sword_logic | reading: haikyuu!!

haikyuu!! (or, in the official viz transcription, haikyu!!) is a manga series running 402 chapters/45 volumes that focuses on hinata shoyo, a teenager who is inspired to play volleyball after seeing a player on TV who's just as short as he is. this is a criminally oversimplified summary, but i started all these posts with summaries, so here we go.

haikyuu!! is not about volleyball. i would even go so far as to say it's not a sports manga! that's my spicy fucking take, and i will stand by it. haikyuu!! is about learning that it's okay to fail.

truly, all the way down, hq is about the indomitable human spirit. which sounds so fucking melodramatic! but it really is. it's about facing adversity, and losing, and winning. it's about the climax of a match being not the winning point, but the moment where you wanted to do something different and you did it.

hq did an absolutely incredible job of "humanizing" the "bad guys." this is in giant scare quotes, because they're all so deeply human, and they're all teenagers. there are no bad guys. they're all here to play a game that they love so much. even the slimiest, meanest opponents get a window of insight - why they're here, what drives them, how they're just as excitable or jealous or hardworking or fragile as the Main Team. you actively want to root for the other guys because, like, they love the game, too. they want to win, too. i honestly don't have words to express just how well this was done and how impactful it was.

i also can't talk about what Really Hit Me without manga spoilers (the anime has not gotten here yet) so without further ado:

first off, the timeskip and denouement or w/e you want to call it is hands down, hands down the single best wrap-up timeskip i have ever seen. ever. there were thirty chapters dedicated to gently, thoroughly wrapping up the lives of all the players we touched - even the minor ones. thirty whole fucking chapters dedicated to closure. (hoohoo, i'm already getting choked up thinking about this. this was so good.)

second... man. i can't even collect myself enough to talk about takeda's last speech to hinata at the spring finals. i was trying so hard not to cry while reading at work (poor fucking choice!) that i could barely see what i was reading. failure is part of the human condition. failure is not an ending. failure does not mean you cannot try again.

this series also touched on failure and success between generations - between three-year rotations of high school classes as well as actual generations of children and parents, younger and older siblings, senpai and kouhai - in such a staggering way; the final nekoma vs. karasuno game was just. god. i'm now legit crying thinking about it, lol. here we fucking are. idk why i thought i'd be able to talk about this coherently.

but before i go and just full-on drown in my feelios, what really, really hit me was the amount of people in the timeskip who stopped playing volleyball. and it wasn't a bad thing. it wasn't ever framed as giving up, or abandoning volleyball for something nebulously better. it was just a fact of life. some people kept going; some people didn't. and it was okay. hoooohoohoohoo. man. this series was so good. if i ever get my shit together enough to talk about this properly i'll make another post.

reading: haikyuu!!

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