What they Say: “Episode 11 – Fearless Challenger”
Sawamura’s blatant fouls and bullet-like left jabs leave Ippo scrambling to establish some kind of rhythm. He stubbornly forces his way inside, but is he charging headfirst into a trap?
The Review
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers).
Finally, the fateful day arrives. Ippo enters the ring ready to defend his title against one of the deadliest men in boxing, while Sawamura’s exact M.O. remains something of a mystery to everyone but him. Even before the bell rings to signal the first round, though, Sawamura begins to draw from his particularly off-putting bag of tricks. Almost from the outset he refuses to play fair, committing foul after foul in order to throw Ippo off balance. And it works – almost too well. Ippo comes out swinging, angered by Sawamura’s refusal to adhere to some of boxing’s most basic rules of fairness. While he seems to have the upper hand, it’s only a matter of time before Sawamura brings out the “big guns.”
Sawamura has two deadly weapons in his arsenal – the “bullet,” his left jab that fires faster than most people are able to see with their naked eye, and the “lightning,” his right which strikes like its namesake and leaves its target reeling. It’s all Ippo can do to make headway against the the rapid-firing bullet, and as he powers forward through the barrage he ends up falling right into Sawamura’s carefully-set trap. After being struck by lightning, Ippo loses all sense of time and direction, coming to his senses just moments before he’s about to hit the mat. Recovering only to be faced with the prospect of having to face one of the most frightening, unpredictable and deadly opponents he’s ever had the misfortune to encounter, Ippo begins to wonder about his own abilities. Even Miyata, considered one of the most talented boxers in the country for his incredible ability to deal out counter-punches, seems rocked by the show that Sawamura has been playing out. And the game has only just begun.
After a painful two week break, this show literally comes back swinging its fists and presents one of the most entertaining episodes in a while. There’s a certain element of predictability in play here that long-time fans of this series (or really almost any sports anime, I would wager) should be very familiar with; Ippo’s early successes in the first couple of rounds are merely a distraction, because there’s really no way that the match would be over so easily and cleanly when there are still two episodes left in this half of the season. I know that, you know that. That doesn’t change the fact that watching Ippo’s upper hand dissolve into a horrifying disadvantage, almost as if the whole situation is a game to Sawamura (which, to be fair, it probably is), comes like a body-blow to the audience. So far, this is shaping up to be a brutal fight.
What makes it all the more intense is that Sawamura is, at this point, someone that we as the audience just don’t want to see win at any cost. As with many of Ippo’s other competitors, there’s something admirable about his skill, but this is by no means a competition of pure ability, because the past several episodes have spent ample time playing up the man’s outright bloodlust, the lack of qualms he has about playing unfairly, and the disdain he has for each and every one of his competitors. The overplaying of his “evil” tendencies, most obviously his attitude that all his adversaries are just walking steaks ready to be bloodied and consumed, has had the side effect of making the situation feel so hopeless that any later victories will be absolutely epic.
As much as I may argue for characterization on the more realistic side, as I think about it there are some merits to making the “big bad” so evil as to be hated on principle. The second entry in the Ip Man series of films (the ones starring Donnie Yen, not the others with a similar title) features a villain who’s similarly terrible. He’s coincidentally a boxer from the West who comes to pit his boxing against any Chinese style of martial arts. His characterization amounts to spouting racial epithets against Asians and not adhering to social norms regarding politeness. And in the climax of the film, Ip Man beats some flipping respect into him with his typical skill and its accompanying humility that defines her persona, and it’s awesome.
I may be rolling my eyes half the time, but I will say this: I’ll be so satisfied if Ippo beats the living daylights out of this mustache-twirling cardboard cut-out of a villain. I will pump my fists and jump for joy.
Maybe that’s all that really matters here.
In Summary:
I’ve got this entire match played out in my head already, down to the points at which control of the pace will swap between the two boxers. I think I probably know how it’s all going to play out, or at least what the final result will be. But I’m admittedly a little bit nervous about how things are transpiring, and that in itself is a kind of infuriating. When something adheres so much to established tropes and still manages to establish a lot of tension in spite of that, the result is certainly something special. It looks like next week we’ll be getting two episodes at once (at least judging by the Crunchyroll release schedule), and I can’t wait to see what happens.
Episode Grade: B+
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment: Acer P235H 1080p LCD Monitor connected via DVI input, Logitech S220 2.1 Speakers, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560
