Sanrio, a company best known for being behind Hello Kitty, has a surprise hit out on Netflix, the hilarious Aggretsuko, a series about the pain of working corporate jobs. Via io9:
There comes a point in every young professional’s life when they find themselves sitting in a dreary office and wondering, “What am I doing? Who am I? Is this really all there is to life?” These thoughts are typically followed by the consumption of alcohol and, in Aggretsuko’s case, a side of death metal karaoke.
Aggretsuko is Netflix’s new series from Fanworks and Sanrio (makers of Hello Kitty and other relentlessly adorable characters) about Retsuko, a 25-year-old red panda who works in the accounting department of a soul-sucking trading corporation, a business she not-so-secretly loathes. After five years of working for the company, Retsuko appropriately sees her new job as a necessary evil that allows her to afford her humble apartment and slightly excessive drinking problem. But that perspective doesn’t protect her from the living micro- and macro-aggressions that frequently make her want to quit—such as her self-absorbed coworker Tsunoda, who refuses to do her own work, and Ton, Retsuko’s supervisor, who frequently harasses her and enables Tsunoda’s behavior.
Though she puts up a somewhat convincing facade of pleasantness and cordiality at work, Retsuko is, in the truest sense of the phrase, filled with a burning rage that she’s only able to release in her secret solo karaoke sessions—where she sings death metal anthems about the evils of working within a capitalist system.