Reviews - Animefangirl!

Watashi no Koshien volume 4 & 5 (skimmed)

Yup, as I suspected volume 3 was the end of Watashi no Koshien‘s run of quality. The manga continues for another 2 volumes and manages to achieve its initial objective, but the light had gone out and it was just a bitter angry manga till the end. Still the ending doesn’t feel abrupt, so I suppose it was meant to be a 5-volume series from the start. I’m all for the rare, short baseball manga, but this was just crap.

Not that I’m 100% qualified to say so, since I read about a third of volume 4, skipped through to the end and skimmed most of volume 5 as well. All I wanted to know when I started 4 was whether Wataya had repented of her selfish abuse of her charges, but not only had she not repented but the writers had decided “This is no longer an issue, okay?” and done an arbitrary time-skip to the next academic year. Plus all the angry team members suddenly love to practice and think Coach Wataya is the best thing since sliced bread. Explain? They don’t owe you any explanations!

Then 4 new students show up (recruited due to Wataya’s passionate efforts). The coach’s new plan is revealed: pamper and promote these new students to make the older students jealous, desperate and exceedingly grateful for every moment of playing time she chooses to bestow on them. In a better-written manga this would come across in a more charitable “trying to motivate everyone to do their best” kind of way, but as usual Shihono Wataya comes across as stubborn, scheming, self-centered and inconsiderate.

After that the team has a game against the best school in their prefecture, even better than the one they played last time. Aaand I stopped reading. Skimmed. They drew. More jealousy and bickering between team members. Somehow they all learn to get along and appreciate just how wonderful Shihono really is. Then the Koshien prelims start and they win all their matches and go to Koshien, the end.

Final verdict: That was… pretty bad. The art is nice, the baseball action is interesting and clearly drawn and most of the characters are passable but when the main character is selfish, self-righteous and is portrayed as someone who can do no wrong even when she is clearly wrong, it doesn’t matter what the rest of the manga is like. I saw some parallels between this series and Ookiku Furikabutte and I can only hope the latter doesn’t fall apart as quickly and as completely as Watashi no Koshien did.

Watashi no Koshien volume 3 review

Sometimes it comes as a shock when a manga is cancelled. Sometimes it’s more of a mild surprise, because you could see the series declining but you didn’t think it was that bad yet. And then sometimes, as in the case of Watashi no Koshien, you can pinpoint the exact moment when the whole series began to fall apart. Volume 3 is the clearly the beginning of the end for this series, though it will continue to limp along for another two volumes before the merciful end.

To explain I’ll have to spoil a bit so spoiler warning. So, the Kugunari Nine manages to pull of a major upset at the beginning of this volume, defeating Seiryo 2-1. However the coach of the team they’re facing next was watching the game, and he’s picked up on some of pitcher Kouhei’s habits. While they’re practising hard to defeat Kugunari, Kouhei and his troops have let a little success get to their heads and are spending their days singing karaoke and their nights playing video games.

The problem starts after they (predictably) lose by a called game in the 5th. See they didn’t just lose, they also embarrassed coach Wataya in front of her former teammates, and she is mad. How mad? So mad that she orders them to run 40km from the ball park back to the school. You could argue that she didn’t force them – merely told everyone who wouldn’t do it to quit the team. But why does it have to be an either-or thing? And why does it have to be so radical? What is this supposed to change? There are so many things wrong with that scenario. In the end not a single member manages to complete the course.

The parents are naturally outraged and the PTA bans Wataya from coaching the team any more. But here’s the issue. It would be one thing if this was a deconstruction of the hot-blooded shounen training-from-hell genre, but instead the writers actually try to justify Wataya’s behavior! Forcing tired, out-of-shape kids to run 40 km with no food and no water since morning just because they lost a match and embarrassed you? In a tournament they didn’t even want to play but you made them to? And by her own admission Wataya did it because “she was angry” and because “it’s necessary if we want to go go Koshien”!

Now the “My, not Our Koshien” part of the series title starts to come out – it’s Wataya’s dream to go to Koshien again because of her dead buddy. The team members don’t even know about that stuff. Yet they’re the ones who have to play the game, they’re the ones who have to do the training. They’re just her tools, to be kicked around and tossed aside if they don’t work as she desires. To end to the volume she refuses to apologize because “If I apologize then it means I was wrong.” Uh, but you were wrong. “If I apologize then it means I can’t do it again.” Uh… you mean you want to do it again? Yes, yes she does.

And as I said this is all portrayed as right and proper and necessary if the team want to go to Koshien (which, as I said, they don’t). Some of the team members skip school for the next school days, not because they’re sick but because they’ve got a good excuse to. And that is used as justification to claim “See! It wasn’t that bad, was it?” That’s like stabbing someone and seeing him walking the next day and saying “See, being stabbed wasn’t that bad, was it?” It’s not for you to decide! Then the team manager decides she’s going to run the same 40km course, again to prove it wasn’t that bad. Again, that’s not for you to decide!

