blue lock is a manga that has been recommended to me a few times before and i guess i should’ve listened because i finished it in two days. i liked it and had some thoughts while reading it
egoism
someone on the internet once said “you should read shounen manga every so often to breathe some of that shounen spirit into your life” and until my graduation i was disassociating pretty hard, so hey maybe blue lock will knock that ego back into me.
i initially didn’t read this manga because 1) it’s in the shounen/action kinda genre — i mainly read yuri — and 2) it’s a sports manga.1 but blue lock defies what i imagine is the norm of “we can win with the power of teamwork and friendship!!” and instead the entire series heavily centers around what the author calls “egoism”.
this theme of “egoism” is nicely demonstrated by the opening scene of the manga. isagi, our mc, is in the zone and he’s managed to get the ball in front of the goalkeeper. he now has two options — does he try to score with the goalkeeper on him? or does he pass to an open teammate to score instead?
at this point you have cliches like “one for all, and all for one!” and “soccer is a sport played with 11 people!” etc etc being thrown around, encouraging isagi to make the team play. and that’s what he does, he passes to his teammate—
—who misses. then they lose the game and fail to qualify to the nationals. said teammate cries a bit. isagi is lost and confused. should he have taken the shot instead? was he wrong to trust his teammate?
and the answer presented throughout the series is “yes”. he should have shot. he should have trusted in his own ability, taken and scored that shot and won that game. after all, scoring goals is all that matters — and if you’re the best, you can make that shot, right?
this premise is what drew me to this manga. i don’t really care if it accurately represents soccer or not. i doubt it. instead i see it as the mangaka is using soccer (the idea that egoism = success in soccer) to send a message about “egoism”2 — that he/Ego thinks is important for success in general
…and success
the rest of this post will various screenshots and tangents on them that furthered my enjoyment of the manga, most of them related to success/winning/improving. i can’t find a better word than “success” right now.
it’s amazing how this “sports” manga nails so many things that resonate in competition, sports, esports, grades, games, business etc. though this reinforces my belief that to reach high level at anything you eventually converge at a similar set of values.
luck
luck is not pure chance — luck depends on your exposure, as well as how prepared you are to receive it. from the four kinds of luck as well as visa’s post on it
“Persistent tinkering” luck – Austin says that “a certain level of action “stirs up the pot”, brings in random ideas that will collide and stick together in fresh combinations, lets chance operate”. This is the luck you get from doing things. If you write lots of tweets, eventually some of them will do better than others. Maybe you accidentally said something insightful-sounding.
[Chance II] involves the kind of luck [Charles] Kettering... had in mind when he said, “Keep on going and chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down.”
this is the occasional banger from a random channel with that gets favoured by the youtube algorithm and becomes popular.
“Prepared mind” luck – This is when you introduce discernment into the equation. Austin’s words: “Chance III special receptivity, discernment, and intuitive grasp of significance unique to one particular recipient“. Louis Pasteur characterized it for all time when he said “Chance favors the prepared mind”.
The classic example is Alexander Fleming discovering penicillin from a “spoiled” experiment that most other people would probably have dismissed as some sort of error or fluke. There’s an interestingly similar story about how stainless steel was discovered by accident. Brearley was trying to make better gun barrels for WW1, shiny steel technically had no direct application to what he was doing. But he had the tinkerer’s insight to realize that he had stumbled upon something useful.
the manga uses “luck” in a scene where someone was in position to catch a rebound despite not having the ball in his possession, and ultimately be in a position where the ball “luckily” falls at his feet — and scores the goal. i think this falls somewhere between 2 and 3 — every soccer player knows what to do with a ball once its in their possession but you need the insight to actually move to a place where a) the ball might rebound too and b) people can’t steal it from you.
“preparedness” also means realising that what seems like pure chance is not actually pure chance, the e.g. in the manga is being shat on a pigeon might be “unlucky” but also you might be in an area with lots of pigeons. no game no life has a bit about this.3
bubbles
well i say bubbles, but its more like “stages”. it’s the same for anything, sports, games, you enter a new stage, it’s hard, you slowly get used to it, slowly improve until everything in that stage becomes “normal”, and it repeats. or it doesn’t. you reach a new league or a new rank, and you master it. the thing is, this process repeats, and each time it gets harder and slower. you can’t improve as fast as you might’ve before, and you might even drop a little — are you going to continue?
this is the same for grades (and money? i’d imagine). but i feel like the mobility is less common. for example, being in a good school automatically means you have to adapt to an environment where the standards for “normal” are higher than maybe a slightly worse one. and for money, i mean there’s the way in which people who are rich don’t realise how extravagant their habits may seem to others — and that’s cause they have their own bubble.
