Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Welcome to the Ballroom
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Animechic420
 Posts: 1727 Location: A Cave Filled With Riches |
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Man…was I glad Mako slapped the shit out of Gaju. It was gold.
The boy was being an asshole. |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11354 |
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No mention of the exploding falsie that brought down the house? I knew she'd lose at least one the moment she came out in them, but I didn't think it would turn into a banana peel that torpedoed all their competition. And given the excessive jiggle when she came out, I was expecting water balloons in there, not a couple layers of curved padding. Even more bizarre, it seems to me that that ought to be some kind of demerit, you know, to discourage sabotaging the other dancers, but it appeared to be consequence-free only for Tatara and Mako.
At this point I guess I'm still watching just to see how much of a soapy clusterfk they can make of this. I think it's past redemption now. |
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DuskyPredator
 Posts: 15462 Location: Brisbane, Australia |
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Have to agree with the music thing, it really had me wondering where the music they are supposed to be dancing to when hearing largely the clacking of their shoes with music that is not ballroom dancing. Was it a problem with copyright? Because I imagine that part should be one of the most important when they were planning this show, and that they would not get away with what other shows would do.
Mako is certainly the more interesting character, with her brother being a huge douche of a horrible person. But the current plot that Tatara is desperate to win that she would go back to her brother, he does not mean it to be bad and he wants do what she wants, but it almost sounds like he wants to get away from her. |
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DmonHiro
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I really hate it when people try to argue how mysoginists a shounen is because the male charatcers are more powerfull, or stuff like that. But come ON. Even I have my limits. The females in this show are barely even human at this point. They could be replaced when a giant body pillows and the story would be the same. How can this show, about DACING WITH A PARTNER be this mysoginistic?
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Merida
 Posts: 1945 |
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That really bothered me a lot. I understand that the show is trying to portray ballroom dancing as some kind of intense battle between "Tough Guys" 
Same. |
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Princess_Irene
ANN Reviewer
 Posts: 2607 Location: The castle beyond the Goblin City |
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Honestly, I'm waiting for our resident ballroom expert Mojave to weigh in on this - it certainly struck me as both weird and wrong, but since most of my performance experience is in modern dance, where you just keep going even if your costume falls off, I didn't think I was the best one to comment on it. |
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Z-Raid
 Posts: 132 |
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I know animating is hard and I can imagine how difficult and time-consuming animating a dance sequence would be, but man, for a show that is supposed to be about dancing there's not a lot of dancing. The few dance scenes we do see are well-animated and beautiful, but they're so sparse and infrequent. I don't need an entire dance sequence animated, just a solid 1 minute and 30 seconds of dancing without 30 second cutaways of someone's reaction interspersed throughout it.
And yeah, that music. Yeesh. It's a problem when the shoes clacking are more prominent than the actual music the characters are supposed to be dancing to. The lack of dancing combined with disjointed music is really not helping things. It's a shame. I read and enjoy the manga, so this anime just comes off as a lackluster adaptation of a good manga. I can see the potential for the anime to be good, but so far it consistently falls short of actually reaching it. |
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CrowLia
 Posts: 5505 Location: Mexico |
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Although there was a slight improvement on the characterization of the girls, both with Mako slapping Gaju who's giving Sengoku a run for his money on being irredeemably awful and Shizuku showing her pride as a competitor, I just can't summon any goodwill for it given the constant mocking of Mako's body followed by mocking her insecurities about her body. Of all the ways to make them pass to the second round, couldn't they think of something more stupid and contrived than flying banana peel boob pads? smh.
And I also second on the problems with lack of animated dancing and inadequate music choices. I mentioned it on the ANNCast thread, but the music (or lackthereof) for the dancing sequences seems a huge problem to me, just gonna copy what I said on the other thread:
The episode and the lack of dancing in spite of it being a dancing competition was made specially frustrating because last episode was all about how they were gonna use the Quickstep to make the difference and they even mentioned it again this time "do all the dances like usual and surprise them with the Quick", then when the so anticipated Quickstep finally came... it's cut short after Gaju and Tatara have their d*ck measuring contest and we never actually get to see this so amazing Quickstep.
I'm no ballroom expert (in fact I have precisely zero knowledge about ballroom and this show hasn't really done anything to educat me on it or motivate me to learn more about it) but at least in figure skating, such "wardrobe malfunctions" would cost you at the very least a -1 or -2 deduction (don't remember which) because a piece of fabric lying around on the ice while people skate by at super high speed can be extremely dangerous. Euro Pair Champions Tarasova/Morozov received one such deduction at Worlds this year
Me three, me three. I wonder if Production I.G. will take a big hit from this show's poor sales, preorder estimates are looking atrocious |
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DuskyPredator
Posts: 15462 Location: Brisbane, Australia |
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Does it sound horrible that I am kind of happy that we are allowed to hate on this show for its problems of: poor amount of actual dancing for an anime about dancing, a lack of proper music which would be a necessity for something that is meant to be along side music, and a troubling amount of sexist undertones. It maybe comes that I really was not a fan of the type of creepy elongation and twisting of people as they dance, it makes me feel a little off. But for me, the show I think might be a perfect idea of comparison for the show would be good, would maybe be if it took a little bit off of Haikyuu. Alone it is maybe that despite the lip service this show does about being partners, Haikyuu always felt like it gave respect to everyone's part rather than saying one person is the only reason they won.
