Winter 2023 is by no means a great season for anime, but from the very beginning I had my eyes dead-set on reviewing two anime. They were Oniichan wa Oshimai and Mahou Kakumei. But something called Real Life™ got in my way, and instead of writing shit, I spent my free time lying in bed, catching up on desperately-needed sleep time, half-awake and half-dreaming about some giant-ass pumpkin patch. It was pumpkins as far as the eye can see, with the hills and the valleys and the far-off mountains all textured with delicate orange stripes. Well, fuck pumpkins, fuck sleep, and fuck real life. Who cares about anything else when you can watch Blue Lock? It’s objectively the best football anime of Fall 2022 and Winter 2023 and it’s pointless to even consider a 2nd place. So now to answer the all-important question for the readers of this review: What is this anime about?
Blue Lock starts when our power-of-teamwork guy Isagi passes the ball to his teammate instead of shooting for himself and his teammate misses. Isagi then starts pondering if teamwork is hella overrated, and before you know it he is whisked away to the wonderful world of Blue Lock, where the goal is not to work as a team, but by becoming the single best striker in the world. And how is our now-not-so-power-of-teamwork guy Isagi gonna do this? Well, first he has to win matches in teams of 11… and then win more matches in teams of 2-5, and if he succeeds he gets to play in a better team of 11… wait… something doesn’t seem quite right, let’s try something else.
Blue Lock starts when our not-actually-power-of-teamwork guy Isagi passes the ball to his teammate instead of shooting for himself and his teammate misses. Isagi then starts pondering if teamwork is hella overrated, and before you know it he is whisked away to the wonderful world of Blue Lock, where Isagi’s current understanding of “teamwork” is immediately thrown in the trash. Our reformed-power-of-teamwork Isagi, throughout the trials and hardships of Blue Lock, comes to realize that teamwork is not about passing the ball to his teammate in any situation, but instead knowing the strengths and weaknesses of each player and working with that, to generate “chemical reactions” that play to the strengths of each player… wait, timeout, hold on a second.
Isn’t this “chemical reaction” thing just the plain run-of-the-mill definition of teamwork?
When you look at Blue Lock more closely, it turns out not to be the “revolutionary approach” to football that it boasts itself as. Instead, Blue Lock’s goal is to explain very basic concepts of football in the most overcomplicated way possible to make it sound like something really cool. Like, what is “smelling a goal”? It sounds really cool, but when we translate it from Isagian to English it turns out to just be “coming up with a winning strategy”. What about “turning zero into one”? It’s just learning how to play in a team instead of individually. And what does “awakening” mean? Easy; it means “shounen shenanigans”. Concepts such as consistency and luck are overexplained in the most overexplanatory way possible that when you realize this, this show starts to be painful to watch. The “character development” is nothing but a contrived sense of progression that is randomly bullshitted by the author with the idea that “if you throw enough bullshit, some of them might not be seen as bullshit”. There’s simply nothing to be found.
Well, if the character development is nonexistent, then at least we can settle for just the characters themselves, right? Well, no, not really. Isagi is basically a reprinted shounen character who says things like “I have to get better” so often that he skips sleep to say it more. Bachira’s characterization is that he can dribble, he is cute, and he can be shipped with Isagi. Ego is a character who spouts off some random shit and also eats random shit. Chigiri has long legs and long hair. Raichi has spiky teeth and spiky hair. Nagi’s characterization is that he can do weird kicks, he is cute, and he can be shipped with Reo. They are pretty much just shounen characters, each with strange “superpowers” that no ordinary high-schooler could possibly have, constantly talking about winning and shit.
So what’s the point of Blue Lock? It fails at plot, fails at characters, fails at OST (it’s generic as shit). But there’s one thing it doesn’t fail at, and that is making cute, shippable characters. Take Bachira. His VA is talented and adds a considerable amount of nuance to Bachira’s dialogue. But what is this nuance used for? Better character exposition? Reflecting Bachira’s emotional state in a non-obvious way? These are forlorn hopes. The nuance’s sole intention is to make Bachira cuter and more shippable. Nagi’s backstory makes no sense: he only practiced for 6 months and is already a living god at technique. But the story’s intention is not realism; Nagi hence seems more mysterious, so he can be contrasted with Reo better, so they can be shipped together better. The whole purpose of Blue Lock is to ship cute boys together. At the time of writing (just after last episode) there are 3067 Blue Lock fanfictions on AO3. 2643 of them are categorized as M/M fics, of which 473 just so happen to be rated explicit. There are 778 Reo/Nagi fics, 382 Bachira/Isagi fics, 375 Isagi/Rin fics, and many more consisting of all sorts (and forms) of ships. Comparatively, Okabe/Kurisu from the fan-favorite Steins;Gate has only 178 fics to its name; that is less than the 225 Putin/Medvedev fics that exist somewhere on this site. So we can say, with certainty, that Blue Lock was invented to ship cute boys together. Maybe we can go further: Men’s sports manga was invented to ship cute boys together. Fuck it, let’s go even further. Men’s sports was invented to ship cute boys together. Men were invented to ship cute boys together? At this point I don’t know anymore. Perhaps I’ve been ridden to insanity over writing this review, juggling real life, and watching this show. Who knows.
So with all that said and done, let’s try this one last time.
Blue Lock starts when our cute shounen boy Isagi passes the ball to an irrelevant character and loses the game. The plot don’t matter, the details doesn’t matter, but Isagi becomes tired of his surroundings, and before you know it he is whisked away to the wonderful world of Blue Lock where he can meet other cute shounen boys for the audience to ship and scream random shounen stuff about self-improvement and winning that sounds really, really cool. As Isagi powerlevels, he can meet more cute boys and scream about more bullshit stuff, and the cycle continues until Isagi has all the qualities essential of the world’s #1 striker: know every cute boy on the planet, and be able to scream out the most overcomplicated form of every concept that ever exists. And if a story like that isn’t worth watching, I don’t know what is.