At long last, the real racing has begun. Time to break out the sorting hat. When grand tour bike races start (and in high-school terms three days certainly qualifies as a grand your) everyone tends to fall into their specified roles. With two-week affairs like the Tour de France the […] Read more
Low-key, that was not. Fall 2013’s twin titans of sports anime continue to be in lock-step, as Yowamushi Pedal begins its Inter-High arc on the same week Diamond no Ace starts its Koushien Arc. The similarities end there, for the most part – these two series are taking very different […] Read more
Seems Hakonegakuin tends to take “pulling a fast one” a little too literally. I confess, that was a development that took me by surprise. No question that competitive cycling can be a contact sport, but I’ve never seen a cyclist horse-collar a competitor like that before. Chalk it up to […] Read more
The fated rival holds up his end of the bargain. I’m not too surprised Yowamushi Pedal chose to fill in the backstory of Manami Sangaku. He has a crucial role to play in the story – with Onoda’s two co-leads effectively paired off from a sports standpoint (at least) and […] Read more
Don’t lie – I know most of you were singing it in the shower the last time you heard it in an episode… Yowapeda is back in a much more mischievous and balanced mode, with the non-stop intensity of the training camp behind us. Plotquakes aside that was a very […] Read more
That really hit the spot. The timing for watching the Yowapeda “Special Ride” OVA was perfect – which is odd, considering it was originally released (though never subbed) some months before the anime began. It works much better now, not least because it’s set in the days after the Souhoku […] Read more
Low-key, that was not. No question about it, sports can be a brutal lesson in the unsentimental nature of fate – just ask Tom Watson. That, and a reminder of the hard truth that more often than not, talent wins out in the end. That said, I was never too […] Read more
Shameless. Utterly shameless. There came a time, about halfway through this episode, when my thought process shifted from “They couldn’t possibly – could they?” to “Dammit – they’re going to do it, aren’t they?” And sure enough the vicious rat bastards did – they ended the episode exactly where I […] Read more
I’m getting way too caught up in this story… It was another pretty good week for Yowamushi Pedal. Volume 2 of the anime actually improved on V. 1’s first-week sales by 1.5%, and that volume has added enough in subsequent weeks to take it to 6300 – it’s now the […] Read more
Game on. If you’ve been paying attention there have been a number of hints that the two second-years, Teshima and Kitaro Aoyagi, were going to be entering the drama soon in a big way. Besides their presence in the OP and ED, within the episodes themselves they’ve sort of been […] Read more