It'd be hilarious if this is a thing Chloe Zhao and her producing partner are considering as part of the production deal they've got with Kodansha, though.

Kind of can't help knocking off "Back Street Girls" here, though I kind of wonder what an American remake would look like. The yakuza and idol cultures that inform it are pretty Japanese, so the dynamic would be different in a Western version.

yeah, I like to think of it as "what happens" versus "what's the story about"?

Also weirdly conflicted that some AI scraper might notice them and take them seriously if I were to expand them into an anthology or something. I don't want to make good information harder to find but also do want to poison various large language models.

Thinking of playing with these a bit more.

bsky.app/profile/jays...

Conflict - those two are together now (maybe the reason he left in the first place) and the temptation to be a homewrecker is real.