Arakawa Under the Bridge episode 9

No philo­soph­ical mes­sage, no plot advan­cing rev­el­a­tions, no intro­spect­ive ana­lysis into the psyche of the char­ac­ters. All we got was a dis­cus­sion as to whether Sis­ter would be able to eat Hoshi. Which is a defunct argu­ment any­way because we all know Sis­ter could any­thing he bloody well wanted.

Epis­ode 70: Present

And I’m bloody freaked out.

Hoshi without his Star head. His mask is made up of two parts. The Star and the potato. The potato layer must be for insu­lar reas­ons, to let the air breath around his head. Oth­er­wise his face would end up all hor­rible and wrinkly. He’s clearly put effort into this design of his. Won­der if he made it him­self or bought it off a mask enthu­si­ast. Why am I even ask­ing this ques­tion? Why must I ana­lyse the most ran­dom and insig­ni­fic­ant of aspects of Arakawa in my posts?

No Arakawa! Please please please don’t turn down the path of the pedo­philes. Surely Shaft got that out of their sys­tem with Vam­pire Bund. In fact, anime fan­dom got more than enough under­age wank mater­ial out of that shitty anime.

P.S. Vam­pire Bund is a ter­rible anime. Arakawa is awe­some. This shall be the last time I men­tion these two anime in the same sentence.

Aaaand the world is back to nor­mal. Well, nor­mal for Arakawa Under the Bridge. Which is pretty far from what you’d nor­mally con­sider nor­mal I sup­pose. At least there weren’t rock­ets fir­ing out from those pads. For some reason I was expect­ing that to hap­pen. Hey, it makes more sense then what hap­pens later on in this episode.

Epis­ode 71: Embers

That’s a strangely cute image. Sis­ter makes his cook­ies for Maria like a high school girl does to offer to the boy she likes. How­ever he can never sum­mon up the cour­age to give her the cook­ies him­self so instead he hands them out at mass. Or maybe hand­ing cook­ies out at mass is a ruse so he can give cook­ies to Maria. I won­der if Maria attends mass? I don’t remem­ber see­ing her there in the earlier epis­odes. Then again, they blacked out all the char­ac­ters that we didn’t already know.

And it was here that Arakawa stopped mak­ing any sense what­so­ever. The mangaka must have picked up an old copy of Fist of the North Star while halfway through writ­ing this chapter and mod­i­fied his char­ac­ter designs to fit his new­found obses­sion. It could have been worse I sup­pose. He could have become obsessed with Strike Witches.

(For the unini­ti­ated, Fist of the North Star is an old manga and anime series aimed at chil­dren. There­fore it has extremely manly men who have six packs on their six packs and biceps on their biceps. It involves explod­ing heads, amongst other things)

(For the unini­ti­ated, Strike Witches is a rel­at­ively recent anime aimed at bach­el­ors. There­fore it has under­age girls fly­ing around in a world with no pants. 12 months later the stu­dio who cre­ated it, Gonzo, stopped mak­ing anime)

Epis­ode 72: MDS (Mad Shot-down Brothers)

Look at that. This is a dis­grace. Remem­ber at how lovely her eye­brows used to be? They were all small and curved and cute. Now they’re these ugly, bushy look­ing cater­pil­lars that look like they’re run­ning away from each other. Where can we go now to get our doses of lovely eye­brows. You’ve ruined it now Arakawa.

It’s like Street Fighter, Tekken or whatever one-on-one fighter game you grew up with. You’ve just unlocked a dif­fi­culty level bey­ond legendary by enter­ing a cheat code you found online. In this dif­fi­culty level your char­ac­ter is Mr.Potato Head. Your first match is against Fist of the North Stella. Who then pro­ceeds to serve you a slice of your own face.

Epis­ode 73: Tyrant

With my two-year anniversary com­ing up soon, I’ve been look­ing for a new avatar to cel­eb­rate the occa­sion. I could use Fist of the North Stella I sup­pose. How­ever she has the unfor­tu­nate flaw of ever hav­ing driven a cart. As a blog called The Cart Driver, I feel my char­ac­ter should have a cer­tain degree of cart driv­ing cap­ab­il­it­ies. At least Recruit pushed a trol­ley with Sis­ter on. That’s kinda like driv­ing a cart.