realism
this manga starts to get particularly good when the actual pro players come in, because you start to get questions like these:
it’s a very good question to ask for two reasons.
one because it forces you to strike a balance between being “realistic” and “giving up” — on one hand, you could say it’s “unrealistic” to chase the dream of going professional because of how lucky/gifted/talented/selected you have to be, and on the other hand you could be completely delusional, the “i will be the best player in the world” mentality without any thought for how. i think you need a bit of both, you need to have a sustainable plan for how you think you will make it while stilll maintaining that dream. yknow?
two, because you can interpret the question beyond just physical/monetary sustainability but instead — what is your value beyond whatever field you are pursuing in? this is the interpretation the manga doesn’t consider, because everyone is dead set on being the #1 striker.
but when you define your entire worth around a single field, that’s risky. especially in fields like sports, grades, competitive games — when your worth is defined inherently from something that gives you a value and judges you against others for it (here’s jeff bezos on this). what happens if you lose? what happens when you’re not the best? for every winner there is after all a loser.
and you see this everywhere. pro players deal with this. i suspect majority of their mental health issues stem from a huge part of their identity being tied to a something that compares them with others. watch interviews and they’ll tell you that you need to have friends, family, other hobbies from which you can derive meaning from too, not just whatever you’re competing in. 4
students deal with this, it’s why the ones who “don’t care” don’t do well (because if they did care, some part of their worth would be defined by it — and losing is scary), it’s why people break down when they fall short. of course they do, i mean we spend eight hours a day in school studying for our grades, it’ll be hard not to assimilate some part of it into our identity.5
if you’ve improved at something before you probably know the feeling of rust, that frustration at yourself for not being as good as you once were. it’s very real, despite how much we joke about being “washed” or having “peaked”. you see people still parading around the highest rank they reached, like it’s some reflection of what they are now. and it might be! but for most of them i feel like it’s a sad refusal to accept their present state.
improving
nothing too suprising. replace “the best” with “the type of person i want to be” and you get Atomic Habits.
Ask yourself, “Who is the type of person that could get the outcome I want?” Who is the type of person that could lose forty pounds? Who is the type of person that could learn a new language? Who is the type of person that could run a successful start-up? For example, “Who is the type of person who could write a book?” It’s probably someone who is consistent and reliable. Now your focus shifts from writing a book (outcome-based) to being the type of person who is consistent and reliable (identity-based).
Once you have a handle on the type of person you want to be, you can begin taking small steps to reinforce your desired identity. I have a friend who lost over 100 pounds by asking herself, “What would a healthy person do?” All day long, she would use this question as a guide. Would a healthy person walk or take a cab? Would a healthy person order a burrito or a salad?
ideals and values
this might seem similar to the previous section, but the focus is on staying true to your own values — rather than the process of improvement. knowing what the best you is so you can work towards it.
from hotelconcierge:
Narcissism is a defense against rationality: you remake the scale so you are always at the center. It works, except your inability to fail robs you of the ability to succeed. It works, until you encounter anyone who doesn’t accept your ever-changing values as gospel. Then you doubt yourself, panic, turn to religion, “Give me a sign!”, or rationalism, “Give me a number!”, anything external that can affirm your value. Pacified, you return to the status quo.
Narcissists vacillate, rationalists obsess, but they have the same basic problem: an inability to stick to the script. The solution is to pick a character, write down your values, and commit. Sometimes, you will fail. It will suck. But the doubt will stop. You will have something real that tells you if what you’re doing is right. You will know when you are winning.
this is very closely linked to having a “dream” — once you get to the niche of it, the ideal you want to be is what you dream of becoming. it also provides an answer to deriving your worth beyond comparison to others — you can compare to your ideal self instead. yes, they might’ve won the game, but according to my values i’m still winning. that mistake i made i can improve on, that shot i made was good but wasn’t capitalised on, etc.
cultivating your taste
okay but how do you find what you want to be like? like you know, everyone keeps saying “you should do what you enjoy!” and stuff like that.
by being observant, especially to what you are inclined to. by looking at others, taking the parts you like, noting the parts you don’t.
from my english practice questions:6
from t.s eliot:7
Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.
