The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You Season 2

Episode 18

It's a known quantity that baseball episodes of anime are virtually always good, but why is that? My take is that the sporting situation provides the optimal combination of novel and focal appeal; it's a series presenting an activity outside its usual wheelhouse, with a structure that can showcase all the characters in their roles and as a team. 100 Girlfriends has always excelled at the latter element so taking the GFs out to the ballgame is just one more run added onto its grand slam of episodic efforts. This was always the perfect show to do a Baseball Episode, they just needed to wait until they had enough players to fill out the team.

The trick, as it always is with these episodes, then becomes a matter of seeing how the game will go and how the characters will handle it. Getting the otherwise ineligible players of Hahari, Kurumi, and Meido onto the field is a simple enough matter—I love the anime's swift introduction of the Kaykay Sisters. And as far as actually consequential new characters, I gotta give it up for the opposing team of fierce dinosaur women the girlfriends find themselves facing off against. It's a whole crew of superbly sporty girls with razor-sharp teeth, where's their spin-off so I can watch a hundred episodes of it?

The stated appeal of baseball as a sport and show subject is as a group activity, but this storyline is still ostensibly a focal introduction for Iku. She's the one they're trying to win this big game for, after all, so an arc for her bookends all the base shenanigans. It helps flesh out the structure of the whole story: Iku is naturally the secret weapon on a team of girls that otherwise barely started playing baseball two weeks ago, so she's got to have her powers hobbled somehow so they can't be carried to victory on her sweaty, straining shoulders. It's incited in the form of a tragic baseball backstory wherein she injured someone with her incredible sports prowess. Rough enough on its face, and multiplied when you consider that hurting someone else is probably the greatest feeling of failure for an avowed masochist.

All that is the lead-up to this 100 Girlfriends entry gamely playing at being a "normal" baseball episode, before all hell can gloriously break loose. The amazingly named enemy catcher Velocci Rapko performs a viciously cruel verbal hit job on Shizuka. That precious cinnamon roll must be protected and avenged, and the resulting rally from the Rentaro Family is the kind of game- and show-breaking absurdity that keeps viewers like me coming back week after week. It's outstanding long-form comic timing, as I'd been amused by the antics up to this point, but the imagery of the girls vindictively going Super Saiyan and counterattacking with pissed-off tsundere powers and best-timed booby bunts hit the perfect balance of fist-pumping and gut-busting.

Rallying around defending a family member is the ideal counter to the dino-girls' destructive dalliances. This is always the way of 100 Girlfriends, it's just here it gets to be demonstrated via beating another team to death at baseball. The constructive aspect rounds back to that framing arc for Iku as well, since reassuring her that she is in this together with her polycule of pitching pals is as key as Rentaro himself going out there to be her catcher in even the most intense situations. It's effective relationship advice and multi-entendre metaphor, and it provides the climax of Iku's sheer energy of being the best at baseball shredding off her uniform, delivering fanservice of her hitting a home run in her sports spats. This show gets it, it gets it so hard.

Even by the standards of a series that does nothing halfway, this episode was 100 Girlfriends giving 100%, and I'm crediting it being a baseball episode with a lot of that. It let everyone show off in multiple ways appropriate for the action, including iterating on Iku and her relationship with Rentaro. Way to go planting that one on him at the end of the episode, girl, I'm sure you'll be getting way past first base soon. This episode also provided a perfect review image featuring all the girlfriends together, so instead of the usual round-up, enjoy bonus images of the episode's focal couple in their service-y sports skivvies—special shout-out to Rentaro's leopard-print boxers. The boy has taste.

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The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You Season 2 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll on Sundays.

Chris has watched at least 100 anime, and really really really really really thought most of them were at least okay. You can peruse his thoughts on those and other subjects over on his blog, or see which cartoon girlfriends he's reposting art of over on his BlueSky.