Tsuritama Episode 4 – (Insert Fish Joke Here)

I’m finished with putting things about fishing in the titles of these posts, but the show isn’t really giving me anything else to work with here.  Already four episodes in, and still almost nothing that I would consider a major event in the story has happened yet.  Even now, I still can’t really tell if the show is building up to anything bigger (i.e. saving the world) or if it’ll just stay in the quirky slice-of-life state that it’s in now.  I can’t help but to hold out in hope of the show taking a more serious turn, but I think at this point it’s pretty obvious (at least to me) that the show probably won’t change that much, and if it does get more serious it probably won’t be that big of a deal.  But hey, Evangelion didn’t get really serious until episode 20 or something like that, so maybe we still have some hope left.

Like the last few episodes, this one moved fairly slowly and didn’t have much going on for the first half of it.  The show seems kind of like it’s shaping up to be a twenty-something episode series instead of the standard eleven or twelve episode that would normally be associated with a show in this time slot, although Wikipedia claims the series has eleven episodes.  For some reason though, MAL doesn’t have the episode count listed, so maybe, just maybe, that means a second series/season could come out.  However, if that isn’t the case, and this is indeed an eleven episode series, then they need to pick up the pace a bit.  Hell, the Indian dude hasn’t even really been introduced to the group yet.  All we’ve gotten so far is Yuki slowly starting to form real relationships with people for the first time in his life.

This episode was mainly about Yuki still trying to adjust to Haru and the way he acts around everyone.  Again, it seems odd that his sister would be able to easily converse and socialize with humans in a much, much more normal way than he does.  At least she doesn’t run around acting like she just smoked a truckload of weed the whole time.  Anyway, Yuki finally comes to the realization that he does care about Haru, though it seems it’s because he doesn’t really have anyone else he could actually call his “friend”.  And as impossible to put with as he may be, Haru does seem to be the one person who doesn’t really catch on to Yuki’s epic social awkwardness, which is perhaps what allows him to act so friendly around him.  One thing’s for sure, the planet that Haru’s from has got to be the most badass place ever.  To create a person that happy and carefree, the place has got to be pretty amazing.

The whole “Duck Organization” thing still kind of confuses me, because it doesn’t really seem like they’re doing anything, but then again, it’s not like we know what the hell Haru and his still unnamed sister are trying to do.  I mean, Yuki caught a fish, wasn’t something supposed to happen after that?  Don’t Haru and Flower-Hair need fish in order to fuel their fish-powered space-mushroom back home or something?  What’s the point to all of this, and are they even trying to leave in the first place.  Unfortunately, I think the answers to those questions will come much later than I would hope, since this show doesn’t seem to be moving anywhere fast at all.  For a unique kind of slice-of-life thing it’s still doing very good, but I still want thinks to have a little more direction to them, considering that so much stuff has been set up for the show to actually take advantage of and use.

Tsuritama Episode 3 – Fishing is Srs Bsns

With each episode of this show, it seems my head cocks itself farther and farther to the side in an effort to see if there’s something that I’m missing in all of this.  Right now, everything just seems a little too odd and a little too quirky to understand where all this is going to end up, and that fact that there’s still no concrete story doesn’t help too much.  But at least we (kind of) have all the characters together, and know a little about each of them.  And someone needs to get Haru a muzzle or something, like, right now.

The whole concept of this episode seemed really weird to me too.  Now, I’ve been fishing several times before, and from all the experience I’ve had, under no circumstances have I ever actually needed to cast the lure in a perfectly specific spot.  Even though Natsuki said that it was important to cast where the fish were, you don’t cast right on top of the place where you thing the fucking fish are; you’re supposed to cast the line beyond that point and reel it through where you expect the fish to be, because you have to have time for the lure to sink and begin look like it’s actually a fish, worm, or whatever your lure looks like.  Not only that, but spinning reels are probably the easiest kind of reels to use for actual fishing, at least in my opinion, and getting it to go in the direction you want is fairly simple.  I can’t even imagine what this show would be like if they were using baitcasting reels or something like that.

At the very least, it seemed that things finally did start to get a little more serious in this episode, though the fact that the words “Enoshima bowl” were said about 5,464,327 times kind of got in the way of that.  Akira is part of some secret Indian duck spy service sent to observe Haru, because Haru’s an alien.  Although, it doesn’t really seems like that fact would really be secretive information, seeing as how the first thing he ever said about himself to Yuki’s grandmother was that he was an alien.  And speaking of her, I can’t help but think that thinks aren’t going to go to well for her.  Assuming we apply the law of movie conservation to anime as well, something as specific as her giving Haru the flowers and telling him to take care of them so they won’t die seems bound to show up again somewhere.

And amazingly, even when Yuki’s grandmother is in the hospital with some nondescript potentially life-threatening illness, Haru still finds a way to be an unbelievably annoying jackass.  Honestly, how could any sane person think that someone could be consoled by saying, “It’s okay, your grandmother, who’s essentially your mother right now, is going to bite the dust eventually”.  I would have kicked the shit out that flamboyant motherfucker if he said something like that me, and I’m surprised that Yuki has the ability to just walk away from that blatant disregard for his grandmother’s life.  And even though Yuki made some comment about how Haru can never understand because he’s an alien, I would assume that the potential death of a family member is almost a universal bad among a civilized family.

But I guess that it’s all good, because Haru saves the day by narrating everything that’s happening and pretty much being a device to shove the idea of the episode straight down the viewer’s wind pipe.  I sure hope that he becomes less annoying as the show goes on, or I at least hope that I can get use to him.  Why can’t he just be like his sister?  She seems pretty chill, and wouldn’t it make sense for the less ridiculous of the two aliens to be fraternizing with the local population?