勝ちたい

A Thesis on Blue Lock’s Standing in the Sports Genre

I just want to say that Blue Lock isn't anywhere near close to being done. It is only getting started. The Blue Lock battle royale may have been the beginning, but we still have a long way to go. We still need to get to Worlds. In the beginning, Blue Lock makes a seemingly ridiculous and insulting ideology: you need to have a big ego to be the best. The story isn’t that simple, obvious, or single-dimensional, though.

It is true that every Blue Lock player must surpass and outclass the rest to be number one. The key point that everyone misses, however, is that Blue Lock actually forces its players to adopt a champion mindset. The point of the champion mindset isn't to think you are better than everyone else (i.e., in Blue Lock, every player is constantly reminded that there is someone better them); the point is to focus on and make conscious the systems you rely on and continually improve them in order to be better today than you were yesterday. This is the key to becoming number one. The reality is that there will always be players who are better than you, but if you cannot focus on your own improvement and you lack the drive to get better, then you don't deserve to be number one. By recognizing this, taking initiative, and using your peers as a metric to gauge how much you’ve improved, you're on the right track to becoming a champion. That, my friends, is ego. This, in my opinion, is the essence of Blue Lock.

Though Blue Lock -in its early stages- may not accurately represent football at its best, Blue Lock certainly represents SPORTS at its best. The reason why people love, and play sports is because sports show us the epitome of humanity’s effort to transcend our limitations and develop new capacity in real-time and in a simplified, focused context. Put simply, sports illustrate humanity at its best. We are winning when we are bettering ourselves; hence, the champion mindset is realized and best depicted through Blue Lock's storytelling. This is the "football's most critical moment" spiel that Ego was trying to impart to his players. Isagi is a likeable main character because he is respectable and admirable for adopting the champion mindset. He is an exemplar of humanity being at its best.

For these reasons alone, Blue Lock should surpass Haikyuu because it gets down and dirty with some of the most intimate aspects of sport, which is human greed. Unfortunately, most people are just blind, horny, or both. All I can say is that the future is uncertain in terms of Blue Lock’s chart-topping ability. I won’t delve into this.

Also, for anyone who says that Blue Lock completely defies one of the primary virtues of football (teamwork): you may be correct, but you are also missing the point of the story. Teamwork is inevitable and it's constantly shown throughout the manga. What is unique about Blue Lock is this thesis that individual greed and hunger actually catalyzes the formation of teams. One's selfishness fuels the fire needed to power a team sport. You can't expect to form a team if everything is fine and dandy, where players are equally strong or equally capable. Why would you? If everyone were good at everything, if no one struggled, then there would be no problem to solve that requires the contribution of multiple minds. If teamwork is the virtue that football prides itself upon, then what comprises teamwork? Well, we first need to ask: what is the purpose of teamwork?

If you asked me, it is to actively pursue the realization of one’s own strengths and combine these with the strengths of others who have also actively pursued their own realizations in order to achieve a common goal.

Have you ever struggled on a homework problem and had to ask others for help? Have you ever witnessed victory in a war without an army? Teams don't form if there is no struggle, no problem. If everyone’s ego were well-fed, then there really would be no struggle. We all know that this can never be the case; therefore, the source of struggle is in the need to satisfy one's ego. Without the ravenous individual ego, there will be no team. Competition also results from the need to satisfy one's ego. When you clash two different egos together, the natural hunger and selfish desire to be better than your opponents will not originate from outside the individual; it comes from within. The desire to “level up” or “become stronger” is the unconscious acknowledgement of the discomfort you feel when knowing that you are inadequate. Thus, to be less inadequate: you feel the need to surpass those who have proven they are capable, hence minimizing your initial discomfort. Yet, the difference between a champion and a loser is settled by how one internalizes and deals with their discomfort. Again, here comes our champion who seeks their own development through rigorous self-reflexive analysis and uses their peers as a metric to gauge their growing capabilities. Here comes our champion who strives to be better than they were yesterday, to develop the systems that produce outcomes they want to improve. This champion knows that if they want a better performance, then they need better systems that provide the foundation for their performance. This mindset, however, is very tricky to handle and adopt, though. Some people can easily get caught up in wanting to destroy others around them, which is the wrong way to go about doing things; you will only set yourself up for severe disappointment when embarking on that path. The point is: there's a fine line in the sand that tells you whether you're focused on yourself or on others.

Now, let's say you have a bunch of egos smashed into one team and now two teams are pitted against each other. What happens then? Would the champion still outshine everyone? Would the team with the champion win? See, that's where things get interesting, and the beauty of Blue Lock really starts to shine. Everyone should act like a champion. The winning team will be the team that can address and support each champion's strengths and weaknesses. In other words, the synergy and mutual respect/understanding for each champion's ambitions will most likely result in a culmination of egos that can be observed as one entity.  It's similar to constructive interference, which is a description of particle/wave behavior. Every wave has an amplitude; thus, when two waves that are in phase with each other combine their different amplitudes, you observe a single wave that has a much larger resulting amplitude. The opposite could be said of destructive interference. Thus, the winning team, among a sea of champions, will be the team that exhibits constructive interference. This is a phenomenon that pro-league teams exhibit at the World Cup, and we have been leading up to this point in Blue Lock throughout the manga. This is the whole purpose of Blue Lock and the hidden meaning or implication behind Ego's brief speeches.

With all that being said, Blue Lock is a gem for conveying so much wisdom within a short amount of time.