Hakata Tonkotsu Ramens

[type_wild]

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Banba Zenji is a private eye in Hakata, the city where 3% of the population are hitmen. One of the 3% is Lin Xianming, and yes, he's wearing women's clothing because he thinks it's cute. And at one point, makes this face:



Being on strike in a typically non-unionized trade means camping out on the target's couch in order to chase off any other hitmen sent after him, and so begins Hakata Tonkotsu Ramens, an anime about a baseball team of that very name, where the members are people who either do or at least support the carrying out pay-for-justice. Specifically, it is about the partnership of Banba and Lin, and their satelite crew that will provide your convenient bit of information, a passable-looking decapitated body, a well-timed smartphone theft.

Yeah, it's not clever, and I guess it's not trying to be either. It's hyper-violent in nature but rarely gets gorier than your expected spurts of blood as someone gets cut; as I pointed out some weeks ago, the topic is one which should be about people who are either severly damaged of emotionally stumped, but the cast of this anime goes about it as if killing someone is a vocation of no larger consequence than working at a konbini (seriously, Saito). People who have watched more anime than I have, have compared HTR to other titles it doesn't live up to. What instantly strikes me is Weiß Kreuz, at least in this particular angle: there's an extreme amount of violence being dished out by the main characters every episode, yet it's never the violence that causes anguish. Weiß Kreuz is an exercise in shoujo manpain; HTR in a absurdly shounen-ish lecture about accepting that you're part of the team now and need to let yourself rely on your friends.

I don't really have a lot to say about this one because I feel like there ultimately isn't much to say. It's based on a series of light novels that is still ongoing, and it rather shows in that the overarching plot... pretty much isn't there. After the initial setup is set up, there's a brief mid-point going into the past of one of the regulars, until we end it with a barely longer arch which goes into Lin's backstory. We're left with a number of questions that aren't explicitly asked even though it feels like they should be (why does Banba take Lin in, why does That Police Guy work with known hitmen, how did the Niwaka Samurai become the Niwaka Samurai, why is Submarine Ninja even around?). And so HTR ends up as just another okay-ish anime that's fun enough if not-too-violent violence and damaged people learning to open up a little is your kinda thing, and utterly forgettable outside of that. Watching it again for fanfic reasons, I enjoyed it more than I did the first time around - for whatever that would be worth.

Potentiall of interest to some, I assume, is that Hakata Tonkotsu Ramens is oddly gay. As in, there is no less than two men on the baseball team who are just casually gay while they're planning revenge and dishing out torture (not, however, a couple). One of our two main characters just as casually crossdresses, and has a market disinterest in the fairer sex. Go to the novels, where (I'm told that) someone brings up a real-life novel about gay baseball players and compares it to Banba and Lin, who incidentally play the same positions. What is to be made about that I'll leave for people to explore, but suffice to say that I agree with whoever claimed this one for the category of "marketed as shounen but really written for the female audience".