A rant about Blue Box
Blue Box is a Romance/Sports manga that follows Taiki who plays badminton at high school, he likes Chinatsu who is a year older and the best player on the girl's basketball team. He is often accompanied by his 2 best friends Kyo who also plays badminton and Hina who is the top gymnast for the school, and is the daughter of an Olympic gymnast. Taiki wants to excel at playing badminton and sets heavy goals for himself, such as reaching the nationals tournament for under 18s in Japan. Similarly Chinatsu has the same goal, and the 2 of them are always the first ones at morning practice in the gym. This is how Taiki gets to know Chinatsu and encourages her to push for her own goals as well. One day Chinatsu ends up living with Taiki as her parents are going abroad, but she wants to continue competing, and Taiki's parents are friends with Chinatsu's. This allows for their relationship to progress, being the main catalyst for the story to begin.
This will contain spoilers for the entire manga of Blue Box, as well as the manga for Ramparts of Ice so don't read unless you have finished them, or don't mind being spoiled.
I want to start this off by saying that this will NOT be ALL negative in the slightest.
I just finished catching up to the Blue Box manga after I watched season 1 of the anime a few days ago, and I don't think I have ever been quite as torn on a manga as much as this, almost to the point that I struggle to come up with a good score to give it. In my personal opinion, Blue Box had the potential to be one of the best romance manga out there, I found it super refreshing how it's able to blend in the romance with the sports. The sports part of the manga was the first sports I have personally encountered in any manga/anime so going in, I wasn't sure how I would feel about it, but I came out realising that is was very fun and compelling, though I don't have anything to compare to, so I have no ideas how it measures up to other sports manga in that sense.
Another thing that I found Blue Box to really excel at was the way it managed to craft and develop all of it's characters, most of the characters feel very human and natural, and each one has very interesting motivations behind how they act, and are fleshed out really well. Some of the characters even go through some very admirable character development in addition to this. I don't want to go into too much detail as I'm not really a reviewer and this is just a short rant anyway.
But this brings me to why I said it had so much potential, but obviously didn't reach that ( at least for me personally ) and that's the love triangle and the drama around all of that storyline, both with Hina and Ayame later on in the manga too. I know that love triangles are pretty much universally hated anyway, but I don't want this to come off of as me just complaining about it, because I do think that love triangles can have potential to come off as good story telling, but for me in Blue Box it just wasn't good. The original love triangle that happens with Hina, Taiki and Chinatsu is much worse than the one later on in the manga.
The reason I feel this way has many reasons, one of them being that Hina felt like a very fun character in the story, and it was very refreshing to have a completely platonic relationship between a male and female character in a romance manga. Taiki and Hina's relationship early in the manga was very fun to read and it was all kind of just thrown out of the window for something we knew wasn't going to go anywhere in the end anyway. Maybe because I already knew going in who the main couple was that I felt this way, but even then, it starts out with Taiki telling us that he likes Chinatsu, and we are shown that this will probably never change.
Another reason I hated it so much was because it relied so heavy on plot contrivances to push forward the idea of the triangle, and cause potential drama, whilst also being very predictable in the way it does it. For example, characters overhearing conversations, or seeing other people at misleading times, this can be ok one or two times, but it happens SO often in this story that it just didn't feel at all realistic, which is one of the things I liked about Blue Box, how real it felt compared to many other romance manga. The worst of this for me was when Taiki was roped into playing the prince in the play. I could see this happening from a mile away, even before Taiki had the crystal ball conversation with Nishida, it felt so predictable, and there was no real reason for it to even happen in the first place, it only happened to cause drama, which admittedly didn't have as bad of an outcome as I was expecting it to.
The last reason that I have for hating this love triangle is that it ruins a lot of character moments ( at least for me ) with Hina, especially later on in the manga. In the first love triangle arc with Hina, not once did she overstep anyone's boundaries, she was only ever honest and didn't, to my memory, try to meddle with Taiki's relationship with Chinatsu for the worse. This is a good thing, and pretty rare for a love triangle as far as I know, but this is then all ruined, as well as all of Hina's character development when she decides to kiss Taiki. I quite liked Hina as a character even though I always thought the story went the correct direction with Chinatsu, but this singular moment made me lose a lot of respect for her, and I think is by far the worst decision in the entire story. Whilst her motivations make sense, it doesn't feel in character for her to go through with that, no matter the circumstances, ESPECIALLY as she knows Taiki and Chinatsu are in a relationship, and as I mentioned before, it just ruins most of, if not all of her development. It also makes some moments just not hit quite the same as i feel like they should do, for example in chapter 224 where Taiki talks about how he has 2 great best friends. This happens BEFORE he is able to have a proper conversation with Hina about what she did, and honestly feels weird, even if we know Taiki will probably forgive her ( which in my opinion he shouldn't but that's not part of this discussion ).
As fore the love triangle that involves Ayame, Kyo and Takasago, in my opinion this was handled much better overall. The reason I say this is because it actually felt meaningful for the character development for Kyo, but even more so Ayame. I don't think I need to explain what the character development with her actually is but it meant that the triangle didn't feel too forced, and there was a reason behind it existing. It also did not rely on any of the contrivances I mentioned earlier, it only served as a way to push Ayame and Kyo's stories forward. The problem is that it still doesn't feel quite right, and the main reason for that, in my opinion, is that it's the second love triangle in the story. The former hurts the latter, even if in a vacuum the latter is a pretty solid depiction of a love triangle, and that's a shame.
This love triangle reminded me a lot of the one that happens in The Ramparts of Ice between Minato, Koyuki and Momoka. That one being my favourite love triangle depiction I have seen, and it shares all of the similar story beats, such as developing Minato as a character, giving him the final push to realise what is truly right for him, in the same way it does for Ayame.
This all feels really disappointing because for me Blue Box is a VERY good manga when you have no love triangle problems happening. The relationship between Taiki and Chinatsu is one of the highlights of the story for me and makes it a very good romance, I just can't help but imagine how much better it would have been if it just focused on them and the other characters without relying on unnecessary drama. As I mentioned before the characters are all very strong, and much more developed than you would expect from a romance, and its combined with the sports aspect of the story almost seamlessly which is very impressive. I still really enjoyed the manga overall, and I will be keeping up with it weekly now until it finishes, I just really needed to get this off of my chest to be honest.
I would really appreciate if other people could share their opinions with me as well as I'm all for a discussion, whether you agree or disagree. Also I appreciate if you actually read this, I only really made this to get a load off of myself after catching up with it 😃. To the Blue Box fans, I really do understand why you love this manga so much, and I don't hate it at all either trust me. I'm very curious to know what you guys think!