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!

Comic Girls is Frustrating

Even though I’ve been watching anime in some way, shape, or form for 20 years now,
I never really considered myself a hardcore anime fan until around 2016. This was the year of
my first convention, the first time I made any updates to my profile on MAL, and the year I first
made a concerted effort to branch out of my shonen comfort zone. Even still, there was one
corner of anime I was avoiding, not out of any malicious intent, but because I didn’t see any
appeal in it: the slice of life genre.

But in 2017, I dipped my toe in that water with Recovery of an MMO Junkie. And I loved it so
much, I came back in Winter 2018 to watch A Place Further than the Universe and
Skilled Teaser Takagi-san, and they were great, too. But a little voice in the back of my head
kept saying, “That’s not really slice of life. MMO Junkie and Takagi-san are romantic comedies
and Universe is an adventure story.” And while it might be just semantics, I conceded the
point and let the voice in my head win. And so in Spring 2018, I started watching two new
slice of life shows: Sanrio Boys and Comic Girls.

We'll talk about this another time, don't worry. I have opinions!

Comic Girls follows the life of rookie manga artist Moeta Kaoruko, more commonly known by
her pen name Kaos. After having her most recent pitch rejected, her editor sends her to live at
a dorm for aspiring manga artists like herself. This way, she could observe their techniques
and hone her skills in a constructive environment. Once she arrives at the dorm, she meets
the rest of our main cast. First there is Koyume, an energetic shojo romance artist who
struggles drawing male characters. Then we have Ruki, the team mom who originally wanted
to draw a manga about animals aimed at young children, only to be talked into drawing hentai
by her editor. And finally, we have best girl Tsubasa, who draws shonen action manga whil
cosplaying as her characters.

Comic Girls is a comedy, first and foremost. The characters are quirky and naturally end up
in humorous situations as a result of their personalities rather than crazy outside
circumstances. All of the jokes are perfectly set up with music cues and visual gags,
and the shows penchant for using comic book panels as reaction shots is a cute touch.
Add in a great sense of comedic timing and some good animation, and you have a recipe for
one of the funniest anime I have seen in quite a while. So why can’t I bring myself to like it?

From left to right: Tsubasa, Koyume (in the back), Kaos (in the front), Ruki

At the end of the day, a show like Comic Girls, which is built around character-based humor,
lives and dies on the strength of its character writing. And for the most part, it does very well
in this regard. Koyume is just the perfect blend of peppy and naive to be cute and not
annoying. Ruki being flustered easily when talking about her manga while still acting as a
nurturing mentor is a delicate balance that looks effortless. And everything Tsubasa does is
solid gold, especially when we learn more about her family in later episodes.

But then we have Kaos. Our protagonist. The character we will be spending the majority of
our time with. And she sucks. I can’t stand her. She’s not as good at making manga as
everyone else. Fine, I can accept that. But when we see her pitch future concepts to her
editor, they are so bad it stretches credulity. Like, this isn’t just a matter of her art or writing
not being quite good enough for publication, her pitches look like she threw something
together in five minutes without really thinking the concept through. After the third or fourth
time we see her break down crying over some basic constructive criticism, she stops being
sympathetic. Also, I get that she has low self confidence and all, but did she really not think to
pitch her concepts to anybody else? None of the other girls share an editor with Kaos, so it
doesn’t seem crazy for her to pitch something to one of their editors. But no, she just gives up
and moves on, which tells me that she doesn’t actually believe in any of the projects she is
starting.

But hey, that might be annoying, but at least it’s somewhat realistic. You could take
everything I said above and make it into a likeable character with a few tweaks. But then we
get to her actual personality. Kaos has no self confidence and frequently bad mouths herself.
She puts her friends on a pedestal and refuses to believe that she could reach their level of
talent. In other words, she refuses to learn. You know, the whole point of moving to this dorm
in the first place? She just sees how much farther ahead everyone else is, says “I’ll never be
that good”, and just goes back to her half-assed manuscripts that are gonna get rejected and
thrown away with no further attempts at revision. Then the anime tries to tell me how great
she is because she “never gives up”? She’s given up like a hundred times and is just going
through the motions at this point!

Now, to the show’s credit, we do eventually have scenes of Kaos actively learning from other
characters and her skills do eventually improve. It’s rushed near the end of the series and is
ultimately too little too late in my opinion, but it IS there. Regardless, all this baggage Kaos is
carrying is NOTHING compared to my biggest problem with her: she’s a pervert.

