Sonny Boy

Episode 4

Every anime needs a baseball episode. I don't play baseball, and I hardly ever watch it, but there's something transformative—something inexplicably wonderful—about the crack of the bat in the hands of an anime character taking a short respite from their usual heroic duties. Recent favorites Jujutsu Kaisen, Dorohedoro, and BNA: Brand New Animal have each joined the home run pantheon, and now Sonny Boy's fourth episode supports my thesis, even if its take on the most favorite of pastimes is full of the gnarled and layered obtuseness we've come to expect from the show. It doesn't help that its simian-based baseball stands in for multiple and competing concepts at the same time, which muddies any attempt to leave this episode with clarity. I'm going to do my best to break down what I think Sonny Boy is getting at here, but I also think it's worthwhile to stress that the series' openness to interpretation is very much part of its point. Whether you find that fun or frustrating, you can't argue it's not a deliberate feature.

Blue's backstory is largely just set dressing, which honestly might be for the best. It also begs the question: why include this reference in the first place? While there's one clever narrative turn I like—Cap describes the monkeys as nameless and indistinguishable, only to then detail how they persecuted a monkey that didn't fit into the crowd—the rest of the episode doesn't have anything much to say about this long and ongoing history of persistent violence. It's not a strike against the episode, but it does prove that Sonny Boy's ambition goes hand-in-hand with a buckshot-like approach to its topics.

As usual, Sonny Boy's main concerns are broader ones about institutions and abuses of power, resulting this time in a bloody spectacle on the baseball diamond. Another story might have stopped on the high point when Blue overcame adversity, but here, we follow Blue's trajectory downward, until his overwhelming celebrity overwhelms both himself and the game. A person's or people's liberty should not be contingent on how well they play baseball, or how well they fit into any arbitrary framework dictated by those in power. Those rights should be uniform and inalienable. By contrast, the other monkeys only stop caring about Blue's hair color because they stop perceiving him as a fellow monkey and start perceiving him as a pitching demigod.

Blue becomes a parasocial focal point of all the monkeys' hopes and anxieties. He becomes infallible. He doesn't make a mistake; it's the world itself that shifts around him and causes him to fail. This kind of blind deification and conspiracy-addled justification has come into painfully sharp focus in recent years, but this tendency has been with our species since time immemorial. If Sonny Boy has been consistently critical of anything, it is the authorities that consider themselves (and are considered by other people) above and outside the rules. Blue becomes a tragic despot thanks to that pressure, and the umpire becomes this story's tragic hero, martyring himself for the integrity of the game. It seems hypocritical at first for the rebellious Nozomi to venerate the hardline umpire as brave, but this is consistent with Sonny Boy's messages. Again, Sonny Boy doesn't really dislike institutions per se; it dislikes our uneven and hierarchical way of applying those institutions' rules, breaking them for powerful individuals and abusing them to oppress the collective.

Still, it also seems like Sonny Boy has more respect for baseball as an institution than it does for the rules of the school or island. Under Cap, the school's leadership was vilified, while here our monkey umpire is lauded as the lone sane man torn apart by a worked-up mob. This might seem thematically hypocritical, but again, I think I see what the story is getting at, and furthermore, I agree with it. The answer, ironically enough, lies in the musings of former despot Cap. Baseball is a game. Baseball is play. Its rules are designed not to repress or oppress, but to provide a structure in which that play makes sense. By design, it allows for equal parts triumph and heartbreak. While there are times when that will seem unfair, in the grander and more cosmic sense, it's about as fair as anything in the universe can be. Those rules might be derived from humans, but as long as they're applied evenly, they provide a framework bigger and holier than any individual. If you break those rules to get ahead, you break baseball. You kill baseball. And why would you want to kill something that's fun?

Well, you do it when it stops being fun. Like so many other sources of extracurricular joy, capitalism has taken baseball and beaten it into another way to pad your college application, demonstrate teamwork, become rich and famous, or otherwise monetize your every single spare second of time. Enjoying baseball is a tertiary (or worse) concern, behind being the best at it or using it to prove your worth as a productive member of society. Cap loves the game, but recognizes he's not talented enough to break into the majors, so he resigns himself to quitting. Ace, meanwhile, defines himself via his baseball talent, so he's stricken with inadequacy when separated from that framework. That's why he becomes the Prometheus of pitching and introduces the game to the monkeys; he wants to be respected again on his chosen terms. This is also probably why the Monkey League goes down the same path, corrupting a beautiful pastime into a cruel microcosm of authoritative supremacy upheld at any cost. And that's why the umpire, the only monkey unable to play the game they all loved so much, was able to keep his heart pure to the bitter end.

I told you there was a lot going on bubbling underneath the baseball diamond this week! It's easy for me to forget a lot of the other stuff that goes down this week too, from the black hole diving hole, to Nagara's improved mastery over his teleportation powers, to Mizuho's cat throwing the perfect feline stink eye in her direction. Structurally, it's also noteworthy that most of this episode's thematic meat arrives by way of telling instead of showing. This won't help win over anyone bored by baseball drivel, but I think Cap's enthusiastic narration goes a long way towards both setting the scene and adding some depth to his character. As always, I also enjoy the bevy of unexplained oddities: the true nature of the invisible monkeys, the accelerated timeline of their baseball escapades, the origin of the magic monkey flashlight, and so on. And I neither need nor want a solution to those open questions. In my estimation, these unsolved mysteries are the very character of the show's unsettling setting.

The biggest mystery of all is where Sonny Boy is going to go next. The sudden appearance of Ms. Aki throws what little status quo the students had into chaos. Traditionally, in a situation like this, the arrival of a familiar authority figure would be celebrated, but Sonny Boy has had very little love for would-be authoritarians. However, even Hoshi seems displeased with this development, and furthermore, we don't need to rely on subtextual clues when the first thing she does is call the kids “worms.” Whatever her reason for being there, it can't be good, and I can't wait to see how she shakes things up.

Rating:

Bonus Baseball Fact:

• After a bit of research, I learned that a scenario very similar to Blue's thwarted perfect game actually did happen once to Armando Galarraga. I don't think it's germane to the episode discussion, because the umpire Jim Joyce was absolutely in the wrong and even admitted it after reviewing the replay footage. However, it's a nice story about sportsmanship with an amicable-enough ending despite the bad call.

Sonny Boy is currently streaming on Funimation.

Steve writes bad jokes weekly for This Week in Anime, and outside of ANN, you'll be able to find him making Sonny Boy aesthetic posts on his Twitter.