Sorairo Utility is available to stream on HiDive.

Gotta love a hobby anime.

Not just one that's “a rom-com about a pair of birdwatchers” or what have you. I could go to the Hallmark Channel for that around December and trip over three. I'm talking about shows that are so unironically, jump-up-and-down-in-their-seat enthusiastic about their subject matter that you'd have to grab the author by the shoulders and plead with them to please pause their diatribe on fishing lures for long enough to get back to the character drama.

And, occasionally, you have to do the same things to the characters themselves. Case in point: a couple weeks ago, Sorairo Utility aired an episode that, in its entirety, was about three characters going to the store to buy a golf club. It's the inciting action from frame one, and it's the complete through-line until the show cuts to credits.

It might be one of my favorite things to come out of the current anime season.

The Kojima of It All

If you're not generally an anime person – thank you for reading five paragraphs deep into a seasonal show about young women playing recreational golf. But if so – and even if you are familiar with anime's general trends – there's a particularly infamous point of comparison to draw here.

Death Stranding, for all of the things that it tries to be about, is most successfully about the act of walking. Whereas “walking simulator” gets used a dismissive catch-all for combat-averse games about exploration, Death Stranding relishes in very minutae implied by that badge. How volcanic rock and packed mud wear differently on your boots. How the state of those boots begets physical exhaustion and frostbite. How your boots' wear on the rock and mud in turn meshes with the actions of thousands of other players to slowly carve desire paths into the world itself. And that's all before factoring in the management of weight and balance that creates a tangible crunch to an act that the supermajority of games should prefer to gloss over. It is literally simulating walking, and goes to the same lengths to sharpen every detail about the activity that entire other games go to for driving cars or sword dueling.

And that's a shared thread across any game directed by Professional Weirdo Hideo Kojima. If you know one thing about Metal Gear Solid, it's that it loves to spend lavish stretches of time in monologue-dense cutscenes. And that half the time those siloloquies aren't even about the immediate plot; they're shooting off down rabbit-holes about specific military hardware, nuclear arms treaties, and even the series' own fictional lore. It's all the same enthusiasm of your nephew reciting his recent learnings from a library book about dinosaurs, but aimed at a HIND D helicopter.

His geektitude is showing, and it's one of the more consistently endearing parts of his whole body of work.

Game Recognize Game

While Sorairo Utility has been a lovely example of this sort of heart-on-its-sleeve ardor every week, the greatest of those weeks has to be that single trip to the golfing-goods store.

Because what gets enthusiasts to spill their hobby guts all over the floor quite like being surrounded by wall-to-wall product?

Well, something that's at the heart and soul of any sport – competition.

Which is potentially where things can fall apart. High-stakes competition creates hositlity, externalizes motivation, invites all manner of strong, occasionally abrasive opinion. It creates a coin-flip where one kind of person is spurred on, but another allows their worst self to be brought out – while a third would just as soon bow out and not look back.

Sorairo Utility is, gratefully, completely disinterested in any tangible form of stakes.

Its competition instead comes from possibly the three most un-serious men the show has to offer. A veritable Team Rocket of sporting-goods salesmen, who somehow agree to a wacky three-part showdown to let heroine Minami earn a multi-figure discount on merchandise that her heart is already set on.

And to what end?

Well, not much – for three men who ostensibly make their living around the sport, they throw easily the most ineffective, clown-shoed performance of the show so far. And I do mean throw – the show seems to invite (albeit not admit) the interpretation that this trio is deliberately goofing around, willingly (if flashily) losing the match at the business' immediate expense in the interest of letting this bright-eyed kid walk away with her Dream Driver.

These three Goofy Guys can only be explained away as enablers, not just in it for the love of the game, but in it to ensure our intrepid, peppy heroine fosters and grows her own love of the game.

They're passing the savings – and the Sorairo Utility spirit – on to you.

Blind Adoration

Now, does Sorairo Utility simiarly over-romanticize golf to the point of glossing over its less toothsome details? You bet your bottom dollar it does.

And it's not the only show relishing so deeply in one particular interest among just new-this-season anime; a quick review of that list turns up productions on authors' personal darlings ranging from to youth sports coaching to otome gaming to poetry recitation and radio broadcasting. And while two of those things are central to critically-accaimed Hollywood films or whole other genres, you have an uphill battle convincing an audience that watching somebody read to you is a good vehicle for personal drama.

It's why I'm so excited to have a ice hockey manga available in the U.S. that, frankly, isn't hot dog water. Because with how long it's taken for any manga about the sport to reach critical mass, you just know it's making it across the threshold largely because the author is deeply invested enough to really push for its strengths in the same way that a show about kabaddi willed itself into existence.

(Being helmed by a bestselling Young Jump author probably isn't hurting it any, but I digress.)

It's that the creators have to convince the viewer that their niche little interest is secretly The Coolest Thing Ever, I Promise. And not via some thesis argument, but by leading by example, with the characters on screen every bit as bought in as the writers. They become the most natural vectors in the world for the story to bite anyone in range with their infectious enthusiasm. The best, most benign of mind-viruses.

And, chief among those, you have to have some immensely positive characters working on behalf of an immensely excitable creator.

With that humdinger of a combo, you could sell the brooklyn bridge.

Or at least convince me for twenty-two minutes that I'm pretty jazzed to pick up golf.