Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Birdie Wing -Golf Girls' Story-
|
Goto page Previous 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Next Note: this is the discussion thread for this article |
| Author | Message | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Oby
Posts: 108 |
|
|||
Nafresians (the term written in Eve's passport) are supposed to speak English in Madlax IIRC. But since Madlax portrayed Nafrece as France-like country, it probably has two national languages (English & French) like Canada. That reminds me, if this anime takes place in Madlax universe, I wonder if the mafia organizations here have any connection with Enfant. Will we get to see Margaret cameo in this show? Will they mention Gazth-Sonika? |
||||
|
||||
enurtsol
 Posts: 14783 |
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
|
Thesarum
Posts: 415 |
|
|||
|
Been away for a couple of weeks, so I'm on catch up. And man was watching the last three episodes of Birdy Wing back to back a wild ride! I think it's going to take another week for my brain to recover.
I'm pleased that the transition to the most common setting in all of anime (a Japanese highschool) hasn't robbed the show of anything that makes it great, though I am sad to see the end of Rose. You've got to respect the way that woman lived her life for maximum drama and pathos. I'm not sure coach-guy can quite live up to her drama-focused Machiavellism, though he's putting in a solid effort. Nobody is ever going to accuse Eve of being smart or studious (its amazing she can even read her name in her passport) so "school" isn't her thing at all, but it seems she's just going to barrel right on through like a charging bull as usual. Her leaning right into that "hot delinquent" thing is fantastic. It takes her all of about 24 hours to have practically the whole school wrapped around her 7 iron, though Aoi is enjoying playing hard to get (I do feel a little bad for her long-suffering caddy).
Surely? I mean I really hope so. It feels like it has flown under the radar enough that we can't be entirely confident it'll get funding. It totally deserves to be allowed to show us where its insanity can take it. I'm not sure it's the sort of story that gets a neat ending, it needs to be punk and wild to it's last breath, but it'd be a shame for that last breath to come prematurely. |
||||
|
||||
|
John Thacker
Posts: 1006 |
|
|||
The all important question for a second season is, of course, "Have sales for the Gunpla featured in Birdie Wing increased?" I'm joking, I think. |
||||
|
||||
7777ale7777
 Posts: 105 |
|
|||
|
I gotta say Steve, this reviews are great. I always look forward to them.
On another note, this episode revealed that Aoi's caddy, Amane, is her classmate too?! Before this I would've said she was at least in her late 20s. |
||||
|
||||
|
Florete
Posts: 363 |
|
|||
|
It would be pretty crazy - and awesome - if this series gets two cours.
But, like, does that even count as a mini-golf course? It was all just straight shots (unless you're Eve, I guess). I've seen plenty of mini-golf courses and they're simple, yeah, but more complex than that. |
||||
|
||||
Helix91
 SubscriberPosts: 62 |
|
|||
Actually, all of the marketing tie-ins (the Gunpla, plus the actual real golf clothes that Eve and Aoi wear in the opener/closer) might help the show justify more episodes. |
||||
|
||||
|
minamikaze
Posts: 221 |
|
|||
I got a different impression from Aoi's conduct. It didn't seem to me that Aoi was being petty in revenge for being stood up. If you think about it, she has actually only been stood up by Eve once. I don't think Eve not logging into the virtual golf game again counts. In the game, Eve said that she wanted to play Aoi in the real world not in a virtual one, but she was disconnected before she could make any promises or plans. I would agree more with what you said about Aoi playing the long game. She wants to keep Eve with her in the long term and probably believes that just giving in Eve's constant challenges to play, she would run the risk of Eve of leaving if she could never win. If you remember at the end of the Nafrece 15 and under tournament, just before Aoi was about to make the putt that would have beaten Eve's score (had Anri not interfered at Rose's instruction), Eve seemed pretty much resigned to the fact that she had been beaten and that was the end of her brief rivalry with Aoi. That's why Rose had Anri interfere with Aoi's shot: to keep Eve invested in the rivalry because it would improve Eve's play. Rose wanted to beat Eve when she was at her best. In a similar fashion, I think Aoi wants to face a stronger Eve as well. As her mother told Amane, Aoi has never lost even once in her life (even to Eve). Being able to have a rival in Eve that could actually beat her, is what Aoi wants most. Well, as far as the golf side of her relationship with Eve goes anyway. 
