Blue Lock: Sports Manga's Dark Horse

Across my journey of sports manga, I've seen countless recommendations. However, through my pilgrimage, I heard of a dark horse growing more powerful last year with each stride—a divergent beast intent on carving its path away from the usual sports tropes.

A primal force called Blue Lock by Muneyuki Kaneshiro and Yusuke Nomura. Since its introduction into the manga scene in Jump Magazine in August 2018, the series has steadily gained massive popularity. So much so that its recent anime adaptation could lead to the series replacing the hole that Haikyuu left in the sports sphere after the manga's finish in 2020. Whether or not these statements are factual is up for you to decide. After all, I can tell you my thoughts here and now. So please sit back and relax, dear reader, as I analyze Blue Lock properly.

Note

This will be a spoiler-free review of the Blue Lock Manga. I'm also coming from Blue Lock, knowing only the basics of football. I've heard that the series doesn't sit well with fans of the sport due to its rhetoric and over-the-top nature. However, I'll be tackling this series mainly from a perspective of a writer and reader and not an active player or fan of the sport.

Summary

In the hyper-competitive field of international football, Japan has remained somewhat behind. So much so that the Japanese Football Union was left begging for a literal game-changer. And those pleas were answered by Junapchi Ego, a revolutionary who comes with the controversial program called Blue Lock.

Ego takes three hundred young forwards in this prison-like facility and completely reformats everything they know about football. From the other two hundred ninety-nine corpses, one man will rise as the world's most fantastic striker and become the hero of Japan. Realizing that potential greatness may be waiting for him, Yoichi Isagi decided to take Ego's challenge, forever sending himself and many others on the path to be the world's most fantastic egotist striker.

Cast

Like other sports manga shonen series, Blue Lock has a huge cast of borderline insane characters. However, due to the cutthroat and competitive nature of Blue Lock, "teammates" are more so rivals, and there is no set status quo for them, which means that I will only be going over the most important characters in the first arcs and then later on.

First is our mc Isagi, a usually kind, easygoing, and friendly opponent. However, the more time he's in Blue Lock, his demeanor changes, becoming fiercely ambitious, ruthless, calculating, and cruel. While he starts as one of the worst in Blue Lock, Isagi's intelligence, observation, and resourcefulness of his fellow rivals make him a remarkably quick study.

Outside of him, the starting Team Z includes the prima donna speedster Chigiri, shifty Igarashi, heroic Kunigami, hyper-aggressive Raichi, and playfully instinctual Bachira. Later on, we get introduced to fan favorites like the egotistical brute Barou, preppy rich kid Reo, animalistic maniac Ryusei, and stern egotist Itoshi Rin. While Blue Lock's ever-changing structure makes it so you'll never get proper screen time for every character, it makes character interaction much more fun. Almost all of the players have a unique quirk that leads to chaotically cool or funny moments, respectively.

At its best, chaos pushes the other characters to actively steal the show from one another in hype moments to improve themselves. So while it does break the traditional sports makeup, we still have an unpredictable revolving door cast that can become relevant and strong in their own right at any time.

Presentation

If there is one thing that I think can universally agree upon, Blue Lock's art is crispy af. Yusuke Nomura's art style is amazingly unique and gives the series a lot of its distinctive charm. Bold outlines and deep blacks mix together to create hundreds of varied designs. In addition, the expressions on Blue Lock are top-notch, especially when it comes to showing the intensity of games. If Hakyuu is the master of capturing the fun or electricity of a particular moment, Blue Lock emphasizes the pure vigor of lighting fast struggles. Another thing I love about Blue Lock's art because most of the characters have consistent visual schemes that evolve with their playstyles.

Isagi is often portrayed as a living puzzle, constantly taking account his Blue Lock teachings and environment to reconstruct himself to win a game. Barou's powerful physique and pure egotism got portrayed as a strong lion. Bachira's playful, more cooperative mindset is described as a childish monster. This not only creates loads of cool imagery but also cool ways of visually expressing a player's development or skills. Overall this almost combative aura makes Blue Lock feel less like a real game and more so an intensive battle shonen. Which I think fits with the series overall.

Overview

From the very beginning of the series Blue Lock makes it's rhetoric very clear. While other sport series and hell a lot of shonen, in general, expressed the importance of teamwork and cooperation, Blue Lock is massively different. It actively scoffs at those notions, instead promoting the players operate entirely on egotism and selfishness.

