Terrace House, A Deeper Dive: Chasing Ami

Ami is a bigger mass of contradictions than most people in the cast of Terrace House. On the one hand, she is blunt to the point of rudeness at times, but, on the other hand, the people on the show genuinely seemed to adore her for reasons that are not at all clear in what appears on screen. Her initial statement for what she's looking for in a guy as someone who will not betray an interest in her seems to be accurate, impossible to satisfy, and demonstrably attractive to to almost every guy in the house with her. She seems relentlessly passive until Seina shows up, but then it's off to Taka's room to ask him out. What does Ami want, and to what extent are her actions intentional? And, more to the point, why do all of the guys she lived with on the show with the exception of Shion seem to be genuinely romantically interested in her?

She's pretty, of course, but all the women on Terrace House are beautiful. (It's a gross, but really interesting question: who is the least physically attractive woman who has ever been on the show? There have certainly been woman who are now considered unattractive by the audience based on their personality and behavior on the show, but it's much harder to rank their looks. The guys, on the other hand are allowed a broader range of looks and so it's almost certainly a much easier question when considering them.) She's a younger member of the cast, but youth has also not been considered particularly attractive in prior cast-mates.

I think her personality plays a part: the guys do seem interested in figuring her out as a puzzle - how do you show interest in someone who says she'll shut down on anyone showing an interest in her? Yuudai has received and deserved a fair bit of criticism for his behaviors, but his approach to her might not have been entirely wrong: the blatant negging might well work for her (not that I think negging is ever justified or a good idea in any sense). Certainly, neither Taka nor Shohei had any more success with more conventional approaches.

Here's my thesis as to why she is both implausibly attractive based on what we see on the show and why none of the guys worked for her: you guys, I think she may be funny.

Specifically, I think she has a sharp, dry and sarcastic wit, and expects nothing less than for the guys she's interested in her to keep up with her and dish it back. I also think that it's really hard to capture her wit in the house segments of the show when contrasted with the panel segments of the show. In comparison to the broad and quick banter of the professional comedians on the panel, her sarcasm just comes off as rude.

The critical scene to justify, however, is when Taka gets his butt hurt, and Shion tells Ami to go to see him in episode 15. He's obviously in pain, and she gives him nothing. Watching that scene again, I think she's trying not to laugh. Clearly, she's making sure he's okay, but when that's established she just is not going to give any ground. I think she intended the scene to be read by Taka and and audience as funny, but, instead, it's easily read as uncaring and cold. And I think Taka was just getting tired of her games. My initial read was even that she intentionally trying to establish that she was not interested in Taka and wanted to shut down his advances entirely. Now, I actually think that had Taka responded with equal sarcasm right back at her, he might well have won her over.

I am not a conventionally attractive cisgendered woman: I cannot imagine what it must be like for any of the women on Terrace House. I can guess that they all have to learn to deal with unwanted attention. Ami has chosen to act like if not be a shrew, a rose whose thorns are meant to keep predators at bay. But the danger of such a path is that it feeds into problematic narratives of dominance and submission that can be and are fetishized across many human cultures and feed into structures of gender-based harassment and control.

Ami is a cypher. To a greater or lesser extent all the people of Terrace House are as well. Despite the length of Terrace House seasons, we only see a fraction of these people's lives, and it's not entirely possible to read their the motivations and desires even as the producers do their best to assemble a narrative from what is captured on camera. Thus, there is a huge temptation to read into the stories the things we want to see as opposed to what is really there. That is, in Ami's case in particular we are tempted to do exactly what Yuudai, Taka and Shohei do: see in Ami what we want to see. If we want to see the spoiled mean girl who dismisses the people she no longer has any use for, she can be seen that way. If we want to see the sarcastic girl who just wants to be met as an equal on the field of verbal sparring, she can be seen that way too.

In that sense, we are all chasing Ami.