The best show nobody’s watching continues its thankless job in good spirits and fine fettle this week (just as Kabukibu! did last season, though I think a few people picked that one up by the end).  This show always delivers in entertaining fashion, doing for the manga what most late-night shows do for the disc releases – act as a paid infomercial.  I don’t know that even the manga for 7O3X is especially popular (I’ve never seen it on the charts) but if nothing else, this strikes me as a story that’s especially well-suited for anime.  It’s very dynamic and almost interactive, and anime can bring that to life in a way manga just can’t.

As sports anime go, this one is quite focused on the sport at-hand – we’ve had competition of some sort in every episode, and this one was no exception.  This time around it’s a joint training session with Miyaura High.  But while Mikuriya-kun is present (and as full of himself as ever) he’s not part of the scrimmage – he deemed too skilled to make for a good practice match with the others.  But being as this is a match between a power school and a nobody that doesn’t even officially have a club, even the first-year scrubs from Miyaura should be able to handle the Buzou trio without a problem.

That raises an interesting point – why would a nothing school like Buzou keep getting invited to tournaments and shared training?  Sasajima-sempai is the reason, clearly – he has a reputation in this little corner of the world that carries real weight.  That makes me very curious to see what he’s like when he steps out from behind the podium and becomes a player – something I expect we will see before Nana Maru San Matsu is done.  Hell, he even carries a non-working button in his pocket like  pitcher would a baseball – this guy is definitely a tiger, we just haven’t seen his stripes yet.

The Miyaura boys are indeed more experienced (and used to buzzing) than their opponents – though Fukami-san does her best. This format is a basic “college bowl” setup – teams of three, anyone can buzz in but any of the three can answer (no conferring).  While Mari has the general quiz bowl skills, Shiki and Daisuke each have their specialties – with the latter it’s not just otaku matters but mathematics, too.  What Shiki has is a depth of knowledge – but in quiz bowl, this is a mixed blessing.  When called upon in class he was unable to answer the question not because he didn’t know enough, but because he knew too much and couldn’t organize it into an answer.  The potential here is obvious – even cocky Mikuriya is swept up by it.

There’s the matter of those buzzers, too – I’ve never seen an anime where buzzers were a kind of MacGuffin, but I guess to a quiz circle with no money they’d be a major obsession.  As I speculated last week, library girl is the key here.  And she has a (familiar) name – Sasajima Jinko (Matsuda Satsumi).  She also has a Kansai-ben, which is add because she’s actually the Kaichou’s little sister and he doesn’t have one at all.  There’s a story there for sure, but the story for now is those buzzers – and once Jinko has had a chance to dissect Miyaura’s (to their horror) she reckons she can build Buzou one a set, no problem.  But shippers take note – apparently such a thing as “low-current girls” exist, and they have their own otaku.  And since Daisuke is one, we might perhaps have our second potential pairing of the series.