Aoki pushes towards victory while Imae remembers what’s most important in life.
What they Say:
“The Distance Between Me and Glory”
The Review
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers).
Things seem to be going well for Aoki, and his unconventional tactics have thrown Imae completely off guard. With his friends staring flabbergasted from the stands, he seems poised to take the championship belt right from Imae’s grasp and send him packing. As the two swing frantically (and impotently) at one-another in the haze of their exhaustion, Imae reaches an epiphone that could potentially change the tides of the match. He comes to realize that Aoki’s strength and will come not only from his years of training, but also from the support of Tomiko, his devoted girlfriend. As Imae recalls his shunning of Sachiko, the woman who stood by his side even during his lowest periods. As Aoki tries to pull one of his tricks a third time, Imae notices Sachiko sitting in the audience, praying for his victory against all odds.
With his will to fight restored, Aoki and Imae trade blows once again, and it becomes abundantly clear that, with their reduced strength and faltering stamina, the match will most likely come to a judges’ decision. Even when Aoki finds an opening to pull off his Frog Punch one last time, his weakened legs lack the “oomph” to put Imae down. As the tenth round comes to a close, the two fighters await the judges’ decisions. What they get in return is both understandable yet frustratingly ambiguous, and Aoki finds himself unable to make any concrete decisions about his future.
Whatever the future holds, Aoki’s is bolstered by Tomiko’s love, and Imae has a new understanding of what the support of a devoted lover can bring into the ring. As Ippo and the others go to visit Aoki at home, they find out much too blatantly the type of “support” that Tomiko offers Aoki, and decide to come back another time.
For all that shounen sports anime get flack for being “black-and-white” and predictable in their plot outcomes, it’s story arcs like this which offer a stark counterpoint to that assumption. Without spoiling too much of the nuance of this episode, the sport of boxing itself offers plenty of opportunities for matches to end in ways that don’t offer any clear victories to the participants, as well as some technical victories and defeats that may play by the rules but which don’t provide any sense of satisfying closure for the sportsmen and women involved. It’s in this sense that Aoki’s match with Imae comes to its eventual close, not with a powerful, satisfying K.O. victory as one might expect from one of Ippo’s or Takamura’s matches, but with each fighter, evenly-matched and dragged down by their own personal baggage, struggling to survive for ten rounds only to have their fates decided by three men whose viewpoints are, as with all humans, ultimately subjective.
If you’re anything like me, the intensity of what occurs in the final couple minutes of the match, as well as its aftermath, will probably leave you with a lump in your throat. This story arc seemingly managed to pull off the impossible – it turned its “class clown” into a serious contender, while (maybe inadvertently) making a study of what weighty expectations can do to those individuals who make a habit of hiding their insecurities behind bombastic and flippant personality traits. There’s a personal component to Aoki as a character that makes him more approachable to those of us who maybe don’t have as obvious a talent for sports (or art, or music, or writing), but who ache to be recognized in some form or another anyway. His desire to be acknowledged among his peers rings the truest of all the other characters, because it’s a desire that, coupled with his average skill level, must exist all the more intensely.
Though this episode did offer something of a proper denouement, the one thing it lacked in my opinion was a link to whatever story is coming next. While it’s not completely necessary, I do like a little bit of a preview to whet my appetite for what’s to come. In this case I know through some peripheral general knowledge of the manga what’s coming up in general, but as for the anime this episode had an element of finality to it that made it feel more like the end of an OVA series and less a part of an ongoing, serialized story. Of course, I could just be irritated at having to wait another week for the next episode. Oh, the downsides of anime simulcasts!
In Summary:
It would be difficult to classify the end of Aoki’s match as “satisfying,” because by nature the judges’ decisions kept them from taking any concrete action. As the next step for Aoki, however, it provides him with a bit more depth and nuance going forward. It’s not as though his role as a comic relief character is forever changed, but with this new perspective on his reasons for fighting, as well as the true nature of the things he feels when not forced to hide behind his personality I expect things to feel a bit different going forward.
Episode Grade: A-
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Acer P235H 1080p LCD Monitor connected via DVI input, Logitech S220 2.1 Speakers, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560
