Who Should Win Cobra Kai’s Sekai Taikai? Amanda LaRusso
No, she’s not competing, but the girl has earned a win.
Here’s how it has to go down: EXT. Barcelona – Sunset. It’s the final bout of prestigious biannual karate tournament the Sekai Taikai, and the spectators are gripped more tightly than both of John Kreese’s lapels. Following a gruelling number of punches and character-arc-specific flashbacks, one of the 30-year-olds who play Cobra Kai’s teen karate champions slow-mo kicks their opponent off the top of the Sagrada Familia and in so doing, learns an improving lesson about friendship and self-esteem.
The trophy is buffed, the victor’s arm is raised in celebration, and then… a wave of phone alerts sound. Everybody scrambles for their screens to find out what’s happening and word spreads fast: it’s the pope. He’s issued a Papal bull using Vatican privilege to override the result and to crown a winner who wouldn’t know a kata if one bit her on the ass. That’s right: Amanda LaRusso is the new Sekai Taikai champion.
The crowd erupts in whoops and cheers, Amanda dips Johnny Lawrence and plants one on him like that sailor planted one on that nurse in the V-J Day photo; Carmen’s into it and slips Amanda their hotel room key for later; and Daniel misses the whole thing because he’s crouched by a vending machine giving busy little kisses to a photograph of Mr Miyagi that he keeps in his wallet.
Justice! Recognition, at last, for Cobra Kai’s greatest and least-sung character: all hail Amanda LaRusso. Pour that woman a large white wine.
She’ll already have one, because a fishbowl of Sauvignon Blanc is Amanda’s signature accessory – presumably to wash down all the Valium she requires to stay married to the Karate Kid.
For six seasons of Cobra Kai, Amanda LaRusso has been the sole grown-up in the San Fernando Valley. After what was presumably a decade or two in which her car dealer husband did all the normal over-40s stuff (watching documentaries about the Roman Empire, getting moles checked by the doctor…) one day, his brain went ping and his every waking thought became dominated by the martial art of – Ross Geller pronunciation – karate.
Instead of waving the kids off to boarding school and moving in with her Pilates trainer like most women would in the circumstances, Amanda stood by her man. She folded her arms and watched his rolling katamari of karate rivalries from afar, stepping in only to mildly take the piss, and once, to slap a guy when her daughter’s arm got broken.
While Daniel LaRusso can’t do the big Saturday food shop without committing himself to a karate grudge match with a guest star from his teen years, Amanda refuses to be drawn into feuds. Daniel’s enemies? She invites them to brunch. Daniel’s ex? She pulls her into an embrace of sororal warmth and pumps her for goss on her guy’s high school years. With wine, wit and sarcasm, Amanda cuts through the nonsense. And her family’s karate obsession is the sina qua non of nonsenses.
Usually, being the grown-up wife to a man-child would make Amanda an unenviable character to play in a comedy, but Courtney Henggeler and Cobra Kai are masters of comic tone. They’ve turned Amanda into one of America’s foremost ironists. She’s a walking raised eyebrow, entirely aware of the ridiculousness of her husband’s dojo woes, but somehow (it’s the wine) managing to stay amused instead of enraged.
If any character deserves a spinoff after the end of Cobra Kai, it’s Amanda. Once Daniel has finally retired his little karate headband and concreted over the Zen garden he uses to teach moral lessons to children based around them falling into a koi pond, the writers should gift her a quickie divorce, a sponsorship deal with the Echo Falls vineyard, and a new career as an agony aunt and podcaster. ‘Laugh It Off With Amanda’ would be bigger than Joe Rogan. Every episode, she’d chink her wine glass and console some poor spouse with her catchphrase “If it ain’t a dojo, it ain’t a prob, yo”. (They can workshop the catchphrase.)
We should all strive to be more Amanda. Of all the life lessons being learned in the foreground of Cobra Kai (in summary: violence is never the answer, except in the 95% of scenarios in which it absolutely is), the most useful one to learn is walking around in the back of shot, making sardonic comments and drinking margaritas. Amanda gets it. She knows that she’s married to a lunatic who’s in love with the ghost of his dead karate teacher, but it passes the time, they have a beautiful home, and his obsessive rivalries with other local senseis leave her with plenty of space in the diary for yoga and book group.
Amanda’s not allergic to the odd scrap herself, but only when provoked. She slapped Kreese sideways, went to bat for her daughter against Tory, got into an Ohio bar fight, and lent her strategic nous to the battle against Terry Silver. She’s a trooper, is the point. When she’s not laughing behind it, she’s got your back.
She’s also the only person in this entire show with an inch of perspective about how much of one’s brain should correctly be dominated by karate at any one time (anything over three percent is a pathology). She’s sanity itself. She has the patience of several saints and a sense of humour to die for. If anybody in this show deserves a trophy, it’s her.
Cobra Kai series 6A is out now on Netflix.
Written by
Louisa Mellor is the Den of Geek UK TV Editor. She has written about TV, film and books for Den of Geek since 2010, and for…