Mugen Monday - 27th Edition

I still remember when I was younger, the amount of people exposed to Anime used to be quite a few. That has, however, changed with time come.

If you too have been exposed to this massive burst of Anime fandom, it is likely you have come across one or two massively repeatedly mentioned Ani-Manga series names, such as maybe Death Note, Attack on Titan, Demon Slayer, Jujutsu Kaisen, etc.

Of course, I do account that few of my readers reading this newsletter have already brazenly been induced to this world, and are rather forefront experts on this nonetheless.

Yet today I want to trade down the valley and introduce one of my favourite series, and how it has stood apart from the rest of the bunch for people who have not heard of this before. I also want to tackle a particular issue regarding the series’ film adaptation for those who are already versed in it.

You may like: How to Watch Haikyuu in Order Before Seeing the Movie

If you’ve ever come across any Volleyball Instagram reels or YouTube shorts, or any such short-form content for that matter, you may have seen at least one comment mentioning something about Shoyo Hinata and Kageyama Tobio.

Such is the impact of Haruichi Furudate’s massively well-received, almost Anime pop-culture phenomenon, Haikyu!!.

Yet due to recent declarations by the production team behind the Anime, fans have been in an uproar. Why? Because the Anime has declared to finish the entirety of Haikyuu!! Anime series in two final films.

Yet the manga still has some 150 chapters left to be covered, we have done a detailed article on that here.

- From the Editor’s Desk

Rhytham Das, Editor-in-Chief, Spiel Anime

The Haikyuu movie 2024 is currently running in Japan: here’s when it could have an international release

Read the following report here.

The beauty of Haikyu!! as something beyond just ‘Sports Anime’

Few Anime/Manga go well and hard in explicating the Nakama trope, especially in Shonen series’.

The typical power of friendship meme is derived from these kinds of plots, to say the least. However, Haikyuu really takes this a notch further.

The pending question is how one even dares to venture into the land of incorporating the power of friendship gestures into their story without oversaturating their work - because after all wine tasted too much is toxicating, and not in a good way.

Haikyu!! overcomes this problem of potential overuse by only deploying the friendship trope when required. It builds its characters more subtly. My famous example, and this is a subtle one, is in Season 3 when Hinata Shoyo, despite his small height, to cope with the humongous 190 cm tall blockers of the opponent team Shiratorizawa, starts jump blocking by first running into his position.

Why run? Mainly because it gives you more momentum and a higher capacity to reach even if the opponents are Mount Everest’.

And what does the coach tell the team? That sure, Hinata can do this, but the team must rise to the occasion and help him out.

And they do it, Hinata jumps quite aggressively, and Tanaka, his second-year senpai, tells him “COME Hinata, I got you”, letting Hinata bump into him in full force, taking the burden of that force, and still retaining his balance nonetheless.

It would be undermining to say this is all there is to Haikyu!!, there’s certainly more. The entirety of Season 3 of the series builds around the story unfolded so far in two previous seasons.

It then takes you through a journey of personal growth, where characters like Tsukishima come around - in what appears to be that the author had deliberately made him dislikeable only for that one particular moment in the third season.

A seam of connectedness flows through by the end of season 3, going well and above being just about Volleyball, without ever explicitly mentioning any other life-changing philosophy.

Haikyuu does itself best, by doing what it does, and still teaching things that it never directly intended to. And in doing so, it has posited itself as one of the most thought-inducing and emotion-provoking works of art, revered by many Anime veterans.

I do not wish to make this long, but maybe just enough to elicit a spark in you. And if I did, believe me, Haikyuu!! is all about sparks.