PicoBlog

it’s hard for me to find the opening to talk seriously about blue lock because it is, technically, a well and truly unhinged piece of work that for the last year, prior to the anime airing, i’ve mostly just consumed to file under my interesting subversions of genre tradition folder. that’s not a derogatory subcategory, either. far from it. i’ve been called out for showing favouritism to the point of bias towards narratives that are actively subversive — or at least ones that acknowledge, critique, oppose and/or embrace its forebears in the genre all at once. some pieces of media, i have resented for not going far enough in embodying its metatextual qualities and taking what i found to be the cowardly approach to paying homage, but many others i have loved for how the initial premise reflects an understanding of the pitfalls of an overcrowded, over-consumed genre and somehow manages to cut into all of that and into the heart of a thesis that it would not have reached in quite the same way otherwise. 

the mangaka ONE is unparalleled at this, and what conversations about their art style tend to bury is their keen eye and finger on the pulse of the shounen anime/manga tradition. shounen is by and large the most consumed “genre” of anime, (probably) partly because it encompasses so much and partly because existing demand requires further supply. the anime and manga scene is never wanting for a new title that people will hold up to its millions of predecessors and subsequently declare any of the following three: 

and — well. one would hope, right? one would hope that a new entry into the genre is emblematic of it and is unlike any of the others and distinguishes itself from the older generations of works. but it’s easy to fall back on any of those three sentiments when i’d also argue that consuming anime means constantly working against the wider cultures it belongs to. the wider culture of japan, which owes a lot of its soft power as a political entity to the global popularity of anime and manga; the wider culture of all shounen anime, which any new kid on the block must always consciously work towards and against at the same time; and the wider culture of whatever shounen subgenre this new entry belongs to, where it will be forced to contend with the most popular and beloved existing titles to earn its place in the canon. 

“genre” is a sticky term to use in the context of fiction in the first place, and one that is often more limiting than it is intended to be expansive. particularly in anime and manga, where genres are technically only meant to denote the intended demographic of a work and the reading/consumption level of that audience, certain labels also reflect the shared tradition or set of conventions that a title belongs to. this is more true for the genres shounen (young boys) and shoujo (young girls) than it is applicable to their adult counterparts in the josei/seinen categories, but shounen especially has birthed a sub-subgenre of works that have a metatextual, self-referential theme to them. most are often billed as comedy, though it just as often transcends any easy tags. you get everything from gintama’s trademark anachronisms and fourth wall breaks to one punch man forming its very literal title around a superhero so unbeatable that challengers only leave him more listless. there’s an Absurdist texture to these types of narratives, but i would also argue that none of these would be as funny and/or novel to us if we weren’t also tapped into the works and tropes they were meant to subvert. the deadpan humour in mashle’s main character responding to a reveal from the big bad of his story by saying he wants to take a nap is doubled by the fact that plenty of other main characters before him had taken a scene like this seriously, until even that has been drained of inherent weight by just how many times we’ve seen it. we joke about how some characters behave as if they don’t have “genre awareness” (i.e. the next victim in a horror movie understandably believes this is just another day in her high school coming-of-age life), and refer to different relationships to a story — reader, character, creator — as being “doomed” by a narrative.

we live in an era so inundated by media upon media upon media, many of them trying to replicate the popularity of one specific title that happened to blow up due to a variety of factors that cannot be engineered artificially or remaking an existing franchise in the name of nostalgia or adapting a story with an existing viewership, and it’s only natural that we’re now reacting to our own awareness of genre traditions by pointing out the tropes ourselves. among a generation reared on fanfiction tags and YA publishing trends that fizzled out eventually because they singled out the wrong winning component of the popular work that prompted the trend in the first place, we have a specific awareness of narrative structure and character whether we like to or not, and whether we embrace it or not. tropes do not make a story and should not be encouraged as the only foundation a story needs to exist, but you also can’t discount the fact that a single plot device needs a lot more than just one or two works to become convention. tropes have been named for a reason, and that reason lies in their shared existence among the hundreds of entries that comprise a genre. for a lot of us, a general understanding of what those hundreds include comes part and parcel with just consuming any form of media. 

