EVERYTHING. IS. VOLLEYBALL.
This is your brain on 'Haikyuu!!'
The other day I was chatting with a co-worker about our relationships to our phones. I was lamenting that in the last month my screen-time had almost doubled. Why? Because I was rewatching Haikyuu!! (two exclamation points!!) in anticipation of the new movie: Haikyuu!! The Dumpster Battle. There are four seasons—three twenty-five-episode long seasons, and one-ten-episode long season, for a grand total of eighty-five-episodes—and I was determined to rewatch (or in the case of season four, watch) all of them before the movie.
The only problem: I became aware of the movie less than a month out from release. This resulted in my shotgunning the series. Twenty-minutes spare before work? I’ll sneak in an episode. Arrived at work ten-minutes early? Time enough for half an episode. I was watching it before I went to sleep; I was watching it when I woke up; I was watching it while I was drifting in and out of consciousness zonked on painkillers after my wisdom teeth removal1. By-and-large, I’m a movie person; I like stories that begin and end in the span of two-ish hours. This makes TV my enemy. There are loads of shows that I like but gave up on because they were just taking too long—and when I do watch a TV show all the way through, it’s normally over a span of months, sometimes years.
All this is to say, watching Haikyuu!! this quickly, this dedicatedly pretty much broke my brain. I've had Haikyuu!! phases before (more on that later) but not like this.
For the uninitiated, Haikyuu!! is an anime about the epic highs and lows of highschool volleyball. Our protagonist is Hinata Shoyo. He is five-feet and four-inches tall, which is unusually short for a volleyball player, unless they are their team's libero. But Hinata doesn’t want to be a libero2; he wants to be an ace3. This proposition would be farcical if not for two facts: he is very, very fast and can jump very, very, very high. The story, then, is a classic underdog tale. Everyone writes-off him because he is short, because is unpolished, because—like a pig being the best damn sheep-dog you’ve ever seen—people take one look and say, ‘No way!’ And Hinata, fire-haired, fire-eyed, fire-hearted, proves them wrong time and again.
Of course, he does this with the help of his team. He plays for Karasuno, a school that was once a powerhouse on the national volleyball scene, who’s acclaim has recessed of late. Each of Hinata’s team members have their own demons to work through. There’s Tsukishima Kei, a chronically apathetic middle-blocker4 who needs to learn to care. There’s the team's current ace, Asahi Azumane, a strong player knee-capped by anxiety. Wing spiker5 Ryūnosuke Tanaka: jack-of-all-trades, master of none, who needs to find his speciality. The team's captain, Sugawara Daichi, can inspire but lacks the ability to harness his players' strengths. And, most importantly, Kageyama Tobio. He’s the team’s setter6, and is a little bit of a genius. But can get tyrannical about plays, demanding that players try harder to match his insane sets, rather than tailoring his sets to each player. He needs to let-up a little, but he also needs a player with enough natural skill—and speed—to match his sets, so that he can elevate his plays too. Thank god, then, that Hinata fits that bill to a T.
Haikyuu!! is a show about foils: every character has at least one perfect opposite who exposes their individual weaknesses and exploits them mercilessly. Hinata has about a dozen different foils. There’s Kageyama, who’s all training and consideration, while Hinata is all raw talent and vibes. There’s Takanobu Aone, a blocker tall and talented enough to shut-down Hinata’s quick attacks. There’s Kōrai Hoshiumi, another “little giant,” who’s just as fast as Hinata, can jump just as high, but has been playing for longer, and therefore is more put together. Then there’s the players from Shiratorizawa Academy: Ushigima Wakoatoshi, who has all height and physical might that Hinata does not; Goshiki Tsutomu, who is as much of a neophyte as Hinata, but far more tactical; and Satori Tendō, a blocker who is as cheerful as Hinata, but has Joker-disorder, where his only goal is harshing everyone else’s vibe just because he wants to see the world burn.
And, finally, there is Kenma Kozume. He is the setter for Nekoma High (which itself is the primary foil for Karasuno High: Nekoma is great at defence; Karasuno is great at offence; the school have a decades old friendly rivalry). He is a foil for Hinata in just about every way imaginable (I’ll delve into that later). He is unique amongst Hinata’s foils in that he is also Hinata’s friend.
(I’m just introducing these characters as context, as flavour, so don’t worry about remembering all their names. The only ones you need to keep in your minds-eye are Hinata and Kenma. The rest are just a vehicle for me to illustrate the shows structure and thematic “deal.”)
