Eva’s First Impression
It was a week before this aired when I realized that I had forgotten to add Love Through A Prism to the Winter 2025 Preview. To preface my initial reactions with the preview, I was already hooked. I knew I was going to be all over it. And the first episode?
Happy to say it did not disappoint!
This was a fantastic start. It was simple, but I really liked the way they set things up in a very concise way right off the bat. And can we just take a moment to appreciate the gorgeousssssss backgrounds!? I’m absolutely obsessed with it. Unfortunately I’m not art-savvy enough to know the exact styles, but still, I love it.
Set in the London of the early 20th Century, we meet Lili Ichijoin who was recommended by Hayashi (who I’m presuming is her mentor) to attend Saint Thomas Art Academy as a representative student for Japan in the Oil Painting department. It is a prestigious academy that allows student with promise from all over the world, from commoners to nobility, and even royals to study at their academy.
However, while Lili was blessed to have even been chosen to be the representative, her mother on the other-hand was not about it. She had begrudgingly agreed to let Lili go there to study, but under strict conditions. She’s not allowed to be anything less than first place, because second place is always forgotten. Only those who come first are the ones remembered and etched into history. She made this point abundantly clear when she tested Lili on whether or not she could identify the second tallest mountain and longest river in Japan. So because of that, she must achieve becoming the number one student in just six months. Otherwise she will be ordered to come home and take over the family’s Kimono business and get marriage arrangements in order.
Interestingly her father is quite chill about all of this, and even went as far to trying to support Lili by imploring the mother to let her make her own decisions. But the mother is far to intimidating for the guy, so he didn’t really get to finish even saying that.
But this does raise the stakes for Lili, as getting to first place will be undoubtedly a challenge. There’s many people vying for that position. However the biggest obstacle of all will be dethroning Kit Church, the uncontested number one artist of their graduating class. She got her work cut out for her!
Speaking of Kit Church, he and Lili already had two encounters. The first was a mixed bag, of one he came off as an eccentric guy (which he is), yet was the one person who did actually give her directions to where she needed to go. The second encounter was in the school’s art room where Lili had dozed off, only to wake up to find him rummaging through her stuff. (EXCUSE ME SIR?!) Apparently that’s one of his other weird habits besides eating bread he with charcoal smudged all over it since his friends had called him out on it.
We were also introduced to Dorothy, who… is your classic western who’s super interested in Japan’s culture but couldn’t be waaaaaayyyy off the mark. Lili was not mentally prepared for her bombardment of asking her to show her a shuriken, and then going on about she must be from a samurai family and then committing hara-kiri if the secret comes out. Justifiably, she ran from her when she saw the opportunity to. Unfortunately Dorothy was not about to give her a chance to correct her on all those assumptions.
Overall this was a great start! I really like Lili alot, and I’m excited to see her rivalry with Kit Church. We haven’t seen any of her oil paintings yet, so I’m really interested in seeing where she’d be ranked when it comes to her first critique session.
Though I must say: I was completely caught off-guard to see Netflix had dropped all twenty episodes. I always have mixed opinions when they do that… But you know what? This actually works in my favour. With all the episodes released, this actually allows me to comfortably pick a day to release my entries instead. So I’ll be releasing these entries on Fridays (and sometimes Saturdays if necessary due to schedule). That said, it certainly has been a while since I’ve last picked up this many shows in a season ahaha… But hey, I can at least get ahead of this when I have free time, or at least that’s the plan! (Already got Episode 2 & 3 written as a double-post for next week!)
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