Special A Episode 2 - Pride and Pro-Wrestling

First off - the OP is, to be tricolonic about it, awful, awful, awful. Where is the strength in Yuko Gotou’s singing voice? She sounds like she’s trying to sing into an oboe. Naff beyond belief.

The episode itself drove me slightly nuts. The premise is that anyone may take the place of a Special A student if they beat them in some kind of contest (regardless of the fact, presumably, that as soon as they rank lower than 7th in an academic test they get booted out), so the Student Council president challenges them to a pro-wrestling match. Unsurprisingly, Hikari and Kei end up tag-teaming, but when Kei discovers that they are both being targetted for elimination by sneaky tactics he decides he doesn’t want Hikari to compete because she might get hurt.

This is the first point that made me foam at the mouth. To be extremely uncouth about it, he’s putting the pussy on a pedestal and treating Hikari like an object; does he even KNOW her? This just struck me as being a plot contrivance for the sake of introducing drama to the episode - from the way the first episode plays out he’s always been happy to team up with her before, so why do something so ridiculous here?

Anyway, they end up handcuffed together and fighting in the ring, so Kei throws Hikari out the ring and “protects” her by taking the blows of the over-muscled pro-wrestlers that attack the pair of them. Is this noble? Is it HELL! It’s moronic and out of character for exactly the reasons as mentioned above. Maybe if I were a girl in my early teens I’d find it mildly romantic, but it just riled me more than anything.

Nevertheless, we get the cheesy little revelation that she’s useful after all, and so Kei severs the handcuffs. Surely it would have been much more dramatically effective to have them fight with the handcuffs still attached, thus highlighting that Kei realises they should work together blah blah blah, rather than just having them repeat their antics from the first episode!

Despite how angry this show makes me, I’m going to continue to give it the benefit of the doubt. With a little more familiarity the secondary characters have grown on me a little, and perhaps if the show stops being quite so centred on Hikari and Kei it’ll liven up a little. It’s still nowhere near as entertaining as Itazurana Kiss, though.

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