I suppose Watashi no Koshien could still salvage itself at this point. Maybe Wataya could learn that Koshien isn’t a dream you impose on people but a dream you share with others. And then they’ll all live happily ever after. The writers could also use this as an opportunity to discuss what, if anything, discipline should be administered to a team that loses because they’ve been slacking (but if they win after slacking then it’s a-okay), how much training is too much, what lengths a coach should go to motivate his/her team and other such pertinent questions of that nature. It’s not going to happen though – if it was certain in-story characters wouldn’t be going to such lengths to defend Wataya’s actions.

Honestly I’m not feeling very motivated to continue. But there are only 2 volumes left to the end (cancellation?) so maybe I’ll see it through. I’ll decide later.

Barakamon epsiodes 1-3. Dropped.

Actually it’s more like episode 1, half of 2, 3, then dropped. I’ve watched enough anime to know what I like and what I don’t like, so there’s no need to drag things out any longer than I should. But still, I started Barakamon because it was a suggestion I got in response to a request for recent, complete anime. It’s only fair to those who suggested it to explain in a few brief points why I quit so quickly, especially when Barakamon is only 12 episodes long so I was already a quarter of the way through.

Reason 1: The exoticization of the “other.” No, this hasn’t turned into a social commentary blog. And you don’t have to memorize any difficult terms, though it helps to know that exoticization/exotification = “the act of romanticizing elements of something, like a culture, that is foreign to oneself.” You’ve probably seen it in action without knowing it, every time you read a book or watch a movie or listen to a BBC documentary about some wealthy, down-at-heart urbanite who moves to some remote island or jungle or whatever and learns from the “natives” ‘what life is really all about.’ In shallower works of this sort, this will often involve fornicating with one or more of the more presentable natives as well.

And it’s always someone from the “civilized” world learning ‘life lessons’ from people who are clearly portrayed as more primitive, more backward, less sophisticated and frequently more ‘in touch with man and nature.’ City boy/girl observes or participates in their quaint little customs and imbibes their quaint little view of life all and suddenly all is right with him again. The protagonist’s struggles to fit in and accept their way of life is only used to highlight just how foreign their ways are to him, and by extension to the rest of the presumably civilized audience.

What a farce. And how dehumanizing to those portrayed as ‘other’ instead of as human beings in their own right. You even get several scenes that mock their local dialect – oh look, the little primitives can’t even understand each other sometimes, they should learn to talk normally like we do. But no, there’s a lesson in this for higher mortals such as ourselves, we’re so clever, etc etc. And so we comfort ourselves thinking we’ve changed from the experience, but actually we have just reinforced our own superiority by taking what is ‘meaningful’ from the experience and melding it to our original advanced way of life.

That’s Barakamon in a nutshell, that is.

Reason 2. It’s too preachy. Just because you have the fairy godmother of wisdom embodied in the form of a 6-year old or whatever doesn’t make preachiness any less preachy. There’s always some lesson for protagonist whatshisname to learn, no matter where he turns. And it’s not enough to merely show him changing or learning, instead the show has to spend a few minutes beating us over the head with it through either a long lecture or a long soliloquy from protagonist-guy. Just show us what’s happening, don’t talk all the time.

Reason 3. I didn’t like the characters. A slice-of-life show lives and dies by its characters. If you like them, great. If you don’t, that’s the end of the show for you. The main character is too self-centered and full of himself. Of course the point of the show is to change that aspect of his life, but he’s so hard to root for that I don’t care to stick around and see it. The rest of the villagers are just too pushy, too over-familiar and too preachy for me to care for. I would be out of the village in no time if people kept shoving themselves into my life the way they do in Barakamon.

Luckily everyone is so nice and understanding that they totally forgive him for being a jerk all the time.

Reason 4. I didn’t like the humor. It would have been better as just a slice-of-life show, maybe, because the harder Barakamon tried to be funny, the more I felt myself pulling away. I don’t like ‘humor’ that revolves around embarrassing someone, for one thing. And much of the so-called humor in this show was just vulgarity, like a 6-year old using all kinds of filthy language, or someone being given a suppository, or a man hugging another man to the glee/shock of a closet yaoi fangirl. That sort of thing. Not my kind of show at all.

And there you have my 4 reasons for dropping Barakamon.

Watashi no Koshien volume 2 review

Right-ho, continuing where we left off with the Kugunari High School baseball team and their rookie female coach. The entirety of Watashi no Koshien volume 2 is spent on the fall tournament match that was started at the end of the previous volume where the Kugu 9 go up against Seiryo, the best school in Miyagi prefecture, in their very first official match. If that sounds similar to Ookiku Furikabutte, let me assure you that the similarities don’t end there but are plentiful and easy to spot for anyone who has read both.

