#GIVE US THE GOLF LESBIANS BAMCO

[regallibellbright]

Welp, it’s been a few weeks, brain says it’s time to talk about Birdie Wing again! Today, I want us all to take a moment to think about the ending sequence. Which I have listened to quite a lot, it’s a lovely song, if a bit of an odd choice for a show as unabashedly camp as Birdie Wing. (For those who aren’t aware, it’d be Tsukuyomi and Yurrycanon’s Nightjar. Heads up, I’d be willing to class the first verse as “kind of suicidal ideation”, though the full song is at least somewhat less heavily depressed.) The ending, for reference!

I don’t have it in me to describe the entire video, but its opening visual shows mannequins in a golf store window, dressed in very marketable golf apparel, with wigs making them resemble our protagonists, Eve and Aoi. In the shots later where we see Eve and Aoi, they’re dressed in these same outfits. The tension of the verse builds until exploding into a burst of feathers at the chorus, cutting to images of birds flying through the sky playing over the silhouettes of Eve and Aoi, lying in opposite directions so that their heads are next to each other, nearly touching. The ending closes on a shot of Eve’s golf ball on the green, showing the pink wing mark on her balls, morphing into a bird flying in front of the full moon, shining above a sea.

The chorus has different lyrics both times it appears in the full song. Given the bird imagery, you’d expect they’d be using the version of the chorus that gives the song its title, talking directly about a bird flying freely in the sky.

It actually uses the second rendition of the chorus, the one that goes “If I’d never met you, I’d have lived in a cage deceiving the world.” (Translation courtesy of the official music video’s English captions.)

This can apply to Eve as well as Aoi, of course - she was adrift in the world and just getting by supporting her adoptive family before she encountered Aoi, who showed her what playing golf could really be like. But between the mannequin imagery and the lyrics, I tend to read this one as more about Aoi and the expectations of her mother and grandparents for her to be a perfect golf princess so that she can be a vehicle for marketing their products. Meeting Eve, who defies every convention of the game of golf, respects no authority whatsoever save “whether or not you can kick her ass at golf,” is generally brash, aggressive, and unmarketable, and also is the first person to match Aoi in golf skills and histrionics opens her eyes to a whole new world of what golf can be. That world includes getting a bogey because you hit your ball directly into a tree branch, sure, but it ALSO includes the very next day managing to hit your ball into the same exact spot where that tree branch was so that you can bypass the entire trap of the hole and go straight for the win. Eve is ridiculous and we love that for her. And seeing this inspires Aoi to go off-script and behave in ways that aren’t designed to be perfectly palatable and marketable, breaking free of her cage.

What I’m saying is, if the show DOES pull the rug out from under us and reveal they’re sisters, it’s obviously going to weaken the story because then Athena just has TWO golf prodigies to try and market as they resist these attempts (newcomer Eve being even less agreeable than Aoi), but also the ending sequence is contextually gay as hell and if it gets walked back they are cowards.