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This Week in Anime
Birdie Wing Takes the Swing

by Christopher Farris & Nicholas Dupree,

It's the height of the sports season, and championships are in full swing. While sports tournaments play out this season, Birdie Wing's got different ideas for its golf tournaments.

This series is streaming on Crunchyroll and Apply TV+.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.


@Lossthief @BeeDubsProwl @NickyEnchilada @vestenet


Nick
Chris, it's the height of the sports season. We're days away from the NBA and NHL championship series. People who care about baseball tell me that things are starting to matter now. So I think it's only fitting that we take the time to cover the most important athletic event of 2023:
Chris
That's right, it's time for the most accurate, respectfully portrayed golf ever put to animation, depicting the game with all the rainbows, sniper rifles, and cannons for which it's so well-known.
God, it's nice to have this show back. We had to wait an extra season, but it's been worth the wait to see Birdie Wing cast its alchemy and transform the most boring sport on the planet into something fit for human consumption.
Birdie Wing famously came right out of nowhere back in Spring 2022 to turn out to be that season's cult hit, cultivating an online circle singing its praises despite hardly turning into a mainstream megahit. So my big question for the show's return was, without the element of "Wait, what the hell is happening in this show?!" surprise on its side, could the Golf Girls' Story still survive on its own merits?

Turns out, it can't just survive. It can thrive!
Who needs the element of surprise when you have a devastating advantage in firepower?

For real though, it's a testament to Birdie Wing's understanding of its own madness that, a year and 21 episodes later, the appeal of its golf-based nonsense has only grown.
The series wisely frontloaded its most outwardly outrageous elements like the Golf Mafia and the mechanical roguelike golf course to hook us in. By the time we settled in for more "straightforward" sports storytelling in a high school setting, we were still absolutely on board thanks to our appreciation for Eve and Aoi as characters, their dynamics, and the fact that they still approached the game with all the campy seriousness that Golf Where You Die If You Lose afforded.


This second season opens right back in the middle of that high school tournament storyline, and accordingly, in just the first episode of the season, delivers to us Golf Psychic Analysis Powers, Golf Wasting Diseases, and Golf Amnesia Cures.
I'll admit, I was a little worried at the end of season one. As wild as our lead duo's superpowers were, I was afraid the whole show would be solely focused on high school tournaments until they finally got their rematch. However, it eventually revealed that it was just shifting into an entirely different kind of over-the-top soap opera.
I mean, many people had been predicting some sort of secret familial twist, but to just magically drop it right in the second episode of the season? No show would be so brazen—oh right, this is Birdie Wing.

Aoi may never emotionally recover from this.
I can't help but wonder what all the normal golfers are thinking as all this goes down. Like, imagine going to a high school chess tournament and midway through a game, your opponent has a seizure after remembering they were secretly their own grandfather from the future, then got you into checkmate by moving the pieces with their toes.
It really does speak to what a means to an end this high school tournament storyline was when, well before it's over, they've thoroughly disregarded the established rival characters to the point that they're actively admitting they're nothing in the grand scheme of things.
Sorry, ladies, but you two weren't secretly raised by Gundam characters to become the ultimate Golf Newtypes; you're just destined to be a small fry.
That part isn't even a joke, by the way. Yes, with Birdie Wing being broadcast alongside the second season of G-Witch, we have a phenomenon not recreated since G-Reco and Build Fighters were airing: two Gundam anime airing during the same season!
We already clocked Reiya Amuro and Golf Char last season, but it only just hit me that Aoi's mom's name sounds suspiciously similar to Sayla in Japanese. So I guess we know who the creators shipped in the UC.
Oh yeah, one of the highlights of this season was witnessing multiple people, myself included, hear Tohru Furuya say "Seira-san" and suddenly understanding who that blonde lady was referencing.
The bastards were hiding it in plain sight this whole time! It's enough to make you wonder if this project didn't start life as some weird Gundam '79 alternate universe fanfic and wound up becoming the greatest sports anime in history.
Some alternate reality where Char and Amuro trained their daughters to battle each other with the most powerful technology available in the next generation, embodied in Aoi inheriting the Hi-Nu Gundam golf clubs.

