天下制覇

Maybe we should've gone with a different acronym to avoid "BL Rating."

Impressions:

As always, the lack of self-awareness is what stands out to me among this hyper dramatic sports shows, though there's certainly an argument to be made that this is more of a very low stakes Squid Game than having anything whatsoever to do with actual sports, least of all soccer. Still, you'd think when an entire room of dudes start yelling "No, I'm the specialist who was supposed to go to Nationals!" someone would pick up on that. But no. Losing the one game at the start is always the first ever taste of defeat despite supposed years of playing the sport and being a teenager, so now it's time to listen to some crazy-ass dude posing and cackling like a lunatic where we eventually end with the declaration that you must destroy your best teammates by any means necessary in order to be the best. I don't think that's the right lesson from the parable of Nancy Kerrigan.

And also as ever, I find the whole thing too silly to take even slightly seriously. You can take your over the top premise and run with it to its logical insane conclusion as a show like Keijo did, or you can spend upwards of a third of the episode watching a contortionist do a TED talk on how greed is good while a bunch of gawking idiots nod along and then clutch their fists and hyper ventilate about their newfound religion while playing a particularly arbitrary version of dodgeball. There's probably a formula here for the amount of blathering, both internal and external, but I guess at least there were no montages or janky-ass CGI. Just janky-ass regular animation.

Next Episode:

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