Prince of Stride Episode 08 -Wall

Wall – Chasing, Still So Far Away

Your teammates are thinking, just like you are. You’re not alone.

Overview:

The final part of End of Summer is here and it solidly kicks our kids’ butts.

They’re in the best four along with Saisei but before the matches, there will be a time trial where they’ll compete and be timed. Their opponent is Kakyoin, a previously unranked school. And of course they turn out to be a secret powerhouse. If that’s not bad enough, their coach is Sakurai Joe, Nana’s father, and their star runner is Yagami Tomoe, Riku’s brother.

That oughta end well.

Hint: It doesn’t.

Calm before the storm

Honan gets annihilated in their match. Not only do they lose the match as a whole but also each individual race by a very wide margin. Even Takeru, who’s arguably the fastest out of them, is left in the dust. Even their Relationer is far ahead of Nana. Meanwhile, Tomoe has a mid-run crisis about Kyosuke but he gets over it pretty quick and wins. Later, he seeks Kyosuke out to bid him goodbye, saying that he (Tomoe) thought that they’d all been meant to come together but now realizes that they’ve been walking separate paths instead.

Nana sees her dad, who pretty much abandoned her when she was a child. He’s the ‘father of stride’, lauded as the man who gave the sport the prominence it now has. As far as reunions go, this one is colder than a dead fish but ah well. Life’s like that.

Honan getting their ass kicked

Honan is understandably glum and Riku storms out. His brother issues even get addressed but unfortunately, that comes in the form of him snapping at Takeru that he’s just like Tomoe which I take to mean stride-obsessed. A flashback shows how his brother’s complete superiority over him in stride crushed Riku’s spirit and pretty much sucked all the fun out of it, hence why he quit in middle school. In the present, Tomoe approaches him.

Next episode should be interesting. I’m thinking that they will manage to beat Kakyoin but that’s going to be tough and I’m curious to see how they’ll manage it.

 

Thoughts:

Ouch, Honan.

That was one hell of a loss.

This episode’s rife with interpersonal drama. First, we have Kyosuke and Tomoe, then Nana and Joe and of course Tomoe and Riku. The other members don’t seem to be doing that well either.

It’s obvious that Kyosuke and Tomoe are the pair of players that we see in Nana’s flashback at the beginning of episode 1. That, as well as Tomoe’s repeated attempts to get Kyosuke to run with him, suggests that the two of them plus Heath had a lot of chemistry once. So Tomoe’s excitement to run with them again makes sense but his reaction to their match leaves me confused. From what I can see, it’s either that he’s disappointed by the gulf between their skills or disheartened by Kyosuke’s devotion to his team over the sport. I hope that’ll be explained later on.

Is it just me or does this seem like a lame break-up speech

Nana and her dad is a whole other can of worms. Her mom’s dead and he left her with his grandparents when she was a kid to go to the U.S. It’s clear that they’re not close. Nana didn’t even know what he was doing, for gods’ sake. So he’s got some fucking audacity to just come back and demand that she transfer to where he is after being absent so long. This is a touchy topic for me because when my father treated me like I was insignificant in his life, my reaction was to write him off and shift him from ‘family’ to ‘person with whom I share blood’. Ever since, I’ve been as emotionally invested in him as I am in the pesky spiderweb at the corner of my room.

Parental failure warning

Long story short, I’ve got no patience for inadequate parents and even less for drama associated with it, mostly because stories have an unfortunate tendency to pull the ‘but it’s family!’ card. Spare me.

 

Moving on, Tomoe and Riku remain the most interesting of the lot. They have one mess of a relationship. Riku has an inferiority complex the size of a small mountain and Tomoe seems like he’s an awkward little turtle at communication. Maybe Takeru is like him in more than one way.

That can be interpreted in a lot of ways, Pinky