OIKAWA TOORU IS NOT A GENIUS
all right, fine. i'll talk about my favorite haikyuu character. if you insist
It is July! It is Cancer season. I am a blood clot on the way to red open air. I am a waiting game. I am a horrible villain and I am just a girl. I am often mean; I am just a girl. I am passionate and I am hard work and I am just a girl; I am more than any of that. I have lost and lost and won and lost again. I am a hyena about to reach the river on the way to the desert. I am an artist! I am not a Cancer.
Oikawa Tooru is a Cancer. Oikawa Tooru is this character in Haikyuu!! that haunts me, changes me- and yes, it is that serious. Haikyuu spoilers are on their way, too, so maybe watch or read it before you continue? Or don’t. I suppose I can’t stop you. That’s cool of you, to be unstoppable. It is that serious.
Where do I start? Recently I’ve been rewatching Haikyuu!! and finally catching up with it. I’m on season four now with my sibling; I enjoy watching it through his eyes, seeing his elation at Karasuno’s wins and his annoyance at Oikawa or Ushiwaka or any other number of players. He was like, Oikawa’s so annoying, but I respect him. Damn right. When we reached the end of season three, I actually cried out of joy. Haikyuu!! is one of my favorite shows of all time- it exudes passion and love and happiness like nothing else I’ve seen, it’s a popsicle in the summer, a snow angel in the winter, it’s a love letter to volleyball that’s a million pages long, it’s intricate and it beams its smiles and it’s so well written. It’s a pleasure and a blessing, it’s good luck and it’s hard work. I love Haikyuu. I’m going to stop italicizing it and doing the two exclamation points now.
Oikawa! My beloved. That’s my guy. I didn’t think of him much, when I first watched the show- I was very caught up in Hinata and Kageyama’s whole deal and didn’t have room for much else, as I think is the case for most people when first experiencing Haikyuu. I did not give a fuck about that guy. I was like, Beat his ass. I did not know who Iwaizumi Hajime was and was very confused about all the online mentions of him. Listen, man, I just loved Hinata Shoyo. I wanted Karasuno to win. I wanted Hinata to touch the sun, to become it.
What does it look like when I win? Ah, well. When I was a teenager and a child and before even then I think I pictured winning as: streamers, confetti, fireworks, gold medals. Applause applause applause applause. And then I got older and winning was more quiet, sometimes. Winning is, half the time: a good night’s sleep, a hand on your shoulder, a smile sent your way from a part-stranger, palm trees, calloused feet, laughter where there wasn’t before, an almost-nice paycheck. Winning, the other half of the time: bomb explosion parade dying star rebirth cake in the fridge that you can eat for a week.
Look. I’m addicted to that latter type of winning. I want cake all the time and forever. I want it for the week after my birthday and I want it after that. This is something I’ve never experienced. Would I still get excited about it if I had it all the time? Probably not. Maybe? So, then, I might just be a snake eating its tail. Or someone infatuated with the chase, the buildup. Because I know every day cannot be my birthday but I still want it and it drives me, and I’m never satisfied. What’s a girl to do. What’s a hyena to do. There’s this thing Iwaizumi says to Oikawa, after season two: You probably won’t become truly happy until you’re a geezer.
Ah, so then. What’s a girl to do.
Maybe winning is, like, for me, the feeling of working hard? The journey? Can I romanticize that? Or do I just have a complex that thinks everything needs to involve sacrifice and immense labor and that the endings of these things have to be bombastic and crowd-pleasing or else what am I doing it for?
I laugh sheepishly, tug at my collar. Ha ha ha! Let’s talk about something else.
(Should I just learn to enjoy this chase. Sink into it. Let it wash over me, make me happy. Or is there something to fix here. Do I need to change something. Can I escape my self-destructiveness or is it an infallible part of who I am, something I should embrace instead of push back against. After all, I’ve gotten this far because of it. After all, it’s fun. Purely. Unabashedly.)
