Bucchigiri?!

Episode 8

At last! After what's felt like eons, Bucchigiri?! has finally started pushing its story forward and addressing all the character drama it's spent all season hinting at. Frankly, that should have happened at least two episodes earlier, but after a whole lot of mediocre time-wasting, I won't look this gift horse in the mouth.

The focus is now on Matakara by bringing him into all the nonsense with the magic body-builder genies, and he's a welcome personality. While I don't think being likable automatically makes for a better character, Matakara is simply a far more motivated and active figure to follow. His dogged pursuit of Arajin's attention may be repetitive, but he's at least doing something instead of ping-ponging between other characters at random. His story with his brother is a little under-cooked – with said sibling getting hospitalized entirely off-screen mere hours before he retired from the force was released from juvie, but Matakara himself is sympathetic enough that we can feel for him, even if we wouldn't know his brother from Adam. Because of that, as Shindo manipulates him into making bad choices, we can understand why, and empathize with the pain and confusion he's going through as things spiral out of control.

I'm glad to finally get Matakara and Arajin talking to each other, breaking past Arajin's deflecting to confront their relationship fully. The ensuing argument doesn't go well for either of them, but it does a great job of articulating why Arajin is so important to Matakara, and why our hero has been dead set on avoiding him. Seeing his old friend reminds Arajin of his own cowardice, and all that dogged devotion is a constant flow of salt into a wound that never healed. It gives genuine pathos to Arajin's flaky behavior that works a lot better than reiterating that he wants to get his dick wet, and allows the story's most important characters to have a believable and effective falling-out. At the same time, you can tell just how much Arajin's friendship means to Matakara, and why he's been willing to hold out for so long, and put so much of himself into his quest to be stronger. He needs somebody to look up to, to run after so that he can keep going under all the stress. Yet Arajin is incapable – or at least believes himself to be – of being that person, consumed by the guilt of his own cowardice.

This is the beating heart and personal tragedy the show has needed for a long time and is very much in line with Utsumi's previous originals like Free! and Sk8 the Infinity. My one quibble is that this all comes at the hands of Shindo and the most obvious manipulation possible. Even giving a lot of leeway for Matakara's generous nature, he should know that the guy who tried to destroy both gangs at once is up to something. Still, the drama that stems from that contrivance is organic enough that I can let it slide, especially when I've been begging the show to put its foot on the gas for so long. I still wish we'd gotten here sooner, and fear that it might be too little, too late, but I am going to run with this momentum as far as it'll go right now.

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Bucchigiri?! is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.