Look, I didn’t want to have to write this. But what the fuck happened to Birdie Wing, man?

Have we all gotten so wrapped up in the belief that everything this show does is some masterstroke of camp irony to ignore that it’s completely phoning it in, and laughing at us for applauding it for doing that, too? Like, I’m getting the feeling that this show’s first half was so good it has now conditioned us into going “oh, man, this fucking show, I just can’t believe it just did that” at writing that is upon closer inspection just some of the most lazy, half-assed hackery I’ve ever seen in anime.

I feel like I’m being gaslit. At this point, Birdie Wing is expecting us to be amazed at it simply for being Birdie Wing, because if you look at what it’s actually giving us, it’s mostly just a pale imitation of what we used to get. The show has dug itself so deep into its formula of combining soap opera melodrama with shounen tropes and deliberately juxtaposing those with the most boring sport imaginable that it now wants us to find that very premise entertaining in and by itself — almost as if it forgot that the reason why that formula worked is because it allowed for the most unpredictable nonsense to happen. Remember the hypnotic cleavage sweat? Remember the robot arm? These kinds of twists have been more or less completely gone from the show as of late, and as a result the appeal of the core premise has similarly just sort of fizzled out. Instead of escalating the bombast, the show is now resting on its laurels and winding things down, expecting to be praised for merely being what it is. Unfortunately, what it is is becoming more mundane with each passing episode.

I don’t know why this show thinks it needs to pay any kind of lip-service to what golf is actually like. As Aoi and Eve rise through the ranks of the professional circuit, their games have become less exciting, their opponents more banal and their shenanigans far less entertaining. Birdie Wing used to baffle. Now we can count ourselves lucky if balls don’t land exactly as expected or plans don’t go off without a hitch. In its entirely unwarranted insistence to be a “legitimate” approximation of real golf, the show has doomed itself to constantly repeat the same beats. Rather than unhinged set pieces like the transforming golf course, the crying Pac-Man or the immortal line “I’ll kill you, in golf”, viewers of the show’s second half have mostly been forced to sit through one boring tournament after another, all of them mostly consisting of fifty interchangeable flavours of “hit ball hard”.

Now, this is not a problem in se. I used to think Birdie Wing’s over-reliance on stock footage accompanied by the same music time after time again was funny, a kind of young-in-cheek lampooning of mecha anime’s tendency to do the same thing. It didn’t matter that all of Eve’s differently coloured “bullets” do the exact same thing, because it drove home the point that Eve is as dumb as a sack of bricks. But now you’re trying to tell me all of those super moves actually mean something, Birdie Wing? That they deserve to have huge chunks of episodes dedicated to them as if you put actual thought into them? You’re going to have to step up your game significantly if that’s the plan.

You see, I don’t mind that Birdie Wing is trying to be a shounen anime. I do mind that the shounen anime it is, is absolute dogshit. New super moves are unlocked willy-nilly, it’s virtually impossible to tell one character’s style of golfing apart from another’s, and characters don’t face meaningful challenges or undergo significant changes. It feels more like a facsimile of average hot-blooded anime tropes than the real thing. Trust me, if an actual shounen fighting manga tackled these classic tropes as half-heartedly as Birdie Wing is doing them, we’d be absolutely tearing that show to pieces. For shame.

Worst of all, this repetitiveness is revealing how utterly weak the writing underneath it all truly is. I already felt that the twists regarding Eve’s and Aoi’s parentage were almost kind of underwhelming, but I could still write those fumbles off as deliberate. A clever subversion for those of us expecting the girls to have been clones, or genetic experiments, or aliens, or worse, sisters. I just can’t do that any longer. At this point, the writing in Birdie Wing has been bad so often and in such utterly uninteresting ways, I don’t believe it’s bad on purpose any more.

Birdie Wing is spinning its wheels, and it arguably has been ever since its return. Everything it does feels perfunctory. The stakes are non-existent, a lot of what is said and done doesn’t actually make a great lot of sense — and not in the good way — and major dramatic undercurrents that the show has been teasing for months, have ended up falling completely flat. Leo Millefoden, the mysterious legendary underground golfer who subjected Eve to a brutal training regime in order to turn her into a golfing monster? Yeah, he turns out to just be some guy who can’t even manage to muster up a modicum of a mean streak. His new pupil Aisha? Literally only there because Leo can’t participate in a women’s golf tournament himself. Up until the latest episode, she didn’t even talk! And the bitter wedge that their parents’ heinous sins have driven between star-crossed lovers Eve and Aoi? You know, the very crux of this entire second half? That conflict might as well not even exist. There is no heart-rending animosity. There is no melodramatic sapphic pining. There is no climactic gang war looming on the horizon.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind that we’re not going to get any of the things we speculated about on the podcast. We’ve always claimed that speculating about what Birdie Wing would bring next served no purpose, because what we’d actually get would be anything but what we could think of. Yet I think it’s time to admit the show has started to use that belief to try and get away with giving us nothing at all. There is still the occasional funny joke, or a memorable line, or a screenshot worth taking. I still care about these characters. But I just can’t bring myself to brush off every mistake this show makes with a “oh, they totally know they’re being ridiculous on purpose” anymore. Like Eve trading in her trashy getups for classy brand name golf outfits, Birdie Wing is trying to be something it was never meant to be. The Rainbow Bullet isn’t piercing my heart any more. The only thing it’s piercing now, time after time again, is Birdie Wing‘s own foot.