Why the Individualism of 'Blue Lock' Is So Compelling to Me

It’s no secret that Asian cultures are more collectivist than the West. For most people, you are responsible for your obligations to the family and those obligations to society above that of your own. You are expected to make a lot of sacrifices for your family. Everything you do must reflect well on the family’s image.

I personally have had a lot of friction, as an Asian-American who was torn between American and Asian cultures, with this expectation and this culture. I used to think this culture was inherently evil given its penchant for saving face and masking at the expense of dealing with real problems. Now, however, I just recognize that each person has their own values, and those values are not mine as someone who prioritizes individuality and independence more than devotion to the collective.

I have also always been a big fan of anime, and anime tends to be a reflection of this collectivism in many respects. Naruto and Dragon Ball Z are reflections of individuals with superhuman powers but who are only able to succeed with the support of their communities. Other sports animes, like Kuroko’s Basketball and Haikyuu!, which are basketball and volleyball animes, respectively, also are about selfish, arrogant people who evolve and become better teammates and people after transformative experiences with their teams. According to Lauren Kells at Screen Rant, these themes of teamwork and camaraderie are tropes in Shonen anime, which is a category of anime that targets young men and is the most popular type of anime in Japan, of which Naruto, Kuroko’s Basketball, and Haikyuu! fall into.

However, I have been very pleasantly surprised at the popularity of Blue Lock, an anime that touts the value of individualism and egoism at the expense of this team-oriented collectivism. Blue Lock is a sports anime that focuses on soccer, but is often labeled an “anti-Shonen” due to subverting all the themes and tropes of traditional anime and sports anime.

It starts with the main character Isagi Yoichi, despondent at losing a crucial soccer game because he decided to pass the ball to a player who was more open (and missed) rather than take the shot himself. He rationalizes by saying he made the best decision for his team, and his coach tells him this too.

However, Isagi then is invited to this project to make the best forward, or striker, for his Japan called “Blue Lock”. There, the director tells a group of teenage male soccer players that everything they’ve been told, that they need to sacrifice for the team, is wrong and a lie. Instead, the director, Ego, tells each person that they must embrace their ego and aspire to be the absolute best, to crush the people they play with on their teams rather than to defer to them. To be the best, you have to be ambitious, selfish, and highly egotistical. You have to be delusional about your own ability and capacity for growth. The director tells the players that it’s better to get the opportunity to take the final shot and lose than to pass the ball to teammates and win.

Over the course of the series, the characters start embracing this egoism to take their potential to new heights. I won’t spoil the whole thing, but players like Isagi and his competition try to steal the ball from each other, not pass to each other, and always try to one up each other. While they are assigned teams because soccer is a team sport, many times, when someone else on their team scores, there’s bittersweet happiness toward victory, but disdain that someone else scored instead of them. There becomes a hunger to be that guy in the next game, and a fire to work hard and train to move to that next level.

While some players engage in teamwork with other strikers, they only do so when it is mutually advantageous. The players previously playing for their teams and their country was just a charade, as they all wanted to just prove they were the best, and each player relishes the taste of unlocking their play to new heights.

To be fair, it’s not like the characters don’t know how to work in a team and optimize the performance of that team. It’s that these players are entirely self-motivated and seek their own advancement. They go against the cultural expectations of Japan and the cultures of their teams to chase their dreams and are no longer restrained by embracing their dark sides.

In high school and college, I ran cross country and track. I was all in on the team. I did my best to make contributions to the greater good of the team. I sat on the sideline taking times and splits down for runners better than me. I owed a lot to my team, whether it was in high school or college— they breathed a sense of community and confidence I never had before. They believed in me even when I did not believe in myself. When I look back, I owe so much to my cross country teams, particularly in college. There was nothing wrong in loving the team and giving a lot to it because that’s the situation I was in at the time, and in a workplace, the same team-oriented approach is essential. I am undergoing the recruitment process for the Marine Judge Advocate General, and the military as an institution requires me to be more committed to the institution than I am to myself.

However, now, I run for me. I have run 70-mile weeks to run personal bests in the marathon and half marathon. I am affiliated with a running club, but at the end of the day, that’s all I am: affiliated.

In reality, I have run for both: I run for my teams, and I run for myself. I think, for each athlete, it is always a mix, too. In running, it’s easier to be more individualistic because it’s your time, your race, and the contribution to the team in terms of points tends to be auxiliary to the individual effort.

For now, I do want to engage in an exercise much like the protagonist, Isagi, and his friends engage in in Blue Lock. I want to be the best. I want to chase my lifelong dreams to be a better runner. I want to be fast. I want to be successful. I think I can one day make the Olympics in running and my window is closing soon.

Recently, I ran a personal best in the marathon. It was a four-minute personal best, and that result was one of the best experiences of my life. Of course, while it was nice that day, it left me craving more personal bests and pushing past my limits to an even greater capacity.

Although I always had these ambitions, there was a difference between believing I could push past my limits and actually doing it. But I would not say it was a better feeling than my team’s success when I wasn’t doing well. I would say it was a mix — I wanted my personal success and my team’s success too. They were not mutually exclusive. There were plenty of times during runs and workouts when my teammates and I would get carried away. We would turn a six-mile easy run into a game of one-upmanship where we tried to break each other. It was all fun at the end of the day because we pushed each other to get better and because we spent so much time together, we all became friends outside of running.

Now, without a team, I can only embrace my ego and try to be the best now because post-college, I have no one else to run for.

I think the biggest benefit of embracing selfishness and ego, although not to an extreme level as the characters of Blue Lock, is that in a collectivist and team-oriented environment, there is a lot of extrinsic motivation. When you do it for yourself and in pursuit of your own greatness, you need as much intrinsic motivation as possible. For me, that has meant it was just between me and the sport, which is compelling in a very different way. Again, it’s always a mix of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, but Blue Lock teaches me that if I want to be a lifelong runner trying to maximize my own potential and success, I need to do it for me, no one else.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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