Medalist likes to troll the audience, like Kimetsu no Yaiba, with bad jokes and bad art. It did so this episode as well, with a dumb moment where Inori and Tsukasa ate bananas. But Kimetsu no Yaiba, despite that, is my #6 favorite anime. It's about time I admit Medalist is one of my favorite anime too, dumb jokes and bad art included.
Come to think of it, there were dumb jokes and bad art in Rurouni Kenshin too. Sometimes you just have to roll with it.
Medalist is great because it's about loli figure skaters, which is about as beautiful a combination as one can get. Their figure skating prowess is only slightly below what you can see in the Olympics despite being pre-teens. In truth, if young girls were allowed to compete in the Olympics, many of them would be competitive. There's just a stupid biased regulation against young gymnasts and figure skaters that keeps them out of the competition, with no regard to merit. This stupid bias, though, doesn't stop us from watching the girls perform in Medalist. Here they get to strut their stuff and do their best, and we get to watch them, undisturbed by the stupid taboos of the wider world.
The figure skating performances of the lolis in Medalist are some of the finest dances/costumes/performances I've ever seen. Both in the first and second seasons, the word 'wow' was made for this anime. The second season's anime opening, where all the prospective novices do a dance together on ice, is incredible. The gracefulness, the speed, the choreography, it's absolutely beautiful.
Just watching Medalist as a sport would be worthwhile, especially with the Winter Olympics only a few days away, but it also has some great human drama where good people seriously try their best and fret about all the bad things that happen to them, or could happen. There's always a seesaw of emotion, a whirlwind of people rising and falling from grace, which is typical of figure skating. The realism of this show permeates everything. It feels like everything is a vignette of some real figure skater's life. It feels like every performance has actually occurred before in the real world. And for some reason, the mangaka of this work is really wise and squeezes in amazing lines of dialogue all over the place. People say the perfect thing for the situation like it comes naturally to them, when philosophers would have had to sit down and think about it for a week before they could give the same advice.
Medalist has everything. The art, the animation, the lovable characters (Inori and Hikaru are already in my fictional character hall of fame), the high stakes drama, the learnable lessons, the intense emotion. If only it didn't have occasional intentionally bad segments it would be limitless. But again, Kimetsu is at #6 so I can forgive a lot.
For now Medalist can stay at #199. I kicked out Shuumatsu no Izetta to make room, which had been my intention for some time now. We'll see how good this second season is, and learn if the upcoming movie is actually canon or not, before rating it higher.
Cold Night, the opening theme to season 2, is extremely catchy. I added it to my music hall of fame as a 4-star song, and made it Inori's theme song in my wonderful playlist. Various songs were demoted to make room.
Meanwhile, the Kimi to Idol Precure movie came out, so I watched that too, and it's also great. It's a nice addendum to the anime as a whole, with a lot of songs, which you'd expect from 'idol Precure.' As a result, for a brief moment, the total length of great anime in the world is exactly 10,700 standardized 24 minute episodes. Soon enough anime will breach the 11k barrier.
There's also good news for Isekai Nonbiri Nouka. Season 2 starts airing this spring, not long from now.
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