I’m kind of glad I found my way back into Tsurune’s orbit, because apart from a couple of hiccup episodes I think it’s quite a good show.  It’s not going to change your life or anything but it does comment on how diverse a genre sports anime is, much in contradiction of the mass of opinion about it in Western fandom.  You could hardly ask for three series that take more different approaches than Gurazeni, Hinomaru Zumou and Tsurune, but they all manage to be pretty insightful and add something to the genre’s larger body of work.

It’s always a good test of a series to see whether it can present an episode (or arc) built around a character you don’t like, and make you like it.  Or at least be invested in it, which I was with this episode – and I liked it too.  That’s not to say I now like Seiya – I don’t.  I still find him a surly and kind of creepy little puke, but I think I have a better understanding of who he is and how he got that way, and that it was obtained organically and realistically.  One can feel empathy for a character (or a real person) and still not especially like them – affection and empathy are two different things.

What is it that Seiya feels towards Minato, exactly?  Is it love, either in the fraternal or romantic sense?  Is it obsession (almost certainly)?  Thanks to a flashback we now see the root of this relationship’s power over Seiya, which was Minato reaching out to him when he was the new kid on the block (I like that he kept the “Pucky” box).  From that moment on it seems the two boys were close, but it was always Minato who was pulling and Seiya who was (willingly) being dragged along in his wake.  That applies to archery too, a fact which is one of the more important story elements in Tsurune and probably the essential core of Seiya’s character.

There’s some other interesting stuff in here, like the debate over whether one should approach kyuudou scientifically or philosophically.  Is it for the form that matters, or the result?  Maybe Minato is right and most archers need to choose one or the other, but I suspect for the best of them the two go hand-in-hand.  Even as he still struggles with his target panic, we can see Minato has slowly emerged from his personal darkness – I think we saw his smile more in this episode than in the first eight combined (and that’s not even counting the flashbacks to the ever-smiling chibi-Minato).  But that smile seems to give Seiya no joy – and I think that’s part of the problem.

Thanks to the second part of the flashback sequence we know there’s something else seemingly driving Seiya’s feelings towards Minato – guilt.  It’s a bit hard to know exactly what happened, but for certain Minato was seriously injured in an accident – he was comatose for ten days and his mother died.  The implication as far as I can tell is that Seiya called out to Minato when he was in the middle of a crosswalk with his mother, and the two of them were struck by a car, though that’s exposited a little clumsily so it’s hard to tell for sure.

That would certainly explain Seiya’s protectiveness towards Minato, but understanding why a behavior exists is not the same as acknowledging that it’s healthy.  Frankly there’s a real problem here – by all accounts Seiya is unhappy that Minato is becoming happy, because he’s not the cause of it.  Seiya was unable to lead his friend back out of the darkness, but Minato emerged anyway with the help of Nanao last week, and especially Masa-san.  This is a cycle repeating for Seiya – when Minato got to middle school it was Fujiwara-kun that became his fated kyuudou soulmate, not Seiya.  And now he sees himself being replaced again, this time as Minato’s guardian angel by Masa.

No, this is clearly not healthy.  For Seiya to say he “hates” Masa-san over this is a testament to how messed up he is.  I do hope he gets better, largely because Minato clearly cares for him and while I don’t much care about Seiya I do care about Minato.  But as to archery, I think the answer to Masa’s crucial question to Seiya is obviously “No”.  I don’t think Seiya loves kyuudou and he never did – he started it because Minato loved it.  And now that Seiya is adrift as an archer, he has no anchor to help him find his way back the way Minato is currently doing.  It sucks for Seiya that it’s not him that’s helping Minato rediscover himself, and that he doesn’t have the same path to aspire to.  I sincerely hope he finds a path that works for him, whether it involves archery or not.  But if he’s truly Minato’s friend, he has to start acting like it and care more about Minato’s happiness than his own responsibility for enabling it.