Oikawa’s written to be an antagonist as much as any other team captain is. It’s joked about a lot that he is trying to be a traditional Shonen villain within the world of Haikyuu, which is low stakes and slice-of-life and full of bubbly happiness, where missteps feel like the end of the world but actually aren’t. Missteps that mean something, that make you better. Oikawa is rude and annoys a lot of people but is endearing to me. The thing about Oikawa is that he is mad, sure, but he’s also honest. He admits when people are better than him, albeit bitterly. He admits when he’s upset, or jealous, or when he thinks he can do better- he’s incredibly insecure and incredibly confident, my favorite sort of oxymoron. He’s overcompensating and he’s sweeping the floor with everyone. He’s excited to be there, in love with volleyball, undoubtedly, but he’s also in love with revenge, with getting one over others, with proving himself. You could argue that a lot of Haikyuu characters are obsessed with proving themselves, with “revenge”, even. Is that the core of having a capital P Passion that involves competition with others? That in the end, you’re doing it so other people see you?
I think sometimes we’re taught that wanting attention from others is bad, but I kind of think that human existence largely involves being seen by others, examined and praised, and that most of what we do within capitalistic society is actually so people can clap us on the back and say, Good job. That when we talk about following our dreams, those dreams often mean being the best in a way that’s measurable, that’s “objective”. Haikyuu wouldn’t have much conflict if they weren’t competing against other teams to get to nationals, obviously. That’s the whole point of volleyball. Competing against others. I’m just saying.
But: to talk about Oikawa, I think I first have to talk more about Hinata.
I’ve loved Hinata since day one. I’ve cried for Hinata, with Hinata, in place of Hinata. Hinata is a character you don’t get all the time. He’s incredibly written, relatable, inspiring. In general, when I watch Haikyuu, I feel as if I could do anything, like the world is brighter, more light-hearted, more hopeful, and I feel as if I should go outside and run. I hate running. I watch Haikyuu and it’s more effective than Nickelodeon’s Worldwide Day of Play was when I was a child. I guess Haruichi Furudate got it right?
Every time I’ve watched Haikyuu I’ve been more and more struck by its analysis of the ideas of “talent” and, also, classism. The latter of which makes people look at me strangely when I bring it up. No, really. Haikyuu is about lack of opportunity and hard work in the face of those obstacles. At the surface level, it’s a story about a kid who has a literal physical disadvantage in a sport made for people who were born tall. He’s short. This is a big conflict in the series. It’s funny because Hinata and I are the same height (5’4”) and I’ve never felt less than average, but I also have never been face-to-face with a volleyball team lineup. Over time this conflict is thrown at you so much that you start to think, It’s not even a big deal. Everyone needs to shut the fuck up about his height when it’s obviously whatever. But from the get-go, we see that Hinata has nothing that his peers have, even the more casual players. A huge aspect to Hinata’s story is that in middle school, he didn’t have a proper volleyball team. No one taught him anything that his peers did and no one around him gave a shit about volleyball, much less men’s volleyball. He practices alone in a corner of the gym and his friends barely want to help him out. He eventually learns from the women’s team and also from his friends (tennis players), everything about his initiation non-traditional, but we’ll get to that later. The part about Hinata that makes me the most emotional is that he has to fight tooth and nail to even be on the fucking court. He has to sacrifice so much just to fucking play the game. And then he gets there and everyone’s saying, Why the hell are you not at our level? Like it’s out of laziness, or choice.
Perhaps this is really easy to see for some, but I want to acknowledge it for a bit. This burden Hinata has. The way he wants to go to school at Karasuno when other schools don’t even consider it a noteworthy school, and how he bikes over a mountain in all sorts of weather just to get there. The way he had never been taught the volleyball basics and how he is constantly faced with people who had been brought up from elementary school to play volleyball. This is a very intentional thing. Almost all of the big-name players Hinata faces are teenagers who had learned volleyball very young and had the ability to go to a school who prioritized it. Karasuno in general is referred to with imagery that involves trash and alleyways, run-down and forgotten, while schools like Shiratorizawa are beautiful gardens and forests, castles, places eagles can fly. Obviously this is at the crux of Haikyuu as a show. The crows versus the eagles, and all that. But every time Hinata says something like, “I’m Hinata Shoyo, from the concrete,” I go crazy. Karasuno are the scavengers, the crumb-eaters, and they’re up against the people whose fathers played, whose siblings played, who were chosen by people because of their stature, their background. Hinata comes from nothing. Hinata comes from a glance at a television screen sitting inside a store window. Hinata comes from somewhere we can’t see, somewhere no one truly asks about.
