On Motivation: The Spikers of Karasuno High
⚠️ Season 4 spoilers ahead.
If you remember, I wrote about Haikyuu in the previous post. It’s a show about a high school volleyball team.
For me, the show has been so inspiring that I have binged it numerous times. Bingeing Haikyuu has been especially helpful during periods of low motivation. The whole cast of characters is terrific, but this time I will talk about the excellently relatable and inspiring characters of the spikers: Asahi Azumane, Ryunosuke Tanaka, and Shoyo Hinata.
Asahi is a senior and the ace of the team. The story starts with Asahi not being a part of the team. He had stopped coming to practice after a fight with a team member. However, the reason for the argument was that both team members were trying to take the blame for a loss. In the match, Asahi kept getting blocked by the opposite team and couldn’t score significant points. I think we have all been in a situation where you keep failing no matter how hard you try. Asahi couldn’t face himself after facing a situation like that. In the moment, it feels like all of your hard work, all of your perseverance, amounted to nothing. You start doubting yourself. You question yourself about whether you could have put in more effort, and you start wondering if it’s too late to get to that level, and if it is, did your efforts really matter? We see Asahi contemplating getting back on the team after the visit by the team’s freshmen. We see him joining the practice again and trying hard to recover that confidence. Mind you, he doesn’t lack in skills. He has been an excellent scorer in the past. Falling from being the ace of the team to not having the confidence to score at all is a drastic change.
Getting up from that state, just even making efforts to regain self-confidence, requires a lot of courage and bravery. It is an arduous task because he starts from a place of doubtfulness. In that state, you doubt if even your current efforts are going to make any difference. Asahi not only bounces back from that, but he also bounces back stronger. He scores points against the same team that blocked most of his spikes. What a lot of people don’t realize is that Asahi is extremely considerate besides being sensitive. A comeback like this, for such people, is extremely difficult. It is a constant battle against their very own nature. Asahi’s journey shows us that no matter how daunting, how difficult it seems, you can bounce back even after you thought you quit.
Tanaka, the delinquent-y sophomore, never really stood out or had his moments in the first three and a half seasons. In the second half of the fourth season, though, he got his moment. It comes in the match against Inarizaki, at a point when Tanaka had been struggling to score points and receive serves aimed at him. A realization hits him that he is average, unlike other people on the team, who are among the best in one or the other thing. Like many of us, he thought in his childhood that he was a genius, and he sometimes still thinks that, but as he grew, he noticed that many people can make much better plays than him. That makes him toil on the path forward instead of running like usual and eventually stops and makes him take a hard look at himself. But suddenly, this time, he stops thinking and quips to himself,
By the way, my average self, do you have the time and luxury to look down on yourself?
and hits a super cross spike that he hadn’t ever been able to hit before. That, to me, is one of the most inspiring things in the whole anime world. In this part of the show, Tanaka went from being an unrelatable character to one of the most relatable characters, if not the most. This lifted me. It saved me. A lot of times, people start wallowing in self-pity when nothing goes their way. So have I. But during times like that, whenever I have come across these words, they have helped me stop doing that and do whatever I needed to do to move forward. To have the guts to tell yourself to get up when you are hurt and don’t feel like doing anything is no mean feat. And it’s an important thing to do because only getting up will help recover from that hurt. Remember never to pity yourself.
Hinata is a freshman and the protagonist of the show. We see his beginnings. He got inspired and started playing volleyball after watching a player nicknamed the Little Giant on the TV screen. However, he didn’t have what most people who learned to play volleyball took for granted. There was no men’s volleyball team in his middle school, let alone someone to coach him. Many of us have been in his position, we have dreams, goals, and needs but no resources to fulfil them. That is enough to make a lot of us quit, and sometimes the healthier option to live life is to do just that, quit. But Hinata doesn’t. He keeps at it. When he comes to Karasuno, most other players have good fundamentals, but not Hinata. He keeps challenging himself to do better and keeps persevering. Even when faced with the most jarring of obstacles, he keeps his motivation. He does whatever he can. There are no miracles in his story. It’s just him giving his hundred per cent all the time. He does get rewarded. He gets rewarded very well. And when he does, you feel like you are rewarded too because you set out on his journey with him. When you see Hinata, you get reminded that perseverance never goes to waste. In fact, in a lot of situations in life, you have no option but to persevere.
Haikyuu has been inspiring for me in so many ways. I can’t recommend it enough. I had to write this. Getting to know these characters has changed my attitude towards things. It has helped me during the lowest of my times. I hope you try to get to know these characters if you already haven’t. It might change your life like it did mine.
