Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

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“The Symphogear of Golf”

-Blurb for a now-deleted ‘review’ of the first episode by Anilist user SolidQuentin.

From the start, I suspected there was something strange about this one. Even by the standards of the “cute girls doing cute things” pseudogenre, golf is a reach. Pairing up a genre of anime that already gets criticized for being dull with what is unquestionably the most boring major sport in the world seems like a recipe for disaster, on the surface. Thankfully, Birdie Wing isn’t anything like that at all. Instead, it’s one of those shows where a random game or spectator sport–golf, naturally, this time around–is taken with a seriousness by absolutely everybody that, in the real world, is usually reserved for matters of religion and politics. Late in its first episode, someone in Birdie Wing calls golf a “sacred sport.” They are not being ironic.

That said, with apologies to SolidQuentin, Birdie Wing is not nearly visually dynamic enough to be “the Symphogear of golf.” At least not yet. (And really, that’s no knock, that’s a hard bar to clear.) But it does manage to make an honest run at the “most unhinged show of the season” title in a season that also includes ESTAB-LIFE. That’s worth something on its own.

The trick here is that our protagonist, the mononymic Eve (Akari Kitou), is not really a golfer. She’s more of a….golf mercenary. A golf secret agent. A golf hitman. The first thing we see her do is impersonate a pro golfer–complete with a latex disguise–and play a qualifier tournament to said pro’s specifications (fourth place, nothing showy.) After she’s paid for that job, we eventually learn that she, her friend / girlfriend / something Lily Lipman (Akira Sekine), and Lily’s older sister live and work out of a bar, where they also take care of three orphans. Yes, really.

Eve’s golfing habits are half moneymaking scheme and half personal obsession. Over the course of the first episode we see her take on a masked, harlequin-themed golfer in the middle of the night and handily win 6,000 Euros in a bet. (Which she later loses by buying off a crooked cop harassing Lily’s sister.) She trains by bullseye-ing golf balls into rusty paintbuckets from a distance. There’s a flashback, which is inexplicably presented like a sepia-toned music video, where someone (presumably either her father or a former coach) compares golfing to firing a gun, saying that one should mentally destroy their opponents and “pierce their hearts.” All this in greyscale while Eve’s hair glows a fiery orange and she’s surrounded by whiffed shots.

Oh! And Eve has a nickname; The Rainbow Bullet.

^{It makes a kind of sense.}

Despite all this, Eve mostly plays for money, downplaying her shonen protagonist-level skills by dropping this particularly great line.

She’s akin to an absurdist extension of the classic “perfect swordsman” trope. And it’s off that absurdity that Birdie Wing mostly gets its charge, as of now. (I could not help but laugh when, in her second match of the episode, Eve deliberately aims for a tree branch and breaks it with her shot, completely bypassing the course’s main obstacle.)

If you want to reach for themes, you could maybe dig up something about rich, establishment folk being more preoccupied with appearances than actual accomplishment. (Note how Eve’s second opponent first denigrates her for her appearance. And then tries to bail on the aforementioned broken tree branch match because she doesn’t want to “throw off her game for [a later] tournament.”) But that does feel like a stretch, this early on. And really, something this wonderfully stupid doesn’t really need themes, it just needs to keep up the absurdity.

Eve does meet someone who seems like she might become a worthy opponent–a short Japanese girl named Aoi Amawashi (Asami Seto) who, despite her small stature, totes an utterly absurd four-foot golf club–but we don’t actually see their match here. That’s presumably for next week.

The fact of the matter is that Birdie Wing‘s first episode works because of the sheer friction between the subject matter–again, one of the most boring sports known to man–and the shonen-esque seriousness everyone applies to it, especially Eve. And this is to say nothing of the dialogue, which serves as ample evidence that the folks behind this show aren’t taking it any more seriously than we are.

Golfing!

That’s a trick that works fine for now, but the show can’t simply coast for twelve weeks. It’ll either have to continually top itself (a difficult prospect, but not an impossible one), or it will have to actually wring some meaning out of all this absurdity (likewise). But I’m at least interested in finding out if it manages to do either of these, and if a first episode hooks you in, then it’s largely served its purpose.

The Takeaway: Fans of the sublimely stupid and of ridiculous premises should put this one on the priority list. As for everyone else, it’ll take you about five minutes tops to find out if this is “your thing” or not. There’s no reason to not at least check out the premiere.

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