FEATURE: Wild Birdie Wing Moments That Are Actually About Golf
Our heroine, Eve, encounters a new opponent and utters her now familiar catchphrase: “I’ll pierce you through with my bullet!" They begin their bout, where Eve’s unorthodox techniques quickly throw off her more traditional opponent, driving her into a corner. Right when it seems that all is lost, their game of minigolf is interrupted. That’s right, everything I just described was a couple of high schoolers playing a game of mini golf. The dramatic back and forth, the fated rivalries, catchphrases, all of it is in service to people playing golf, a sport most people associate with rich businessmen and politicians, the exact opposite of anything BIRDIE WING -Golf Girls' Story- does. And it’s impossible to look away.
No offense to the golf fans out there, but I think we can all admit that golf isn’t really known for being so hot-blooded or exciting. But BIRDIE WING's golf isn’t the golf your parents play. This is high-stakes golf where your life is on the line! This is golf where every swing is delivered with the force and heart of a shonen hero punching out the big bad. BIRDIE WING is full of people who treat golf as life’s highest goal.
Just look at Rose Aleon, the anti-villain of BIRDIE WING's first arc. She’s a tough, grizzled mafia boss with a talent for manipulating people into the exact situation she wants. She offered Eve the deal to get into the tournament as a way to get her to play in the underground mafia game, sabotaged Aoi’s match to motivate Eve, maneuvered Eve into having motive to join the second mafia game, all in the service of what, exactly? Getting to play a game of golf against a worthy opponent.
Rose all but orchestrated a gang war, even sabotaging her own boss, because she wanted to play golf. It’s convoluted, absurd, and completely brilliant. And that’s not even getting into the fact that a conflict that opened with a mafia hit on a politician was ultimately resolved by a game of golf — played, of course, in the mafia’s super-secret transforming underground golf arena. She showed the ruthlessness and cunning of a Black Lagoon villain, all in the service of golf.
And what a game it turns out to be! Eve gets to gradually catch up to Rose’s strength, for the first time facing an opponent who can match her own. She even gets to show off her new Purple Bullet technique. They’re evenly matched, with tension sharp enough to cut with a knife. And then Rose’s arm explodes because it turns out she had a robot arm because her arm got cut off by the mafia as punishment for losing once. This happens in a show about golf.
Eve’s Rainbow Bullets (AKA her golf swing) naturally win her the match and saves the orphans, but that leaves a conundrum: Where do you go after life-or-death mafia golf? There’s only one answer: an all-girls Japanese high school. In BIRDIE WING's universe, a tournament between Japanese high schools is the natural escalation from underground mafia golf against a cyborg. And it is glorious.
That scene I talked about earlier between Eve and one of her new rivals? That happened when she met Kuyo, a girl from a school with a rival golf club (because golf rivalries are the height of drama in this world). Now, I’m no expert on golf, but I don’t think challenges usually involve declarations that you’ll shoot your opponent, literally or metaphorically. Except that’s only natural here. That challenge leads to another first: someone having their confidence completely shaken by watching someone else’s unorthodox way of playing minigolf. But once again, that’s par for the course (no pun intended) for BIRDIE WING's world.
And somehow it continues to escalate from there. Eve draws all eyes at her new school, proving to be quite the lady-killer in the process. She walks through her new school with the confidence of a hotshot racecar driver, just with her confidence driven by her golf swing. Naturally, Eve’s reaction upon meeting her new rival, ace high school golfer Mizuho Himekawa, is to declare that she’ll kill her… in golf. In all the millennia of human history, this may very well be the first time anyone has uttered that phrase. Just another day in the golf-obsessed world of BIRDIE WING.
Mizuho herself is yet another escalation. Eve’s chief opponents in the first story arc were underground mafia bosses with a giant transforming underground golf course. Her chief rival now is a third-year high schooler who won the previous year’s high school championship. A shift like that shouldn’t work at all, but yet again, it feels as natural as can be in BIRDIE WING.
All of this is to say that BIRDIE WING is infinitely more fun than you’d ever expect a show about golf to be. By taking its premise and injecting it with a metric ton of anime-style melodrama and hype, BIRDIE WING turns a sport normally associated with middle-aged businessmen into a spectacle on par with any action anime you could name. And yes, BIRDIE WING really is about golf.
Are you excited for BIRDIE WING's next season? Let me know down in the comments!
Skyler loves writing and chatting about anime, and is always ready to gush about the latest One Piece chapter. Read more of his work at his blog apieceofanime.com and follow him on Twitter at Videogamep3.
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