It has to be weird that often these shounen like series that are more aimed at young women can tend to be the worst with its female characters in removing their agency and the like, all to focus on the boys I think. |
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Guile
Posts: 595 |
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Shounen by definition is aimed at boys, so no I dont find it strange a show aimed at boys would focus on the male characters more. Shounen aimed at women is an oxymoron. |
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DuskyPredator
Posts: 15462 Location: Brisbane, Australia |
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Welcome to the Ballroom counts as a shounen, but it would be silly to say that this series is aimed at mostly boys. Who do you think would be more interested in a teenage boy starting ballroom dancing where you can cut the sexual tension between male characters with a knife, as it would with a male volleyball team who get all over each other. Now I am familiar with the terms, and why I put some thought in and went with "shounen like", because I could not really think of a term that would be more fitting of shows clearly aimed at girls, but taking a bit from the hot headed shounen shows, rather than cuter shoujo, although it is probably not entirely a fair piece of reasoning on my part. I was probably projecting some thoughts from some reverse harem like shows where female agency is messed with a bit. Or maybe with something like Anonymous Noise from last season. |
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Mojave
 Posts: 178 |
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The Tatara/Gaju collision was presented fairly realistically. Sometimes couples get set on a collision course while dancing, and while you don't want to be a jerk about it, you also don't want to be the losers in that collision. Ideally it would just be a slight bump that didn't significantly knock either couple off balance or rhythm. But there are situations where, once a collision is inevitable, one couple will go through it unscathed while the other will be knocked over. Intentionally slamming into a couple to sabotage them can get you disqualified, but that's an extremely rare situation. I only ever saw that once in a competition, where the female partner in the clearly-second-best couple purposely hooked her foot behind her in order to trip the male partner in the clearly-best couple in the finals round (if two couples wind up back to back during competition, it will usually be the male partner from one couple and the female partner from the other couple, because everyone's following line-of-dance). It was pretty blatantly obvious, so they were immediately disqualified. Usually though, collisions are much more incidental. Flat out stopping on the spot and completely interrupting your routine is a no-no, although a slight pause of one or two seconds while holding position to avoid a collision is usually okay. With the Tatara/Gaju collision that wasn't possible, because they were both doing a variation of the rocket, a quickstep move that builds up an incredible amount of momentum, so there's no stopping it. When we were first taught the step and practicing it, if you got on a collision course with another couple (and it was common to, because everyone was new to it), everyone involved was gonna wind up in a heap on the floor. Even though Gaju and Shizuku were the physically larger couple, the balance and momentum of that step could realistically render them as the ones who lost that collision. As far as Mako's wardrobe malfunction, that was all sorts of unrealistic. First off, a dancer of Mako's experience would never, ever, put those in in the first place. Your silhouette is incredibly important, and you vigorously practice the silhouette you're going to use. Doing something that completely alters your silhouette at the last second without ever having practiced it is utterly unthinkable. I doubt even a pure beginner would do that. Secondly, putting those in at the last second would compromise her balance as well as her frame with Tatara. The positions couples take are very much influenced by chest size. As a male ballroom dancer, the frame that I would take with a busty partner differs from the frame I would take with a flatter partner. And the balance your chest provides also differs depending on its size. Even as a male dancer, there were a few times where I came back from a break of a few months with larger pecs due to other athletic activities during that break, and had to adjust to how that affected my balance. For some steps, the chest, not the hips, is the center of balance. So a last second alteration of the magnitude that Mako made to her chest would destroy her balance. And yes, Tatara and Mako almost certainly would have been disqualified for that wardrobe malfunction. You are taught to be very careful about your costumes, as small malfunctions will get you marked down and large ones that impair other couples will get you automatically disqualified. Usually it's the female partner that has to worry about that more, as male costumes are usually less elaborate and more sturdy. So Mako once again would have known better, and the second the malfunction happened and other couples slipped, she would know they were getting disqualified. It's possible that because of the very intimate nature of the part of her wardrobe that malfunctioned, she might have been given a little bit of leeway, but with as much carnage as her malfunction caused, that likely wouldn't have helped at all. It's also to be noted that Gaju and Shizuku would have been instantly disqualified when Gaju headbutted Tatara backstage. Physically assaulting a competitor off stage will get you not only disqualified, but also banned for a lengthy time. Mako's swat at Gaju is less clear-cut, because it could have been viewed less as an assault against a competitor and more as a quarrel between siblings. There's still a chance her and Tatara would have been disqualified for it and that she would have been banned for a period of time as well, but it's not as clear-cut as with Gaju's headbutt on Tatara. So once again, the show presents bits of ballroom culture that are accurate alongside swaths of complete inaccuracy that have no foundation whatsoever in reality. If the show wants to save itself, it needs to drop its shonen trope elements soon and return to its accurate elements. This show is feeling less and less like a ballroom dance show and more and more like one giant overblown shonen tropefest with each passing episode. |
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Princess_Irene
ANN Reviewer
Posts: 2607 Location: The castle beyond the Goblin City |
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Thank you, Mojave. I really appreciate you filling in the gaps here.
One of the things I like about the manga is that it's more faithful to the actual sport; although the wardrobe malfunction does still happen along with other improbabilities, the tone is less reliant on shounen tropes. I think part of the issue with the anime may be that it doesn't seem to understand the importance of the actual body to dance - breasts are jokes, not simply a part of the body that needs to be thought of as such. It's that kind of bog-standard "humor" that helps to bring this down. tl;dr - Decent as a plain ol' shounen show, but I was hoping for Swan. |
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Animechic420
Posts: 1727 Location: A Cave Filled With Riches |
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And what the hell is up with Hyodo's mom? Is she just prone to flirting with every guy she come across? And with her son having to witness all of it? She just another blonde looking bimbo in anime with big boobs.
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Angel M Cazares
 Posts: 5424 Location: Iscandar |
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After episode 8 I decided to drop this show. The female characters continue being treated like objects by the cast of asshole males. This was becoming more and more uncomfortable for me.
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