Pon. Why doesn’t this school have a girls’ soccer team in the first place? Clearly there are girls there. Do they just not care? Do they want these assholes from Halloween Town to be able to create despair monsters whenever they feel like it?
Oto. I guess none of them wanted to play soccer.
Pon. That’s clearly not the case. Did anyone even ask them?
Oto. That was a terrible monster, by the way. I give it 3/10 for design. So bad. It’s a soccer monster. Why didn’t it primarily use its legs?
Pon. Why do you have to bring your super sentai snobbery in here?
Oto. This isn’t about super sentai. It’s about proper monster design. It was a soccer ball in black spandex. I expect that out of something like super sentai where they are working on a budget to make costumes for real people, but this is anime. You can do whatever the fuck you want.
Pon. Are you saying, like, whereas the flower magic has consistent metaphors, the monster in this one wasn’t consistent with its metaphors? You want the soccer metaphor to be fully borne out.
Oto. Uhh … yeah! I mean, pretty much. It’s just that, why would a soccer ball monster go around punching people? It’s not a boxing glove monster.
Pon. I guess that’s fair.
Oto. I’m glad Tuxedo Mask didn’t make an appearance.
Pon. He was there in the beginning.
Oto. I mean, he does not appear to be needed to save the girls in EVERY FUCKING EPISODE!
Pon. Something we have to mention eventually is, obviously this show is super gendered. It doesn’t need to be unpacked because it isn’t packed to begin with. It’s all on the surface, like a pink-ass coloring book with FOR GIRLS in the title. But one consequence of that is, stuff like this thing where a girl can’t join the soccer team seems really goofy in a post-Utena world. We already saw Utena dunking on assholes because she was just better than all of them, which, I guess Utena makes a point there about double standards, about women having to be better than men to achieve the same adulation, but you know what I mean. Haven’t these 13-year-old cartoon boys seen Utena?
Bros Before Shows 