While this spring anime season has been somewhat slow, there are still several shows that continue to be popular, like The Apothecary Diaries, The Shiunji Family Children, or To Be Hero X. Somehow, instead of those, I fell in love with Rock Is a Lady’s Modesty, an anime that floated in 10th – 20th in our weekly rankings.
Rock Is a Lady’s Modesty is an anime about rich young ladies getting off to each other in front of an audience, while playing instrumental rock. That sounds completely unhinged, and there is a good reason for that. The anime explores the inner world of a group of prim and proper ladies, who have to spend almost their entire existence acting a certain way, and on the flip side, the emotional explosion that happens when they finally get an outlet for expressing themselves.
Rock Is a Lady’s Modesty centers the story around Lilisa, the daughter of an upstart woman who remarried into wealth after divorcing her husband. This forces her into a very tight situation, as she suddenly has to blend into high society at Oushin Girls’ Academy, an institution for wealthy young ladies, while having a commoner upbringing.
Not only that but to solidify her mother’s position in her new family, she is under pressure to overperform and aims to become the Noble Maiden, a title reserved for the most ladylike of the ladies in Oushin Girls’ Academy. This is the first facet of the story, the struggle to act like she belongs in a place where she doesn’t belong, and to put on the mask of the same rich people she secretly dislikes.
This changes, however, when Lilisa accidentally stumbles upon Otoha playing the drums by herself in an abandoned school building. Otoha is one of the ladiest ladies that have ever ladied, at least when looking from the outside.
She is the incarnation of both what Lilisa hates and what she is trying to become. So naturally, it comes as a shock to her to see her playing rock songs, a very unladylike pastime. After an argument, Lilisa ends up picking up the electric guitar, which she learned from her commoner father and loved.
An intense, sweaty jam of doubtful platonicity ensues and ends in both of them getting very much into it, going completely unhinged, and screaming at each other to get better, a perfectly normal interaction for rock bands, but definitely not something you would expect from two of the top candidates to become the Noble Maiden.
Rock Is a Lady’s Modesty‘s story switches gears from here on and focuses on the formation of a band centered around Lilisa and Otoha, and how they found their style and their bandmates, bandmates who also happen to be prim and proper ladies.
In my opinion, the anime has two main selling points. First, the rock girl band theme, which, as someone who lists Nana in my top anime of all time, will always at least entice me to give the anime a chance. The music for Rock Is a Lady’s Modesty is nowhere near as iconic or memorable as the Nana OST, but it is solid and does a great job of supporting the story. The concert scenes are a highlight of the anime, with great animation, energy, and music.
And the second selling point, which really elevated the story for me, is the exploration of the internal struggles and contradictions of each of the girls. Each of them has a unique situation, but all of them are looking for a way to harmonize the persona that has been forced upon them with their internal desires.
And this journey of self-discovery results in them developing very unhinged and interesting personalities throughout the show, which results, for example, in a memorable scene where Shiro, who up until that point was pretending to be the cool, aloof band member, randomly asks Otoha to verbally berate her.
This gap moe made for very funny and cute moments, and it made Rock Is a Lady’s Modesty a treat to watch.
Rock Is a Lady’s Modesty is available for streaming on HIDIVE, and they describe the story as follows:
Lilisa’s passion for rock reawakens when she meets Otoha, her seemingly perfect classmate who’s secretly a heavy metal drummer!
©Hiroshi Fukuda,HAKUSENSHA/Rock Lady
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