Sports anime

As I mentioned in the season update, One Outs is being talked about, if not as a top drawer show. Now the apologists of sports anime made their point in Jen's comments (hat tip: saturnine). Impz summed it up thus:

I cannot agree more. The issue with such shows is that it will be terribly under-watched because most people

1. Hate sports anime
2. Hate series without moe
3. Cannot take baseball in general.

It is clearly a pity because the whole series aims to decipher the thought processes of humans, and try to manipulate it through the use of little small actions. Episode 4 is a brilliant case on this. It is hard to find, for the lack of a better word, a mindfuck anime that makes you go “wow, this is seriously manipulative.”

All true, but is it a bad thing? The current fad is to wrap the sports anime into the skin of something else. Here's how SDB's original expecations were for Strike Witches:

Ignoring all the mecha musume trappings, what you've really got here is a girl's baseball team. And that is the story they're going to tell. Miyafuji is the newest player to join the team. She's inexperienced, but it looks like she's got home-run power if only she can learn to use it. And she will, and that's the series story-line. Ep 3 was right out of canon: the benchwarmers (Miyafuji and Bishop) got put into the game in a desperate situation and made a game-saving play together. Miyafuji is going to hit her first home run in ep 4, and it will proceed from there.

This sounds much better than the straight sports story.

Then we also have the inverse, a non-quite-sports story in a sports setting, like Bamboo Blade. The whole thing rested on Tamaki's fierce cuteness [^1] and Kirino's awesomeness.

In the same thread, TJ expresses expectations for Ani-nouto to have a wider range of coverage:

And I agree with Impz, even Author of Aninouto loves moe only, the fag.

Well, if it's a good story, why not? Like I said just recently: hate classical music, love Nodame. My main problem with One Outs is the repulsive trappings of Kaiji, not the sports (ok, not primarily the sports: sports is a secondary problem that has to be overcome by the main merits, again see Nodame).

[^1] Remember, no M-word on this blog.

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