Progress on chapter five has slowed this week because I found out I have to move. It’s been very stressful. Working on not feeling silly because of how stressed it feels. Like, yeah, I shouldn’t be worried that my landlord is angry, or will be, at me, and finding a new place in close to two months is a normal thing. The advent of this time has come over me suddenly, but it’s not happening immediately. It’s still a stressful thing, though, and I don’t want to tell myself I’m wrong to feel that way. Anyway, it’s been harder to focus on story planning, because the end of June has felt like tomorrow all week and so I have to focus on that decision-making. I do have some important dialogue drafted up, though, and will continue with that. The picture this week is a first draft for a version of Medusa I want to use in a story. I like the picture overall, but I’m not sold on the outfit. I was imagining it as “toga + kimono,” but I don’t think that’s what I ended up with. I really have a lot of work to do with color, too.
Anyway, this week is another media analysis week. I have been reading Captain Tsubasa on the Shonen Jump app, and it’s pretty great. It’s a soccer manga following a young phenom from elementary school and into middle school. I’m at the finals of the middle school tournament, so I don’t know how much farther it goes. I’ve read a few sports manga before, and they’ve been more character-focused, such that even if you don’t know much about the game, you can still be invested in the story. Captain Tsubasa is different; it’s action-focused, such that even if you don’t care about the characters, you can still enjoy watching as the author invents a series of uniquely impressive soccer games, beat-for-beat. The things I want to talk about have to do with the transition between the elementary and middle school stories. While the series isn’t suffering, per se, there are a few issues on the narrative side that I want to address.
First is the introduction of romantic storylines, or what passes for them. There was a recurring thing in the elementary arc where the captain of the school cheer squad, Sanae, had a crush on Tsubasa. Classic sports thing. Sanae, known then as the Boss, was a very solid comedic relief character (a kind of character I typically don’t like). She was a brash tomboy, she was kinda shameless, she was not hiding what she was feeling. After the three-year time skip for the middle school arc, she’s completely changed. While her character transition from the brash tomboy into a stereotypically demure and reserved young woman is believable, in that social pressures cause that transition in real life all the time, it’s still pretty disappointing. She’s a boring character now, with an identical pasted-on smile no matter what she’s feeling. She’s being positioned as the more serious romantic plotline, even though we all know there’s no point. Sanae certainly knows. If it’s not a soccer ball, Tsubasa doesn’t want it. They also introduced a first-year team manager (whose name I forget; Mina?) as Sanae’s rival, who also learns that there’s no chance with him. He doesn’t seem to have feelings for either of them.
It’s supposed to be a love triangle, but it’s actually two teens having one-sided crushes on the same boy and not really being in conflict over it? Like, they’re friends and feel competitive, but there’s no real tension? It’s weak and doesn’t add anything to the story, since there’s no work connecting the team managers to the performance of the team. There are multiple instances of team managers being in love with the team’s ace, and it’s boring each time. The author clearly doesn’t have a sense for writing romance, and in that case, I’d much rather we just didn’t have it. I’m usually all for the depth and character work of romantic subplots in otherwise action-heavy stories, too. But I wasn’t reading this book, hoping for a romantic subplot. It’s about the magic trick of creating fake soccer matches. If your heart’s not in it, then please skip it, you know?
There’s also something of a DBZ problem here. Tsubasa is, of course, the best player around. Everyone else on his team, who are all supposed to be highly-skilled, national-level players, are inconsistent, at best. They all agree that they’re chopped liver and there’s no point competing with Tsubasa. They trip up and act like rookies all the time, and then pull off incredible miracle plays, saying, “Yeah, we’ve always been good, remember?” Like, no, I don’t, because you’ve been playing so poorly without Tsubasa. Before the regionals, there was a storyline where the team had to get their motivation back (which was strange, since they also emphasized how hard they worked and were winning all the time), and the end result of that storyline somehow wasn’t the rest of the team vowing to surpass Tsubasa to prove themselves. What’s the point? There’s another element where a key player in the elementary school tournament, Taro, moves away before middle school, so Tsubasa doesn’t have his partner on the field anymore. The obvious answer being that he should have teamed up with one of his other teammates, or spent three years developing a partnership with each of the three top players. It’s a huge missed opportunity, in my eyes.
The last thing I’m hung up on is the positioning of Tsubasa’s main rival, Kojiro Hyuga. Kojiro is a rough guy, introduced as a player with a lot of raw power who’s willing to injure other players without a second thought to score. His coach, Kira, was displayed as like the crooked drunk type leading him astray. I think, at least, because over time they softened that image dramatically. Kojiro’s elementary school arc shifted from his teammates begging him to be less mean to him learning that teamwork is important. His background is that he’s from a very poor family, and he wanted to work hard to get a soccer scholarship to ease the burden on his family. That’s what starved him for victory and drove him to his extremes. In middle school, he stagnated in his growth as a player because he got that scholarship. Kira returns to tell Kojiro he’s gotten soft, that his newfound compassion for other humans is a weakness soccer doesn’t allow, and he should come train with him to regain his senses. That training was just fancy strength training on the beach; I’m not sure where the elimination of compassion comes in.
Like, I get that sports can be rough, and I don’t know a lot about soccer, but isn’t this half of a story about the desperate player going to the dark side, without the conclusion that being evil is bad? I fully get doing anything to win, but if you can’t beat someone without hurting them so much they can’t play anymore, then you’re not better than them. Right? Do you want to win, or do you want to be the best? Kojiro has legit skills, but I’m not convinced he’s actually as good as Tsubasa. The story skips addressing the issue of rough play in sports, despite heavily featuring it. Everyone’s like, yeah sometimes you get severe injuries and play through them. Sometimes other players will purposefully attack your injuries with “soccer techniques” and you just have to roll with it. Is that an actual thing in soccer? If this is going to be such a big part of the story, then can the author please take a stance on the ethics of trying to fully murder your opponent in a middle school sports game just to score another point? Am I supposed to be sympathetic towards an equally skilled player with a troubled home life, or am I supposed to be hoping that Anakin rejects the Dark Side? We have both, and it’s not clear what the vibe is.
It also doesn’t help that returning to the Coach Kira influence sidetracks the actual progress Kojiro made, which was becoming the teamwork guy. There’s a way to frame his storyline around wanting to rekindle his individual skills and passion without rejecting teamwork. Kira can be part of that by telling Kojiro he used to be a one-man team and now relies too much on others. We do kinda have some of that, but it was instigated by the compassionate weakness argument, which confuses the issue. What is Kojiro lacking, at this point? What’s his arc supposed to be? Tsubasa is a teamwork guy, and can be a one-man team, and he’s not injuring others to do it. Where exactly does Kojiro fit in the world of soccer?
As a conclusion, I had a realization last night I want to type out. Whenever I’ve worked on a drawing or a story on a break at work, it’s been really nice and worked very well. It’s similar to working in the backroom generally, where there are other people quietly doing their own thing in the same space. That’s called parallel play, right? I focus better on drawing when there are other people in the room engaged in activity, but not paying attention to me? That’s why I like listening to podcasts while I draw, because then there’s “another person” talking about something else – doing their own thing. I’m going to try going to the library more often.
Weekly Art Blog 5/11-5/18/2025
Life in the Gutters 