Even the folks subtitling it are in on the joke. It's great!

The thing is, even if you didn't catch the oddly specific references and casting, it still works because every aspect of Aoi and Eve's backstories is the most ludicrous thing you could imagine.
Oh yeah, I've joked that Birdie Wing disregards the rules of storytelling as much as it does the rules of golf, but it's something I actually mean and intend as a compliment. Like intentionally landing your ball in a sand trap, this is a show that will just go for something based on what works only at the moment, and then continue rolling with it from there.

Only this show would drop that apparent half-sister twist, then immediately wheel over to a long-form flashback that clarifies, only for the audience's sake, that the two golf girls they've been led to ship for a season and change are still not, in fact, related.
Anything more conventional would be beneath the standard Birdie Wing has set for itself, honestly. It would be an insult to its own ideals if Eve weren't the secret love child born from two star-crossed scions of the Golf Manufacturer royalty.
It also bears mentioning that one side of that, the Burton family, is another reference to Birdie Wing's occupation of the MCU (Madlax Cinematic Universe).
I am decidedly ignorant of that particular world, but the ludicrousness of Golf Mafia Parte Deux is too good to resist. I especially love that nothing about Eve's unlocked memories explains how she was magically able to speak Japanese last season, meaning there's either a second mystery or Eve truly is built differently.
It is extremely funny that of all the bridges that Birdie Wing has crossed and burned, the language barrier was one they decided was too far, and actually wrote in a reasonable explanation for Ichina effectively doing the same thing, instead of repeating that same sort of handwave.

Too bad those language lessons couldn't prepare her for, uh, everything else about the non-high-school side of this series.
Let's be real, she set herself up for that one.

Honestly surprised they didn't have the opening notes to "Roundabout" play when she said that.
Dropping a normie like Ichina into the back half of the series is a clever move to remind us just how outrageous all this Golf Mafia stuff was, regardless of how acclimated we got to it back in the first half. It's another sign of the show being incredibly aware of its camp prowess and doing everything it can to prevent a drop-off in that energy as we get deeper into the episode count.
What's even better is that it immediately pivots upon that return, showing us that both Eve and the story have moved past the need for wacky, underhanded tricks. Oh, this top-level golf criminal has a secret weapon? Pssh, that's just pissing in the kiddie pool now that we've experienced the triumphs and defeats, the epic highs and lows of high school golf tournaments.
Please note that Mafia Golf is still mutually exclusive from Golf Superpowers, as our heroines are happy to keep developing those on the fly, even as they're soaring free of the underworld.
Eve certainly wouldn't take a whole season to kill a single demon. She'd have clubbed that thing to death by episode four so we could move on to her having a golf tournament on the moon.
Speaking of pacing, I also have to wonder how intentional the structure was, with Eve having to go through a full 18 holes of episodes before she could return back to where she started at the beginning of the series.
This show is provably galaxy-brained enough that I wouldn't put it past them, but I do wonder if they could have spared a bit more time for the arc after that. We're getting dangerously close to the end of the season and still aren't close to Aoi and Eve's rematch.
Despite ostensibly being predicated on a "normal" competitive structure like the high school tournament storyline, the Road To The Pros arc is at least keeping the wildness quotient up, even as it's taking its time reuniting our favorite golf girlfriends. Aoi's side of the storyline is technically the most basic the show's gotten in a while, and it still features a caddy bound by Golf Indentured Servitude who saves the day with weather control.

Turns out Honoka from Love Live! might have had a future on the fairway if that whole idol thing didn't work out.
I don't think anything quite sums up the brilliant stupidity of this show more than Amane's genius advice during that battle.