There, too, is the idea of innate strength and weakness. Especially with season three, which I was lukewarm about the first time around but made me insane this time, where we are shown that Shiratorizawa’s coach prioritizes easy physical strength above complex tactics. Ushijima is a great and balanced player, but his main thing is that he can hit the ball really hard. Which, sure, I guess is valid, as you can argue that this is just another way of approaching the game, aimed for simple, raw pleasure, honing the physical body, but, also, fuck off. Hinata is our protagonist, our priority, and he simply cannot be as physically strong as Ushijima because of his genetics or whatever, and he has to work around that in other ways, causing him to have to [arguably, I suppose] work twice as hard as anyone else. He has to learn to jump twice as high as anyone else would have, he has to be twice as fast, he has to hone his instincts twice as much just to even look these guys in the eye. It’s a neat allegory for systemic disadvantages. Everyone always gets so mad when Hinata approaches where they are. They get so pissed. Hinata is taunted and teased and insulted by everyone ever and then he still wins. He knows he has that disadvantage, admits it readily, admits his jealousy of others just as readily, and yet he still fucking wins. That’s cinema, baby.
In season four, the Shiratorizawa coach puts together a training camp and doesn’t invite Hinata but invites everyone that Hinata’s team beat, just because they’re tall. Hinata crashes the camp and the coach says he can be a ball boy and basically just treats him like shit for like five episodes. I bring this part up specifically because I was watching it recently and I was so upset at all these scenes of Hinata being made to clean, to wait on the other players (that he fucking! beat!), to be polite and sit there on the fringes of this “exclusive” training that he had been personally kept out of. This whole season so far (I’m catching up) has consisted of people telling Hinata he can’t do anything on his own, that he relies on Kageyama for all of his skill, can’t do shit, when he obviously can- he just hasn’t been given the opportunity to grow on his own. No one has taken him aside and been like, Yeah, c’mere, I care about you as an individual player, I see that you didn’t have the training in middle school that these guys did and I’m going to catch you up. No! Everyone just berates him, bro. Hinata can’t catch a break. In the end, though, we’re shown that Hinata’s path to learning volleyball is different, yes, but this difference makes him unique, makes him work harder. It’s just as valid. He learned techniques from casually playing tennis that he now uses in volleyball. It’s interesting to me, this concept. That people who have less opportunity simply - sadly - have to work harder, because you have no other choice. You have to create new ways to get there. You just have to. You just do it. People born at the top don’t get that, dude. Prove me wrong, I guess, but that’s just what I’ve seen. They don’t.
It’s, like, okay, when I first went to SVA for animation, big bad top animation school or whatever (no), I got in and I was taking my first animation class. I honestly had only used Adobe Flash when I was fourteen for, like, an hour or something. I didn’t know anything about animating. That’s why I went to school to learn it. Duh. I struggled in this class almost immediately- with the programs, with my peers, with my draftsmanship in the face of digital mediums when I had primarily liked to work traditionally when sketching. I was completely on student loans, none of my school expenses paid with real, current money, not my housing, or my food, or my supplies, all of that. Oh, woe is me. Whatever. Art school is expensive and stupid. This is all going into my Blue Period essay. But this animation class, right, had this teacher who was not a good teacher and who taught primarily using YouTube videos and did not seem like they had the most experience teaching. They were nice, sometimes, but most of the time I could tell they didn’t like me. They didn’t love anyone but they certainly were not my fan and kind of ignored me. Okay. Whatever. There were just these comments, though, that haunted me, still do, that were, verbatim: “You’re really not good at drawing [thing], are you? I see that now. You’re better at [this thing]” and “Are you sure you want to be an animator? You just don’t seem like you want to be an animator” when I asked for a recommendation letter to apply to another school (also for animation). That year I hated my school a lot. It was half fun and I don’t remember a lot of it now but I remember this feeling of, like, I have to get out. I’m not meant to be here. This place isn’t made for me. All of my friends pay out of pocket and took pre-college classes. All my friends have Cintiqs and new laptops and talk about their trips to Europe every summer. All my teachers expect me to know everything already. I wasn’t taught anything about art in high school. I learned everything from Tumblr and YouTube and I have no followers. All my teachers know I’m not meant to be here. I know. Bro, now I think about this and sigh and laugh. Yet, still, in later years at the school: No one understands my art. No one understands where I came from. I tell people about how hard it is and it feels like no one actually gets it. I want this so bad I don’t know what else to want but then I hear my peers laugh and explain how they got here on a whim. People get on my case for fighting for things they’ve always had. Where am I supposed to go? Am I meant to be here? ‘Course I was. Wasn’t that serious. But it was. It was like something was looming over me and blocking the sun out. Swatting my hands away.
