Major 2nd is Surprisingly Good

The Spring 2018 season was probably the most hype season I have seen since I’ve seriously gotten
into seasonal anime. It was just sequels and remakes everywhere! My Hero Academia, Steins Gate,
Tokyo Ghoul, Food Wars, High School DxD, Full Metal Panic, Lupin the 3rd, Captain Tsubasa,
Cardcaptor Sakura, Sword Art Online, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, HOLY SHIT!!
Between stuff like that and high profile new anime like Megalo Box, Darling in the Franxx,
and Hinamatsuri, it’s understandable that some shows flew under the radar. Well, today, I wanna tell you about one of those lesser known shows. Today, we’re gonna talk about Major 2nd.

Now, when I first heard the name Major 2nd, I first thought about the musical term that describes
an interval between two notes that are adjacent to each other on the scale. Yeah, I went to a music
college...for history...Make of that what you will. So I thought that this might be a music type anime
about two conflicting personalities trying to rock out together and win the battle of the bands or

something. That sounds awesome! But no.

It’s a baseball anime, apparently! Apparently, there was a baseball manga called Major written by a
man named Takuya Mitsuda that ran from 1994 all the way to 2010! It follows a baseball obsessed kid
named Goro on his journey from little league all the way to the goddamn World Series! Yeah, I’ve never
heard of it either. From what I can tell, it never had a North American release, which is super weird,
because the sequel Major 2nd is being simulcast on Crunchyroll right now.

And I kinda love it. As in, it’s one of my favorite anime of 2018.

That’s weird, I know. A sequel to an anime I’ve never seen that ran for six years based on a manga that
ran for SIXTEEN years should be something that I just looked at, shrugged, and dismissed before just
watching some My Hero Academia. But I didn’t know that this was a sequel and I like sports anime - like
a lot, it’s a serious problem - so I decided to check it out anyway. And that’s where I saw the first of
many good decisions on a sequel to an anime that ends with the guy winning

the World Series: get Goro the hell out of here!

Insert joke about Goro being "out" here.

See Major 2nd went to the Boruto school of sequel writing and is focusing on Goro’s son Daigo. Daigo
is very proud of his dad. Like, REALLY proud. The very first scene of the anime is Daigo reading an
essay he wrote about how great his dad is.This is a clever way of telling the viewer everything they need
to know about the first Major (Goro is really good at baseball, the end) and gives you a bit of insight into
Daigo’s character: namely, his love of baseball and idolization of his father. Then the opening happens,
and it’s pretty cool. The song’s pretty good, and there’s some blatant spoilers, so that’s a thing.

Also, I adore this shot.

And then, right after the opening, we see Daigo and his family watching an old video of Goro winning the World Series. And I feel conflicted about this scene. On the one hand, it feels unnecessary. We just had a scene telling us about how Goro is a super cool pro baseball player, why would you have another one right afterward? Also, the Hornets are not a real Major League baseball team. Come on. But it’s not a bad scene since it shows a bit of insight into the family dynamic between Daigo, his sister Izumi, and their mother, and leads into Goro, the guy who we’ve been hyping up for about four minutes now, getting written right out of the show, playing professional baseball in Taiwan. We hardly knew ye…

Yeah, Daigo, he's probably not coming back until the anime is over.

So, now we follow Daigo as he goes to his first Little League practice. We get introduced to a bunch of
characters who really don’t matter and whose names I will probably never remember before Daigo
introduces himself and everyone is super impressed that his dad is a famous professional player. And
Daigo is loving the attention. Anyway, they start practicing, and this scene is so good. With almost no
dialogue, we see Daigo’s skills presented before us straight up and they are underwhelming. What really makes this work for me is we see other people go before him and some do
okay and some have errors, so this gives us a pretty good idea of what we can consider to be average
at this skill level. Then Daigo comes up, and his fielding is actually better than most of his peers. He
traps the ball quickly and transitions into throwing seamlessly...only for the ball to bounce on its way to
first base. After it happens a second time, he hears the other kids muttering to each other, which causes
him to be distracted. On his last drill, he misses the ball, panics, and ends up throwing a wildly
inaccurate throw to first. All of this together tells us so much about Daigo’s skills and personality: He’s
got above average fielding skills and knows what he’s doing, but he has a weak arm, is easily distracted,
and panics when he makes a mistake. All of which is shown without falling into that sports anime trap of
having a side character spell it out for any viewers who aren’t knowledgeable in baseball. Because they
already explained it by showing other characters go before him.

The next few scenes just keep reinforcing this idea of Daigo panicking and failing to live up to other
people’s expectations of him. He fails his tryout for pitcher and doesn’t hit a single pitch thrown to him
in practice. And all the while, his teammates are whispering in the background about how he’s not as
good as his father or sister at baseball. After a brief training montage that is pretty well-animated, we
cut to a game. Daigo is sitting on the bench, and his team is losing but starting to mount a comeback.
That’s when the coach decides to send in a Daigo as a pinch-hitter. And this is when the music starts
building up and we have a little internal monologue about how hard Daigo has been practicing. Surely,
this is the moment he’s been waiting for. The first two pitches are strikes, but that’s okay. This is the
first episode of a sports anime! All this buildup can only mean that Daigo will trium-oh, wait, never
mind he strikes out.

What?

