Medalist #01 — Winning is Everything
January 4th, 2025
Weird message to try to promote your sport.
Impressions:
There's a largely unspoken assumption through this entire episode that really undermines the entire thing; that a hobby isn't worth having if you aren't doing it competitively. She wants to skate, because it makes her feel special, but everybody, herself included, is against it because she won't be 'good enough' to compete with the serious people. It isn't until like 15 minutes into the episode that the mom puts to words that if you try to do something, and don't get a material reward for it, then all your efforts were a waste and worthless. This goes for the protagonist who wants to ostensibly support her too. His issue is not how messed up this line of thinking is, but that it's not too late for her to start just yet.
It's a damn hard pill for me to swallow or get behind, especially when it starts doing the standard tired thing of her radiating sparklies that only he can see just from her touching the ice. Why does that matter if the only thing that's actually important is whether or not she wins? Even her own speech about how important skating is isn't about actually wanting to skate. It's entirely result oriented; that it only matters if she succeeds and proves that she's 'better' than her school bullies. Which leads into its visual presentation issues. The animation is surprisingly decent given the terrible studio, but it has a real issue where everybody reacts to everything with the same loud exaggerated despair faces. I'm fairly certain that if you picked 10 at random, you'd probably only be able to tell for certain about half of which were from dramatic moments and which were from comedic. Your comedy and drama should be a little more distinguishable from each other without the help of a loud bwonging noise.
I guess at the end of the day, it's Yet Another Sports Show™, which isn't a cheat power reincarnation thing, though now that I'm thinking about it, how have we not had any reincarnation sports shows? Going either way, honestly. Let's see Liu Bei play tennis. Or send someone into a fantasy world to be the ace at Gwent. What was my point again? Right, sports show. Try your best, but only if you can win. Damn weird message for everybody, including a ten year old, to be spouting.
Posted in Medalist | 4 Comments »
Aroduc 
residentgrigo
I don‘t know, the “just have fun :)“ argument is a lot more valid when it comes to soccer or whatever where you can join the local soccer training for a measly sum but the show makes it very clear that ice skating requires a lot of money and has an inherently competitive nature where parents make sure their kids start young. Dance Dance Danseur made it very evident that ballet, which is similar, is the same.
You also have to take into consideration that this is a sport that is competitive and performance-oriented to a significantly higher degree. With soccer, you can assemble two teams and have fun and that‘s it. It‘s a team sport with a high factor of socializing. With ice skating, it‘s just you and you‘re on the ice and unless you like eternally sliding from A to B and back, you want to learn tricks and those tricks you then want to perform in front of people and if you want to interact with others, you compete against them and that‘s what it all boils down to.
If this was a soccer anime and the coach told her the same, I would have shared your point of view but I don‘t think this applies here.