Medalist
Episode 9
by Jairus Taylor,
How would you rate episode 9 of
Medalist ?
Community score: 4.2
Inori's performance goes well enough to elevate her to first place, but aside from her injury, she also has Ema's score to worry about. We learned from Yudai last week that Ema's been suffering from growing pains that have made skating more difficult, but as Ema starts her performance, we get a clearer picture of how that's affected her. The strain her height has caused on her body has kept Ema at Level One for years, and the gap got large enough that Yudai was pressured to pull Ema out of their skating school altogether. However, seeing how determined Ema has been to stick with skating motivated Yudai to keep working with her, and the two of them see this competition as an opportunity to demonstrate all the hard work she's put in.
Ema's story feels very similar to Inori's, so it's not too shocking when Ema manages to snatch first place by pulling off more difficult jumps than Inori can currently manage. The animation does a good job of showcasing how much skill is going into her performance. Given that Inori was both injured and knocked down to second place, it would be easy for the story to zero in on her loss. Still, it takes time to let Ema take in her victory, and since we've seen that she's just as deserving of victory as Inori is, it's hard not to feel happy for her.
That's not to say that Inori and Tsukasa have taken nothing away from all this. While they may not have gotten a gold medal, they do take away a couple of key lessons. For Tsukasa's part, he realizes that he needs to do more as a coach to keep Inori from straining herself and recommends that Inori spend the next few months focusing on recovery. Given how much a lot of similar sports narratives tend to lionize athletes powering through injuries in pursuit of their goals, I was expecting to see Inori protest this or insist on a workaround, but I was pleasantly surprised to see her take the advice seriously, and it's a good sign of how much she's grown. Before all this, it would have been pretty easy to imagine Inori fretting about wanting to keep up, but rather than just seeing Ema's performance as a demonstration of how big the skill gap is between them, she also sees how hard Ema must have worked to pull it off. Thanks to that Inori's realized that she's far from the only skater who's had to struggle to get where they are, and has accepted that there's no closing the gap between herself and skaters who have done this for much longer. Instead, she realizes that the best she can do is simply focus on improving herself, and it's a surprisingly healthy mindset to see from this kind of sports show. As easy as it is to get behind an underdog story, and revel in someone overcoming skilled competitors through hard work and determination, it does make it easy to forget the reality that a lot of those same competitors have also likely worked just as hard to get where they are, and are no less deserving of a shot at victory. Equally refreshing, is that rather than fixating on Inori placing second as a point of failure, Tsukasa and Inori's mother take the time to celebrate her achievement, and congratulate her on her silver medal. Considering where she started, this is still a victory, and it helps drive her to try and do even better. Inori and Tsukasa may not have gotten the victory they wanted, but they did get the experience they needed to grow, and it's great to see that framed as a positive.
Rating:
Medalist is currently streaming on Hulu.
Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. One or more of the companies mentioned in this article are part of the Kadokawa Group of Companies.
discuss this in the forum (66 posts) |
back to Medalist
Episode Review homepage / archives