Aside from “lesbian golf mafia battle”, what do I love so much about Birdie Wing?

It’s really easy to make a sales pitch on the cult sports anime Birdie Wing: just say “lesbian golf mafia” to someone and you’ll probably shock them into curiosity.

But a simple catchphrase is too shallow for a series this good. A season out from Birdie Wing’s first season and my immediate “this is obviously awesome” recommendation, I’m going to try and talk about it in a little more depth.

Perfect shonen, densely packed

Birdie Wing doesn’t come from the pages of a shonen manga magazine, but it follows a lot of the same strictly defined format.

A hero appears! A hero proves her might against an inferior foe. A hero struggles against a noble, superior foe… but finds that extra strength inside— love, friendship, self-discovery— and achieves new power to emerge victorious. A hero enters a tournament. Repeat as necessary.

It’s actually really hard to get that formula right; the timing is vital. If the hero takes care of business too quickly, the viewers won’t feel any impact. Stretch out time for too long— see glacial Toei adaptations like Dragon Ball Z or One Piece— and you’ll bore viewers into a stupor.

Birdie Wing, on the other hand, gets a perfect shonen arc handled— the entire “golf mafia” business— in a mere eight episodes. Big turns come out of the seemingly innocuous events of the early episodes, and pretty soon Eve is fighting for her life against a powerful rival.

Do we know that she’s going to win? Yes. Do we know how? No. Could we guess? Also no. The final battle is a thrill ride with insane twists, big payoffs, and one of the best denouements anime has given me in a while.

If you’re not on board with Birdie Wing after the eighth episode, shonen anime just isn’t your thing.

This is my tone

But I’m not necessarily a shonen battle anime guy. It’s got to have the right tone to really vibe with me, and by that I mean I like this stuff intense, absurd, and sincere.

Birdie Wing does a zoom in all the way to the main character’s blood cells as she yells DIRECT HIT! BLUE BULLET!! The golf mafia has a secret underground self-terraforming arena, worthy of Evangelion, specifically so that it can auto-generate random golf holes for its matches. Politicians get assassinated over golf with rocket-propelled grenades in Birdie Wing. Nobody in the series treats any of this stuff as ridiculous and nobody winks or nods. The characters’ love of golf is entirely earnest.

That’s my tone. That’s where I’m at. By all means, be this melodramatic.

Birdie Wing is surprisingly well-written

With spectacle-driven anime like this we often say “don’t worry, just accept it”. You have to adjust your suspension of belief to accept giant robots, or girls who yell the names of their special golf shots as they swing.

But if you just start pulling anything out of your ass1, the audience is going to stop accepting it. The best shonen (Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, One Piece again) are deeply grounded in their insane worlds, and Birdie Wing is no different.

Taking the Pokémon approach, Birdie Wing presents a world where everybody is obsessed with golf. There’s a golf mafia, as you know, ripping people off with rigged mini-golf for cash in the streets.

But the pro world might be just as shady. Eve breaks out of the underworld only to arrive in a place with its own secrets, and it’s all clearly been though out well in advance.

The most popular guess I’ve seen about where the show is going is definitely wrong, and the second season trailer promises a lot of drama and intrigue. I’m really looking forward to where it takes us.

Birdie Wing gets to the point

I really appreciated the directness with which the show handles its relationships. Generally this kind of series handles romance with kid gloves, in kind of a permanent-adolescence state of unfulfilled longing. Birdie Wing, though, is very frank and matter-of-fact about its various romances.

Eve and Aoi’s flirting, for example, is so loud and obnoxious that everyone notices them, and they’re kind of annoyed. There’s nothing “just gal pals” about it when the two girls are betting kisses on the golf course.2

My favorite couple, though, are the comic relief character Vipere and her favorite mob informant. They’re shown together for maybe two minutes total, but their easy manner and they way they ride off into the sunset… ah, I want that.

It is refreshing to see relationships handled with such directness in anime, particularly this kind. That feeling of adult frankness helps to ground a crazy world.

Birdie Wing loves Gundam

This is a niche case, but it’s also very loud and proud throughout the series. It feels like everyone involved in Birdie Wing just really likes the perennial classic sci-fi anime Mobile Suit Gundam, beyond the steady product placement for Gundam model kits.

Specifically, a lot of Birdie Wing’s subtext is tied to the relationship between early Gundam’s eternal rivals, Char (Eve, the bruiser) and Amuro (Aoi, the technical ace). A few episodes in, we find out that Eve and Aoi were actually trained by characters who are very obvious Char and Amuro surrogates.3

It’s an absolute shock for any Gundam fan when Eve’s golf master walks into the bar and out pours the unmistakable voice of Shuichi Ikeda, Char’s original (and retired!) voice actor. Toru Furuya appears as Aoi’s teacher as well, except, interestingly, he comes off as a bit of a schemer as well.

It’s worth noting that series writer Yosuke Kuroda wrote Gundam 00 and Gundam Build Fighters, itself a Gundam self-tribute. A few characters are actual Gundam fans who pop off lines like “the brass wouldn’t know about it!” and, rather than looking at the camera knowingly, get dejected when nobody else in the room gets it. Now that’s understanding fans!

Birdie Wing is a unique delight

It’s not so much the subject as how you pull it off, and as commenters have noted, Birdie Wing doesn’t even really pay that much attention to golf or its unique appeals. You could adapt this exact story to any sport or competitive endeavor.

It uses golf, as it would have used anything the producers and money-men decided upon, as a springboard to get to the good stuff. And let me tell you, it’s got nothing in it but the good stuff. Enjoy.