But just because I thought I knew how things were going to play out doesn’t mean I got any less nervous as I read the game. It’s not like Seiryo is ready to just roll over and play dead. While they started out underestimating pitcher Kouhei, by the halfway point they had pulled out their second-stringers and populated the lineup with nothing but regulars. Kouhei hangs in there valiantly, but by the end of the volume his stamina is starting to fail him – and he’s finally starting to appreciate that the training from hell he went through in Tokyo actually had a point.

This volume also gives a bit of development to some of the other guys on the team. Rookie catcher Moichi has never caught anything other than a fastball before, but there’s a limit to how far Kouhei’s fastball can take them, so he has to learn to catch sliders on the fly. Third baseman Baba makes a fatal mistake and nearly costs them a run. Can he redeem himself? And was girly-boy Bei recruited just to round out the team or does he have hidden depths? The star of the team is clearly Kouhei and he gets the majority of attention, but much of the rest of the team gets their chance to shine as well.

So what about the initial mystery of the story? Coach Wataya’s dead boyfriend who is now a ghost possessing a baseball, what’s up with him? Well halfway through the match he manages to possess the body of the team adviser. He uses the opportunity to give the team all kinds of advice and encouragement, like teaching Moichi to catch sliders and reminding Kouhei of a certain pitch he threw once, because it’s not a baseball manga if the pitcher doesn’t have a special pitch. What the ghost doesn’t do is tell us exactly what happened to him, but I suppose Shihono already knows so there’s no need to go over it in the middle of a game.

In the end the conclusion of the game is delayed until volume 3. This one ends in the 9th inning with Kouhei needed just one more out to narrowly eke out a win. Unforunately he’s barely staying standing, and if he can’t strike out the current batter then the next one will be the team’s cleanup. What does fate (and the author) have in store for the team? Find out in volume 3 of Watashi no Koshien!

Skimmed Ookiku Furikabutte chapter 116 (spoils)

I stopped reading Ookiku Furikabutte well over a year ago, suspecting (rightly as it turned out) that Nishiura would be playing Senda for a long, long time to come. I was both sad and happy to discover I didn’t really miss the series either. I like the characters, but everything takes so long to happen it’s not really worth following on a month-to-month basis.

But it’s a new year, I have time to kill, I thought I’d pop in to see how the Nishiura 9 (or 10) was doing against a top team like Senda. The first thing I noticed again was how bad the art is. Especially if you started with the anime like I did, it’s like WHAT IS IT I DON’T EVEN. Those eyes! Those mouths! Those body proportions! Even after you get to know the main characters, sometimes Higuchi just draws them so off-model you’re like… who?

More importantly, the spoilers: Nishiura is losing against Senda pretty badly. Mihashi’s special fastball is being knocked around like pinball and he’s already allowed 4 runs in that inning. I think the score is 7-4 in favor of Senda. To make matters worse Senda has just sent in an unknown batter as a pinch hitter… is the situation they’re in when the chapter begins.

No, that's not a frog. It's Izumi. — No, that’s not a frog. It’s Izumi.

And I was too lazy to read the whole thing so I jumped around a bit… Uhh, Abe failed to catch Mihashi’s knuckle curve and let a runner on. This match seems designed to teach Nishiura all the ways they’re lacking so they can improve on them. I should have thought the Koshien prelims did a good enough job of that, but well, let’s keep going. Flip, flip…

Oki makes some kind of mistake and Senda scores again. Okay, Nishiura has definitely lost this one. I hope Higuchi puts readers out of their misery soon. The series needs a time-skip to the next year ASAP, because these first-years have gone as far as they can possibly go. Sakaeguchi calls out to Mihashi, “You’re not alone! We’re all here with you!” Well I’m not.

The next batter gets another hit, but luckily Izumi catches it. 2 outs, still one more out left to get when the chapter ends. Even if they do get him out and change sides the game is almost over and Higuchi Asa isn’t the nice, warm kind of mangaka who would let her team come back from a 4-run deficit. At least now I know enough to check back in in about 6 months or so to see what the team does next after losing so spectacularly.

And might I add here that even though in real life losing matches and winning matches last roughly the same amount of time (especially in timed sports like soccer), fans don’t necessarily want to read 10 chapters of their favorite team losing, especially if those 10 chapters take 12 months to cover when you factor in the author’s breaks. Higuchi is a planner who must have known she was going to make them lose in the end, so she really should have condensed the match and focused on the “what happens next” aspect. We’re not going to get attached to Senda at this point, so stop introducing so many new characters and get on with it already!