the anime for mob psycho 100 recently wrapped up, and while the finale is to me the weakest part of a really strong story, it doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s just a well-done work of shounen genre subversion. it takes conventions we should know from older animes and comics — an overpowered do-gooder main character, a not-so-do-gooder secondary main character, a rotating cast of similarly powered individuals, a cult Big Bad, a corporate Big Bad, attempts at reminding the audience that the main character is still a student just trying to live his life — and it doesn’t do away with them or do them any differently, per se, yet there’s a perfectly balanced quality to mob psycho 100 that ensures none of these labels fit cleanly and that it pays homage to shounen while also critiquing it and working against it. yes, the power of love saves the day. yes, there’s a separation arc. yes, supposed antagonists are reformed and all come back in nearly the same order we meet them in the final arc. yes, mob psycho 100 is technically structurally formulaic, but it knows that, and by knowing, it cuts down all the fluff and leaves you with what matters: the story of a boy, regardless of any powers, who just wants to confess to the girl he likes and maybe build some stamina in the body improvement club in the meantime. no matter what else fluffs up the stories in mob psycho 100, no matter how much it echoes of the stories that precede it, no matter how many battles it features and how much power-scaling it invites, all of that feels secondary, even unfair to focus on, in the kind of story mob psycho 100 is. all on top of being funny and at times devastating, because ONE writes with a hand that loves the shounen genre as much as it knows that this particular work will just be one more in the same pile of similar stories unless it turns its own eye to its siblings and ancestors. 

mob psycho 100 probably didn’t set out to be commentary, and if it did, it isn’t a very rigorous one, but the subversion in itself is already commentary because i would posit that a genre can only begin to be metatextual and/or self-referential when it’s become overpopulated past a point of no return. which sounds pretty obvious, and it is, but in my personal case, i think i always underestimate when that point would be. i never know that i’m looking at the event horizon of a genre i’ve been entrenched in since childhood until we’re there, and at times not even until the genre has already died out and is in fact about to have a renaissance. 

the world of sports manga, though, i guess i just never expected to have a point of no return. my earliest memory of any anime was of slam dunk, and even if i didn’t consciously seek out sports animes until their peak years in the 2010s, they were never too far from my consciousness growing up. prince of tennis, hikaru no go, yawara! and baki and hajime no ippo, the 500 seasons of major, ping pong, each one so different that i never once considered the genre would eventually have its own traditions and widespread tropes. or maybe it’s just that most of these stories don’t involve sports teams, and it wasn’t until the explosion in popularity of animanga like kuroko no basuke and haikyuu!! and yowamushi pedal that the industry found there was even more to explore and market in a big cast full of a multitude of dynamics. 

but no matter what pieces of a formula are proven most effective of all, none of these sports animes are truly interchangeable for another, nor do they share much except for lovable characters and team bonding and a combination of stakes and resilience that you’d expect from a wartime survival drama instead of high school sports. it’s good, and it works, but it works differently for everyone. yuri on ice and run with the wind share very little, for instance, as do free! and eyeshield 21. the truth about sports narratives is that it’s an easy anchoring point; the rest of the work is in fleshing out the pieces on the board so that when they matter to the audience, and the stakes matter to the characters, the stakes also matter to your readers/viewers. 

it’s a simple and efficient premise, and though many sports animes trying to replicate the success of the luckier ones fail by relying too much on the foolproof-ness of that simplicity, thinking it’s a shortcut to earning the audience’s love, just as many sports animes succeed by keeping it simple the way that mob psycho 100 kept it simple. is it about the technicalities of track and field, or is it about a household of college boys trying to realize someone’s dream alongside him before it’s permanently outside of his grasp? is it about who gets to be a volleyball player, or is it a confident narrative of what it means to love something enough to defy the limits of your human-ness, your underdog-ness, your alone-ness on the court, to come together with your team and achieve flight for even just a moment? 

