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LOOT Anime Celebrates Victory!

This month, Loot Anime celebrates VICTORY in sports and competition with some of your favorite team-based anime and manga series. And when it comes to sports-based anime, Free! and Yowamushi Pedal are unquestionably two of our favorites.

Free! may not focus heavily on swimming, but what resonated with us was how a primarily individual sport still had a strong team dynamic to it. We know Free! has a bit of a reputation but we really do enjoy its lightheartedness and how much the characters all value each other's friendship.

With Yowamushi Pedal, the first couple episodes did a spectacular job of setting up the journey we eventually see in Onodera, Imaizumi, and Naruko's, who go from a bunch of self-centered first years to realizing that they're part of a team and must sacrifice their own goals for the greater good. We had an idea of what competitive cycling was like, but we didn't really think about how much team coordination/sacrifice goes into ensuring the team's one cyclist reaches the finish line first.

That's the most important thing for both of these titles: the strong emphasis on teamwork. Both cycling and swimming come off as individual-focused sports, but both series highlight how teamwork and self-sacrifice is still necessary to succeed even at an individual level in order to achieve VICTORY.