Kouji Miura's Blue Box

I have surprised myself as, after half a year of barely reading manga or really anything, I have found myself invested enough in a certain anime that I saw on Netflix to the point I decided to pick up the manga only to catch up by reading 132 chapters in a single day.

This manga/anime is Blue Box (Ao no Hako), "a sports romance manga that follows Taiki Inomata, a high school badminton player, and his quiet admiration for Chinatsu Kano, a talented basketball star and his senior at school."

I take pride in the diversity of my taste in mange and anime. Looking at my anilist and seeing Dorohedoro and Goodnight Punpun next to Ao Haru Ride and Horimiya bring me tears of joy each time. But, my god, I feel the power of my Latino genetics with how emotionally invested I get with romance.

My first thing I really like about Blue Box is its (kinda) realism. A lot of the characters go through some shit that either made me sad or gave me second-hand embarrassment, and it's not as exaggerated as with most romance manga.

As a story focusing on sports and working hard, it makes sense that a lot of the characters either have to learn to grow from failure or deal with the limits that life and adulthood put on them. The characters all feel relatively real thanks to the diversity and well-thought personalities and there aren't many you can't like except a specific douche whose name is Matsuoka. I am warning about him. (I even have favourite side characters! Hyodo and Haryu).

The dialogue, unlike in other anime, genuinely feels very nice to read!! While there's still bits of exaggerated comedy, I can see myself and people I know in a lot of the characters. Blue Box also succeeds in conveying emotion as it shows you, or doesn't, what goes through the mind of its cast.

Not only that, but the story is also well paced, and makes you understand how long people train for a few matches that last at most a couple of minutes, which is a big part of the story!! Seeing how hard these characters work for goals that for others would be trivial has unironically helped me to stay motivated through my final exams lately, for which I feel very nerdy.

I'd say the art is also very good! Something nice in the manga is you can kind of see the way Taiki goes from some naive boy to a hard-working young man through subtle changes in the way he's drawn. The art is also consistent, except of course in important moments when you can see the artist went all out!!! It's made me slightly motivated to practice my drawing more ...

With how much I'd like to write an essay, I'll keep my review at that. My personal score? For now, 10/10. The manga is still ongoing, so perhaps it will change as time goes on. But for now this is my favourite romance! Thank you for reading. ◾︎