Wind Breaker Season 2

Episode 23

I can't believe I'm saying this, but maybe this storyline should have gone on a little longer.

Not that much longer, mind. I'm not asking for Wind Breaker to pull off the kind of decompression that was apparent back in the Shishiroten arc. But the resolving, emotional stages of this grappling with GRAVEL have felt a perfunctory sort of staged. So it went with Shizuka's backstory and emotional climax last week, and so it goes again with laying out what these antagonists from the rougher side of town have been through.

It doesn't help that team leader Suzuri is really not endearing himself to me. Couching worldviews in game is already an automatic loss for me, as a decade and change of seasonal isekai has worn me down on that sort of gimmick. And Suzuri's actual invocation of it really just feels tacked-on and half-assed besides, making vague gestures at the kinds of aesthetics and writing platitudes supposedly seen in games. Technically, it does fit with the sort of idealized tat marketed on the game posters it's shown he was imprinting on, but then that's all it amounts to, and even he sort of just forgets about it halfway through his sob story.

Now, I will give Wind Breaker points for retreating from where I thought it might be going in last week's episode: that is, espousing that the violent, illegal activity of GRAVEL's way of getting by might be down to some inherent criminality of the poor. The story has frank understanding of the fact that hardship and economic desperation force people into unscrupulous situations. There is sympathy for these guys, and even acknowledgement of how they intersect with the other groups, their themes in the story, and how comion can help all once the dust has settled. It's a story on the right side, as Wind Breaker is wont to be. Also, not for nothing, but the enlightened Suzuri does look pretty cute with his hair down.

The problem is that there isn't enough personal affectation for Suzuri's side of this story beyond acknowledging that he is, as Tsubaki says verbatim, "having a rough time." Nor does it help that none of the other GRAVEL guys besides Suzuri have a name or personality or given connection with him to showcase what of his own he was fighting for. There's the possibility to comment on the difference between "dependence" and genuine "love" between found groups, also vis a vis leadership styles as this show regularly comments on. But the most the writing can give is that Suzuri understands that scarcity of resources demands banding together to get them for yourselves however you can. Apes strong together, and all that, but I'd expect a more revelatory resolution than Suzuri just being informed that there were, in fact, other jobs his gang of guys could get besides street-level leg-breakers. The conflict turning on a dime because it turns out a bunch of the Keisei Street businesses are hiring in their stockrooms is a bit of an anticlimax, is what I'm saying.

For what it's worth, that does conceptually fit with this whole arc's overall theme about acceptance and the importance of groups and community. That's why Tsubaki's emotional elements of the episode are the ones that actually land. Espousing the power of love does make sense when you consider how love is based on mutuality, being shared between other people and letting them get stronger together. Being involved with other people, worrying about them, and shouldering that worry is a unifying element in "good" leadership as espoused by Wind Breaker, and it's all put on as a show that Sakura is watching and learning his own lessons from.

Further undercutting the strength of this technically thematically sound material is that the fighting has fallen more off-point as it's become a backing element instead of being front-and-center over the episodes. It's real neat when Tsubaki goes dukes-up and says "I want to get to know you more. Tell me more about you," fitting with the fighting-as-a-conversation convention of the series. …at least it is until a couple seconds later when the onlooking characters simply spell that out, and Tsubaki keeps having a detailed, verbal conversation with Suzuri in-between blows anyway.

On top of all that, the remaining resolution for Shizuka is her continuing to be browbeat by Tsubaki about how stupid and insensitive she was for not letting herself be saved until she did. Once again, the underlying message does fit with this story's overall idea of trusting others to do things on your behalf. But also once again, the actual presentation and emotional thrust of it feels underbaked, and might have benefited from extra time and care marinating in Shizuka's personality and worldview. At least there's movement from Sakura, as he's processing his feelings on Roppo Ichiza's go-down-swinging fighting strategy. So I can be confident that his arc for the season will coalesce effectively. And things aren't entirely over, as this episode ends with an escalating appearance by my man FRANK! This promises to up the stakes and maybe dig into more exploration of Tsubaki, a character who has gotten significant time and focus to make these driving drama-bombs work. We'll see.

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Wind Breaker is currently streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

Chris brawls his way through the mean streets of anime reviews, with a close-knit crew of co-writers he knows he can count on. You can check out his stomping grounds over on his BlueSky or see some of the tags he's thrown up on his blog.