In those ways I often feel a kinship with Hinata. Even in high school I did not have anyone take me under their wing and say, Sure, I’ll teach you. I had to make it there on my own. I really actually did go to a different school my last year of high school because there was a better art program there, and it involved a longer drive. Though I never felt like I belonged there either. I took AP art class because the teacher let me but then I was expected to have known everything already, too, and I worked independently. Had learned how to paint from studying Pinterest photos. In the first year of college, I wanted to go to an even “better” school, like that would prove to everyone that I was worthwhile as a person, a fucked-up idea, I know. I do that with a lot of things. I think that if I get far enough in life and get all the titles, the “objective” sort of trophy, then people will finally fucking respect me. I hope that’s just a common sentiment, but maybe I just have a specific kind of complex. In those ways, I often feel a kinship with Oikawa. But, also-
Ushijima refers to Aoba Johsai as “barren soil”. Ushijima has that iconic scene with Oikawa where he tells him that he should’ve gone to Shiratorizawa, because he’s wasted his time and talent at a place like Aoba Johsai. Homoeroticism aside, it’s obviously an asshole thing to say that Oikawa hates. Ushijima seems to think that Shiratorizawa is more worthwhile because it has people are “powerful” in a way that is very easy to comprehend. I would argue that we see in season three that Shiratorizawa lacks fun, and that the coach sucks (I hate that guy. Just so you know). The team members do not seem to have the camaraderie that any other powerhouse team we’ve seen has. It certainly pales in the face of Karasuno. Also, everyone is really mostly concerned with Ushijima and not any other players, and while the other players are amazing, they’re not put on a pedestal like he is. If Oikawa had gone to Shiratorizawa, would he have had more opportunities? I mean, honestly, I’ve thought about this (too much?) and I think that Oikawa was meant to go on the path he did. It makes him more interesting. And this is canonically an Oikawa thing, to do something unexpected, something more difficult. Going to Argentina is the big one. One can figure that Oikawa went to Aoba Johsai because that’s where his friends are. I think that’s lovely. Ushijima doesn’t seem to understand that. That you can have love outside of volleyball. That that creates more love, within volleyball. Do you get me, dear reader? Do you understand, my bro?
His worthless pride! His worthless fucking pride! I’m cheering and banging things to make noise. I’m hooting and hollering. I love that scene. Now we’re in full Oikawa territory. Walk with me. Oikawa is about losing and then winning. Oikawa is about knowing that not every loss is the end. How, actually, most losses are never the end. Oikawa is about patience and passion and determination. Oikawa is about pride! (Memeable statement) Oikawa is about realizing you’re young and have your whole life to achieve your goals! Isn’t there something so romantic about working so hard for something you love? Even when it’s difficult, when it’s not fun? Oikawa is about finding the fun hidden inside years and years of resolve. Oikawa is about loving volleyball and also blooming tomorrow or maybe next year or maybe when you’re thirty. Oikawa may never be happy until he’s a geezer. Sometimes that’s kind of nice. All that time sprawling in front of you. All the life left to live.