"I've run hundreds of thousands of advanced simulations in my brain, calculating the physical force of every blade of grass or raindrop. The key to success? Golf real good."
I've always felt that one of the secrets to Birdie Wing's success was that the basic rules of golf are the simple sort that almost everyone understands. So it doesn't need to spend a lot of time on the ins and outs of complex scoring metrics or mechanics apart from motivating things by raw sports-anime passion. In a way, that makes what you called "the most boring sport on the planet" a perfect fit for this series to stretch its brand of free-form bullshit over.
A less charitable way to put it regarding golf is that there are infinite ways to improve upon it, and Birdie Wing was brave enough to explore damn near all of them. Just imagine how much cooler the Masters would be if all the players had to make car noises and take a running start for each shot!
I was losing it all through this week's episode. After Birdie Wing already invited comparisons to previous golf-disrespecting colleague Happy Gilmore, we bring in a new character whose playstyle is nearly exactly akin to the titular character in that movie!

Probably should have seen it coming, since Birdie Wing, like Happy Gilmore, previously also featured a sort of mentor character who was missing an arm and tragically died later on.
It also delivered that new golfing style with the most powerful metaphor ever applied to Golf.

You just know Golf Char was sitting on that one for years while he raised his secret second protégé after teaching amnesiac orphan Eve.
Golf Char, like Regular Char, is a man who lives his life by being committed to the bit.
Also, like Regular Char, the only thing that can overturn his machinations is critically powerful lesbianism.

That's right. Eve's so powerful, she made the moon gay.
The sapphic undertones—oh, who are we kidding, the sapphic overtones of Birdie Wing—were another attention-drawing element in its first half. And with the hilarious bait-and-switch swap-out of the secret sisters' twist, the abundance of rainbows (they even added extra ones to the OP!), and the embracing of Aoi's pining and Eve's dirtbag lesbian flirting abilities, one gets the impression they might really go all out before the end.

Between Eve's Rainbow Burst and Aoi's Shining Wings, we have exactly the right ingredients to basically recreate the finale of The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and the Genius Young Lady. C'mon guys, give us that second nickel.
Also, it makes for yet another odd parallel with the other lesbian Gundam show it's airing alongside. We've even got melodramatic, messy breakups and manipulative moms happening around the same time!
Here's hoping neither of these two ends up starting an international war. That would really get in the way of their rematch, considering Eve's body count is already high enough.
I think the takeaway from all the fun we're still having with Birdie Wing is that it works because it's a show that, despite mild pacing issues and comparatively pedestrian production values, is confident in the kind of fun it's going for. A few weeks ago, Steve and I had to make our way through KamiKatsu, a show that seemed to aim for "So Bad It's Good" on purpose and execrably missed. Birdie Wing, on the other hand, is gloriously in on its own joke, embracing its irreverent camp with entertaining sincerity.
The secret sauce, I believe, is that Birdie Wing knows what it is, and it puts every ounce of force it can muster behind that. It never apologizes, never undercuts itself with a wink to the audience, and never stops reaching for the most glorious, goofy idea it can think of. It swings for the pin every time.
Exactly. There's a tendency to presume that critical successes are of the stuffy, impenetrable sort (think those influencer memes about "film bros" preferring dense monochrome foreign movies). So it's entertaining to see a fairway farce like this garner that sort of attention.

And in that context, what better target for that sort of subversion than the uptight institution of golf?
This show may or may not ever find a larger audience, but regardless of the score, it always plays by its own rules. It is uncompromisingly its own beast, and in that respect, it's already got the only victory that matters.

But also, if they wanted to let the girls kiss, that would be a second W.
Look, either this show or G-Witch has to go for it, and lord knows my timeline will let me know the instant it happens in either one.

I ain't complaining about spoilers. That sort of exciting, engrossing crowd experience is the reason I watch anime, as opposed to golf.
Amen to that.

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