Tenka Seiha » Akiba Maid War #08 — Battered and Bruised » Blog Archive

…And why?

Impressions:

Another episode where I feel like the absurdity of the premise doesn’t match well with how the characters treat it. Nor has the Random Baseball Episode gotten any better over the years. Samurai Champloo’s will always be the one that I think back to as the first time I thought “This is incredibly stupid and completely out of place,” and it hasn’t gotten any better over the many dozens I’ve been subjected to since then. Mostly, it makes me wonder how many different costumes they have. Just this episode alone has work, funeral, and baseball uniforms. Maybe your organized crime syndicate needs to start looking at how much money it’s spending on tailors.

Anyway, they’re told to play baseball against the remnants of the alien group, and are so touched by Nagomi’s sportsmanship that they all turn a new leaf. All of them. Both teams. It feels absolutely ridiculous for a character to be endlessly yelling that they need to be good sports not just in spite of the murder of her not-wife, but to properly honor her expectations, but nothing about anything Nagomi said seemed like it was meant to be a joke. Nor was her being completely godawful at baseball. She was just… godawful at baseball compared to every single other person, including the random dancing immigrants they hired, who were probably the high point of the episode.