I first got into Haikyuu!! in 2016. This was the peak of my anime phase (I had a subscription to Crunchyroll back when the site was kind of unusable) and also the peak of what I call my “gay-double-think-era,” in which I was closested, in a relationship with a girl, but also pretty much knew I was gay, and was constantly drawn to gay™ things, but had kind of siloed these two truths in my mind, and figured that I could perform heterosexuality and acknowledge homosexuality without any kind of problems (reader: this did not work).
Haikyuu!! is light on female characters. There's the club's manager, a ten-out-of-ten smokeshow baddie who turns heads wherever she goes, but her attractiveness is played for laughs: every guy is into her, but she is forever out of their weight class, and they make fools of themselves trying to impress her. There’s also a romance subplot in season four, but it’s a deeply unserious narrative exercise.
The only meaningful relationships, then, are between boys: boys who are friends, boys who are rivals, boys who are dynamic duos, boys forming emotional support networks for other boys. Boys, boys, boys. But, despite what some fans online will tell you, the show is not “gay.” In fact, it is dedicatedly unerotic. While there’s a lot of attention paid to the male form, it’s almost exclusively viewed through a machinist lens: Wow that guy has bulging biceps… all the better to spike with! Wow that guy has great legs… all the better to jump with!
Even in my gay-double-think-era, I was not drawn to the show out of a desire to project sexual desire onto the characters. Rather, I was drawn to it because of what the lack of eroticism created a space for: beautiful, holistic homosociality. I liked the show because it was about male-male relationships that bore no spectre of self-conscious masculinity. These were characters that—in classic anime form—spoke about their feelings and desires directly, boldly, emotionally. These were boys who were unafraid to tell each other how they felt (about volleyball); these were boys that were unafraid to touch each others bodies (hugging when they did well at volleyball); these were boys that were unafraid to show weakness (crying when they did not do well at volleyball).
Hinata is perhaps the best example of this. He fails just about every test of real-world heteronormative masculinity: he’s physically unimpressive, too emotional, and commits the ultimate faux pas of wanting something really, really badly. Yet, in Haikyu!! he’s the star, the heart of the team, the paragon. Whenever he beats an opponent, their thoughts—which we get in beautiful, melodramatic voiceovers—are the same: I want to be more like him, I want to feel, I want to fight, I want to want as much as him.
In the world of Haikyuu!! all personal problems and anxieties can be sublimated into volleyball and resolved by winning. Anxious? Get confident by winning a game of volleyball. Depressed? Feel happy by winning a game of volleyball. Not really sure what your purpose in life is? Your purpose in life is winning a game of volleyball.
Naturally, then, Haikyuu!! is best when the characters are actually playing volleyball. Each season is broken into two halves: training and gameplay. The training elements, usually the first twelve episodes, tend to feel a bit like eating your greens: here are all the characters, here are their deals, we’re setting stuff up. The second twelve episodes are all gameplay: Karasuno plays in their local tournament, and later at nationals, and all those conflicts that were set up get resolved through gameplay. As a result, each season feels a bit uneven. The first half is good—you really do love these characters—but a bit of a slog. The second half you almost can’t help but binge.
The exception is season three; it’s only ten-episodes long; the entire thing is one match: Karasuno vs Shiratorizawa. In terms of structure, season three sort of resembles Challengers. Sequences of gameplay interspersed with flashbacks, which add emotional weight to the proceedings. Except unlike Challengers, the emphasis is put on the present day stuff, with the flashbacks used sparingly, a 7:3 ratio lets say. The result is a story paced like a bullet, one of the best seasons of TV I’ve ever watched (I watched all ten episodes across the span of a single morning).
Season three is the perfect expression of the show's key themes: tradition vs innovation, individualism vs collectivism, temerity vs tenacity. Shiratorizawa has all the former qualities: they’re a team of conventional powerhouse players who all do the things they do very well, but rarely together, and they win matches through sheer force of will. Karasuno has all the latter qualities: a complete ramble of unconventional plays and players, who compensate for glaring weaknesses with teamwork.
Spoiler alert: Karasuno wins. Homosocial relationships prove more powerful than hyper-masculine individualism. It’s not complicated stuff—if anything it’s too obvious—but that doesn’t take away from its power: when I watched season three as a repressed kid I cried; when I rewatched it as an adult who is living their happy, open gay life, I cried again. Volleyball has the power to change the world.