Oikawa’s conversation with Jose Blanco is just so good. He’s not a genius. In kind-of-parallel with Hinata, Oikawa’s grappling with the idea that he does not have “innate talent” like other players do. Kageyama in particular. Listen, I’m not an Oikawa apologist but he was also, like, fourteen when they had that fight, okay. Kageyama is a foil to characters like Hinata and Oikawa but he’s not quite an Ushijima, is he. He’s somewhere in between. Kageyama practices hard and I think there’s something I want to argue about talent never being innate and that concept being made up but that’s for that goddamn Blue Period essay. Oikawa is not like Hinata because he’s tall and went to good schools and seems to have been playing since very young and he gets a lot of praise and fanfare, but it’s also clear he’s worked for it. It’s been easier for him than Hinata, undoubtedly, but he also feels he has been shown up by someone who is three years younger than him and doesn’t know what to do about it. Maybe “innate talent”, my friends, is connected in some ways with innate, systemic disadvantages, and it’s all lie. Did we ever think about that? Oikawa is about overcompensation. Oikawa is about showing everyone a nice face and being a huge snake on the inside. Oikawa is not truly ever mean, in my opinion, but he’s sometimes very not-nice. Yeah. LOL. I like that he’s calculating. I like that he learns that bringing out the best in people is what being a setter is about, and that he kind of makes this act seem a little evil? I like that Oikawa is like, Yeah, I’m so evil, hee hee, when no one asked. I love that he stays up all night to figure out Karasuno’s hand signals, I love that all the players in Aoba Johsai’s team tease him but also obviously respect him. At the end of the day, Oikawa uses the power of friendship to try to win games. Like, that’s his thing. Kageyama learns how to use the power of friendship from him to win games with Karasuno. That goes so hard. Ugh! Oikawa makes a mistake and learns to do better. Kageyama does the same.
Oikawa does not settle. He does not go to Shiratorizawa. He does not take the easy route. Is this self-destructive? I don’t know. Is it a lust for life? I say yes. Going to Argentina instead of Japan. We don’t know if Japan even wanted him, or would want him. Oikawa just forges his own path. Maybe he was forced to, but also maybe it’s because he’s different. He wants more. He embraces it. He sees an opening and he takes it, no matter how crazy that is. Obviously this character is very important to me. I’m very inspired by what we learn in the Brazil arc of Haikyuu in particular (the Hinata stuff there is also incredible). Imagine having to start from scratch in San Juan, Argentina, when you’ve grown up in the Miyagi prefecture. It thrills me. There’s that old meme where people would be like, Oikawa didn’t go to nationals tho lol but he went to Internationals, bitch. He’s the final boss. Aren’t so many parts of Haikyuu about not getting what you want and continuing anyway? Having the drive, anyway? I think it achieves this better than any other sports anime I’ve watched. Oikawa, while portrayed as an antagonist, is also portrayed with grace and complexity. I remember reading the Jose Blanco pages and thinking, Oh. I see. Maybe it is about enjoying the chase. The working-hard part. I felt seen. For better or for worse, that’s who I am, right now. I want to want things. I enjoy wanting things and getting them, even if it’s something people tell me I’m not meant to want. What, are you saying you know the limits of your abilities already? Even though you haven’t yet finished growing physically or mentally? Even though you haven’t mastered all the skills you could master? If you are going to complain that someone born with more talent than you is and always will be better than you no matter how hard you work, no matter how many tricks you learn, no matter how many great teammates you have… do that only after you have given everything the best effort you can.
I let it sink in. I let it wash over me. I don’t listen unless I feel respected. I don’t settle. I reach for love, for my friends. I am just a girl, but not really. Not at all. I have lost and lost and won and lost again. I’m a hyena who crossed a river on the way out of the desert.
the author would like to note that they know it is not cancer season at the time of publishing this post, but that it was when they started writing this.
THIS WAS AN AMAZING READ . i absolutely love this so much you dont even understand this like exploded my brain in the best way ever.
still a gorgeous piece of writing ❤️ another rereading~