How would you rate episode 5 of
FX Fighter Kurumi-chan ?
isn't really about finance. It's about addiction. Yeah, that's profound—the exact point anybody who watched one episode of this show already clocked. I'm like Kurumi, I'm so dang smart. I'm pointing it out here anyway, because that's the point thatepisode drives at specifically. Kurumi had previously cashed out high. She's told herself she's through, but now, watching Mebuki's successful short—based on Kurumi's own intuition, no less—she's wondering when's the right point to buy back in. Of course she does, by the end of the episode. Everyone does. If they weren't here, the viewers wouldn't be, and now they're explicitly narrated as primed to upset the market and change their lives. For the better, right?
For the better, right?
The thing about gambling addiction is that it is a true addiction like any other, but it's also unlike any other because it comes with its own compulsory elements. Enablers can be found in any vice, but rather than just watching friends get drunk or high without them, a recovering gambling addict can, under the right circumstances, watch their fellow addicts succeed without them. FOMO is the fundamental function fueling financially frivolous flings. Kurumi can watch Mebuki hit these hot streaks and be consumed with addictive avarice—it should have been her. It could still be her.
The streak of Kurumi fighting back against her addiction is the most messed-up meaty part of this episode. I momentarily wrote in some credit to her that she was "really trying" but I just backspaced that. I'm thinking through my compulsions to read her compulsions in real time because, honestly, is she really trying? Despite supposedly being out, she's still got the forex charts up on her monitor. Maybe that's just because she's acting as Mebuki's consultant, but that's an excuse. She claims she's seeking out other hobbies to fill the gap of the addiction, which, hilariously, she's 100% right about. This is a good way to fill in one's life and beat back addiction. That's good advice from this show that's ostensibly about how powerful and exciting addiction is. So of course Kurumi grabbing books on bonsai growing and tarot reading and camping (its own potentially dangerous activity) are just half-hearted motions gone through. She's only doing it so she can say she tried and ditch it later. These are more excuses, disguised as investments in her future.
I mean, Jesus, she can't even use gambling to fill the gambling hole! The girl plays through 5,000 yen worth of pachinko and gets nothing out of it. And her reasoning gives the game away: she doesn't dislike it because she lost money, she dislikes it because she can't understand it. With forex, she fully grasps why her investments are being drained and she's losing so much money. That's why her screaming and pathetic prayers and desperate theft are part of the pursuit of the high, contrasting with just flushing money into a one-armed metal-balled bandit. It's nightmarish, but she worked hard to instill that nightmare. That's why she's already had money loaded into her account, ready to play with, this whole time.
It was a foregone conclusion so long as this show still had the rest of the season to go, but that's what I meant when I said I couldn't give Kurumi any credit. She was always going to come crawling back to fighting the FX. If the FOMO from mentoring Mebuki didn't do it, some urging from Mochiko would have. It's the only sure bet this show has had thus far. The real wager, then, is how does the story make it compelling to watch someone re-throw their life away when, narratively, there never was a real choice?
FX Fighter Kurumi-chan 's tack is, as with so much other misery-focused storytelling, just to make it as visceral as possible. Kurumi's mucking through metaphorical mud, scrambling for imaginary piles of cash she feels entitled to. This anime's always played with visual flourishes; it has to, if not to be entirely about anime girls screaming at monitors. But in this case the extra-thick symbolism is here to show just how delirious Kurumi is getting in her desperation. Is it cheesy? Is it the stuff of after-school specials or anti-drug PSAs that portray addictions as cartoonish peddlers and monsters preying on protagonists? Is it necessary to show Kurumi, just five episodes in, specifically throwing away her childhood hopes and dreams, to watch the line go up again? Does the audience really need to watch a metaphorical child drown to get it?
Maybe not, but it simply wouldn't be as interesting to watch without being privy to Kurumi's inner decision making process. One day she just wakes up and she's investing again. Kinda banal, huh? Better show that child drowning.
For further proof of the failures of that sort of flippancy, look no further than Mebuki herself. She's the vehicle for Kurumi's ascendant downfall this episode. Hell, she also helps rope Affi, who turns out to be her IRL friend Yasuko, into the adventures by the episode's end. But Mebuki's really got nothing going on herself thus far. Idiots don't catch colds, and they don't fail at enacting investment advice provided to them by much more precious protags. One starts to wonder if Mebuki's airheaded affects are even really threatened by the narrative of FX Fighter as Kurumi is. But then there I go, implicitly wishing for something horrible to happen to a character for entertainment value. The show did it, this is the story going on and on about how dangerous forex is. It has to happen, right? It's just like knowing that Kurumi would fall back into her addiction by the end of the episode; it's fine for me to predict similar downfalls for the other vessels in this story. I'm not reveling in it. I don't want to see what kinds of contortions Mebuki's face will make, what shrieks she'll let loose when she realizes her confidence has at last been betrayed and she's splattered against the inevitable wall of failure—
Characters are tools. They're just tools for demonstrating ideas. Ideas like the fact that addiction is dangerous. I didn't know that before watching this anime. It took seeing Kurumi's failed attempts to escape addiction in this episode to make that clear. Deep, revolutionary pontifications on the subject of addiction in this show I praise for its dense storytelling. I'm being somewhat sarcastic there. You can tell. But that's the visceral thrill-ride of using these characters as tools. They do it internally. Kurumi realizes she's using Mebuki as a tool, betting against her incorrect intuition as if using the innocent girl as her own personal Jim Cramer. And Mochiko, in turn, lets Kurumi cotton onto the fact that she's being used the same way. Just like it's okay if I realize the characters are tools, it's also okay if the characters themselves realize they're tools. It means it's not just schlock. It's not just me looking for my next hit of viscerally portrayed pain and misery. It means I can rest easy, telling myself that this show's about something.
FX Fighter Kurumi-chan is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.
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