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Free! 2.0
Free! has a really banal plot: will swimming prodigy Rin make up with his childhood friends? There's only one possible ending to a story like that.
This also left it wide open for a sequel, because sure, why not make another twelve episodes about dreams and friendship and handsome boys who spend 60% of their screentime in skintight swimsuits? It's not like it was the clever plot that made people watch the first season either.
For what it is, I found Free! Eternal Summer to be more enjoyable than its predecessor. Partially because Rin graduated from being kind of annoying and wangsty to being probably one of the best characters of his kind I've seen in ever. But mainly, I think, because the first series really lags until it gets to the halfway point of episode eight and then quickly accelerates towards a genuinely touching finale. The second series hits the ground running and is a fun watch already from the get-go. Storywise, however, it's a lot muddier, because what the hell is even going on here?
Well, it's something like
- What are Haru and Makoto going to be when they grow up?
- But really, it's "can Haru be arsed to follow his potential and become a professional athlete"
- What the hell is New Guy up to? Why is he even there?
- And probably something about how the Iwatobi Swim Club is going to place in tournaments this year
But none of these things are clearly enough stated to be an obvious goal to pursue, and so Eternal Summer just comes across as being about us watching the Iwatobi Swim Club and the Samezuka Swim Club be goofy at each other and ANYWAY DID WE MENTION THE LITTLE MIKOSHIBA BROTHER YET.
What Eternal Summer lacks in story, it tries to make up for with theme: The very title of the series is an oxymoron, because the very definition of a season is that it is a temporal state. The first episode is about Mikoshiba's last day as the captain of the swim club, and it's clear that once summer is over and Cram School Season starts, Rin, Haru and Makoto will likewise leave. Summer is swimming season and when the summer is over, it's back to Real Life where friends inevitably part ways and leave each other behind as they pursue separate dreams. It's just like Honey and Clover! If Honey and Clover thrived on boys getting emotional over swimming in a mixed relay, and not on nostalgia and unrequited love and the cruelties of growing up. And where Honey and Clover dwells in the pain of making the choices that are moving you into an unknown future, Free! Eternal Summer portrays that future as a place of hope and brightness. That is when it bothers talking about it at all, because 90% of the time, it only pays lip service to the themes it purportedly pursues. Its take on graduation angst is more like that of Azumanga Daioh: sure, high school ends and we won't be seeing each other every day any longer, but the purpose of telling this story is all the sillyness that is going on while we wait for that to happen. But unlike Azumanga, Free! always made claims of a plot of sorts - and in Eternal Summer, the difficulties of deciding your future never was more than an occasionally mentioned subplot, and the thing that looked the most like a plot just kind dissolves in the final quarter of the series, instead of builing up to a climax.
So where the first series flounders around before it finds out where it's going, the second series' main emotional core is Mysterious New Guy, and I think it speaks for itself that I kept forgetting his name - he isn't big enough to carry the whole of this story on his shoulders (hahahahaha sorry). Once that mystery is reavealed, the final episodes are left to the frequently mentioned but never really pursued question of what to do when leaving swim club. The first series is saved by a strong climax; the second series starts off at full speed, but then it just kind of peters out and ends on two cute but really predictable episodes of obligatory blah-ness. Seriously "spending five straight minutes reminiscing about everything we did these last twenty-five episodes" kind of blah-ness. It makes for an anticlimatic viewing experience, but not enough to ruin the overall experience: if you made it through the first six episodes of the first series, you'll make it through all thirteen of the second with no problem.
I tried watching Free! three times before I got past the first ten minutes of the first episode, and I still couldn't find it in me to care about the cast and their predictable school club woes and atheltic rivalries until a point where it should've been way too late - I seriously kept forgetting their names until several episodes in, because the story was so meh. High school boy has unsympathetic rival, high school club has member woes, high school kids are stupid. The fact is that everything in the story goes back to Rin, and you can't really appreciate anything until you understand his drama, and how this drama has affected more people than just Rin himself. At the point where that unravels, THAT is when the story becomes beautiful. Unfortunately, this also has the effect that everything that happens before this is pretty much just cutesy comedy. Not that there's anything wrong with cutesy comedy, but it tends to be forgettable. Free!, until the point where Rin starts falling apart, is forgettable, because the boys are cute and they are funny, but there's no conflict to make them interesting. There's this, and that's pretty much all there is to them until the problems suddenly are for real. So where the first series is all kinds of blah early on, the second gets away with it because we (or at least I) already know that there's more to these kids than their shenanigans and the camera's interest in their well-sculpted thighs would suggest.
