Iwa Kakeru! Sport Climbing Girls - Episode 7 - Konomi Starts to Glitch

After using her amazing analytical skills on three walls, Konomi began to show fatigue on her last attempt.

The episode starts off flashing back to Jun as a youngster climbing to set the table that we should not expect her to do as well as the cheering crowd makes Konomi out to be doing.

Konomi continued her successful debut to the fourth and final wall in her rotation, but things started to go wrong. Her High Concentration Konomin mode began to glitch, through mental fatigue, physical fatigue, or a combination of the two. Konomi's inexperience showed in her inability to recognize what had just happened to her. A sudden lack of concentration or focus is a common thing for rookie athletes.

The elite climbers kept hearing the cheers from the crowd and then a more subdued one, so they figured correctly that Konomi one-shotted three walls and miffed the last one. It's still an amazing result for the last ranked climber in the semifinals and put all the other girls on notice. Iwamine the Climbing Spider looked forward to seeing demoralized faces.

Kurea had already been experiencing the full High Concentration Konomin close up, but things didn't change when Konomi left the climbing mat. Konomi had built her own wall that the other climbers struggled to get over. Jun felt that first hand when she slipped on the first wall knowing that Konomi had climbed it on her first try. It was a huge blow to her pride that someone who had only been climbing for two months was much better at competing in the semifinals.

Extended flashback showed how Jun had always been a climbing nerd and ignored pop culture. She tried to make a friend who wanted to try climbing alongside her, but pushed her away because she didn't think the other girl would take climbing as seriously as she did. That dynamic hadn't changed at all for Jun when she went to high school, as we saw how she treated Konomi in the first episode. Jun's failure at making friends became part of her emotional crisis at failing all her attempts at climbing the walls Konomi successfully ascended. It was not a fun episode for Jun.