Roving Thoughts archives

Sound! Euphonium and sports shows

In reaction to my spring midway views on Euphonium, Author wrote:

When I mentioned that Euphonium was essentially a sports show with girls, a few folks were sceptical, but that classification seems even more apt now.

My view is that while Euphonium certainly has elements that also appear in sports shows, it is not one itself. A sports show like Ping Pong, Haikyuu!!, Yowamushi Pedal, or even Girls und Panzer strongly features the actual sport. Good characters and their stories are important, but in a normal sports show the overall story is in large part driven by the conflict inherent in the sports competition and actual 'games' feature prominently.

Sound! Euphonium's story is not structured like this. The actual band competition barely appears and there are none of the normal tropes of sports shows, like actual rival bands and rival performers in them; in fact we don't even see a competition performance from another band (we see one preparing to go on in the last episode, but that's quite different). This would be like a baseball sports show that entirely featured training, practice, and team selection and then didn't actually bother showing any baseball games. You could certainly do such a show but to me it wouldn't really feel like a sports show either.

(And in another example, although Cross Game was more about the people than sports, it featured plenty of baseball games and the climax saw a game actually being played out. See also Evirus on Cross Game, which features plenty of images of people actually playing baseball.)

So to me Sound! Euphonium is not a sports show but a show that is using competition as a setting to drive a character study and a meditation on the real costs of taking competition seriously. An actual sports show version of Sound! Euphonium would be structured quite differently (and likely would be less interesting).

Sidebar: Sports shows and nastiness

Author also wrote:

But I have a feeling, Euphonium would not be very welcome in any case. It’s almost a Yamakan or Shinbo show, stylistically and story-wise. Too nasty. I know a lot of people fall for it (see [me] above). They feel that it’s more real that way. [...]

One thing that distinguishes a classical sports show is that, to put it one way, the protagonists almost always win in the end (although they may have stumbles and setbacks on the way). In this sports shows are shows about just rewards; if you're a good, talented person and you work hard, you will get rewarded for it. Good people do not get cut from the team and they and the team do not in the end go down in defeat.

(This is complicated by noble, deserving opponents and rivals, but I wave my hands and restrict my focus to people around the protagonists.)

Real life does not work that way, of course. Real life is not that nice. But our stories do not have to be un-nice in that way and not all of them are. Really, it would be kind of a downer if a sports story did not feature people winning in the end.

In this sense, Euphonium is indeed 'nasty'. Deserving, hard working people do not necessarily get rewarded. Effort is no guarantee of success. Life can be unfair to you and snatch your dreams away (or force you to make harsh choices between a selfish dream and a selfless one). This is perfectly okay with me because I think of Euphonium as a character piece, not a sports show, and I am willing to see people fail in sympathetic ways in character pieces. But other people may not necessarily like that; they may want more strongly upbeat stories.

(That a number of people in Ping Pong do not get rewarded this way is one of the things that makes it an unusual and interesting sports show to me. Ping Pong is harsh in that; desire, work, and even some talent is not necessarily good enough to guarantee success. Note that Ping Pong explicitly admits that this is unfair.)

Checking in on the Spring 2015 anime season most of the way through

Once again it's time for the traditional 'midway' update on my initial impressions. You probably saw this one coming; I was overly optimistic in a number of my initial impressions.

Great:

• Sound! Euphonium: This has become the smash hit of the season for me and a strong contender for one of my shows of the year. It continues to be great in many ways; its collection of characters, its excellent directing, how willing it is to tell the story with small things and small gestures, and more. I'm not sure what the show is 'about' as such, which is one measure of (good) quality, but in part I've come to see it as an observation on what 'going for Nationals' really means for the people involved. In your typical sports show the narrative is basically all positive; here, we are seeing the cost spelled out, in strained relationships, crushed people, and so on.

  (Or perhaps I'm reading too much into the show. Who knows.)

  Have I mentioned yet that this show is plain beautiful to look at? Because it is. The animation and visual appearance is lovely and the directing is top notch.

Okay:

• Blood Blockade Battlefront: In my initial impressions I called this 'pretty great for a big action show' and that's still a fair assessment. It's just that BBB is not anything more than that. It's fun to watch, it has a bunch of genuine flair due to Rie Matsumoto's directing, the characters and humour are okay, but it's never going to be great in the way that eg Kyousougiga was.

Things I'm still watching:

• Knights of Sidonia - The Ninth Planet Crusade: When the second season is on, it's on. It's just that Sidonia has spent a bunch of its recent run exploring what you could pretty literally call Tanikaze's harem. This is not what Sidonia is good at and it's been kind of painful to watch.

  Hopefully we're now out of these boring doldrums and back into the stuff that Sidonia does so well. The omens are good, at least.

• Punchline: The quick summary of what happened here is that the show has turned down the mania level and is starting to explain things. I don't really expect this to end well; I'm just hoping for a fun ride on the way there.

  (To be fair, Punchline has a bunch of recent enjoyable twists too. They're just not as big as earlier ones. Possibly I'm too jumpy about how the end is going to go, but I do feel the show has slowed down overall.)

Why am I still watching this award:

• Fate/Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works: This has simply not been particularly good or particularly enjoyable, because it tried to hold forth on philosophy. Worse, it tried to be serious about it and then it drew the whole thing out across multiple painful episodes of Shirou and Archer talking vacuously at each other.

  But hey, when it could be bothered to have fights they were generally okay and reasonably pretty, and Lancer wound up being cool, and a few other okay things happened. I'm overly invested in this franchise, okay? Don't ask me to do the sensible thing at this point.

Still cannot rate:

• Ghost in the Shell Arise - Alternative Architecture: This has only just finished rerunning the four OVAs, which I enjoyed plenty but didn't really anticipate as such because I'd seen it already. I'm hoping that the couple of episodes of new material are going to be great, ie up to the usual Arise standards.

My view is that Sound! Euphonium makes this a great season by itself. Without it this would still be a good season; Blood Blockade Battlefront is perfectly good for what it is (I just wanted it to be more), Sidonia has often been excellent, and even Punchline is perfectly good fun with a bunch of enjoyable twists.