365 Days to the Wedding – Episode 1

What’s it about? The travel agency where Ohara and Honjoji work is opening a branch in the remote, wintry wilderness of Alaska and will need a brave soul to relocate there. When there are no volunteers, the branch manager threatens to choose someone, prioritizing employees who are single. Honjoji proposes a plan: she and Ohara can pretend to be engaged so they don’t get picked. How hard can marriage be for two socially awkward people who have never fit in at work?

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365 Days is a cute, classic fake dating caper with room for some deeper social commentary. While this first episode is mostly an introduction and character study of our two newly-betrothed leads, there’s plenty of subtextual or not-so-subtextual themes here about society’s heteronormative and ableist expectations and how they can devalue the people who don’t fit into them.

It’s safe to say that our two “awkward introverts,” Ohara and Honjoji, will both be relatable to neurodivergent viewers: Ohara finds it difficult to verbalize his thoughts, takes longer to process what people are saying to him, and often “lags behind” in conversation. His boss snaps at him for not making eye contact and he worries that his co-workers think he’s slacking off and zoning out when he simply needs to take more time to consider and formulate his responses to things. Honjoji, meanwhile, comes across as “cold” and people often assume she’s angry due to her flat affect and tendency to accidentally stare at them. The narrative spends time in the headspace and POV of both characters and it’s clear that they’re both carrying around anxieties about the way they’re perceived and a sense of alienation from their peers.

In one sense, this makes them a match made in heaven, and awkward as they are, the stage is set for these two to find a sense of true solidarity and understanding with each other. With a shared self-awareness about their social otherness and the resulting fear of transferring overseas and ending up even more isolated than they are now, they dive into their very businesslike scheme to fake their engagement.

Honjoji asks Ohara to submit a detailed form about his personal history so she can better formulate their made-up backstory as a couple, and sets off to location-scout for idyllic (fake) first-date and proposal spots with the same format and rigor she usually applies to her work in the tourism industry. The fact that she takes this super-serious and formulaic approach is meant to be funny, but I get the sense we’re not supposed to be laughing at Honjoji, rather sympathizing with her as she navigates the social construct of romance with the tools she understands. The fact that a relationship can be so easily falsified if you just say the right cute, heteronormative things and hit the right beats on an expected formula, kind of goes to show how constructed the whole idea of modern romance is.

The episode also shows how highly the construct of romance is valued via the travel agency team, whose opinion immediately pivots from annoyed indifference to adoring positivity when they “find out” Ohara and Honjoji are a couple. They’re welcomed into the after-work social circle, bundled into happy conversations, and dare I say treated with more respect and humanity. No longer are they weird or off-putting, they’ve stepped onto the normative life path by being in a (straight) romantic relationship! Congratulations! You’ve become normal! Oh, thank goodness!

This strand of social critique underlines this first episode and arguably the whole set-up for the show: certain relationships are considered more important and real than others, and people who aren’t in those “important” relationships are treated as more disposable, expected to uproot themselves for the good of the company because they don’t have anything else worthwhile in their life. Whether or not the series examines the dehumanizing horror of this corporate culture will be another question, but I think—and I hope—that 365 Days could get into some really interesting stuff regarding social norms around relationships and how alienating these can be if you’re in any way marginalized from them.

Or, it could not. This is a rom-com after all, and the two main characters are obviously going to fall in love for real somewhere in the midst of their fake relationship, because that’s how genres work. In this set-up it may be difficult to maintain an earnest critique of a society that prioritizes certain relationships above others. Then again, maybe 365 Days can have its wedding cake and eat it too: showing its two leads finding an unconventional happiness in their version of romance while also examining the flaws in these greater social ideas. Fingers crossed.

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