Keijo!!!!!!!!

Episode 7

If you're looking for fun anime quotes from the Fall 2016 season, you don't need to look further than Keijo!!!!!!!!. It's really hard to beat the absurdity of lines like “you must take your butt to the absolute limit,” which are said with an absolutely straight face and serious intent. Of course, this is coming from a series where almost half of one episode is devoted to figuring out how to wrench turnips from the ground using only your hips and butt.

That's the big training challenge put before Nozomi this time around. Other anime series have had their own peculiar training methods (the Dragon Ball franchise immediately springs to mind), but tying a rope between your waist and the stem of a turnip and using your butt motion to wrench a ripe turnip out of the ground intact is pretty high up on the list of weird schemes. Like just about everything else in the series, there is a perverse sort of logic to it, as the technique is actually based (to some degree) on physics principles. Nozomi's motivation to perfect this technique also takes an amusing twist: she'll be stuck eating all the turnips she breaks on her failures.

All of this happens because the series wastes no time in getting to the bottom of what Kyoko told Nozomi last episode. It looks like my speculation that her attacks were too predictable was right, but I underestimated the reason why. Apparently, muscling up for the Vacuum Butt Cannon has also slowed Nozomi's butt down, a principle that frequently comes into play in actual pro sports like American football. Finding out that Nozomi was hardly the only one to get whupped by Kyoko is also a little satisfying, as Kyoko conspiratorially mentions to the instructors that Nozomi has particular potential. That leads to the other peculiar training method: walking upstream in midriff-deep water holding your hands behind your head. I can see how that could be fairly effective muscle training for the lower body, and learning how to not fight the current could help develop moves appropriate to the sport, but there's also the amusing twist of using one's chest to knock debris out of the way. What valuable lesson did Nozomi learn from that? We'll have to wait and see, I guess.

More conventional fanservice is on the rise in this episode, both with Nozomi asking Sayaka to examine her naked body without providing any context and with an extended locker scene where Sayaka experiments with the same kind of training suit that Nozomi wore. (The more modestly-built Sayaka apparently has high hopes that it will make her chest look bigger like it does for the other girls.) Neither of these scenes would qualify as overly exploitative by current fanservice standards, though they're still a little beyond what the series typically indulges in. The technical merits are holding up just fine too.

For all of the training-related content, the most important revelation this episode is actually about the East-West War, an upcoming challenge match between the country's two Keijo schools, who are apparently strong (and possibly bitter?) rivals. The preview indicates that Nozomi and crew will encounter their rivals next episode, which I'm guessing will set in motion a plot arc for the remainder of the season. Although this is also something of a sports and shonen action cliché, getting past the training and into new rounds of matches is a necessary step, and it's at least heartening to see that the series isn't letting itself get bogged down by these training sequences.

Rating: B

Keijo!!!!!!!! is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.