Blue Box Season 2 ‒ Episode 4
“I guess the talent that made me good in elementary school won't be enough anymore.” This is one of the lines that really hit home in “Love is the Most Powerful Feeling,” which comes from Yumeka as she reminisces over the long and winding road that brought her to this crossroads with Chinatsu. It comes at that precise moment when she realizes that the sport of basketball that brought her so much joy is now becoming a source of stress, pain, and anxiety. It's an incredibly relatable feeling for anyone who has ever had their personal passions run smack into the brick wall of inadequacy. There's so much to unpack just in that phrasing: “The talent that made me good,” she says. It's true, talent can take someone very far indeed, but there is inevitably that moment when it becomes all too clear that genuine, sometimes backbreaking effort is needed to truly excel.
It's all well and good to understand this as an abstract concept. The adage that every aspiring athlete, craftsperson, or artist will hear a thousand times over is “Genius is 1% talent and 99% perspiration.” While I am a firm believer that the actual ratio is somewhere closer to the 60:40 range in either direction, the principle remains the same. What makes this fundamental truth of success so difficult to enact in practice comes from the sheer number of ways that life will manage to get in one's way. Maybe you have a dozen other pressing responsibilities on top of the sport you love to play. Maybe school is getting tougher, and the mental health situation is no longer as great as it was back in the salad days of the sixth grade. Maybe you're a frustrated and exhausted kid whose parents are going through a nasty divorce, and you just cannot be bothered to give a shit about making it to practice every single day like your effortlessly successful and patently more talented best friend.
As a character, Yumeka Goto is maybe the best thing to ever happen to Blue Box. Even when this episode indulges in its most treacly and melodramatic instincts, what with all of the somber music and moody narration that accompanies the extended flashback, it is impossible not to feel deeply for Yumeka and her struggles. The show plays her parents' split with just enough grit and dourness that it will immediately ring true for anyone who has ever lived in a house where shouting matches tore through the paper-thin walls. The running theme of Yumeka losing faith in her father's position as “the strongest” maybe doesn't translate incredibly well into English, but we can forgive the corny phrasing when the hurt on the girl's face is so palpable. Yumeka isn't going through anything that millions of children all over the world don't also experience on a daily basis, but her conflicts put such stark relief on Chinatsu and Taiki's relatively breezy lives.
This was necessary to give the world of Blue Box more texture and to reinforce the emotional credibility of our central story. Every kid feels like their universe is the most important and singular of all, so I don't begrudge Taiki and Chinatsu treating every awkward conversation or missed opportunity to trade a passing glance as earth-shaking conflict. The story works even better in moments like these, where Blue Box uses Yumeka as an excellent foil for our heroes, who reminds us that the world will always continue to turn, even when our favorite badminton and basketball stars are at a loss for what to do next.
We can take solace, at least, in knowing that Yumeka doesn't have to worry about any of that silly romantic melodrama nonsense, because she already has herself a killer boyfriend. Sosuke is the fluffy-haired dork that seems to be the stable port in Yumeka's sea of storms, and I have to say I am incredibly happy for the girl. The guy appreciates knee-high socks; he's emotionally intelligent enough to recognize that his girlfriend needs to find closure with this Chinatsu business, and he even helps Yumeka start to reflect on how she might get over all of those negative emotions that killed her passion for basketball. That's the wonderful thing about love, in the end. Sure, its power can cause a lot of pain and heartache when things go awry in life, but it's also the tether that can keep us from being swallowed up by our sadness completely. Hopefully, with a new light to sail towards, Yumeka will find herself once again on Chinatsu's side of the horizon.
Rating:
Blue Box Season 2 is currently streaming on Netflix.
James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on BlueSky, his blog, and his podcast.
discuss this in the forum (7 posts) |
back to Blue Box Season 2
Episode Review homepage / archives
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.