But when the second series also is well past the halfway point before it starts being something more than cute, I start to wonder just what story remained to be told about them. I mentioned it above, but it bears repeating: a lot of the satisfaction I got from watching the second season, was that of seeing Rin be happy and capable of seeing the world for something else than his own teenage angst. And having watched the two series back-to-back, I suspect that Free! Eternal Summer would have been a better story if the Samezuka team were the main characters. With the Rin business resolved, the Iwatobi Swim Club doesn't really have any problems with consequences to deal with, but dear Lord does the Samezuka lot have them. From Rin and his ambition, to New Guy and his thing, to Nitori and his never-being-good-enough, and I bet they could've made something about Momo too if they wanted to. Meanwhile, at Iwatobi: Nagisa's parents think swimming is ruining his grades.
I went over to youtube to watch clips of the Samezuka team, and the best I found of them together was a collection of Best Of Momo. So I watched clips about the Samezuka team dealing with Momo at his Momoest, and then I gradually started moving onto clips about Iwatobi that was linked from them. It felt like I had just discovered the comedy sidekicks.
If the first series was about saving Rin, then the sequel in the end turns out to be about saving Haru. However, there is an ocean of difference between what Rin is doing to himself and what Haru is doing to himself, and while the Haru thing IS big and IS relevant, Haru is a character that badly communicates the conflict and the writing doesn't ever get around to making it IMPORTANT for more than a couple of episodes. Mysterious Guy, who initially seems to be the plot, turns out to be obviously slotted to be a foil to Haru - but they don't ever make a point out of that except that he exists. There was obviously a choice to be made about telling a compelling story and making Free! 2.0, and they chose the latter.
WHICH IS NOT TO SAY THAT IT WAS THE WRONG ONE. I really do think that in order for Free! Eternal Summer to have been coherent storytelling instead of fluff, it would either have had to be the story about the Samezuka team, or it would have had to be Honey and Clover. In either case, they'd probably lose audience unwilling to accept the change in focus and/or tone. And for a series about dreams and friendship and handsome boys who spend 60% of their screentime in skintight swimsuits, Free! Eternal Summer is in no way BAD at what it's doing. It is a series whose main mission is to be cute fanservice fodder, and it does that job perfectly. It just fails to live up to the pace set by the finale of its predecessor.
Where I could summarise my feelings about the first series in three paragraphs, the length of this piece probably gives it away: there's a lot more feelings about this one. Despite the above harping about the lacking drive to the story, I really did enjoy its fluff, a lot, and I think that can be credited to the athmosphere of this show. It's fairly light-hearted, it's funny without being utterly ridiculous, it's got drama but it never descends into lengthy sessions of angst; if someone fucks up, there's someone else there to catch them. In the words of someone on tumblr: Free! is a show full of Isumis and Wayas. For a story where the only romance is some secondary character being smitten with a girl, and where family members are conspicuously absent, there is a lot of love going around here. Free! isn't about swimming; it's about being on a team, and it's about the lengths that team is willing to go for your sake when you fall on your face. It's like a twenty-something episode hug. (notice that their list too starts at episode 6, further proving my point about the uselessness of the first half of the first season)
I mentioned Honey and Clover and Azumanga Daioh, both of which have preciously little in common with Free! except they all touch onto the topic of friendships surviving distances in time and space. My familiarity with sports anime is pretty much limited to Free! and to Hikaru no Go, and Hikaru no Go IS a much better comparison here, particularly since the second series of Free! graduates from fixing the past to creating the future. Hikago has the same drama about being in a school club, the same fretting about tournaments, the same angst about the things you leave behind when you choose to pursue a talent, the same weird obsession with finding your One True Rival. Also, Go-playing ghosts and creepy guys in white suits and the international professional scene and yeeeeaah it's a lot, lot bigger than Free! and three times its length. It's also more than a decade old and looks kind of crap even by the standard of the time, while Free! has always been really sleek. I don't think my making this mention is going to convince anyone, but I'm incapable of passing by any opportunity to advertise Hikago. If you're really into the story of Free! Eternal Summer and think the things it tries to do is more intersting than what the first season did, then you'll find the same topics pursued a lot deeper in an old Shounen Jump manga about middle schoolers playing a board game.
and you'll know how incredibly precious the "Isumis and Wayas" description is
This also left it wide open for a sequel, because sure, why not make another twelve episodes about dreams and friendship and handsome boys who spend 60% of their screentime in skintight swimsuits? It's not like it was the clever plot that made people watch the first season either.