When I first watched Haikyuu!! my favourite character was Kenma Kozume. We’re introduced to him early in season one, when Karasuno plays a practice match against Nekoma, and from there on he’s a recurring character, popping up for a couple of episodes each season.
As I said earlier, Kenma is in many ways Hinata’s ultimate foil. While they are similar in that they are both unconventional volleyball players (Kenma is not especially athletic, which is unusual in a world for fitness monsters) everything else about their dynamic is a land of contrasts: Hinata is an extrovert who says everything at a yall, Kenma is an introvert who rarely speaking above a mumble and would rather stay home and play video games; Hinata knows exactly what he wants and will doing anything to get it, Kenma doesn’t really know what he wants. Hinata is a pretty unskilled player; Kenma is a highly skilled player (he’s a setter, and uses the same computational strategies that help him beat video games and also helps him set perfect shots for his team). Despite this talent he doesn’t seem all that enthused about volleyball, and admits that he probably wouldn’t play it if his team didn’t need him. In fact, Kenma is unique amongst Haikyuu!! characters in that he isn’t even all that interested in winning: the whole world is a video game to him, a constant chance to level up; and what’s the worst part of a video game? The moment when you’ve completed it.
Looking back, it’s pretty clear why I was so drawn to Kenma. His inability to align his desires with his available outlets for expression spoke to me as a repressed eighteen-year-old.
If the show has a driving philosophy it’s this: One more point. It’s Hinata’s refrain, uttered at the most desperate moments: the desire to play just a little longer, to go just a little further. Become better, fly higher, want harder—one more point, one more point, one more point.
Other characters—in beautiful, melodramatic voiceover—utter this refrain too. It’s the show’s way of signalling that said character has finally figured out what their core conflict is, and how to resolve it through a sweet, sweet game of volleyball. Most powerful is when one of Hinata’s foils say the refrain. As athletic and ideological opposites, the moment they say ‘one more game’ represents a kind of capitulation, an admission that even if Hinata is not the best volleyball player, he is the purest, and their worldview would be better off if it was a little more like his: no matter the end—mundane, unachievable, or silly—it is better to throw yourself in earnestly, better to want, better to care.
It’s telling, then, that Kenma, Hinata’s ultimate foil, never says ‘one more point’ across the shows four seasons. He’s a pore on the surface of the show’s otherwise smooth worldview: what is it going to take for this guy to want to win? Because if you don’t want to win, then you can’t really self-actualise, nor can you truly connect with your teammates. Kenma loves the level up—but to what end?
Haikyuu!! The Dumpster Battle most resembles season three, in that it zooms in on one match: Karasuno vs Nekoma at the national tournament, a showdown four seasons in the making. However, it’s not even halfway as successful a narrative as season three. With a runtime of eighty-five minutes, the movie is about one-third the length; despite this, there is about double the amount of narrative to squeeze in. Almost every character—players and coaches—have a foil on the opposing team, and therefore an arc in need of resolving. That means there’s about fifteen characters who need to be served by the narrative.
The result is frantic and unsatisfying. Where the show might dedicate whole episodes to a handful of points, here whole sets are reduced to montage. Matters aren’t helped by the fact that it’s been four years since season four aired, and not everyone is insane enough to rewatch the whole show in preparation for a movie; director Susumu Mitsunaka relies heavily on flashback to remind the audience of character’s relationships and personal stakes, but these further interrupt the narrative, and reduce the amount of time that can be dedicated to the game in-progress. Conflicts which have been set up for four seasons are resolved in thirty seconds. It’s deeply, deeply frustrating.
Or at least, it would be, if not for Kenma’s. Haikyuu!! The Dumpster Battle is his movie through and through. His character arc is only one that is given space to breath; it is the film’s shining, saving grace.
Although Karasuno and Nekoma have played each other before, it’s only even been in the context of practice matches, where the purpose is trying out new things, and there are no real stakes. At nationals, however, everything is on the line: if you lose you’re out, no more gameplay for you. We’ve seen Kenma play other matches at nationals, we’ve seen that the lose-and-you’re-out stakes haven’t inspired greater investment in him—but things change when he’s playing Hinata. This is his first time playing against an opponent who’s not just a problem to be solved, but also a friend; the emotional stakes, whether he likes it or not, are baked into the match, and there’s nothing he can do to distance himself from it.
