Anime Pilgrimage RTT

Suzuka – episodes 23-26

April 3, 2006 on 8:20 pm | In Suzuka | Comments Off on Suzuka – episodes 23-26

It’s over, and I’ve got to be honest: If I wrote Suzuka I would have appended the word “bitch” to every time that Yamato conceded defeat to Suzuka’s harrassment.

Suzuka turns out okay; the problem inherent in this kind of series is that it’s always some kind of stubbornness holding characters back from one another and preventing them from anything approximating honesty. I will admit that Suzuka’s block and self defence had some kind of rationality behind it, but she was tapping into her own fear to prevent herself from going ahead.

What we end up with here is standard romance, dressed up with an ice queen female protagonist, a lot of internal monologue, and a dead-end sports plot. Suzuka is okay, but it’s not overly pretty or well done and the penultimate episode descends into pure cliché of the highest order.

Spoilers hereafter

After vowing to be Nipponichi, Yamato chokes in the metropolitan tournaments, failing utterly. However, his will to become a much better sportsman lives on. He confesses to Suzuka anyway, using substantially the same approach as Tsuda did the day before he died. This stirs up the emotions of Suzuka, and naturally it’s time for her to run away in tears and for it to start raining as she’s out wandering by herself. Naturally.

The funeral scenes were well done, actually stirring up a little bit of emotion here and there. The fact that Suzuka doesn’t want to like anyone in case they die is dramatising to the highest degree, but one can forgive her this foolishness because it is a natural reaction.

It’s a terrible cliché to have the final confrontations of a series held in rain, but it has become a cliché because rain is a drama intensifier. Yamato finding Suzuka and the forced kiss that followed were among the best animated moments of the series; a moment where the animation lifted one above the blandness and lack of interest in a foregone conclusion for not-entirely-sympathetic characters to see drama presented purely and simply.

Suzuka should probably be awarded points (odd that I don’t think of any other anime in terms of point systems) for not being so neat in its ending, despite the trite epithet of “this is where it gets hard” from the series’ number one no-help Saotome. The characters did not get paired off as I thought that they might, and the relationship between Suzuka and Yamato will be one of push and pull. I’m okay with that.

Just why Honoka wanted Yamato in the first place is the only real mystery left in the series: Yamato failed to be sincere for the majority of the story as his external and internal behaviours never matched and one could always see that his motives were wrong.
It would be a lie to say that I hated these characters, but, well … I never rooted for anyone.
Suzuka was really a spectator sport: one could shout at the referee all they wanted, but it wouldn’t have changed a thing.