Justin: Well, this was a nice pick me up episode. How do I know that this was a nice pick me up episode? When I want to go to Madhouse studios and tell them to release Episode 13 immediately or...something could happen! There actually, in the grand scheme of things, is not a lot of moving about or distracting scenes. It’s Mizusawa vs First Akashi Girls, and it’s Chihaya Vs Megumu. What does that mean? We’re gonna see the best of the best, and right now we’re watching two players who can impose their will on each other with their own styles and their own memorization of words. We’re also seeing how perception can end up affecting reality and the current times. A few weeks ago, there was a college basketball team that had tradition, lore, and the respect of many due to their history. This team had great players in their past, a hollowed head coach who coached some of those great players, and when you talk about college basketball, you talk about them amongst some of the more prominent basketball schools in the nation. Thanks to their body of work, conference affiliation, and their head coach this season, there was no way many of the casual and even hardcore college basketball fans would ever think about picking against Georgetown in their first round matchup against FGCU, despite Georgetown losing to lower seeds for the past few years. Welp, after many brackets busted (mine’s of course since I picked Georgetown to win it all), once again your history and your conference doesn’t matter in the tournament, it’s showing up to play in your match. No one ever heard of FGCU (Florida Gulf Coast), but merely assumed because they were a lower seeded team, they didn’t get the national exposure, and they didn’t have the history, they stood no chance against Georgetown. Well in blowing them out, they proved that point moot. It’s not about your past. It’s all about your present and what’s now. What does this have to do with First Akashi Girls? Well, they happen to be Georgetown in this case. They have the West Representative on their team in Megumu, and they seem to have a history -- at best, a longer history than Mizusawa since Mizusawa started up just last year -- that would make people assume that they would just be the better team. And in seeing the responses by the crowd after what happened after the first card was read, and the response by one of the tourney staff people in thinking that Arata was actually rooting for Hokuo, it seems these people are just like me -- looking towards the past, looking at who they played, and not really certain of just how good their opponent is. Based on what happened in this episode, it’s looking like they’ll be in for a surprise. (Though they probably won’t be bitter. I...I could say I was bitter since that messed up my bracket!) Muse: While I don’t know much about college basketball, Justin’s analogy seems sound. With just one card, most of the spectators wrote off Mizusawa simply because they have no history. Even before the match started, Megumu pulled off quite the snub by sitting on the wrong side of the field, blatantly showing that she thinks that the semi-finals are a waste of time. To a certain extent, their confidence makes sense; the ace for Akashi Girls is a candidate for Queen, and she’s got the talent and the skill to back that up. However, the disrespect they showed to their opponents, regardless of what they thought of them, rubbed me the wrong way. Was this just a “pride before a fall” scenario, or was there something else going on here? As the episode goes on, we get some backstory from the Akashi Girls’ coach about the team’s journey. They didn’t really care about karuta despite the school’s history, but once Megumu became a serious contender for Queen, they banded behind her and vowed to do everything they possibly could to help her. When Megumu lost in the representative match, her teammates were more broken up about it than she was, leading to a line I found pretty interesting: “We'll help, so let's practice until you're invested enough to get upset. Let's make you Queen.” And shortly after that, another line: “Our goal is to get Megumu more experience, not win!” Putting Megumu’s flippant attitude in the context of the backstory and these quotes, I started to wonder... Does she really want to be Queen? Or is she just going along with this to make the people around her happy? It seems like she just wants to be done with this whole experience, rather than taking each match as a learning experience the way Chihaya does. Throughout this whole tournament arc, a lot of focus has been placed on how every match, no matter the skill level, can teach even top-ranked players something important about karuta. To have a Queen representative essentially say, “This is boring, is it the finals yet?” says to me that Megumu hasn’t realized this. Or she just doesn’t care. This is all speculation on my part though. I’m only making these conclusions since the episode showed Megumu the way that other people see her, and she hasn’t spoken for herself yet. I could be completely wrong, but that was the impression that I got. Justin: My reaction actually was slightly different, but mostly in regards to the team tournament. With their focus on making sure Megumu gets more experience by facing the strongest competition in their team matches, does that even mean First Akashi Girls wants to win the team tournament or are they really trying to just get Megumu to win the individual tournament? Now, they must be really good players since they did get to the semifinals, so they aren’t a one-trick pony. It does make me wonder if their heart is in it to represent their school as a team properly though, and it does make me wonder if Mizusawa has the advantage in this match. But I don’t know, really. Something about this match makes me wonder if Mizusawa will win. It will most likely come down to Tsutomu, Oe, and Porky in their matches if they will come out victorious and get to the finals. But I guess this is also a case of whose method of hard work will beat the other, since the motivation of First Girls Akashi is not all that wrong. I think this is why I want it to be Friday already so I can go see the conclusion of this match! Aside from this matchup, one other thing that struck me was how Kana quietly made her presence felt in this episode. Kana was in a difficult spot. She’s not at the level of Nishida, Chihaya, and Taichi, but she is definitely a key member of the team. She hasn’t gotten a rest at all since the day started, and she had lost all her matches by 2 cards. We saw how energy was a factor for Tsutomu, and in a more extreme case, for Tsukuba who went through three straight matches (and lost in blowout fashion). Yet by the end of the episode, not only did she get Chihaya to remember a poem she spoke about, but she’s managed to have a lead on her opponent by 4 cards. Don’t know if it will continue, but quietly Kana continues to grow as a member on the team, and it will be interesting to see how she’ll perform in the individual tournament if she gets her chance. Muse: I think that this team match will come down to Chihaya and Megumu, since I believe that the other members of the Akashi Girls team really do only care about their ace. Plus, the fact that they’re already looking ahead to the finals may mean that they think they don’t have to go all-out in this match. In summary, I really want Mizusawa to make those who wrote them off eat their words. One of the reasons I feel this way is because of Kana, since it would be great poetic justice for her to finally get her first win in this tournament. In the few flashes that we’ve been shown in the last few episodes, she’s really been on top of her game. I’m also excited to see how the individual tournament works out for her. So how do you think this matchup will turn out? Let us know in the comments below! Images from Crunchyroll.com.
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