from steve jobs, who stole it from picasso:
good artists copy great artists steal
from visa:
then once you find someone whose vibe speaks to you, copy the everlivin’ fuck outta their style
and even in the copying you will never copy perfectly, and in that process you will develop your own style8
unfortunately this is a hard process.9 it’s hard to develop your taste and know what you want, especially since it’s discouraged socially. i think there’s a lot of shame surrounding having a dream, mostly because until you have the finished product it seems childish and naive, so everyone laughs and looks down on it. and so it’s kinda unlucky, like we kill plants before they can bloom.
things i wrote that i didn’t know where to fit in
god it is so annoying trying to find the chapter a screenshot came from. these were just thoughts i had that didn’t really fit into the above.
bachira
i like bachira. along with nagi they are my top 2 favs.10
i also like this way of thinking. i should incorporate it.
nagi
i have this thesis that if nagi existed irl people who probably hate him. not fans, he’d have fans (me!) and fame, but players — people who pour their heart and soul into this and still can’t beat him. because majority of his “skill” comes from raw talent, genetics or whatever, and he’s able to diff people so easily without even caring or trying. why am i working so hard just to be beat by someone playing video games every day?11 yknow?
people like that definitely exist in real life. and the following resentment too.
isagi
i can’t be the only one who sees his “meta awareness” and thinks of ayanokouji. like:
“don’t you dare decide my fate” is exactly how i would imagine a normal person being used by ayanokouji would feel
money
auctions are not such a bad idea. because your value as a player is not solely determined by your skill in game alone — same for esports, or sports — being a pro player is akin to being an idol, where you almost need to market yourself as well. the difference is that pro players have an objective way of being rated (the game), whilst idols... not so much. yet a player’s perceived value could be vastly different from the impact they have on winning — this could be marketing, narratives, aesthetic (in their gameplay) — and ultimately its the viewership that drives the money. so clubs, buisnesses auctioning players give them a pretty good idea of their “worth”, the caveat is that this may incentivise players away from winning.
also some interesting stats. i don’t know how they compare to irl sports.
kaiser (the best player in the world!) has hsi value at 300 mil yen = 2 mil usd
isagi himself has a valuation of 350k usd
and then 20th has a valuation of around 80k usd
i wonder how much people think about money when they chase this dream?
stories
this is such an orv moment.
and then we sell these fantasies to people because they are unable to form their own (this is tlp posting).
that’s pretty much it. i had this sitting for like a week and i was so annoyed of not finishing it so yeah fuck it.
i think the manga’s worth a read, although it depends how much you can get behind the plotline, as with most shounen. the parts i liked most about this manga i’ve written here though.
i think the closest thing i’ve come to sports-ish content was watching an e-sports donghua called the king’s avatar. it’s actually pretty good. i might watch the live action or read it sometime
i’ve mentioned before that i think narcissism is pretty common so a natural question is how does this “egoism” differ and why is it not as common? i think that the egoism the author describes is pretty similar to high-functioning/grandiose narcissism, which is rare
in episode 5 at the part when they win all of steph’s clothes there’s a part where shiro and sora talk about how there will always be factors that at play in a game, no matter how “random” it is. e.g. shiro wins a game of guessing the genders of people walking down the street by knowing the demographic and employment statistics of the area they’re in. knowledge is a form of preparedness too
caveat: that being said, this sentiment is mostly found among older players. i personally think it’s just because they’ve experienced the “fall” before, whereas for younger players that value system has yet to break/fail for them.
it’s also an argument for school being more than just grades, i guess. but to me just feels like we should be taught better ways of finding out what we want to spend time on and hence define our worth by.
the resonances between texts amirite. yeah this is the closest i’ve been to doing a mod a question and my exam is in two days
probably my favourite studied text in english out of the 3
only tangentially related, but one of the first advice i got from wacthing a youtube tutorial on how to improve in cs was to have a player whose playstyle you really like, and just study them immensely. i did this with ropz; i would download all of his vods and go through them.
again, i think schools do a pretty bad job of letting us discover our taste and originality. everyone in school is so fixated on following the rules. even in maths. i’d do something that’s not exactly how they expect a problem to solved and they’d ask “is that even allowed?” and i’d say “yeah it works” and they ask “but you might get marked down for that” which is like. bruh. it’s maths.
i don’t count ego as a character until enough of his backstory is revealed to justify his worldview. otherwise i think of him as the mangaka’s self insert to channel their ideas out.
i have a few thoughts on this too, but so if someone can play video games and beat you while you are tirelessly training every day, perhaps the question you should be asking is what exactly is the difference between you two? do you need the training? is there a specific thing he’s better than you at that your training improve you on?
(i’m thinking specifically about tutoring in this case)
of course this takes discipline to do and i acknowledge does not help the frustration of feeling like it’s unfair at all.