"I showed you my 48-inch shaft please respond." - Hayley
Amuro x Sayla is a romantic pairing which has cast an odd shadow over popular culture. On paper it makes perfect sense: Amuro moves on from any tension with his childhood friend Fraw Bow in favour of a woman with closer ties to his new role as a pilot. Sayla's the younger sister of his nemesis Char for additional tension. Perhaps at some point it was even on the cards to be explored in Zeta Gundam. Fate works in mysterious ways sometimes; You Inoue was in Africa during that show's production and so Amuro hooked up with another blonde woman. It ultimately led to the much sadder perspective through both Zeta and Char's Counterattack; Amuro Ray winds up a man incapable of serious relationship commitments who drifts from hookup to hookup based on what can go in tandem with his workaholism until he dies in his mid-30s. Still, the spectre remains for those willing to write fanfiction: what could Amuro x Sayla lead to?
Turns out it leads to star-crossed lovers making a trans lesbian daughter who contracts a case of Golf Cancer.
Birdie Wing ~ Golf Girls' Story is a Gundam entry. This is not because it is produced by Namco Bandai filmworks. It is not because Lily has a full set of the original ∀ Gundam model kits (both a signifier of great taste and an inability to afford the latest Strike reprints). It has nothing to do with Shuichi Ikeda and Toru Furya's stunt casting or Aoi Amawashi's Hi-ν Gundam coloured golf clubs. Not even the Newtype-adjacent "In The Zone" makes this Gundam. No, what makes this Gundam is how ultimately this is a show about a previous generation aiming to force the current into specific pigeon-holed roles only for them to defiantly break free into their own people. Nobody's staring at the camera and screaming about adults in that Yoshiyuki Tomino style but the same sentiment is burning beneath everyone's skin.
It doesn't matter if you're watching Remember the Titans, Girls und Panzer, The Mighty Ducks, Chihayafuru, Crackerjack or Keijo!!!!!!!! Hip Whip Girl; fiction about sport can on average only tell a single story. That is the story of plucky working class underdogs who compete out of love for a sport who take on wealthier, snobbier elites. There might be an old rec centre or orphanage or school to save in the process, but the core idea is pretty much always the same. It takes truly inspired writers to deviate successfully. Ashita no Joe is a tragedy about how the economics and management of combat sports are used to crush competitors' souls as much as their bodies. Rocky is a tale of working class survival whose sequels transform into anxieties from unexpected success. Uma Musume Season 2 is a piece on how the higher the level athletes compete at, the greater and more frequent their failures. Each failure takes a greater and greater toll on your body. Yet, to risk your body in the name of failure is an act which spits death in the face and proves even just for a moment that you are truly alive. Much worse writers deviate from the ur-sports narrative by simply making the lead characters as privileged as their opponents. This leads to series like Kuroko's Basketball, a deeply evil work once you stop giggling at that "laser beams are just the '92 Bulls" tumblr post. Please just read or watch Slam Dunk! instead. It's unreal just how much better it is.
Golf is a sport for the wealthy. It may offer open tournaments but there are enormous accessibility issues. The equipment is expensive, club memberships are required to consistently train in locations, the courses themselves require absurd maintenance and enough herbicides to render the land poisonous for years after one is left to go fallow. Even traveling to good courses often requires owning your own vehicle or enough money to hire transport. How then can the ur-sports narrative allow a plucky working class girl to even enter competition?
Why, through winning a fortune in secret underground Mafia Death Golf of course!
The initial stretch of Birdie Wing ~ Golf Girls' Story episodes are an absolute riot. Our hero Evangeline Burton's metaphorical golf bullets are quickly eclipsed in ridiculousness by prosthetic-enhanced swings, distractions from a stinky pussy and stakes are escalated by a politician taking an RPG-7 grenade to the face. A golf cartoon for cowards would never think to do something this absurd; let alone have the gall to then de-escalate back to high school golf competitions where the only power someone showcases is "ADHD hyperfocus". It's oddly satisfying when towards the end of the show's run the mafia death golf returns, only for Eve to effortlessly blow through the nonsense because she's grown so far past it in pursuit of combining her old bullets with a swing so gay it creates exploding rainbow wakes after the ball.
The rainbow's not a metaphor; it's established in-universe as literally happening. Whether Aoi Amawashi's phoenix-like swings make an actually audible scream is more ambiguous.
A great sports show has a fully endearing cast and everyone plays their part well here. Our various rivals and antagonists are all perfectly compelling. The first standout is Vipere, the smelly pussy wielder mentioned earlier. Not just the joy of seeing a character with a ridiculously evil-coded face and demeanour switch sides after one match, but when her boyfriend declares his love he does so with a campy line read worthy of Overman King Gainer. Yukari Tamura and Kobayashi Yu play the role of final high school opponents before retiring to watch the rest of the show from their couch. Like the other school-based opponents this is initially from their school club room but the final episodes are set 18 months later and they've graduated. This results in the couple just sitting on the couch in the gay little house they've clearly moved into after marrying. If you were wondering which Gundam couple Hayley and I map to, it's these two. Yes, Nanoha still holds a place in my heart after all these years and disappointments.
There's one other key condition to make this a Gundam show: mismanagement by Bandai Namco. Much like The Witch From Mercury this is 26 episodes split across two seasons. Much like The Witch From Mercury it was clearly intending to run for at least 13 more episodes. The mismanagement even resulted in the two shows' second halves airing in the same broadcast season making for what history may remember as the gayest time to ever watch Gundam live. The ending feels horribly rushed as a result, with all tension effectively removed. Even watching our girls' bodies collapse from striving too hard too quickly feels a little cheap. It's all the cheaper when we only have two minutes to reveal that they're all fine now. Eve spent a few years barred from the sport so she trained her body more cautiously instead. Aoi's golf cancer is cured off screen and they get their happy ending as the T4C golf power couple the entire runtime's been teasing. It's all so rushed that it kind of kills any interest in seeing a followup. This show's got some half decent character drama around the time Eve cures her amnesia by playing golf super good (I'm not bothering with a plot synopsis for a golf anime) so we know the missing beats would have been quite compelling television. Instead, the ride ends and we feel like we paid a carny a little too much for the privilege to do so.
As odd as it sounds to say for an extremely queer coded sports anime from only 2022, but I think with works like Uma Musume Cinderella Grey we may have already surpassed what this show did. The future is bright indeed.
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