Seriously, I was not expecting this. Even though we’ve been shown that Daigo isn’t a phenomenally
great player, this was just unexpected. I’m not an expert in sports anime or anything, but I’ve seen a
few of them, and none of those ever had the protagonist lose his first game. Shonen anime like Major
2nd almost always use the first episode as a way to show off their protagonist, usually having them
win in an awesome way. And the episode tricked me into thinking that would happen here too.
Between the training montage, the music, and the way the narrative sets up Daigo to redeem himself
after his poor practices, I thought that this was gonna follow sports anime tradition and have him pull
a win out of his ass, maybe even earning him a spot as a designated hitter. The bait and switch here
might not have been elaborate, but it certainly was effective, at least for me.

And you know Daigo didn't expect it.

Naturally, Daigo is pretty bummed. He goes out to the river and starts moping about how he’ll never become a baseball legend like Goro. And then the camera cuts away and you hear a splash and then the scene cuts to a two year timeskip.

WHAT? TWO YEARS PASSED?

So, yeah, Daigo quit baseball and he’s shut himself in his room to play 3DS. That’s unexpected. I
mean, what’s the one thing you think about when it comes to every shonen protagonist ever? They
never give up. Like ever. Even if they’re not portrayed as an invincible badass, they’re almost never
shown giving up. But Daigo does. He quits baseball and shuts himself away. And the way he acts
feels uncomfortably familiar. He’s sad and hostile and retreats into gaming as a coping mechanism,
lashing out at his sister when she calls him out on it. When did this show become about me in middle
school?

Speaking of school, there’s a new transfer student and he wants to meet the son of the great Shigeno
Goro. Daigo blows him off, assuming that he just wants an autograph, but then, a twist! Hikaru - that’s
the transfer student's name - is the son of Satou Toshiya, one of Goro’s old teammates. And then the
first episode ends.

And the end card follows the opening's lead and spoils Daigo's eventual solution to his baseball problems.

I know I spent a lot of time on the first episode here, but I feel like I needed to explain just how well this show surprised me and got my attention. As of this writing (which is 18 episodes in), the show has been surprising me with how the focus is less on baseball and more on Daigo’s insecurities and his growth as a character. Hikaru is a fun character as well, a complete newbie to baseball despite his own illustrious lineage who’s sheer enthusiasm gets under Daigo’s skin and slowly convinces him to get over his hangups and play the game he loves. Even still, Daigo’s growth is slow and steady, sometimes frustratingly so. But everything is portrayed pretty realistically and it makes his eventual successes all the sweeter without ever leaving the driving question of how do you respond to pressure.

That’s not to say this show is perfect, not even close. The actual baseball matches are few and far between so far (though they've started picking up after episode 10), and they have been less than exciting, at least on a technical level. I never considered baseball to be an especially exciting sport anyway, but this would be unwatchable in another anime. The show does manage to make you care because of how well the characters are written, and they care, but it’s still a problem. On top of that, the side characters really aren’t being well used here. There are about five characters whose names I can ever remember, and it’s not like the other characters don’t do anything. But aside from Daigo and Hikaru, none of them really have anything going for them. Again, though, that's starting to change. Now that the tournament is underway and Daigo and Hikaru are fully invested in baseball, the narrative has begun taking the time to explore a few other characters' motivations and internal struggles, with the current match being built up around Daigo and Hikaru's rival pitcher-catcher battery on the team.

And Sakura is low-key the best character in the show and needs more screen time.

Also, remember what I said earlier about Major 2nd not falling into the trap of explaining everything to the audience? Yeah, that really only applies to episode 1. With Hikaru being new to baseball, the other characters have to explain things like the strike zone to him, and it's so frustrating. What is it with sports anime and explaining everything to the audience? American media about sports don't do that. Go watch Remember the Titans or Moneyball. They don't take the time to teach you how American football or baseball works because it's not important. Stories about sports aren't a public service announcement about why sports are great, they're about why the sport in question matters to the characters and how the different motivations and dynamics of these characters clash during a match. This isn't nearly as much of a problem in Major 2nd as it is in say, Prince of Tennis, but it still takes away from the experience.

That said, the show has more good than bad for me, and with it continuing into the summer season, I can’t wait to see what happens next. Maybe it’s just that it hits all my sports anime buttons, maybe I’d have a different opinion if I watched the original, but Major 2nd exceeded my expectations, and I really think it deserves a watch. Yeah, it’s a sequel, and you might not have watched the original, but ask yourself this: did you watch the original Dragon Ball before watching Dragon Ball Z? I didn't, and I know that a lot of people, especially here in the United States, didn't either. It's understandable to avoid something because it's already part of a franchise because it can feel intimidating to try something that has a lot of episodes in it already (that's basically the only reason I haven't tried Gintama yet even though it looks right up my alley). The original Major has six seasons worth of episodes, and that's a lot. But with the way Major 2nd is written, all six of those seasons are optional. Being familiar with the original series will clearly add to the experience, especially when it comes to scenes focusing on adult characters, but it's all just window dressing. Everything that is relevant about the original series is explained in the sequel in a natural, organic way once it becomes important. In that way, Major 2nd handles being a sequel better than Dragon Ball Z ever did.

And with that, I’m going to wrap up this post. I apologize for not having anything last week, but my life has recently gone through a massive upheaval. Due to personal circumstances, I have had to leave my job and move out of the city where I was trying to carve out a life of my own and move into my parents’ basement. With all the chaos of moving and such, I never had time to actually work on the blog aside from a handful of notes about future posts. But I’m all settled in now, and the weekly posts are going to resume starting today. Next week, I won’t be focusing on an individual anime, but instead talking about an idea and exploring it with multiple anime. See you then!