Tsuritama – 09 & 10

Apologies for falling behind, haven’t been having the best few weeks with the whole pain thing so I’ve only been managing the short Tourney promo posts since they don’t actually require much writing, although now my front page now makes me look like the worst kind of attention seeker……hmmmm.

I’m not really much better, but I’ll be damned if I let that stop me finish blogging this wonderful show!  I’ll talk about episodes 9 & 10 here, and then I’ll cover the final two episodes when I’m recovered enough from writing this post to do so  – the final four episodes of Tsuritama have been glorious!

I love how the big anti-alien organisation in Tsuritama is so goofy looking, yet also very competent.   I mean you’ve got people running about in ridiculous squeaky rubber bunny suits, wielding hair-dryers as weapons and yet they very efficiently manage to lock down Enoshima and put measures in place to counter the effects of JFX.  It’s things like this that make me love Tsuritama – it takes something that’s pretty standard like an official agency, and presents them in a vibrant and interesting way, yet it doesn’t allow its quirkiness to overwhelm the characters or the very simple story it wants to tell.

Akira started to come into his own here too.  It was always obvious that Akira would be forced to choose between his superiors orders and his budding friendship with the other boys at some stage, so his being apprehended by DUCK! for colluding with Haru didn’t really surprise me much. Akira has always been quite independent and up-front; he doesn’t hesitate to question orders and has absolutely no qualms about doing his own thing if he feels strongly about something.  Akira values his first hand experience of Haru above the official stance DUCK! takes, and so he goes off to try to take care of things himself, but Akira is still very loyal to DUCK! and is sticking to their overall mission – Akira doesn’t do things half-heartedly, once he’s committed, he give it his all.

In a similar manner, Haru also attempts to take matters into his own hands to try to protect his new friends, but unfortunately his taking everything upon himself ended in failure.  While Akira shirks the orders of his superiors in order to turn to his new friends, Haru reverts to his original mission and sends his friends far away from the danger-zone in order to go it alone.  Once Coco is taken over by JFX and Haru his left truly alone, he goes out of his way to at least limit to damage to the civilian population of Enoshima by driving everyone away – a ploy that is very successful thanks to fact that DUCK! were facilitating the evacuation anyway.

Haru has never really appealed to me in the same way as the other characters – I found his happy, smiley antics a bit grating most of the time, however I did feel sorry to see him driven to this desperate state in these episodes – thank goodness he got some sense slapped back into him.

I’d have never thought back in episode one, that Yuki would be the one doing the sense slapping.  While all the other characters have developed over the run of the show, Yuki is the character that has changed the most.  Yuki has a moment of relapse into passive mode, but a pep talk from Natsuki & Kate soon has him firing on all cylinders and barreling back to Enoshima as quickly as possible.  Yuki hasn’t lost all of his social awkwardness, but he is no longer completely stunted by his shy nature – it’s been wonderful to see him change.

Yuki starts off feeling massively betrayed by Haru, after all it was Haru that dragged Yuki kicking and screaming into the limelight, so when Haru sends him packing and tries to go it alone, Yuki feels like he’s been discarded and isn’t as important to Haru as Haru is to him.  Yuki doesn’t mope for too long thankfully, and it was refreshing to see the friendship drama resolved very quickly.

The bulk of these episodes were dedicated to set up for the finale, so we have all the named characters assemble to take on JFX, in accordance with the legend of Enoshima.  Episode 10 left us with a very, very cruel cliffhanger that had me cursing the series up and down – not knowing if Ayumi was alive or dead was terrible!  I was really impressed with how well the show handled this swing in tone though – surprisingly it wasn’t jarring, and served as a reality check that things could potentially get very dangerous.

All that remains to be seen is how our heroes tackle the unstoppable might of a typhoon powered JFX, while also trying to avoid DUCK!’s forces and hordes of Enoshima dancers…….a simple matter for a couple of fishing mad high-schoolers, an alien, a 25-yr old agent and a duck.