Our favorite dorks cheerleading team is about to welcome a lot of new members! As expected they are all a bit weird but heh, that’s what we are here for right? So in no specific order we have:
- The Punk guys who want to join because they want to be real man. They should just watch Houkuto no Ken and they’ll be manly enough. That’s how I become a real man and grew up a beard and a six pack. Only listening to “Ai wo torimodose” makes you manly enough.
- Afro guy wants to join because he likes to stand out. Right after his introduction Megane-kun roasts him by calling him “Outstanding Brocoli'”. Megane-kun is so savage, that’s why we love him to be honest.
- Then there’s the Break dancing guys who joined because the cheerleading team is called Breakers and it is somehow related to break dancing…
Then we have Pink Shota who was a ballerina kid and who is adorable as hell. His first name means dragon and he seems ashamed of that. On top of that he’s fan girling about Kazu a lot even until the point where Megane-kun compares him to “one of those girls”. I guess he was talking about fan girls in general. That’s another roast for you, god damn Megane-kun.- The Chinese son of the Chinese teacher, who looks like him and who’s here to learn Japanese. He has big lips, that’s all I can say about him…
- And there’s Hisashi Mori, who joined because he liked the idea of an all men’s team ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°), I can understand why hehehe. Even though he looked super pumped at the begging, he rapidly got disappointed when he realized the Breaker’s level is not even close to the Spark’s one. However, even with his hopes down, he’s still willing to practice and do all exercises seriously and silently.
Finally the coach Takagi, whom we saw in the previous episodes announced she’ll be the new coach of the team. Her reasons? They suck so bad that it’s painful to watch.
Without losing any time she announces them they’ll be participating in some sort of qualifiers for the national cheerleading tournament. So they’ll have to improve [a lot] in the next 3 months if they want to be qualified. On top of that she gives them some new hardcore exercises and a strange exercise to complete: Each of them are given a notebook where they need to write their personal thoughts after each training. Honestly it looks like a chore to me but I guess it can help you … ahem… processing stuff? Yeah I don’t really know, I had to do this when I was taking drama classes too, I never did it once… that’s probably why my teacher hated me…
On Haru’s notebook is written: “Beat Kazu“. Surprised, Haru asks the coach why she wants him to adopt such competitive mindset when Kazu is his precious teammate and boyfriend. She replies that right now, he sucks really bad and Kazu is better than him, so if he wants to improve he should focus on becoming better than him and to step out of his shadow. Yeah, I don’t really now how I feel about this “coaching technique“. I don’t really like that competitive mindset, it would have been better for me if the coach had asked him to catch up with Kazu, to be at his level so they can be more coordinated or something like that, beating him is a bit too extreme in my opinion. Heh, I’m sure this thing is going to cause drama. Because for the moment, we did not get any heartbreaking drama sequence where the two main protagonists fight because they have different visions of things. I can almost feel it, the drama is coming.
Speaking of drama, this episode revealed what Sho was hiding all this time and why he doesn’t want to do stunts. He was a base in the Sparks team but one day he was involved in an accident. He actually dropped the ace of the team who happened to be coach Takagi’s sister. So that’s why now he’s afraid of talking to the coach and to do stunts, since he fears he might drop someone again. Haru tries to reassure him somehow by telling him to believe in his teammates, thing he learned not so many episodes ago.
Speaking of Haru [you can note that today, my transitions are really subtle… like always], he continues to reveal himself a bit more in this episode, helping all the newbies to train, listening to Sho’s problem and even answering back to some judo guys who were making fun of them for doing cheerleading. However, he’s still in bad terms with his sister and tries to avoid her.
It quite an interesting choice to add all those new characters at the same time. It adds some freshness to the show but at the same time it means less character development for each of them. Even more for the main characters who are going to get I suppose, less screen time. I think the anime is going to continue focusing on Haru and also on Haru and Kazu’s relationship which sadly is going to leave less room for the other main characters such as Ton, Megane-kun, Sho and the two lovers [whom I forget the names all the time]. With such a huge cast I did not expect Cheer Danshi!! to develop all the characters it introduced but at least it should provide us some decent backstory for those main guys. Because right now they are reduced to some very simple character tropes with Sho being the exception… a bit… Ton is the cute chubby guy, Megane-kun the comic relief and the two lovers are also comic relief, only appearing on screen to make jokes.
But heh, at least we’re not getting some heavy drama show, painful to watch and Cheer Danshi!! remains this week again, enjoyable to watch. Although I would love to see more cheerleading action, maybe with the qualifers and the championship we’ll get more! I’m kind of hyped for this actually.