that’s where sports mangas excel, and in that, this is the one true thing they all have in common. “they remind us of what flesh-and-blood athletes and dancers do: they stretch and subvert — or break completely — the bounds of what we believe bodies can do,” maya philipps wrote for the new york times. that goes for the metaphorical, too. the very best sports mangas take their chosen premise — or just field in general, because the same logic applies to animes like chihayafuru and dance dance danseur — and allows it to set parameters for the human experience exactly so they can defy these and take us along for the cathartic ride. 

kaneshiro miyuki and nomura yusuke’s blue lock, however, takes that tried and true fact and decides it’s time to — for lack of a better word, and acknowledging what an eyeroll-worthy choice this one is — deconstruct the genre.

there are admittedly a lot of jokes to be made about blue lock’s premise, which finds the japanese football association looking for solutions after the national team places 16th in the 2018 fifa world cup. desperate for change, they indulge ego jinpachi’s brainchild, a program called blue lock that turns out to be part soccer battle royale and part intensive training regimen designed to pave the way to birthing the best possible striker. all of this is in service of “improving the quality of japanese football,” but it should be noted that a) if you fail at any point while in blue lock, you will never again be legally allowed to play for any japanese team, and b) what ego jinpachi perceives to be sorely missing from the japanese national team is — well. ego. the national team does not have a striker who has the ego to win no matter what it takes, and blue lock is designed to find someone in the next generation of players who will prove to be exactly that. 

i have had friends who, understandably, react to that premise with question marks and some sort of equivalent of why are the stakes so intense lmao… there’s also nothing in blue lock that discourages even more question marks, from the wildest pieces of dialogue you’ll read that week even in context to increasingly impossible to explain turns in the plot. no one in blue lock the series is sane because all of the sane people have already been eliminated from blue lock the program after a certain point. what you’re left with are characters who will drag you up by the hair and tell you to get it together, characters who will happily crack someone’s skull out of boredom, characters who have entire mental breakdowns on the field because all the normal people are probably watching the match from the comfort of their homes, never again to play for a japanese soccer team. 

this isn’t to say that insanity equals ego in blue lock. none of these characters are right in the head, a fact i say with a lot of affection, but not all of them have ego, even the ones who have managed to last to the current arc. what i’ve seen a lot of readers get wrong about blue lock is assuming that to prioritize your own ego is to be selfish, to hoard scoring opportunities and cast aside your own teammates, but our main character isagi isn’t representative of the series’ thesis just because he will spit the vilest string of insults if one of his own teammates interrupts his puzzle-making mid-game. instead, what blue lock means about ego, or so i think, is: how well, really, do you know your own self, and how far are you willing to go to find out and see that self through?

ego, then, in the blue lock world, is about selfhood. it’s about prioritizing the individual and understanding the costs of doing so. there are no heartwarming montages between the members of a bottom-rung team who wanted to go farther, and in fact a character who comes from a lower-income household, forced to give up on being a professional soccer player, instead prompts a self-interrogation in our main character along the lines of: does it make me a bad person, to feel good about a victory knowing i denied someone else a future in a sport they love and secured my own?

being in the blue lock program isn’t about being good or bad, or even necessarily about improvement in skills as a whole, though isagi starts off at a middle position with nowhere else to go but up. the players that make it in blue lock are often unsurprisingly already the best from their respective cities and prefectures, and rather than improving to help the team, much of the skill development in blue lock comes either in the form of “devouring” another player’s style (i.e. taking what you need from how they operate and applying it to how you understand yourself) or in shedding a previous version of you. what’s useless is cast aside in blue lock without a second thought. they have to. heart-to-hearts can never last more than a single stray scene here and there, and often to reframe or reaffirm what a character wants. do i want to follow this other character after all, or will i be doing my own desires a disservice if i do? will it help me or hurt me to want to be more like this other player? am i underestimating or overestimating the extent of my ego by making this choice? 

