2.43: Seiin High School Boys Volleyball Team

Episode 5

Being driven by the idea of its characters scrabbling for second chances means that 2.43 must meditate on whether or not they deserve those second chances. It kicked off with some pretty impressive screw-ups between its main boys Haijima and Kuroba, and as they keep trying to fight their way back to a chance at volleyball success, we see those pasts continue to catch up with them. The series' storytelling also clearly has some ideas about what constitutes someone's ‘fault’ in a conflict they were part of or a mistake they made. Whether the viewer agrees with the show's arguments is going to be a personal choice not unlike the ones we make with troubled figures in our own lives, and the degree to which we might accept explanations and offer forgiveness from them.

One interesting delineation which 2.43 is already making is the idea of differentiating between ‘sports drama’ and ‘real-life drama’. A serious intersection of those two has been following Haijima around since his middle school days: we're told his overblown efforts to push the school-sports careers of he and his teammates eventually contributed to a suicide attempt. By contrast, Kuroba's fallout-fueling failing in the latter part of middle school was purely sports-focused (though it was also fueled by tension over the story of that interpersonal disaster), with him not showing up on the day of the tournament when Haijima and the team needed him. Between these, Haijima's action is definitely viewed as the ‘worse’ of the two, and Kuroba's story seems set on catching him up to simply via quantity. As the beginning of this episode reveals, rumors spilling out of Kuroba simply being in proximity to his cousin's fight at the end of the last episode caused the whole team to be suspended and forfeit their following game in the tournament. Unwilling to come clean about what really happened, or why he actually has a bruise on his face (possibly because it would partly implicate him in acting flirty towards his cousin Itoko, seriously what the hell dude), the mere existence of Kuroba's real-life drama spills over and affects the sports side of things for everyone.

It's a Stars Align-esque observation that more idealistic sports shows like Haikyu!! might gloss over: That the epic highs and lows of high school sports don't exist in a vacuum, that high school is enough of a tumultuous time in people's lives as it is, and there will always be outside issues affecting others that all the practice and passion in the world can't keep at bay. Indeed, the issue of the suspension is only solved by the end of this episode by another outside factor: Itoko herself setting the record straight. That commitment to the macro levels of life these things occupy certainly makes 2.43 come across as more ‘realistic’ as it presents this parable as a microcosm of the complexities of life and the multitudes of sides to a story that can affect someone's situation and perception. It over-arches here to continue building up the issues Kuroba will be facing, yes, but then it also turns out to line up with some clarifications we get on Haijima's own story this week.

That side of things is where I'm decidedly more torn on 2.43's priorities in terms of character sympathy. Haijima's part of the story this episode starts effectively enough: Driven by Kuroba's noncommitment to resolving the issue of the alleged fight and egged on by some harsh words from Kuroba himself, Haijima sets off to finally face Sota, the teammate he harmed all those years ago, in search of closure. It plots an interesting idea of the interconnected growth everyone's issues affect, and there's an appreciable consistency to the way Haijima and Kuroba continue to drive each other forward even outside of volleyball or when they're in the midst of an active spat. I remarked at the beginning of reviewing 2.43 that I thought the show was selling the idea of Haijima working to improve and redeem himself, and his interactions with Kuroba have been the clearest indicator of that. Heck, it's only on account of his coming around on the positive encouragement towards Kuroba that he finds himself driven to seek out Sota, roundabout as the choice ends up being.

Simply showing Haijima make an effort this episode is his growth towards redemption, is what I'm saying, which is why the actual revelations and fallout resulting from it are so baffling. Hearing Haijima's fellow teammates and Sota tell it, his near-suicide was in fact a ruse on some level, concocted by the other members of the team as a motivating retaliation against Haijima's vitriolic, controlling nature, and a way to allow Sota to leave the volleyball team seemingly with less guilt. It's an over-complex conspiracy that seems designed, mostly, to be delivered as a final reprieve for our feelings on Haijima. See, he wasn't that bad, his teammates were worse, and the suicide attempt wasn't even really his fault! It's baffling to the point that Haijima himself can't really clarify if anything changed for him, only that he attained some sort of closure. Instead, this revelation stands out seemingly for the audience's benefit, to retract some of Haijima's flaws and possibly even guilt us for judging him harshly like the way Kuroba did early on.

However, in my opinion, this is an exhausting effort that suffers from overcomplicating its own backstory in the attempt to simplify our opinion of a character. The mean, messy background of Haijima was a tough pill to swallow in terms of protagonist likability, sure, but that just made his clear, in-character efforts to grow into a better person feel more meaningful. To have 2.43 renege on that, several episodes deep, reads as it getting cold feet from any of the more critical readings of its handling of these characters. At worst, it's an attempt to paint Haijima as the ‘real victim’ when his growth has been one of the stronger elements here, as it is in so many other effective sports stories. It means his late-episode declaration of his commitment to making it to the championship with Seiin rings hollow, less like him making up for his failures and more like simply overcoming all the ways life has unfairly screwed him over. Five episodes in, that wasn't the arc I was appreciating about Haijima.

It's a bold, but misguided move from 2.43 that leaves me unsure where to follow the show next. As I've said before, the series has a weird habit of feeling like it's overcome or resolved the biggest personal arcs of its two main boys every other episode, only to throw familiar wrenches back in a moment later. Sure, our own real-life drama is almost never cleanly, fully resolved, but by this point we've got an example of the writing bending over backwards so far to resolve things for us that it trips ass-first into the depths of melodrama it had always threatened. As I mentioned earlier, I do appreciate the narrative symmetry between this plot and the one with Kuroba's suspension in terms of the idea of involved parties needing to come clean to resolve the guilt of another. But it doesn't absolve the larger issue with the motivation behind these plot explanations, attempting to rewrite the kind of sympathy we have for a character at a point where I feel it honestly didn't need to.

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2.43: Seiin High School Boys Volleyball Team is currently streaming on FUNimation Entertainment.