Anime and comics about GIRLS! WHO! CLIMB!

[mozaikmage]

As some of you may know, I’ve been getting into rock climbing lately. I’m still not very good at it due to my crippling fear of heights and complete lack of upper body strength, but I’m getting better!

So, what better time to watch Iwa-kakeru: Sport Climbing Girls?

Honestly, I did not watch this show when it aired despite some of my friends talking about it mostly because the vacuum-sealed tank top aesthetic did not appeal to me. And the numerous cleavage shots also did not appeal to me. And then I completely forgot about it for the next five years. But now! I remembered it exists!

And so I watched the first episode and I was not impressed.

We open with a cute little cameo of real-life professional Japanese climber Akiyo Noguchi, who is genuinely super cool and whose youtube video on finger stretches is extremely useful. She does her attempt at the problem and then up next is... Konomi, the protagonist of the show.

We then go back to Konomi’s first year of high school and how she discovers competitive climbing. She was wandering randomly through her school grounds and stumbled on a climbing wall, and is then challenged by Jun, the prodigy first year member of the club who won’t let her join if she’s not serious. Climbing immediately appeals to her because, as a formerly almost-pro puzzle gamer, it’s like solving puzzles in real life! The next day the club upperclassmen help the two of them have a sport-climbing competition, and Konomi just barely loses to Jun, but Jun is impressed enough to let her stay. Which is good for the club because they have a competition the next day!

Fundamentally, I believe it is not a well-constructed first episode, and this is why:

The characters are not introduced to each other and the audience in a memorable way, and the sport is not introduced to the audience and the viewpoint character in a memorable way.

From this first episode, I feel like only Konomi and Jun got any kind of personality, while the upperclassmen are just Upperclassmen (Generic.) Which I’d understand if they were trying to introduce a dozen people at once, but there’s only four people on the team! You can introduce four characters in 22 minutes!

As for Konomi and Jun, Jun is very clearly a girl iteration of The Kageyama Archetype but is also, like, unreasonably harsh. You have three people on the team right now! You can’t really afford to turn newbies away!

What threw me off the most was how immediately good at climbing Konomi was. I’ve seen a lot of types of climbing newbies at the gym since I started, and even the people more naturally advantaged than me (tall, athletic, strategic thinkers) can’t just hop on the wall and move perfectly on their very first day climbing. Even if we accept the premise that Konomi is amazing at route-finding because of her puzzle game expertise, it’s hard for me to buy that she can move her body the way her mind wants it to move right off the bat, even if she did ballet as a kid. Unless she went really, really hard at ballet as a kid, and quit relatively recently... but if she’d been playing video games for all of middle school, there’s no way she wouldn’t have lost some of her strength and mobility.

As a casual go-to-the-bouldering-gym-a-few-times-a-week climber, the lack of explanation of how sport climbing worked was really confusing. I don’t have any experience with that type of lead climbing, and it confused me how Konomi didn’t need anyone to tell her how to clip into the bolts or when to switch over. Why didn’t she ask any questions? Did the harness feel weird to her? What about chalk?!

The speed at which Konomi just starts kicking ass at climbing felt very unrealistic.

The climbing showdown between Konomi and Jun had a sequence of still images with voiceover on top of them that felt very low-budget for a first episode of a new anime. Also. The cleavage shots. I did not care for them. It is not against the rules of climbing for teenagers to wear T-shirts.

There’s a surprising amount of manga about bouldering out there! Rock climbing is fairly popular in Japan. I haven’t read most of it, but I did take a look at the first chapter of Strawberry Canyon and it reminded me of Chihayafuru but with rocks. The Berry Canyon gym sounds a lot more professional and intense than the gym I go to. I would probably be struggling on the Grade 5 wall in there, even if I can flash V3s at my gym now. Seems cute! Still undecided on if I want to spend money to read the whole thing.

But the webcomic I’ve been reading since I started going to the climbing gym is actually a manhwa on webtoon called Deadpoint by MAYORAC, and it rules!

Hoji is okay at rock climbing, but her real special skill is the ability to see other people’s “talent ceiling” – the highest they can go in their field before they fail, an ability she developed after her mother died in a tragic accident. When she unexpectedly befriends climbing prodigy Aseong Chae, the two of them start training together to discover if it might actually be possible to overcome all limitations.

I just love the art- absolutely gorgeous bright colors, dynamic poses, smooth shapes and sleek lines. And the main character gets to wear T-shirts! Hoji’s design is so cute. She is so babey.

I like that she’s competing at a high level but still struggling to send the high-level problems, which makes the comp problems feel legitimately difficult. I also like that her relationship with Aseong Chae is a little toxic and messed up. Adds flavor!

Despite Aseong also being a black-haired sports prodigy, she’s not quite a Kageyama because she’s taking a break from the sport entirely, and is serving more as a coach-mentor type to Hoji than as a rival/deuteragonist. Her true motivations in helping Hoji are still unclear and possibly sinister— she’s really concerned with learning about the “talent ceilings” of her and Hoji’s biggest rivals in the South Korean youth climbing scene, and she’s still thinking about the final hold in that Olympics problem that made her fall. Something’s up, and hopefully, we’ll find out what that is soon enough.