blue lock does still have the fun dynamics and team bonding we’ve learned to expect from sports animes, just not in iterations we’re used to seeing. it’s one thing to be close off the field and to know each other the way you have to know the guys you’re living in a dystopian jail facility with, but interpersonal dynamics in the series are enriched primarily by having faith in someone else’s selfhood, by believing in how them they can be on the field. there’s genuine respect and awe for each other among the blue lock boys as much as there is tension and frustration, but ultimately nothing is sacred once you play. which checks out with blue lock’s overarching point. that nothing else but the current play should be sacred to you. not even the game as a whole, or yourself, or your team. fuck them. fuck you, too. get this point the way that feels best for you in that moment. then get the next. and the next. that’s how you win. you take the chance offered to you once it comes and make your own luck that way, without looking to see if anyone else wants it. 

selfishness isn’t an entirely new theme in sports animes, though. i think the best main characters for narratives like this are ones who will chase their own ego down to the end of the world — at times literally, at times even if it means giving up all other anchors that can weigh them down. hinata shouyou from haikyuu!! works as the beating heart of a large story relying largely on formulas (backstory, dynamic shifts, naming conventions, personal stakes as personal stakes because the individual motivations are entrenched into the fabric of what makes the team a team) because he’s a character defined by greed and hunger, surrounded by a cast of characters for whom motivation is synonymous with personality. this is a boy who will sneak himself into a training camp he wasn’t invited to and move to brazil to do beach volleyball, a boy who at one point almost collided with a teammate because he moved on instinct for a toss that wasn’t meant for him. murao junpei from dance dance danseur wrestles with honoring his father’s stunt man legacy and pursuing an art form as rigid and demanding as ballet, and when he makes the final leap to choose, it’s with the understanding that he’ll be turning his back on the life he could have had to single-mindedly chase after a dream that very few in history are given the privilege of fulfilling. 

these characters dream big, and dream selfishly, and dream hungrily, and while any good story operates from the assumption that every single character, even side and tertiary ones, are the main character of their own story and we just happen to be seeing this particular one where we won’t see them again after one arc, it’s even more vital in sports narratives. this is a pursuit that will test and break your body, and so you must want it more than anyone else in your position will. but it’s okay, because there will be others with you, sharing in your desire to be better and making this team better, and that level of resilience and inspiration trickles down to the emotions that reach the audience. 

in blue lock, though, the nurturing of ego isn’t encouraged simply in the name of subverting the expectations of the genre. yes, there is a fundamental and conscious shift happening here; blue lock came out in 2018, trailing far after, say, haikyuu!!, which is widely understood to be the best that the pillars of the sports manga genre has to offer. i agree with that, and it’s only because a manga like haikyuu!! exists that we are able to arrange other popular titles along the axis of the position it occupies. sure, manga like slam dunk and hajime no ippo go farther back and in many ways have been iconic for longer, but you don’t discuss the hunger games as the peak of dystopian YA by prefacing it with oh, but the giver by lois lowry has been around for longer. instead, we’re able to judge objective genre failures like divergent for what it didn’t do that the hunger games trilogy accomplished: dystopia as sociopolitical and sociocultural critique, only further strengthened by how its movie adaptations represent all the things the source criticizes. haikyuu!! functions in much the same way: a manga who stuck to basics and never bit off more than it could chew, and the result is a remarkably well-balanced story full of rich, memorable characters and a fanbase loyal to more than just the idea of the story but to the heart of this particular story itself. and so it’s never too far from people’s minds when they recommend other sports anime, even if only to say, oh, this character is like if that haikyuu!! character did swimming/track/skateboarding. 

