And again Tanuki Kazuya demonstrated the vast scope of his analytical mind. Just seeing the speed at which Usazawa (and Beelzebusa) recover from a breaking ball to the balls, he correctly concludes which advanced method of self-motivation Usazawa must have employed!

If this wasn’t a fictional world, you’d call that level of analytical accuracy unachievable. >_> What makes it achievable in a fictional world is not just general carelessness in script-writing, but also the fact that people in the real world can get and be motivated by countless different factors and things…while the number of motivators for fictional character is much more limited. And a flash-back to a Training Camp from Hell is high up on the short list of such motivator applicable to the sports genre, so it’s not that much of a stretch.

Having figured out what Usazawa had done to get himself back into shape, Tanuki immediately decides to counter with his own flashback to his own hellish training experiences. Only to find that they somehow don’t measure up? It’s strange…the experiences sure felt hellish while he lived through them, but now in hindsight they seem utterly trivial. Yeah, the taciturn coach using the communal baths was awkward for all of the players, but is it really comparable to getting crucified and whipped? It might have seemed like that with a teenager’s perspective, but perhaps there was a certain lack of perspective there. And fellow teammates not being undeservedly overenthusiastic about his performance as a team captain also seem like a much more trivial problem in hindsight, as much as it pained him as it happened. It certainly doesn’t really compare to getting stretched on the rack.

On a sidenote, yeah, the coach looks like drunk Oda. That’s inevitable, because in every universe in which drunk Oda exists, he overrides all other images of the Daimyo ideal, just by being so much cooler. ._.

More on Thursday.