While, of course, we get introduced to many opposing teams in Blue Lock, don't get it twisted. Every time the ball gets passed someone else, it isn't eleven vs. eleven but one vs. twenty-one. The only real difference between friend and ally are those you must destroy or use at your leisure. Any serious opposition to this theme gets either debunked or ignored as the series goes on, which I feel is a shame, honestly. Though I think this move and feeling are supposed to be intentional.

Combined with the naturally high stakes environment, and Blue Lock presents a constantly changing host of new challenges that test the players in new ways. Very little downtime gets given for the cast and games of increasing difficulty are commonplace. Said challenges get built around further reiterating Blue Lock's themes and in-universe concepts in a way that I feel other sports series don't.

Finding out your unique skill, honing it to become viable, and using it within the context of your teammates and opponents in a game are all explored with much weight. Such self-reliance combined with the naturally fast-moving and confrontational football effectively breeds, in my eyes, games that are almost always unpredictable since characters will happily jump to create complex but stimulating chain reactions worth of plays at any time.

If I had a nickel for every time my brain went full dummy at seeing a character use their simple skill differently from someone else, I would be richer than Jeff Bezos. In Blue Lock, as long as you have the talent, skill, and ego, you'll be able to shine or get stronger in your way.

As such, I never truly feel the series becomes over the top to the point of breaking immersion since the series gets designed to turn extraordinary into a routine while simultaneously explaining every player's clear limitations and weaknesses. Ego states the point isn't to win every game but to have the mindset that you'll do it. There's a straightforward method to the madness.

Isagi is the best example of how these themes are applied. While he starts off the series as one of Blue Lock's weakest, Isagi's innate spatial awareness on the court gives him the chance to predict and react masterfully to other players in unique ways. Over time, his mindset also evolves with his skills, starting from a boy unsure he can achieve greatness while proudly exclaiming that he will be the one to bring Japan to the world cup no matter how many have to fall to get it.

In short, these concepts and how they got presented can be viewed as a slap in the face of football and an excuse to disguise football as a trademark battle shonen. However, I disagree as I believe Blue Lock, in essence, isn't a story that openly seeks to discredit those concepts, instead bringing up others that we don't like to admit. And whether you want the message of Blue Lock is entirely up to you, but I feel we shouldn't discredit a story for what's is saying but how it says it for its narrative. Nevertheless, the more I grow older, I agree with Blue Lock's message. Said message being-.

Epilogue

As I'm making this, the first month of 2022 has nearly passed me by. Blue Lock's anime will take the world by storm while the manga proper is entering a global stage. On my end, though, I'm about to start back up college and recently started writing commissions. And in those past few months, or maybe these few years, I've changed more than I ever thought possible, or maybe come to terms with myself in ways I couldn't before.

The 2020s so far have brought me people who would never acknowledge or appreciate me, literal forces of nature that impede my life at every turn, and most of all, self-doubt in a world with one depressing certainty. Yet, as a child, I would have stated that good fortune would eventually come my way if I remained good.

However, as I move into adulthood, I realize that isn't all true. This is why I think Blue Lock touches me like no other story has before. Absolute altruism or passivity won't automatically grant me what I want. And having that innate indulgence in that desire should inherently be bad. Since the only way you can get to your goals is by being a little selfish and egotistical.

There's nothing guaranteed in this world, and we have such limited time in it, and I've spent far too much scared to share my voice. So I refuse to let the bullshit of other people and forces consume my life. I will fight, scream and crawl if that's what it takes to overcome it. I will keep improving, thinking, writing, and living because this is my passion, and I won't let it go for anything.

Blue Lock touches me so much because if you strip back the fancy techniques, crazy characters, and even soccer, Blue Lock is the story of a group of young men who seek to answer a question. If you had the chance, how hard would you stride to grasp hold of your now realized dream?

At the end of the story, there may only be one striker that reigns supreme, but at the very least, those two hundred ninety-nine other souls can go on in life knowing that they genuinely did everything in their power to succeed in their dream. Hell, most would probably find another way to obtain that striker's dream without the help of Blue Lock. So if being an egotist means finding your passion, whatever it may be, and finding every single way possible to obtain/enjoy it with no regrets or unfathomable challenges, I guess I am one.

Whether or not my dream of bringing my stories to life happens, I shouldn't regret giving myself credit and appreciation only I can provide. I'll fight with full faith. Either way, I'll make sure that people remember my name, for we both have so many stories left to tell.