my point is: haikyuu!! did all the building blocks right from stakes to characters to relationships, and when the time came to end it, it did so neatly and without fuss. there’s no real pain except momentary grief that will make you stronger and better, and at the end of the day, after all, volleyball is only about one thing: to connect, from one play to the next, from person to person, to do all you can and fly together as one to stop the ball from touching the floor and ending your time on the court earlier than will be enough to satiate your hunger. playing is about how fun it can be to have your moment on the court, and so it makes sense that haikyuu!! characters are never without at least another member of their designated pair, and always somehow reflective of their team’s motto. 

yet that “connect” philosophy, that mentality, is what blue lock highlights as something of a sociocultural problem. when i first started reading it last year, i remember thinking of a medium post about what overseas viewers find so novel about watching terrace house, a japanese reality show on netflix that ostensibly has no other overarching demands of its six participants except that they all live in the same house. members are allowed to live their daily lives as they normally would; the cameras are mere “observers.” a couple controversies will later suggest this is, of course, not true, and that the producers do in fact nudge the members towards the storylines they will have in mind while editing. but for a time, terrace house was beloved, particularly during the boys and girls in the city season, because of how it highlights the difference between the colloquialisms of north american culture and the unspoken social rules observed in japan.

it’s common to highlight the collectivist nature of japanese society when discussing the comparative individualism of western life, but what counts as collectivism rarely has to be defined. that lack of definition might be a part of it as well, because what’s needed to maintain group harmony cannot be foreseen universally; it will be different each time, and the expectation needs to stay loose to stay binding. everything from following a straight path from daycare to the workforce to keeping a history of war crimes out of school textbooks is in service of what renka taguchi describes as a “general trend [in japan] where people prioritize conformity, social harmony, and value group goals over individual goals.” 

taguchi highlights this in a journal article arguing for the pitfalls of collectivism in the development of the japanese economy, and although the paper remains focused on how the pervasiveness of a collectivist culture poses threats to future innovations in the business world, it’s also — brace yourself for the argument i’m about to make and contain your eyeroll — the exact same case that ego jinpachi makes for the blue lock program. 

for all that blue lock is truly, truly off-the-rails batshit insane, because the stakes are insane over soccer and that produces some batshit insane choices and plot directions, it’s a series that was clearly pitched, at its core, with a particular criticism in mind. the characters in the series representing the japanese football association aren’t just there to be corporate antagonists; whenever they’re in a scene, it’s so someone from the blue lock side can leverage a barrage of criticisms at them that make no secret of being rooted in reality. the tension and discomfort in those conversations are, unbelievably, the most realistic part of blue lock, and there’s always a palpable shift in tone when it’s clear that the creators are doing the equivalent of looking into a surveillance camera and addressing the people watching. even when the plot of blue lock wanders into corners you won’t expect from a sports manga, it never forgets its central point about how the sports training and sports narratives produced by a collectivist society have no hope of birthing innovation in the future of their national teams. 

and — i mean. i’m not going to get into the anthropology of it, though it is hard not to notice the importance of group harmony in sports animes once you start looking for it. in any case, blue lock’s premise poses interesting implications for what constitutes ego, and it’s not as if it advocates for the advancement of an individual to represent an entire community, either. one of the earlier speeches that ego jinpachi gives to the japanese football association is in critique of the japanese soccer world’s pattern of “finding a genius,” championing them and giving them a national spotlight before shuffling them off to train in an overseas league, where the combined forces of culture shock, language barriers and all around lack of preparation for the ins and outs of the professional soccer world will break the player down until they return to japan, half what they used to be, only to play in a mid-level league and retire before thirty. 