Aoi already knows that Eve's play, while amazing, could be even better if she could master some more skills. As we learned during Eve's match with Rose, Eve had Aoi teach her how to slice, and at that point, Aoi very likely realized that Eve, with her extraordinary talent, could be even better by learning more. I think Aoi wants Eve to join the golf club so she can improve her game, and that's why she told Eve that they could play more if she joins. Eve asking Ichina if having her as a caddy would allow her to beat Aoi, shows that even Eve realizes to some extent that she cannot beat Aoi at her current level of play.
I'm pretty sure that Coach Amuro's goal, when he set up Eve's meeting with Kaoruko, was to get Eve to want to play in the tournament, instead of her just wanting to join the golf club so she could play Aoi. He flat out told the principal that it was necessary to bend the admission rules to enroll Eve so she could play in the tournament in place of the injured club captain. Coach Amuro's plan was to show Eve that she could face opponents like Kaoruko, that could actually excite her, if she played in the tournament. I'm guessing Kaoruko had Kuyou challenge Eve first to see if she would be worth playing herself. |
||||
|
||||
|
DarkAudit
Posts: 33 |
|
|||
|
Per this tweet, it's only 13 episodes?
https://twitter.com/AIR_News01/status/1535192958089105408 |
||||
|
||||
|
Akcoll99
Posts: 233 |
|
|||
There's no way this wraps up in 13 episodes. And if it doesn't get another season, the chance of me shattering my TV screen with 9-iron in frustration just increased exponentially... |
||||
|
||||
|
minamikaze
Posts: 221 |
|
|||
I can see from the (not quite right) Crunchyroll subs, how someone might make that inference, but that is not what Coach Amuro meant. The line in Japanse was: あの子勝たせたいために、彼女に無理をさせてしまった。 The CR subs translated it as: "I forced her to hurt herself to let that girl win." A better way to translate it (also specifying names and details for clarity) would be: "All because I want to ensure that girl (Aoi) wins (in the doubles tournament), I made her (Jinguuji) push herself too hard (and get injured as a result)." The causative form (使役形) (e.g. 勝たせる、させる) of verbs in Japanese is easy to mistranslate because it can have two meanings. For example this sentence. 佐藤さんは自分の子供にゴルフをさせています。 Can be interpreted with these two different meanings: Mr. Satou lets his children play golf. Mr. Satou makes his children play golf. In Japanese the context dictates the intended meaning. The expression "letting someone win" obviously has a different meaning in English than what was intended here. Additionally, since "to make a person win" is odd in English, using "to ensure that a person wins" makes more sense. Coach Amuro's statement is one of regret that he ended up ruining Jinguuji's potential future as a golfer by pushing her so hard. He is under a lot of pressure to make sure Aoi succeeds. There is external pressure (the school gets a lot of money from the Athena Company), and I would also venture that there is pressure from a personal feeling of obligation (since he addresses Aoi's (presumably deceased) father by his first name, which suggests that they were friends). Since it is a doubles tournament, Aoi needed to have a strong partner to win. So Coach Amuro pushed Jinguuji (and she also admitted to trying too hard to meet his expectations) to become a suitable partner for Aoi. However, as Jinguuji admitted, her talent level was merely mediocre, and over training in an effort to overcome her limitations led to her injury. Although, even with the confusion caused by the inadequate subtitle translation, to suggest that Coach Amuro let Jinguuji injure herself, before Eve even showed up at the school, so that Eve could take her place in the tournament, does not make sense. Unless Coach Amuro Reiya is a Newtype, and he foresaw Eve's arrival.
It is strongly implied that aside from Aoi, Jinguuji was the best player in the club. It seems very unlikely that Coach Amuro would have chosen Jinguuji just because she was the club captain, if there had been another player in the club more suited to be Eve's partner. Especially when seeing, that since Eve's arrival, he has obviously has done everything he can (breaking admission rules, conspiring with a player from another school and even exclusively reserving a golf course for 3 days), to get her to participate and play well in the tournament: all so Aoi can win. Clearly, he had no other suitable candidates. On a separate note, in my previous post, I definitely misinterpreted Aoi telling Eve that she would have to postpone playing because she had a prior commitment as being significant. This episode made it clear that Aoi had every intention of playing Eve as soon as she returned. She even pouted when she ended up having to visit with her grandfather instead. I should have known better: Aoi has never been shown successfully hiding her true feelings. Last edited by minamikaze on Fri Jun 17, 2022 12:04 pm; edited 1 time in total |
||||
|
||||
|
Thesarum
Posts: 415 |
|
|||
|
Low-key episode by Birdy Wing standards, with a fun training mini-arc and a whole heap of setup and character introductions. Probably necessary as the review said before we head into the tournament... But do you really spend a whole episode doing this if you're expecting to reach a full conclusion in another two episodes? It's set up a bunch of threads in not sure it's got time to tie off in anything other than a manic rush. That said, the writing team have probably done enough so far too earn a little trust.