For what it is, I found Free! Eternal Summer to be more enjoyable than its predecessor. Partially because Rin graduated from being kind of annoying and wangsty to being probably one of the best characters of his kind I've seen in ever. But mainly, I think, because the first series really lags until it gets to the halfway point of episode eight and then quickly accelerates towards a genuinely touching finale. The second series hits the ground running and is a fun watch already from the get-go. Storywise, however, it's a lot muddier, because what the hell is even going on here?
Well, it's something like
- What are Haru and Makoto going to be when they grow up?
- But really, it's "can Haru be arsed to follow his potential and become a professional athlete"
- What the hell is New Guy up to? Why is he even there?
- And probably something about how the Iwatobi Swim Club is going to place in tournaments this year
But none of these things are clearly enough stated to be an obvious goal to pursue, and so Eternal Summer just comes across as being about us watching the Iwatobi Swim Club and the Samezuka Swim Club be goofy at each other and ANYWAY DID WE MENTION THE LITTLE MIKOSHIBA BROTHER YET.
What Eternal Summer lacks in story, it tries to make up for with theme: The very title of the series is an oxymoron, because the very definition of a season is that it is a temporal state. The first episode is about Mikoshiba's last day as the captain of the swim club, and it's clear that once summer is over and Cram School Season starts, Rin, Haru and Makoto will likewise leave. Summer is swimming season and when the summer is over, it's back to Real Life where friends inevitably part ways and leave each other behind as they pursue separate dreams. It's just like Honey and Clover! If Honey and Clover thrived on boys getting emotional over swimming in a mixed relay, and not on nostalgia and unrequited love and the cruelties of growing up. And where Honey and Clover dwells in the pain of making the choices that are moving you into an unknown future, Free! Eternal Summer portrays that future as a place of hope and brightness. That is when it bothers talking about it at all, because 90% of the time, it only pays lip service to the themes it purportedly pursues. Its take on graduation angst is more like that of Azumanga Daioh: sure, high school ends and we won't be seeing each other every day any longer, but the purpose of telling this story is all the sillyness that is going on while we wait for that to happen. But unlike Azumanga, Free! always made claims of a plot of sorts - and in Eternal Summer, the difficulties of deciding your future never was more than an occasionally mentioned subplot, and the thing that looked the most like a plot just kind dissolves in the final quarter of the series, instead of builing up to a climax.
So where the first series flounders around before it finds out where it's going, the second series' main emotional core is Mysterious New Guy, and I think it speaks for itself that I kept forgetting his name - he isn't big enough to carry the whole of this story on his shoulders (hahahahaha sorry). Once that mystery is reavealed, the final episodes are left to the frequently mentioned but never really pursued question of what to do when leaving swim club. The first series is saved by a strong climax; the second series starts off at full speed, but then it just kind of peters out and ends on two cute but really predictable episodes of obligatory blah-ness. Seriously "spending five straight minutes reminiscing about everything we did these last twenty-five episodes" kind of blah-ness. It makes for an anticlimatic viewing experience, but not enough to ruin the overall experience: if you made it through the first six episodes of the first series, you'll make it through all thirteen of the second with no problem.
I tried watching Free! three times before I got past the first ten minutes of the first episode, and I still couldn't find it in me to care about the cast and their predictable school club woes and atheltic rivalries until a point where it should've been way too late - I seriously kept forgetting their names until several episodes in, because the story was so meh. High school boy has unsympathetic rival, high school club has member woes, high school kids are stupid. The fact is that everything in the story goes back to Rin, and you can't really appreciate anything until you understand his drama, and how this drama has affected more people than just Rin himself. At the point where that unravels, THAT is when the story becomes beautiful. Unfortunately, this also has the effect that everything that happens before this is pretty much just cutesy comedy. Not that there's anything wrong with cutesy comedy, but it tends to be forgettable. Free!, until the point where Rin starts falling apart, is forgettable, because the boys are cute and they are funny, but there's no conflict to make them interesting. There's this, and that's pretty much all there is to them until the problems suddenly are for real. So where the first series is all kinds of blah early on, the second gets away with it because we (or at least I) already know that there's more to these kids than their shenanigans and the camera's interest in their well-sculpted thighs would suggest.
