Hajime no Ippo: New Challenger - THE GRUDGE Another training-focused episode as Takamura struggles with weight control leading up to his world title fight with Brian Hawk. I don’t even know what to say about Hawk’s revolting, fat-tongued case of yellow fever - who is getting the worse end of that racist depiction? Hawk for being a disgusting monster of a gaijin or the xenophobic Japanese men feeling emasculated by Hawk’s consumption of their women? - so yeah, let’s not even get into that. It’s good to see Takamura getting riled up by it though. The main focus of the past few episodes has been Takamura of course - his delinquent past, his wealthy but fractured family, his reasons for boxing and his extreme weight control (dropping 20 FREAKING KILOS to make super middleweight? Willing suspension of disbelief…) This episode was more of the same and offered a few sweet moments of Takamura bonding (both with the coach, as seen above, and with the younger boxers), some of the usual Ippo humour (at Aoki’s expense in other words), and a lot of Takamura’s excruciating struggle to drop weight. I always get a weird feeling from weight control oriented episodes of Ippo because of the almost painful vibe. The skeletal way the boxers are drawn with their cheeks sucked in and their dry, wrinkled skin makes me feel like I’m watching horror rather than sports genre. Especially at the end of this episode, where a corpse-like Takamura swears his revenge upon Hawk for causing his agony…. THE GRUDGE!!! I guess Ippo does a good job representing the frustration and suffering of severe weight control because these episodes always make me cringe. I really hate these arcs - a few of Miyata’s also come to mind - but hey, way to make the viewer really LIVE it. The quality of this show never fails to astound me.
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