cool and unusual punishment

A Quick Discourse on Beyblade

Everyone had that one show that they watched when they were really little because it was on during that timeslot where their parents didn't want to deal with them or because they were too young to comprehensively understand what was going on in television, right?

Then when someone brings it up later you're like "oh god why" or someone mentions it and you cringe so hard you astral project into another plane. Anyways, I'd love to hear about what that show was for you guys, but for me, personally? 

Beyblade.

So, I've never mentioned this before, but I had this six month obsession with Beyblade in fifth grade. It came on like a winter storm, slowly blanketing the sky and raining down judgement, but just as soon melting away with spring... fuck this, I'm not waxing poetic about Beyblade. Let's just say that Beyblade was my bae for an indefinite amount of time. I bought a bunch of those bitches and I would yell at them like they could hear me, which is akin to that thing people do in Pokemon where they mash the A button so that it clicks three times even though it doesn't actually affect the gameplay.

(Don't lie. If you play Pokemon, you do this.) 

Anyways, I recently rewatched like half an episode during an internet coma, but I also have some real nostalgia for the show, so I'm going to quickly bust apart Beyblade right here. I don't think this is really an educated critique, it's not a rant, and it's definitely not a recommendation, so I called it a discourse, because shit's about to get academic.

This is Beyblade.

also if you watched the original or burst series gtfo we metal saga in here all day every day

1. The Concept

For those of you unfamiliar with Beyblade, Beyblades are those things that probably got banned in your school  after Bakugon but before Silly Bandz. Despite being literal plastic tops, Beyblades are surprisingly lethal and if you ripped them against someone's head the right day, you would at the very least fuck their hair forever and at most give them a major concussion. The Beyblade company's solution to this was to make their plastic tops metal (or maybe fancy plastic? I didn't do my research), and thus, the metal saga was born. 

The show Beyblade is about what you'd expect if a bunch of marketing executives who watched a few shonen anime while high attempted to make a shonen anime. I have not watched enough shonen anime to talk about them in detail but I can tell you that Beyblade is about a man and his friends/companions/rabid followers/harem becoming NUMBER ONE IN THE WORLD. Metal Masters, which is the only Beyblade series anyone should give a shit about if you've already made the grievous mistake of giving a shit about Beyblade, is like the tournament arc of your average anime, except it's an entire season. If you wonder why a bunch of children are being given not only the go-ahead but financial support to drop out of school to bash plastic tops against each other, the answer is no one at Hasbro cares and neither should you. All in all the season ends with the threatened end of the world, causing all the former rivals to team up and fight together, which would be par for the course in most animes, but it's about spinning tops. Beyblade is like the Poe's Law of anime. It's the point at which one thinks "there is no way someone could be this stupid" and there it is, a glistening mountain of "we have no clue what we're doing" that ran at 8 AM on Saturdays on Cartoon Network for six years.

But how, you ask, do plastic tops equal world domination? Glad you asked.

2. The Battles/The Tops

 Beyblade is legitimately the most overdramatic anime I have ever seen. If you think men yelling for a straight minute to power up before fighting each other was excessive, you have never seen men yelling for a straight minute so their plastic top can power up. Every single episode was determined to be more dramatic than the last, with huge astral beasts coming out of the tops during special moves, stadium-wide explosions, huge light shows, and at some point it's just ???

these are plastic tops 

????????? 

what is going on

3. The Animation

What are your opinion on side mouths, stilted animation, and enough explosions for a Fourth of July show going off in every single episode?

4. The Dialogue

Surprisingly the characterization in Beyblade is not very good. Every character has the same goal (BECOMING NUMBER ONE). The only difference is why they want this goal, and most of the time that's not even explained. Thus you end up with a lot of characters who sound exactly the same, and they all talk in such a stilted manner that I'm sure it's not just the dub team's fault. If you legitimately tried to take a shot every time someone said "number one" or "spirit" in any given episode, you would die. The dialogue is that repetitive. 

5. The Character Designs

No one will ever know why Gingka has a bandage on his nose. Many men have endeavored to find out, but none have ever returned. Also, the eyebrows are glorious. Glorious I say. Everyone in Beyblade has the best hair. This is undebatable. 

6. It's a Toy Commercial

Gingka's female companion literally explains every beyblade and their unique abilities during every battle. If you attached "Now Avaliable At Target" to each of her lines it would probably be a fair bit more honest. Beyblade is ten times the toy commercial MLP is, because MLP is a subtle advertisement and if there's one thing Beyblade doesn't know how to do it's definitely subtlety.

6. What the Fuck Was Even Going Down With Beyblade 

The series ends with the American team versus the Japanese team, and it is revealed that the American team is being sponsored by a shadowy organization that...

genetically experiments on children

to make them compatible

with beyblades

I don't even know how this went down in the briefing room how did you come up with this

they're plastic tops 

what are you doing 

Anyways the arc is this glorious calamity as one of the background characters rails off at one of the American members for deserting them (one of the Japanese team members, Masamune, moved from America to PURSUE BEING NUMBER ONE). Then the American guy is legitimately aggressed by a shadowy organization and told to join this comically evil experimental system to pay for his friend's medical bills or said friend would die.  I think this was the first time I ever saw a character break down on screen but tiny Chrona watched in amazement as this child proceeds to panic for eight minutes in front of Masamune before legitimately passing the fuck out 

and then it turns out Friend On Hospital Bills has been turned into the Big Bad for the season because he's actually the most compatible with said system

also someone gets put in a coma because of a beyblade fight

it is never explained or shown on screen how this happened

what