Tsuritama - 11

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Think "The Perfect Storm" or "Deadliest Catch" and you kind of get what this episode was about.

I'm saddened by the impending end of Tsuritama, which has won its place as my favourite anime of the season but will all good things there must be an end before they turn into bad things. That said, Tsuritama really decided to be a tease this episode.

With all of the events leading up to and during the actual fishing attempt being feel good and setting up for a nice happy ending, the ending of the episode completely blind sided me. I assume I shouldn't have been so surprised by the turn of events, seeing as Haru kept reminding the group that he was going to leave after he fishes up his alien friend but in the end when Haru comes around to sacrifice himself, it left me sad and a little bit more emotional than I usually feel when watching anime. It definitely helped that there was such a positive tone to the lead up to fishing attempt, making the sacrifice that little bit more shocking.

Logically speaking, Haru's sacrifice wasn't completely out of the blue, if we consider him to be a character whose purpose was to bring out the closeted main character (in this case Yuki) from his comfort zone or that of a sensei who ends up being defeated in the end (battle anime version but somewhat applicable), although seeing as Haru was such a driving force in the series and was always in the centre of attention in one way or another, it made his sacrifice all the more harder to be accepted by Yuki and even myself.

In a way, Haru's sacrifice has also set the gauntlet for Yuki to put himself second for a friend and to take the initiative and save him thus completing his character development to the limits and maybe allow him to display another use for his eidetic memory; apparently all of those cinema reel scenes we saw whenever he closed his eyes were just his eidetic memory skills that were yet to be exploited.

Other than the Haru and Yuki dosage we got this episode, we Finally see Natsuki accepting his father's girlfriend and also Akira throwing away his affiliation to Duck. Both events end up hinting to a finale with nothing left undiscovered on the emotional front and with the end of the episode being full of chaos and tragedy, I'm expecting a happy ending befitting all of the emotional, character and plot developments that have occurred in Tsuritama; based on Ayumi not dying from the blast, it's safe to assume the ending will not be sad.

Only 1 episode left (I think) and then we can judge whether this has been a great series or an awesome one.