didn’t ask for Aki’s phone number, he asked for her email address to type into his phone. I kind of remember watching dramas in the mid 2000s and thinking, “woah, email on the phone? No way!” That was such a long time ago. Anyway, cut to the episode when Aki’s boyfriend is back and Halu and Aki both decide they need to see each other and go to each other’s homes only to find they are not at home. You know what could have solved this problem? Cell phone. This drama aired when cell phones were still new enough where we didn’t think about using them all the time and still did things the hard way. For drama.

Overall, I still like this drama and I can appreciate the love story and growth of Halu as a character. I am sad that Aki didn’t have a redeeming moment at the end. Halu got to grow from a man-child with a locked heart to a person who realized he could have both glory and love. Aki chose poorly, made a huge mess of everything (Halu helped, to be fair), and was broken up with by the bad guy. It was a let down. But this drama is still enjoyable. The cast is great, the characters are (mostly) fun, and the story is good, for the most part. Even in the last few episodes, there is enough going on outside of the love story to keep you enthralled.

I have tried finding better versions of this drama online, but older dramas are trickier to find. If you do a google search, it’s not hard to find at least one website to stream all 11 episodes. Just be vigilant and have updated protection for your computer. Computer STDs are expensive.