Yeah, I'm calling you out, Kaos.

Perverted characters are nothing new to anime, and they’re almost never funny. It takes
some impressive writing gymnastics to make a character who is partly defined by sexually
harassing people into a likeable character, and Kaos is not likeable at all. She’s frequently
ogling the other girls and making inappropriate comments about them. And look, I’m no prude
or anything. If she had a thing for looking at hentai or imagining her friends in sexual positions,
I could probably overlook it.  People are, generally speaking, hardwired to think about sex.
But Kaos isn’t just thinking about it. She is actively harassing her friends. Just because none
of them call her out on it doesn’t make it okay. How am I supposed to find a character like that
likeable?

That's not something you say when two of your best friends are having a moment!

I keep coming back to that word, don’t I? “Likeable.” A character doesn’t need to be likeabl to
be a good character, we all know that. But a protagonist is a different story. Even when you’re
writing a villain protagonist, it usually helps to make them likeable or sympathetic so I can care
about their story. And I’m not saying that Kaos is a bad character because she has flaws,
either. Flawed characters are usually the most interesting. But when I see nothing redeeming
about a character, nothing that is remotely interesting or well-written, we have a problem.
I shouldn’t be groaning whenever the story focuses on the protagonist.

I have problems with a couple of late game story beats that I want to talk about now, so here
is your spoiler warning. If you still want to watch Comic Girls blind, stop reading, go watch its
twelve episodes (it's on Crunchyroll), and come back when you’re done, cause things will be
spoilertastic over here for the rest of the post.

Okay, I’m assuming that if you’re still here, you’ve either seen Comic Girls all the way through
or you don’t care about spoilers. So, first I want to talk about Kaos’s manga at the end. All
throughout the series she had been pitching manga concepts based on her own experiences
and getting rejected over and over. What finally does get approved though, is a slice of life
manga called…”Comic Girls…”

Are you kidding me? THIS is supposed to be the point where Kaos comes into her own as a
creator? Just telling stories about her life at the dorm? That’s not creative, it’s lazy! What’s
she gonna do when she runs out of stories to tell? And yes, I know that this was just a
two-part pilot and not a serialized series, but that doesn’t change the fact that her ability to
create new stories at the conceptual level, something that has been shown as a weakness of
hers since the beginning, has not improved in the slightest. On top of that, we’re just told how
much she has improved, but we haven’t seen any improvement over the course of the series.
The whole thing just feels rushed and out of nowhere! And even if those things weren’t an
issue, this idea just sucks on a meta level. I mean, seriously? A character writing the events
of the story as an in-universe story is one of the laziest ideas ever, and it’s something people
were predicting here since episode 1! Yes, the actual scenes where the pitch gets approved
and Kaos is overwhelmed with joy are well done, but technical polish can only take a
fundamentally bad idea so far.

But there’s an even bigger problem with the ending, one that has nothing to do with Kaos
(Thank God, I was sick of talking about her). Around the halfway point of the series, we learn
that the dorm is getting torn down because - actually, it’s never explained, but I assume it’s
due to financial reasons. There are some well done scenes with the girls leaving the dorm,
leaving a big old question mark about whether they will see each other again and setting up a
pretty good bittersweet ending. The credits roll and tears are presumably flowing from those
who are a little more attached to the characters than I am. Hell, I’ve been annoyed with the
show this whole time and I had a lump in my throat here, so I know they did something right.

But then, there’s one last scene after the credits. All the girls are meeting up again to...move
into the newly built modern dorm? What? Why? I thought I’d missed something, but I went
back to rewatch earlier episodes and no! They never said anything about a remodel or a
renovation. This entire storyline was being presented as the end of the manga dorm once and
for all. Having Kaos finally get published just as the girls were going their separate ways was
the perfect thematic ending for her character; she learned to stand on her own two feet and
doesn’t need the dorm anymore. But i guess someone didn’t want fans to cry, so they pushed
a big reset button on everything. They even negated all of Kaos’s growth and made her
pathetic again, which undermines the entire point of the story! What an insulting, pandering,
frustrating ending!

But what a pretty final shot.