But when the second series also is well past the halfway point before it starts being something more than cute, I start to wonder just what story remained to be told about them. I mentioned it above, but it bears repeating: a lot of the satisfaction I got from watching the second season, was that of seeing Rin be happy and capable of seeing the world for something else than his own teenage angst. And having watched the two series back-to-back, I suspect that Free! Eternal Summer would have been a better story if the Samezuka team were the main characters. With the Rin business resolved, the Iwatobi Swim Club doesn't really have any problems with consequences to deal with, but dear Lord does the Samezuka lot have them. From Rin and his ambition, to New Guy and his thing, to Nitori and his never-being-good-enough, and I bet they could've made something about Momo too if they wanted to. Meanwhile, at Iwatobi: Nagisa's parents think swimming is ruining his grades.
I went over to youtube to watch clips of the Samezuka team, and the best I found of them together was a collection of Best Of Momo. So I watched clips about the Samezuka team dealing with Momo at his Momoest, and then I gradually started moving onto clips about Iwatobi that was linked from them. It felt like I had just discovered the comedy sidekicks.
If the first series was about saving Rin, then the sequel in the end turns out to be about saving Haru. However, there is an ocean of difference between what Rin is doing to himself and what Haru is doing to himself, and while the Haru thing IS big and IS relevant, Haru is a character that badly communicates the conflict and the writing doesn't ever get around to making it IMPORTANT for more than a couple of episodes. Mysterious Guy, who initially seems to be the plot, turns out to be obviously slotted to be a foil to Haru - but they don't ever make a point out of that except that he exists. There was obviously a choice to be made about telling a compelling story and making Free! 2.0, and they chose the latter.
WHICH IS NOT TO SAY THAT IT WAS THE WRONG ONE. I really do think that in order for Free! Eternal Summer to have been coherent storytelling instead of fluff, it would either have had to be the story about the Samezuka team, or it would have had to be Honey and Clover. In either case, they'd probably lose audience unwilling to accept the change in focus and/or tone. And for a series about dreams and friendship and handsome boys who spend 60% of their screentime in skintight swimsuits, Free! Eternal Summer is in no way BAD at what it's doing. It is a series whose main mission is to be cute fanservice fodder, and it does that job perfectly. It just fails to live up to the pace set by the finale of its predecessor.
Where I could summarise my feelings about the first series in three paragraphs, the length of this piece probably gives it away: there's a lot more feelings about this one. Despite the above harping about the lacking drive to the story, I really did enjoy its fluff, a lot, and I think that can be credited to the athmosphere of this show. It's fairly light-hearted, it's funny without being utterly ridiculous, it's got drama but it never descends into lengthy sessions of angst; if someone fucks up, there's someone else there to catch them. In the words of someone on tumblr: Free! is a show full of Isumis and Wayas. For a story where the only romance is some secondary character being smitten with a girl, and where family members are conspicuously absent, there is a lot of love going around here. Free! isn't about swimming; it's about being on a team, and it's about the lengths that team is willing to go for your sake when you fall on your face. It's like a twenty-something episode hug. (notice that their list too starts at episode 6, further proving my point about the uselessness of the first half of the first season)
I mentioned Honey and Clover and Azumanga Daioh, both of which have preciously little in common with Free! except they all touch onto the topic of friendships surviving distances in time and space. My familiarity with sports anime is pretty much limited to Free! and to Hikaru no Go, and Hikaru no Go IS a much better comparison here, particularly since the second series of Free! graduates from fixing the past to creating the future. Hikago has the same drama about being in a school club, the same fretting about tournaments, the same angst about the things you leave behind when you choose to pursue a talent, the same weird obsession with finding your One True Rival. Also, Go-playing ghosts and creepy guys in white suits and the international professional scene and yeeeeaah it's a lot, lot bigger than Free! and three times its length. It's also more than a decade old and looks kind of crap even by the standard of the time, while Free! has always been really sleek. I don't think my making this mention is going to convince anyone, but I'm incapable of passing by any opportunity to advertise Hikago. If you're really into the story of Free! Eternal Summer and think the things it tries to do is more intersting than what the first season did, then you'll find the same topics pursued a lot deeper in an old Shounen Jump manga about middle schoolers playing a board game.
and you'll know how incredibly precious the "Isumis and Wayas" description is