It’s not that often that I write a review and mere hours later, everything I said was *completely* wrong, but Birdie Wing has done it, by golf!

Golf changes *everything* here. It ruins the dreams of young women by leading them to defeat in a single high school doubles tournament, which clearly is the end of the road for any athlete.

Golf brings people together and tears them apart. It kills people (with the help of one of my favorite shoujo troupes, the cruise liner accident – and a love triangle between serious, yet dysfunctional, adults, a la Marmalade Boy.)

But all of this serves a purpose, I swear! If none of this happened, Aoi would pine after Eve and never really find her own golf. It is imperative that our protagonists develop an intense rivalry or they will just going on being a golf manzai partnership, with increasingly extreme reasons to not take their golf seriously at all.

As Steve Jones puts it on ANN, golfing hard is the message here: In Birdie Wing, “Golf becomes the axis on which the world rotates. You can golf hard enough to save your adoptive family. You can golf hard enough to cure amnesia. You can golf hard enough to die.” Surely, our protagonists can golf hard enough to be a happy couple, now that the most obvious twist turns out to be twistier than we thought.

Vipere returns this next week and the Birdie Wing fandom is (un)reasonably excited, as Eve – having helped Aoi win her competition, and unlocked her own memories*, is rewarded by being deported. Of course she is, that’s totally normal for Birdie Wing – and we love it.

Ratings:

Art – 10
Story – 10 
Characters – 10
Service –
Yuri – Now that they aren’t sisters, maybe Aoi might get that kiss. Probably not, though.

Overall – 10

My love for this series is endless.

*Remind me to tell you my theories about Eleanor Burton.

The first “season” of Birdie Wing was an absolute triumph that didn’t so much come to an end, as just stopped. ^_^ And now what was being called the second “season” is more or less a continuation of the first.

In the middle of what might have been a climactic arc in any high school sports story, for Birdie Wing, it was just another stepping stone from one plateau of unreality, to another. What began as a high-tension story about underground mafia golf and corruption morphed effortlessly into a high school sports drama, complete with a rival pair that Aoi and Eve would have to beat before moving on to re-address the cutthroat world of adult golfers and lingering threats. Only this is Birdie Wing, not any other story and when Eve and Aoi finally take on Himekawa Mizuho and Oikawa Kaede…..they are rendered instantly irrelevant by Eve’s orange bullet. Watching Himekawa crushed might have even been a moment of pathos in any other story, but here is a passing note of “yup.” We’ve seen the opening credits – there’s like another dozen people to get through. ^_^

Also, almost as an aside, it is confirmed that Eve and Aoi are half-sisters, but if this came as a surprise to you then wow, were you not paying attention. Why and how are also pretty irrelevant in this series and I don’t think it matters at all how they are related, when Aoi’s primary goal is to get a kiss from Eve and Eve’s primary goal is to eat lot of hamburgers. As this series has established, there are no rules which it will not cheerfully break.

I don’t think I have to exhort anyone reading Okazu to watch Birdie Wing, by now, but let me just remind you to definitely watch Birdie Wing. It is the perfect sports Yuri anime precisely because both sports and Yuri are entirely wack.

Ratings:

Art – 10 Loving shots of unreal golf
Story – 10  Everything is valid when nothing is real
Characters – 10 Delightful and nonsensical
Service – There are things that can be considered service, depending on how much on likes detailed animation of golf strikes
Yuri – Aoi’s desire for a kiss, not much else, but it doesn’t matter much

Overall – 10

This is still the greatest anime I have ever watched.