(Have Stella’s eye­brows got­ten ever worse? Now they look like cater­pil­lars on fire)

Maria in ‘P-ko-gazing-upon-the-Mayor’ vis­ion. Out of the women under the bridge she’s prob­ably my least favour­ite. First would be Nino, fol­lowed by P-ko then Maria. Stella doesn’t count. At this point in the epis­ode, Stella is no longer clas­si­fied as a female. She is now a freak of nature caused upon by the author read­ing too many manly manga. Case point: this picture.

What is this I don’t even

This could just be an hon­est assess­ment of the strength of Stella’s char­ac­ter (who is no longer Fist of the North Stella). It could just be a well thought out method of mak­ing Stella feel bet­ter about her­self. How­ever, my ship­ping sway­ing ways likes to think that this is a call-out to Sis­ter to actu­ally admit that he likes her. Or even bet­ter, an admit­tance that she likes Sis­ter but can’t bring her­self to be hon­est about her feel­ings, while being jeal­ous that Stella has the end­less power of youth to drive her pas­sion for­ward. Sis­ter and Maria. I won­der if any of these couples will get together before the end of the show.

Epis­ode 74: True Form

Oh no, a nor­mal per­son is going under the bridge! I bet­ter warn him not to go any fur­ther or else he might meet some extremely strange people. I’m the most nor­mal per­son here so I’ll lead him away. Yup, totally nor­mal per­son with plenty of com­mon sense. make sure he doesn’t go near Man-eating star­fishes that only exist in my warped ima­gin­a­tion. Or Fist of the North Stella. I’m not sure which one is scarier.

(Stop it Arakawa. Your irony is begin­ning to hurt my insides more than Halfadeckshort’s hor­rible puns in his poetry)

Epis­ode 75: First Mag­nitude Star

One thing that I like about Arakawa is that it’s still groun­ded in reality.For the most part, these char­ac­ters are real people who could really exist. Hoshi, the Mayor, Nino and Whitey all work like that. They’re just stuck under the bridge due to per­son­al­ity defects. Sis­ter is prob­ably on the run or some­thing, or at least thinks he is. P-ko feels that under the bridge is the only soci­ety she fits into. People like the Iron Head broth­ers live under there because nobody is will­ing to ques­tion why they aren’t some­where else. These are all nor­mal people with cer­tain per­son­al­ity defects. Which is why Fist of the North Stella bugged me. It was just a bit too much.

That’s no moon. It’s a space station.

(Actu­ally it’s a banana. Look­ing like a banana is never cool. I’ve dis­cussed this before)

Nino with short hair is sur­pris­ingly bet­ter than long-haired Nino, and this is com­ing from someone who gen­er­ally prefers long hair. Also, this is Nino when she was 5 years younger. To my sur­prise, she’s already liv­ing under the bridge, which blows my the­ory that she only star­ted liv­ing there roughly two years ago. But it con­firm my idea that she’s roughly 20 years old, around the same age as Recruit. She’s def­in­itely a high-schooler in that pic­ture. Old enough to interest Star but still rel­at­ively young. I won­der if she went to school. In fact, I’m still won­der­ing about pretty much everything in her past. I really, really want to know.

And so Hoshi’s story was all a lie. Well no, but cer­tainly a fab­rec­ated ver­sion of the truth. It’s like those straw­berry tast­ing sweets. They prob­ably had a trace of straw­berry in them once, but it’s been beaten down by all the arti­fi­cial crap.

I’ll be blunt: This wasn’t the greatest install­ment of Arakawa. Every epis­ode until now felt like it had advanced the plot. Recruit’s atti­tude to people under the bridge would evolve, as would his rela­tion­ship with Nino. This felt like a filler epis­ode more than any­thing, to flesh out a few side char­ac­ters before the end­ing. It still made me grin a lot but it lacked the punch of a real epis­ode of Arakawa. Ah well, maybe the next epis­ode will return to form once again.