Hello and welcome back to Otaku Thursday! We’re not dead–well, at least I’m not. Just kidding neither is Star. No she has been working on our super special awesome new content. If you’re wondering what this new content is, I recommend you mosey on over to our Twitter where Star posted the link to our new podcast series: Teatime with Star & Luna — Crash Course in Fandom where we’ll be talking about anything and everything in various fandoms from anime to danmei to k-pop and more. But now onto more important things: the meat of this post: an anime we’ve been watching with bated breath: Birdie Wing.
Birdie Wing is an anime that started last year and continued this season. This series was an anime original when it was conceived–and that’s how it was advertised. Star and I were intrigued by the premise and always up for a sports anime about a non-mainstream sport. Golf sounded like a good one. What we got instead of a straightforward sports anime about two girls playing golf, was a very dramatic story of two girls–one a prodigy from Japan and the other a European girl who was wrapped up into gangs who played golf. They meet and play against each other and then become friends in the cutest, most baity and GL coded way. Like seriously, we were really hoping this would end up as a GL. Not that we wouldn’t have liked a friendly-rivalry story, but it was GL coded. Like, we immediately saw parallels with Banana Fish (a shounen ai story). Like, the dynamic between Eve and Aoi (the main characters) really reminded us of Ash and Eiji to an extreme extent. Their attitudes were very similar, and Eve honestly felt like a female version of Ash Lynx. Eve was even involved with the mafia of her home country so it was all so reminiscent. Perhaps that’s why we got our hopes up that this would be a shoujo ai. By the end of part 1, we were so excited to see more with Eve flying to Japan to play golf with Aoi.
But then things took a turn for the worse in part two. When we came back to the game, things went alright and cute before taking a huge turn for dramatics (and when I say dramatics, boy do I mean dramatics). Let’s see, so first off, we had Aoi and Eve come to a head when Aoi’s parentage came into question. Then we found out that they both had the same dad and might be sisters (which, I’ll come back to in a second). After that we found out their family backstories and that they WEREN’T sisters–that Eve was the real daughter of Aoi’s father and Aoi was actually the daughter of her coach. We saw a rift form between the girls at this point though. Then Eve’s mentor came back in to threaten her with dragging her back into the mafia if she couldn’t become a pro, meanwhile, Aoi was becoming a pro and we find out that she has some kind of disease that her real father (aka coach) also has and that might cripple or ruin her golf playing career. But of course, the girls promise to meet each other as professionals and play each other in a professional game only for a third-world champ to show up in the final episodes adding even more to the drama. It was…a lot. It was almost too much. They jammed so much drama into the last 12 episodes it felt so uneven. Some of it was good, but it all was just really fast-paced. For instance, Aoi’s illness would have hit harder if we had been living with it since part one, but we weren’t. Furthermore, the last three episodes saw huge time skips in the story that ended up with all of Eve and Aoi’s progression feeling unearned.
Now, back to one of the biggest problems I have with Birdie Wing–the sister’s twist. Now, as I stated earlier, this felt like a GL in season one, so when suddenly there was the possibility of Eve and Aoi being related, it literally felt like a 360–like a backspace delete to get rid of those feels and crush that subtext. It was a rather rude awakening and an abrupt way of doing it as there was practically no foreshadowing that would’ve implied this. It honestly was just…insanity. Insanity because just as quickly as it was proposed, it was shut down that they weren’t related–but their relationship never really recovered after it. There was a shift in the dynamic to make them more of friendly rivals than the close intimate relationship that we felt in the first twelve episodes. It really sucked. I kind of wish they hadn’t added that extra drama–mainly because it didn’t really ADD to the story in any meaningful way to me. Like, we saw Eve’s backstory through it, but it’s not like that really changed anything. Meanwhile, Aoi’s backstory didn’t even really effect her past giving her a reason for having her illness (that it was hereditary). So yeah…I could’ve done without it. Even if they like, got into a fight with each other and had that be a rift regardless, I think it would’ve still felt better than the “maybe we’re related” angle.
With how much we liked part one, it was super disheartening to see Birdie Wing take an unsatisfying turn in part two. We kept asking ourselves: why? Why are we still watching this? Why did it turn out like this? Why? And as I was getting ready to start this post, I finally got the answer on why. Because Birdie Wing, in all its flawed nature–is a promotional anime for a game. That’s right–Birdie Wing the anime ended in June 2023 and Birdie Wing the video game just released in June 2023. This means that this whole show, this whole golf girl’s story–it was all to promote this game that was ‘based’ on the anime. I find that incredibly insulting, but it makes sense why at the end of the day, I felt like the show was wasted potential. Because it was never truly meant to end in a satisfying way so much as it was supposed to be a good enough teaser to make you excited when the video game was released. That’s so ridiculous. I am actually livid at that–Star is also livid. Nowhere before had I seen that there was a game associated with the anime–if I’d known that I would’ve stayed clear because there’s rarely any good endings in anime that are all for video game sales. So yeah,livid.
At the end of the day, would I recommend it? No. Not really. Okay, maybe I would recommend watching season one–or the first 12 episodes. BUT I would never recommend watching all 24. It was so not worth the last 12 episodes, and I think you should just leave yourself on a good note with the end of season one. If you really like golf, then sure–maybe it’s worth it. If you’re here for some GL–don’t watch it. If you’re here for drama–don’t watch it. It’s…honestly just so disappointing. But that’s just my opinion. Anyway, that’s enough of my ranting for now.
Stay weebtastic,
xoxo
Luna
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