The perpetually sunglassed manager at 5:00 is really a true chad in how he handles the news and tries to focus Genki mourning!

Kenji Seki also has shown some depth (will show more at the end) and proved not to be a flat villain, also pioneering manly tears long before Kenshiro did!

Nice also to have the juxtaposition with Genki's "civilian" grandparents, weak, hypocritical and unable to share the warrior/samurai ethos that all the people partaking that funeral (and a life on the ring) had; back then that was a pretty harsh bit of satire and criticism against traditionally powerful upper class (ie: samurai or above) families after the war. They will grow too, somehow.

BTW, who the fuck decided that putting that kind of slow, albeit somehow merry march theme during the saddest scene yet was a good idea?

GANBARE GENKI!!!!

That was so sad... why do anime always have to kill fathers off!?! Shark really deserved to live with Genki :'(

RIP Shark Horiguchi, your son will carry on your dream!

And think that IMHO that is not even the most depressing part of this series (still a rather pleasant one to watch overall, if you ask me); consider that while Western (ie: woke) media tend to detest father figures and belittle or kill them off easily, the old school anime were trying to convey the more relatable story of a main character that was orphaned, as many Japanese people were during the war that really hit them hard.

Very true! These days, anime and rl series do make it a trend to detest the father or make him a creep or something bad! I do wonder what is with all this man-hate though?!?

But these older anime really knew how to respect fathers and even male characters as a whole! Where are those days now?

I mean: Japanese media for example still seem to show some deep respect for fathers and father figures - I would not imagine wimpy clowns like Juste or the demented abbot from Castlevania Woketurne to appear in many anime even nowadays; unfortunately we are not getting that sheer, non-comedic manliness we were getting with Hokuto no Ken, Saint Seiya, Berserk or the first few arcs of JoJo (all started in the 80s, IIRC) that often, but there are still solid examples.

I can think of Ainz from Overlord (really acting like a father for his people) or the strong, silent (and, okay, a bit autistic) type represented by Goblin Slayer as good examples of a masculine role model in media that is still not afraid of have general roles in non-cliched, non-trivially scripted stories.

It's here