and if that critique was too conceptual to seem like it matters to the story, blue lock also carves out a place in the story for an example in the form of a character. itoshi sae, older brother to one of the main characters, was championed as a striker at a young age and sent off to the spanish league only to visit japan again years later having abandoned his original dream and steadily growing resentful of japanese soccer. it isn’t that it’s easy to misread sae so much as he exists alongside the themes he embodies and you cannot divorce him from those: this is a supposed wunderkind who was funnelled off to an overseas league without any other tie to home and with the weight of an entire nation’s expectations after a string of failed predecessors. people tend to like the reading that something tragic happened to sae in spain that made him change his dream to becoming a midfielder — and if there is, i’m not especially in need of it. i think all that we can understand about the fundamentals that make up sae is already there. he’s not resentful of japan; we get hints, after all, that he does feel homesick in some part, and only ever speaks ill of his home country in the context of its inability to produce a striker worth his time. he is resentful of japanese soccer, of the culture that made him choose between his responsibility to the soccer he just happens to unwillingly represent and his genuine love for the sport. i think sae chose the latter, in becoming a midfielder, and that he finds sincere fulfillment in the art of passing. i think sae chose soccer, and that you see it in his deference, at odds with the general air of arrogance he adopts, to whatever will make a beautiful play, and his loyalty to the idea of a striker who will do anything to score. i think sae chose to keep himself, even if it meant guarding his relationship to soccer from his own brother, who was too young at the time to respond to sae’s choice with anything but hurt and betrayal that sae was not the infallible striker japan needed him to be — when really what he meant, to sae, was that it was a fundamental betrayal for sae to choose himself, the individual, over the collective. but i think that’s exactly the point blue lock makes about ego: that you can’t have a collective that will get anywhere if you don’t have individuals equipped to forge their own path there. 

i don’t like to read sae’s case as tragic for a multitude of reasons, though i admit there is sadness in parts of it. but there’s something meaningful about a character who has prioritized his selfhood and future by changing directions — especially in a work that has done the same within its own genre. sae’s backstory, and blue lock’s premise as a whole, isn’t the sort of narrative that we would have had in the form we do without the years of tradition preceding it. media is always likely to be reflective of the society and wider culture it belongs to, no matter how fantastical and fictional, and anime and manga should never be excluded from that assumption. if something feels a little too neat, maybe that’s because it’s advancing an ideal considered important in a certain culture, whether that’s for the better or worse. if something feels a touch critical/satirical — chances are that it is. it’s those basic things that make media what it is; they wouldn’t have the power to reach us and change us if we aren’t in them in some way already. 

even media have to evolve and innovate, and i think that’s what we see in titles like mob psycho 100 and blue lock, where the subversion is the point but also the continuation when there’s nowhere else to go. genres will end at some point, if only for a time, just like how we see very few shoujo animes right now despite just having an entire decade full of them. but there is a point before that end where the genre turns on itself — not to attack, but to observe, and in doing so, it also offers a counterpoint to how we’ve always understood the traditions we take for granted enough to expect. that takes ego, too, i think, to put pen to paper and decide that if there’s a story in the ideal, then there’s a story in the critique as well. the questions that blue lock invites its characters to ask — how well, really, do you know your own self, and how far are you willing to go to find out and see that self through? — are the same ones a work like this asks of itself and the wider genre & culture that it’s part of, and i just think that’s super, super neat to witness as it’s unfolding. 

(there’s also a mini-lesson here about craft and ego, the one i meant to write when i first started this doc, but i’ve used up enough words here for an audience of two maximum.) 

if any of you are still reading somehow and are interested in how a work at the last stage of a genre can have no choice but to deconstruct tropes and in doing so end the bloodline it belongs to, this is a really great video essay on how madoka magica did it with the magical girl genre. 

either way, read blue lock — i’m an advocate for reading the manga over watching the anime 9 times out of 10, but especially this one — for a fun time that starts feeling like the bastard child of a night at a sports bar and an acid trip. there are jokes and also excessively long thinkpieces like this, apparently. i’ve been shitposting too much about it and needed to balance it out, maybe remind my friends i do in fact have half a brain cell. 

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