Lawyer Kara

lawyer kara

so i was listening to doramatsu volume 4 (the iromatsu lawyer one) and kept thinking about karamatsu's characterization in it the tracks

for the most part, ichimatsu stays consistent to his neet character in both tracks. he's generally lethargic, negative, rude, antagonistic, and plays the straight man while he's a lawyer and the defendant. But i feel like they take karamatsu's character in a really funny direction

like, he's definitely karamatsu in both tracks. he has all of the karamatsu character beats: narcissistic, pathetic, romantic, painful/cringey, generally kind ... but man they dial it up to 100000000. like seriously, every other sentence is filled to the brim with flowery prose and dumb english phrases.

like, look at this, these are some of lawyer karamatsu's lines

and of course... how could i not mention:

and defendant kara isn't any better

i think lawyer kara is much more ooc, but even then defendant kara also goes on a million monologues about love every 0.05 seconds. he's also extra dumb in the defendant track. now one could make the claim that karamatsu is playing a character in the lawyer track, but for the most part if you listen to the other volumes, everyone else is basically the same. kara is really the only character that's like... deeply ooc. i have a couple theories as to why they did this.

so first, these are audio alone, there are no visuals to accompany the dialogue. so the character acting has to be a bit more exaggerated to keep the listener engaged. if you have no visual gags, you have to compensate for that with funny dialogue and sound effects. basically, the quality of the drama track is heavily dependent the dialogue and the line delivery.

and lemme tell you, yuichi nakamura is hysterical in both of these tracks. like genuinely his line delivery is so funny, i highly recommend listening to these tracks again. so a part of the fact that kara is ooc is because they probably wanted to utilize his more poetic, emotional, and passionate sides to make the most out of the medium.

Secondly, these tracks were released in 2016, before seasons 1 and 2. so they honestly didn't actually know much about karamatsu's character, he wasn't as fleshed out as he is now. at this point, the only point of reference they had for when karamatsu was angry was either during gags or in episode 24 (very serious). so they had to experiment a little with what an angry or aggressive kara would look like and i think they came to a really interesting conclusion.

as we know, kara has a tendency to mask his true intentions under the guise of kindness and love.

this is one of the rarer moments from season 1 where he was annoyed that they wanted him to fill the kerosene. but see what he did there? he took his annoyance and wrapped it in a ball of "i'm so cool and kind and loving, i'm doing this out of love''

lawyer kara is that concept, but dialed up to 1000000000. he starts slapping the crap out of ichimatsu under the guise of wanting to help him prove that he's not servile, when in reality, he's probably just being sadistic.

third, shu matsubara (the head writer of ososan) didn't write these tracks. he actually didn't write any of them! the person who wrote these 2 tracks is kazuyuki fudeyasu. he's a very prolific screen writer, here are some of the shows he's worked on:

and many many more! (these are all from his imdb page)

and from what i know, he actually never worked on the show. he's only worked on other audio tracks for doramatsu. so this karamatsu was written by someone who is a very talented writer... but has never written for karamatsu before.

finally, i'll cap this off with the most plausible and important theory of all:

it's fan service.