Skip Beat

Skip Beat is a popular shoujo manga by Yoshiki Nakamura. The plot follows naive 15-year-old girl Kyoko Mogami, who follows her childhood love Sho Fuwa to Tokyo to support him in his dream of becoming a famous singer.  She is deeply in love with him but is unaware that Sho does not return her feelings and sees her nothing more than a live in housekeeper. Until one day she decides to deliver him dinner, she overhears him making fun of her plain appearance and giving attitude. That is when she decides to swear off love and she would have her revenge by becoming famous than him. This is the start of her journey of becoming the most famous actress in Japan.

One of the key things that make this manga a melodrama is the big physical gestures. On the day she swore revenge, she had to be dragged out by security guards. Kyoko often expresses her feelings in violent, physical actions. Like during the Dark moon arc, she runs off to go perfect a role, she apologizes for causing trouble by violently throwing herself onto the floor. She tends to overexaggerate her movement whenever she feels intense emotion or whenever she feels she has caused trouble for other people.

Besides the big physical gestures, Kyoko's emotions tend to take a physical form. Whenever she thinks of revenge or Sho, the person she despises the motion, literal demons appear and interact with the physical world as the surrounding characters often comment they feel intense hatred or deeply unsettling aura. When she is not acting, her emotions are open and easy to read. Kyoko is a person of extreme and excess because she often goes from happy to sad to rage in a span of one page. After all, she holds onto her disdain on love for 200 chapters before she realizes that she is in love with Ren, her acting sempai.

The most prominent reason why Skip Beat is a melodrama manga the misunderstanding of relationships between characters especially Kyoko's and Sho relationship. Many characters mistake Kyoko and Sho's relationship as romantic and that she is a super fan of Sho. Because they grew up together, they know each other entirely too well to claim a casual acquaintance. Even when she claims hatred, many do not believe her. The disbelief is also fueled by her refusal to talk about how or why she knows Sho so well. Whenever she does mention her relationship with him, the context is often confusing and people become too scared to ask for more details as the room around them gets dark and foreboding.

This is one of the most popular shoujo mangas as it still ongoing today and there are many adaptions of the story. There is an anime, Taiwanese drama, and drama cds. One of the reasons why Skip beat is so popular is because the reader gets drawn in by Kyoko's extremeness in her acting and you can't help wonder what crazy stunt she will pull next for her acting role. Another big draw is the emotional complexities of Sho, Kyoko, and Ren because Sho still has a grip on her heart, one of hatred, but a grip none the less. How Ren is going to break Sho's grip on Kyoko is another question readers want to be answered because currently, Kyoko realizes she loves Ren, but Sho still a dominating presence in her heart.