#gunma grump

[chyfr]

“A base steal attempt can’t be successfully prevented by the catcher alone. It’s possible precisely due to the pitcher’s cooperation.” —mima souichirou

[fictionerd]

Good to see you, friends! 

Heh, I feel like I’m getting better at making these recaps go into more detail without being twelve miles long. I’m also getting better at remembering the sequence of events so I don’t have to go back through the episode as much. That being said I’d better get on with the post before I have to eat my own foot.

We open exactly where we left off, with Daigo getting the news that Hikaru moved away. This, naturally, sends him into a downward spiral. Hikaru was the entire reason he picked up playing again after all. He becomes a grump again fairly quickly and it seems like it’ll be there to stay until Toshiya comes by with a letter from Hikaru. 

This letter is exactly what you think it is from the title of the episode. It reveals to Daigo that the news of Hikaru’s move was just as much of a surprise to Hikaru himself as everyone else. He apologizes for not telling Daigo, who he considers his best friend, when they last saw each other, but he couldn’t bear the thought of their last game of catch ending in tears. He thanks Daigo for showing him how much he loved baseball, and he promises that so long as they keep playing one day they’ll team up to form an invincible battery!

This has an appropriately shonen effect on young Daigo who redoubles his training efforts with Toshiya (who, being the intelligent if estranged father he is guessed the effect the letter would have and was still waiting in his car right outside).

We see Daigo catching 130km/h fastballs at the batting center, and Toshiya applauds. Daigo is puffed up with bravado because of how far he’s come, and so is served a slice of humble pie by Coach Toshiya via the suggestion they try 150km/h. Daigo’s reaction is priceless.

Toshiya quickly explains it was a joke. There’s no need to practice at that level in the Junior leagues. Instead he wants to move on to focusing on other things. On the drive to Daigo’s place, Daigo gets a little somber and says that he’s confident in his catching, but he’s going to be in right field for the upcoming tournament. The old dragon of his weak arm is rearing its ugly head in the back of his mind. He self-deprecates hard in front of Toshiya who gives him the dose of medicine he sorely needed two years before. 

They go practice down by the river. He has Daigo throw 50m pass, and he does it with some effort. He then drops the truth-bomb on Daigo that the kid was too impatient to hear when he first started out: That a kid in Juniors doesn’t need to be able to throw like a freaking pro. Mind=Blown

Having been actually told in a way and by some one he’ll actually LISTEN TO that he just has to work at strengthening his arm, Daigo sets in to chase his dream of playing baseball with his best bud again some day. This leads him to drag Sakura into the next phase of her arc... PRACTICE I mean he drags her into practicing with him... Yeah.

She mentions how she wants to play and he’s all.

“Then you should”

But she’s all “Parents won’t let me” And he’s all “Well then don’t because you obviously don’t want it bad enough”

And she’s all “Wow for you, self awareness is just something that happens to other people isn’t it?”

And he’s all “What’s self awareness?”

“Forget it I’m gone.”

And scene. 

Of course having been batoned over the head by shonen spirit from both Hikaru and Daigo, Sakura naturally takes his “If you want it you’ll chase it no matter what” attitude more seriously than she lets on and through her overwhelming drive and soulful descriptions of the sound effect of a ball hitting the glove just right.

She manages to convince them that she’s serious about this. We end at practice the next day where the coach announces that they have a practice game coming up and introducing Sakura as the new team member. Daigo is surprised... for some reason.

Well, that was pretty great. I’ve gotta wonder why Mutsuko’s parents were so dead set against her playing that they made lame excuses. What is it with parents in this show being so weirdly inconsistent. 

SPEAKING of which! Hikaru’s mom. I’ll grant that she had a good reason for moving and it wasn’t what I thought. I judged that hastily, BUT she doesn’t get off the hook. In his incredibly revealing letter to Daigo, Hikaru revealed that his mom deliberately hid the fact they were moving from him until the last possible minute. Literally the night before the move. How she managed to hide this from him when she would have had to PACK UP HOUSE WITHOUT HIM NOTICING is a line of speculation I won’t bother to dwell upon. What I will dwell upon is this idea of “He’ll totally be dead set against it so I won’t bother telling him until last minute so I don’t have to put up with my child being upset that we’re moving again so soon.” 

Of course who am I to judge? After all it’s a well known fact that children are alien creatures who cannot comprehend concepts such as “Legitimate reasons” and “Compassion”. Telling him as soon as you’d made the decision to move so that he could have time to say goodbye to his friends and explain the situation to those who might care to know would only have brought misery to you. Only adults actually care about saying a proper goodbye to the people in their social circle. No Hikaru definitely would have just ground in his heels and been a problem. So it was much better to let him live in blissful ignorance and then force him to pack up his entire life overnight, go to school the next day, and then drive out to Gunma uprooting the fledgeling social life he’d eked out for himself.

{Don’t make us cut you off for sarcasm again} ((I’m almost done, back off))

Anyway YES This was an absolutely FLAWLESS plan with NO LOGICAL INCONSISTENCY WHATSOEVER! After all it’s not like she had time to say goodbye to her frie- 

Oh... OOOOOOOOOH. 

Yeah, I’m a bit miffed by that. It’s not that it’s badly written. Quite the opposite, it’s a really believable circumstance, because some parents WOULD do this if it was in their power. In my experience the sort of parent who would do this is the sort who wanted to have kids, but didn’t want to deal with little things like: “Their child being upset about something” or “Their child wanting to know why the parent is doing a thing” or “Literally any of the more tedious elements of parenting”

Okay... I need to get off my damn soap box. I’ve never been a parent myself. I’ve only ever been the child in this sort of relationship, but I have seen a lot of parents. I have an understanding, or at least a perceived understanding, of what makes kids “rebel”, and I also know that any responsibility comes with both good and bad elements that we have to undertake if we want to live up to that responsibility. 

Know that critique of parents in fiction is going to be a continuing trend in my posts. Particularly because I have an unreasonably high standard in Junko Kaname to compare them to. xP

For now I’m going to knock off for the day.

Until next post keep talking fiction, friends! I’ll see you soon.

[chyfr]

i have nothing to contribute.. have you seen mima souichirou. mima souichirou please come back .