Harudaki/Skip Beat plot bunny

[geri_chan]

I mentioned previously on this post on minor characters on the Youka Nitta asylum on IJ that I'd like to see more of Kaneko and Shimizu, Katou and Iwaki's managers. So I've been thinking about writing a Kaneko fic, but since we see so little of him, I'm having a hard time really "getting" his character.

However, there is a wonderful manager character in the Skip Beat manga, so I was thinking it might be fun to do a crossover...

Skip Beat is published in the US by Viz as part of their Shojo Beat line. The Viz summary reads as follows: "Kyoko Mogami followed her true love Sho to Tokyo to support him while he made it big as an idol. But he's casting her out now that he's famous! Kyoko won't suffer in silence--she's going to get her sweet revenge by beating Sho in show biz!"

I thought the concept sounded a little silly and I didn't really think I'd find it interesting, but I borrowed the first volume from the library and was hooked. Kyoko's revenge is played as humorous rather than straight, and she's so over the top that she's hilarious. She starts off as a doormat of a girl, devoted to Sho even though he treats her more like a servant than a girlfriend. But when he dumps her, she's transformed into a vibrant, determined young woman with an almost terrifying zeal for revenge. She regularly emanates little cartoon evil spirits when she's feeling particularly angry or vengeful.

Even though she has no acting experience, she manages to provisionally get signed on at a talent agency--one that's a rival to Sho's, of course. And by chance she meets Ren Tsuruga, the agency's top star, a very handsome young actor. On the surface, he is very polite and professional, but he's a bit mean to Kyoko at first. That's because he's dedicated to his craft as an actor, and he found it offensive that she wants to become an actress solely for revenge, even though he can see that she's hard-working and talented. But gradually he begins to soften towards her, and thanks to Ren, Kyoko begins to develop a genuine appreciation for acting.

This being a Shoujo manga, Ren naturally begins to fall in love with Kyoko, although he's oblivious to it up until about vol. 12 or 13 of the manga, in large part because he's never truly been in love with anyone before, although he has dated other women. It's implied that there's some dark secret in his past that's kept him from getting too close to anyone.

Yukihito Yashiro is Ren's hard-working and long-suffering manager. He's a serious looking young man with glasses, but he has a slightly devilish streak to him. He has to use gloves when handling electronic devices because any device that he touches with his bare hands will short out--some sort of weird body chemistry fluke that works as a humorous plot device. At one point, he attempts to blackmail Ren by threatening to destroy his cell phone if Ren won't tell him something--I can't remember exactly what, but it had something to do with Kyoko. The Wikipedia entry on his character says that "the main reason Ren has never been late to a job, despite the crowds of fans that appear nearly everywhere he goes and clearly wish to mob him, is that Yashiro can be pretty dang scary when it comes to his charge, and can stop even the most fervid fans in their tracks with a mere cold glance."

However, Yashiro works hard for his client, and appears to sincerely care about him. Once he figures out that Ren likes Kyoko (long before Ren does), he schemes to find ways to get them alone together. (In spite of the fact that Kyoko is still in high school, while Ren is about 20, which would probably cause a bit of a scandal if a romance developed and became public knowledge. But he seems to think that Kyoko is good for Ren, and he's probably right.)

So the whole point of this long ramble is that I was mulling over a plot bunny where Kaneko and Yashiro are friends--maybe they used to work at the same agency, and Kaneko thinks of Yashiro as his sempai. Maybe they commiserate about how tempermental their clients can be, and Kaneko asks for advice on how to handle the hot-tempered Katou. Yashiro is a vivid, quirky character, so it would be fairly easy to write about him, but I'm still trying to get a handle on Kaneko: what makes him tick, and what made him go into show business? I like Kaneko, but he seems like such a nice, ordinary guy that it's hard to flesh out his character.