We’ve been impressed by Nissin’s clever ads for Cup Noodles more than once. With previous ads featuring breakdancing samurai, battlefield language barriers, and fanatic idol fans, we’ve usually come away with chuckles or goose bumps, and sometimes even both.
Now Nissin is back again with a skewed look at another piece of pop culture: romantic leads in girls’ manga that pound on the walls.
Anime and manga for adolescent and teenage boys gets plenty of flak for reusing the same stock situations, whether it’s the male protagonist accidentally falling face-first into a girl’s chest or more frequently seen clichés such as…no, that’s pretty much the most common one.
This isn’t to say that series primarily made for girls don’t have a tendency to go to the same well over and over again either, though. For example, hundreds of girls’ manga feature a sequence called kabe don, or the wall pound, where the female lead finds herself cornered by a hunky dude who slaps the wall behind her, fencing her in so she won’t run away from his declaration of love.
Kabe don is so ubiquitous it even showed up in the marriage proposal simulator/snark generator that was launched last month.
Nissin’s new ad draws attention to this common scene, and the effect it has on many earnest female readers.
And for one young woman, it looks like her manga fantasies are about to come true!
Or are they?
Like the narrator tells us, manga and the real world are just a little bit different. Still, we can’t blame fans for dreaming, and at least when their hopes come crashing down, Nissin will be there with a quick, hot meal for them.
Source: Jin
Top image: YouTube
Insert images: Imetore Propose, YouTube