Not that he would want to. Those same qualities that made Hinata, and Karasuno, perfect foils for Shiratorizawa way back in season three—innovation, collectivism, tenacity—also make him, them, the ideal opponents for Kenma. If his desire is for the perfect video game opponent, one that will constantly force him to level up, then Karasuno, with their ever-evolving plays, with their ability to regroup and rebound after setbacks, with their constant desire to win, are just that. And Hinata, the most Karasuno-y of Karasuno’s players, is the ultimate foe: a video game boss that you can never truly beat.
What few thrills there are to be had in Haikyuu!! The Dumpster Battle are located in watching Kenma strategizing and adapting, growing more and more invested, finally playing like he means it. He displays a passion and energy heretofore unseen: throwing himself about the court, sweating, shouting, clawing for every point. One more point means something different to Kenma than it does to everyone else—‘one more life’ would be more accurate; one more chance until game over, one more opportunity to keep challenging himself, to keep levelling up—and it doesn’t matter that he’s not playing to win; what matters is that he’s playing because he wants it.
Despite how hard I’ve ragged on the movie, I didn’t want it to end. Maybe it’s a symptom of the particular way I’ve rotted my brain with a month of constant bingeing, but if I could watch this show forever, then I would.
Of course, it does end, but not without first giving us the single best shot in all of Haikyuu!!—one perfect moment in what is otherwise a creative failure. It’s match point and Karasuno has Nekoma backed against the wall. We see the point through Kenma’s eyes: his teammates return a ferocious serve, they scramble to keep the ball in the air; a rally follows, players on both sides leaping, diving, struggling to make the connections, visibly exhausted, bodies giving out from underneath them, but pushing through; if volleyball is warfare then the point is Verdun. Then a chance ball, arcing perfectly towards Kenma, who can set it, and keep the game going for a little longer—
And as it descends, time slips, and suddenly what we’re seeing—what Kenma is seeing—isn’t the game in progress, but a scene from the training camp which he attended back in season two. The camera pans, three-hundred-and-sixty-degrees. There are his teammates, there is Karasuno, in their training outfits, wearing numbered bibs, laughing and needling each other as they try out new plays, often unsuccessfully. And there, in the background, other teams that attended the camp: characters, some of which we haven’t seen for seasons, present and accounted for. This great network of boys, volleyball players, pushing one another further and further, coming to terms with and working through their insecurities on the court. But as the camera continues to pan, the image becomes blurred, until you can barely make out the details. A growing feeling that, even as you try to savour every moment, and try to make each play last forever, and even as you build these bonds that you will carry with you for the rest of your life, your memories are already fading; after all, even though the goal is to keep the ball in the air forever, eventually it will touch the ground.
—and he reaches up, palms open, fingers soft, ready to propel the ball upwards once again, so a teammate can swoop in, connect, spike it, so they stay in the game (so I can stay in this world, with these characters, even as I feel myself growing frustrated with the movie, even as my month long odyssey comes to an end, and psychic exhaustion I didn’t think possible sweeps over me, I find myself un-ready to move on—don’t roll the credits yet!—I want to see another game, see these characters grow a little more, see their bond deepen a little further; as long as the match endures, as long as you stay within this tunnel of narrative, the distance you can travel down this road feels limitless). One. More. Point.
Random Stuff
I would be remiss, after writing this much about sports media, not to recommend my friend and colleague Claire’s sports movies Substack: SportsMovies82.
Although I think Haikyuu!! shipping culture is generally braindead, it did also result in the Chameleon Boy, which is—in my humble opinion—one of the best fanfics ever written; better than a lot of published fiction.
This SRB essay on tone is really good.
Black Check with Griffin and David recently did a mini-series covering the films of Satoshi Kon (the Perfect Blue guy) and it’s a really good companion listen for fans and people looking to get into his work. This is the first episode :)
Does anyone know a good place to get shoes repaired in Naarm? My Docs are fighting for their lives.
Terrible idea. I couldn’t focus on the subtitles and had to rewatch half-a-dozen episodes.
A libero is a defensive specialist position in volleyball and has one of the highest responsibilities on the court. The role of a libero is to be the main receiver of serves and be the 2nd line of defense against attackers.
An ace is actually not a position, but rather a title given to a player. They are the go-to hitter who the setter sends the ball to in tight situations
Name says it all. They’re in the middle and they block attacks.
Wing spikers have to have the skills to pass, attack, block, serve and play defense. Wing spikers are often players who score the most points.
The setter distributes the ball to their teammates. They are the key playmaker and determine the direction of the team's attack.
Ok, so I don’t like anime but this has me curious
is this josh finally entering his sports era? real if true indeed