I’ve been very negative on Comic Girls during this post, but I DON’T hate it. I actually like
most of the characters and the presentation. I just find the show frustrating because I know it
could be better. So I thought I’d end this little rant exploring how I could fix Comic Girls. Step
one: Get rid of Kaos. Okay, she’s not a fundamentally horrible character, but I don’t like her as
a protagonist even if I tried to tweak her ( And I tried, believe me), and I can’t figure out what
to do with her as a side character. Instead, I think Koyume should be our protagonist.
Think about it: she moves into the dorm at the same time as Kaos, has her own obstacles
that can be overcome for the sake of a character arc, and she even has a love interest in
Tsubasa. Sounds like a protagonist to me!  

We open with Koyume pitching a romance manga to her editor. It shows promise and the art
is good, but ultimately she gets rejected because of her struggles drawing male characters.
But her editor still sees potential and sends her to the manga dorm to hone her skills and
revise the original draft. At the dorm, Koyume meets Tsubasa and Ruki. Just like before, she
is immediately infatuated with Tsubasa. She works with the two of them for a few episodes
and presents a revised draft to her editor in episode 3, which is approved for serialization.
But the pressure of having to put out a new chapter every week gets to her, and she starts
slipping up. Her art slowly degrades in quality and her story becomes less and less believable.
This slow dip in quality happens in the background of a few episodes where we focus on
things like Ruki’s first autograph signing and Tsubasa’s family troubles. Eventually, one of
Koyume’s chapters gets rejected for “not feeling romantic enough.” Koyume breaks down and
tells the others that she doesn’t know how to write romance anyother way. Ruki suggests
going on a date to get some more experience with romance, but after a day of her not being
able to find a suitable partner, Koyume decides to quit and starts calling her editor. In a panic,
Ruki takes the phone away and suggests Koyume goes on a date with Tsubasa “for research
purposes”. Koyume gets embarrassed and starts to decline, but Tsubasa agrees and they go
to the amusement park.

The date is a success (relatively), and Koyume’s manga is now better than ever. The two go
on a few more dates to replicate the effect, but neither actually admits their growing feelings
to the other. Eventually, though, Koyume starts to feel “fake” for writing about a heterosexual
romance when she doesn’t feel anything toward boys anymore. This is around the time that
the career forms have to be filled out at school, and when Tsubasa defies her family and
writes that she won’t be anything other than a manga artist, Koyume is inspired to be her own
person as well. She writes a shocking coming out storyline for her heroine and her editor tries
to get her to undo it, as readers are complaining about their favorite ship being split up.
Tsubasa and Ruki stand up for her, giving a speech about how manga is personal expression,
and Koyume refuses to back down. Unfortunately, readership starts to drop, and Koyume’s
manga is cancelled, just days before the dorm is scheduled to close down for good. Koyume
runs away in the middle of the night, and Tsubasa finds her outside the amusement park.
Koyume bitterly talks about how “nobody wanted to see the real her” in her manga, but
Tsubasa counters with how things “always seem hopeless before the hero wins” in manga.
Koyume snaps and screams that life isn’t manga and things don’t always work out. She starts
to leave but Tsubasa gets ahold of her and tells her that she is a hero in her eyes because
she never gave up and always pressed forward with her vision. Tearfully, Koyume denies
being a hero and starts putting herself down before Tsubasa does the unthinkable: she kisses
her.

Yes, I realize that this is all just shipper garbage, but this couple is too perfect and it doesn't make sense for the anime to build it up so much only to suddenly backtrack and do nothing with the setup like it did.

We cut to a few years later, with Ruki on her way to a convention where she was invited to
sign autographs and sit on a panel. She meets up with side characters and learns what
they’ve been up to before reaching the conference room where the panel is taking place.
Sitting at the table are her co-panelists: Tsubasa and Koyume, holding hands and wearing wedding rings while talking about their
new manga: a shonen action fantasy about two heroines in love.

But, hey, this is just an storyline I threw together in a 20 minute break at work. If you
don't think it works, that's totally fine. Let me know how you would fix Comic Girls, if you think
it even needs fixing. I get why people like it. It's mostly a good show, but I couldn't get over
how much I disliked Kaos and how disappointing I found the ending. Next week, I'll be
discussing an anime from Spring 2018 that surprised me in a different way, exceeding my
relatively low expectations to be one of my favorite anime from that season.

And remember, Tsubasa is best girl.