Caddy-chan V2 is fun, though as she's mostly a straight swap for V1, I don't know that she's an addition so much as a reskin. Ichina does have her own goals which differ from Lily's, but both amount to pretty much the same thing in the way they actually function in the story. Gramps seems nice? Though presumably he lead the golf apparel megacorp before Aoi's mother, so he'll have a hard edge too, much as she does. It'll be interesting to see how he reacts to who Eve is, and the effect she's having on his precious granddaughter. |
||||
|
||||
|
zalminar
Posts: 36 |
|
|||
|
Just dawned on me that the "F." of "Evangeline F. Kimishima" is a "Setsuna F. Seiei" reference; I was slow.
Also I'm guessing "Seira" is a "Sayla" reference, which puts a lot of weight on Golf-Char being her brother. And to round out the Gundam references, I'm surprised they weren't able to squeeze in "that thing doesn't have legs" and had to settle for "the brass doesn't understand that" instead. Did I miss a "mistakes due to one's youth" line from Golf-Char earlier? They've gotta squeeze that in somewhere, right? Though given the model kit they featured this week was the 1993 non-grade Shy-Tarn, they might keep trying to dodge the obvious and aim for the obscure. |
||||
|
||||
|
Thesarum
Posts: 415 |
|
|||
|
I guess by necessity there's less ridiculously contrived circumstances here than the underworld arc, but Birdie Wing never fails to wring every last bit of over the top drama out of it's scenarios. I suppose the qualifiers felt a little rushed.. but at the same time, I don't know that much would be gained by showing them in a lot more detail. We got to hit the usual trademarks - a prayer to Pakkun, Eve screaming "Blue Bullet" and ripping up the tee, and Eve breaking someone's spirit with her first shot, Eve and Aoi finishing the round on exactly the same score. At this point is nostalgic more than it's out and out funny. Over using it would ultimately only detract from the experience.
The little callback to Ichina's introduction a couple of episodes ago was fun. Sure she's maybe 60% walking exposition, but she's a likeable enough way to communicate the slightly less legible stakes of this arc vs the underworld (where everything boils down to "take more shots and you'll probably die"). If the series had started out with Secret Memo's on what Match Play is it'd probably have failed. But it works well enough here towards the end of the back 9. Aoi teasing Eve was just the cutest thing. I'm not sure how anyone could interpret that as "not coming together" really. Also the "Barrier!" was hilarious. Eve gets her own back on the bus though. I think I'd call that match a win for Eve. Eve just loves to spit in everyone's faces. Aoi doesn't do that, but cares no more than Eve does of what others think of her. Neither of them are here for your approval, they just want to hit balls with sticks together. And maybe other things together. |
||||
|
||||
|
Akcoll99
Posts: 233 |
|
|||
|
Another very quick, blink-and-you-miss-it moment that stuck out to me was the scene on the bus where Jinguuji thought Eve might be making a play for Amuro and replied by declaring him taken while possessively grabbing his sleeve. After the...embrace?...of last episode, I think there's definitely something going on there. And while I would normally find that shady, there's something in the way Birdie Wing does what it does that you just sort of shrug and go "of course" while either laughing out loud or rooting for its various characters/relationships.
Speaking of which, reading the comments on Crunchyroll was awesome after people got a glimpse of that "peck" on the cheek from Eve. Depending on how that scene plays out, people are either going to celebrate like crazy or lose their minds. I can't wait. I know next episode is also the last of the season, but I can't remember the last time I wished this hard for a second season of any show. Last edited by Akcoll99 on Fri Jun 24, 2022 9:45 am; edited 1 time in total |
||||
|
||||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group