How would you rate episode 6 of
FX Fighter Kurumi-chan ?
These girls are idiots.
Is that fair? Is that too mean? FX Fighter Kurumi-chan is a mean show. It's built on these girls' suffering, but it's also clear about the risks: ultimately, it is their fault for letting themselves get absorbed into forex trading in the first place. They should have known better. Didn't they hear the audience screaming at them to stop—or licking their chops in anticipation of their inevitable failure? Why did FX Fighter Kurumi-chan try to fight FX? Is she stupid?
That's a whole paragraph of rhetorical questions purely for effect. This episode isn't even really about Kurumi—after the earlier introductions, this week's entry shows how Yasuko and Mebuki handle trading with their own strategies, motivated by the group's "competition." So it's still about watching girls scream and writhe in the agony of potential financial ruin, but now they're different girls than the ones from the past few weeks. Progress?
Not that my judgment is any better. Yasuko remains my favorite, which is a fair bet payoff now that she's properly expanded upon in this episode. She's every bit as delusional as anyone else in this game, just in different ways: she touts her careful, small-profits strategy…before obliquely revealing that this is entirely because she has barely any money to invest in the first place. It's not just idiotic; it's pathetic—as a "freelancer," this is the only method she can entertain to scrape together enough to get by. She's living paycheck to paycheck, except that paycheck is marginal gambling payouts, even more directly beholden to the economy's whims than the regular checks the rest of us cash. The economy, that'll be important later. More important than it is now, I mean.
If this whole show is just going to be watching cute anime girls experience debilitating financial anxiety, then the different ways they express that anxiety have to be the main feature. God, when I put it that way, it really does make it sound like the show is a suffer-fest of misery porn. Yasuko's pathetic in a funny way, at least. This is someone whose sole superstitious imposition once she's bought in is to hold her finger up to the screen and beg the line not to go past it. That's stupid, that's sad; I can laugh at that.
Then her stomach cramps kick in.
Look, financial anxiety is a universal feature of living in a hell world in hell year 2026. Nobody can afford anything. It's why people can relate to the pain of the characters in a show like FX Fighter Kurumi-chan even as they're also tacitly rooting for the anti-catharsis of their failures. I know the feeling of watching funds slip away, of falling into a hole I feel like I'll never dig out of. And I know the feeling of those stomach cramps. It sucks. There's already suffering in the form of a plummeting livelihood, and now there's physical pain as well? Yasuko's also hungry, so the pangs compound the excruciating experience.
Maybe this isn't fun anymore. Secondhand embarrassment, cathartic cringe entertainment, those I can handle. But a series communicating straight-up sympathy pains? The scale is still effectively there. After Yasuko imagines intense battlefield scenarios and catastrophizes over her high-stakes single share, the camera briefly cuts to the others casually discussing how they've handled hundreds of times her bet. In the grand scheme, Yasuko's failures are nothing compared to what Kurumi, Mochiko, and Mebuki say they're prepared to lose. Also, and I can't stress this enough, they are not real. Nothing bad actually happens if the audience sees them fail, drop out, and starve to death.
That's why the cathartic schadenfreude can be so much more potent when Mebuki's turn comes around in the episode. Hell, I glibly admitted I was looking forward to this last week. Yasuko has consigned herself to running a market she basically understands but is unfortunately inept at, but Mebuki leaped into it with her full suite of school aid funds and nothing to go on. She is, truly, an idiot. A couple of weeks of doing whatever Kurumi told her has her believing her own hype when it comes to intuition. On top of that, her family is breathing down her neck and doubting her, so Mebuki gets Kurumi's "something to prove" impulse without any tragedy to temper it. It was apparent when she was first introduced that she saw forex trading as a work-avoiding get-rich-quick scheme, but Mebuki is genuinely lazy and stupid. That's unsympathetic, right? The audience wants to see someone like that humbled. Failing. Like Icarus. Yeah, his downfall was his fault for stupidly flying too close to the sun, even if he was just trying to escape his prison. The same way Mebuki is trying to escape the prison of adulthood, work, and responsibility. The rest of us would never dream of that hubris. She's the idiotic one.
Mebuki really is an idiot, though; I need to stress that. She's gotten into forex trading without even knowing what an economic indicator is, let alone how they work. The thing is, this is funny. Because she doesn't know what economic indicators are, she's googling finance forums trying to get a handle on why her EUR buy-in is plummeting. Now, if I've got my timing right, FX Fighter Kurumi-chan taking place at the point in 2016 as it does means the "Carney" comments coming up are Mark Carney's musings on the effects the impending Brexit vote would have on the economy. That's basic political economic analysis that could have clued Mebuki in on how that currency would go. If she couldn't clock that, she really has no business being in this…business. But of course she's too stupid to realize that.
Also, with the show seemingly taking place in early 2016 (Obama is still shown as current U.S. President), then ooohhhhhh fuckin' boy are these girls in for some political shockwaves being sent through economies later in the year. Makes me think of the prediction market bettors who just took a bath on the midterms this past week. Topical!
The idiocy of a character like Mebuki, and her reactions that exacerbate it, are the main feature of this episode. It's like slapstick, watching a stupid, stoogely character fail, then succumb to the consequences of her failure—if instead of comically tripping down a flight of stairs, she was losing all of her student aid money, trashing her laptop in a fit of rage, then pathetically crawling into bed to feed her line-watching addiction on her phone after saying she was done for one (1) minute. And she's got the stomach cramps too. See, funny!
It does make me wonder if this will be the show's recurring arc: will the characters fail, suffer, and writhe in agony until a miraculous turnaround saves them, only to try again and fail? Or is this a plot twist, with Mebuki being the sacrificial Mami of these monetary Madokas, who is shockingly taken out of the plot earlier than expected? There is imagery of her getting decapitated this episode. Because that's the concern in this and any destructive addiction: this can't go on. It has to get better. Something has to change. Or does it? I genuinely asked for this. Last week I said I wanted to see this happen to Mebuki. Yes, the show basically wanted me to ask for it, with its framing and its characterizations. Those are its own narrative equivalents of economic indicators. I saw them, I placed my bet as to where they would go, and now I've followed them here, to the same place they always do.
Maybe I'm the idiot.
FX Fighter Kurumi-chan is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.
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