#also still need to watch kemonozume and the tatami galaxy on the yuasa front

[canmom]

Since you're anisports posting, can you share your thoughts about Yuasa's Ping pong ?

the very short answer is man I really gotta watch more of Ping-Pong! so far I've only seen the first episode, but it was pretty interesting in terms of character dynamics. I hear the animation is really creative later on - I mean go figure, it's a Yuasa project - so I really gotta watch more. (I am actually really bad at getting round to watching stuff outside the context of the movie night... hell I'm like 7 episodes behind dunmeshi right now.)

so, from memory then... what I did find striking in the first episode is this theme of like, elitism and international rivalry. the story begins with a Chinese player coming to Japan and finding himself contemptuous of how shitty the Japanese players are in this pathetic backwater where nobody is good at ping-pong. and being good or bad at ping-pong is a big deal for these characters.

'China is much better at ping-pong' is not a concept I'd really been exposed to before that! (I absolutely could not tell you what countries are supposed to be good at ping-pong.) but it does resonate with a certain broader recurring theme you occasionally see of like... whether Japanese (xyz) can hope to stack up against the mighty (xyz)-doers of whatever other country. whether that's playing ping-pong or building fighter planes (a sentiment you see motivating the characters in The Wind Rises).

and that makes me think about odd places I've seen that sorta nationalist underdog sentiment crop up, not just in Japan. whether Chinese social media critics writing scathingly about guómàn out of a perceived need to rise to the level of Japanese and American animation, or Japanese game developers taking to heart the cruel sentiments expressed about Japanese games by other developers during the 2010s and talking about wanting to make Japanese RPGs (for example) compare with Western ones. maybe even the South Korean government going all in on supporting a fraudulent geneticist out of a feeling that the country had to prove itself scientifically.

these examples are all from Asian countries but I definitely don't think this is something that only happens in Asia lol. that said, it's kind of a contrast to the general attitude in my country, where nationalist sentiment more often looks like empire-nostalgia or blithely presuming superiority. people don't so often seem to feel like we collectively have something to prove. maybe there's a sense of embarassment when the UK loses the football [soccer] again, since that one's supposed to be our thing. it was kinda darkly funny when the womens' team actually did win the football, and suddenly people cared about womens' football.

I don't really have much of a thesis on that though, I'm just running along a tangent here. I'll have more interesting things to say about the sports, and the boys that play the sports, when I give Ping-Pong a proper watch through.