The problem with writing Leorio and Kurapika h/c is that Kurapika is consistently shown to be brisk and capable in an emergency and that doesn’t lend itself  to fluff; and given Leorio’s dedication to the medical profession I can’t believe his professionalism wouldn’t completely take over if it was the other way around.

*sighs*  One more bunny that’s not going anywhere.

On the topic of problematic things, though, the whole notion of tenipuri continuing is making me cringe in anticipation.  Because I remember the bit of gossip, way back, about how Konomi wanted to write them on in high school, and I’m dreadfully afraid that’s what he’s going to do.

And it won’t work.

The thing about shounen sports is that it is, by dramatic necessity, limited to one season unless downright heroic measures are taken to alter the venue and cast.  One season tends to exhaust the dramatic tension.  The progress has been made, the goal has been met, the crown has been won; going another round to do it over just doesn’t work.

Not that Konomi has ever really known how to do dramatic tension, witness the fact that the hero team failed to lose the penultimate climax (aka Regionals).  Losing an important one like that isn’t a genre convention just for the sake of convention; it’s a tried and true way to provide motivation, pathos that helps the readers identify with the heros, and (all together now) dramatic tension to keep the readers engaged.

For an example of how this can be done superbly, over and over, without becoming stale, read Eyeshield 21.

Back to the continuation, though.  What can possibly be left to accomplish? Fuji has started playing for real, Tezuka has taken his team to a Nationals win, Takashi has completed his third year with his friends and has an honorable win as proof of his strength, Echizen has found True Tennis… so what are they supposed to do to keep our interest now?  What goals can they strive toward in high school?

And even if Konomi does the sensible thing and shifts the venue to professional tennis, how can the characters possibly get any stronger?  After the disco ball lights and the two-places-at-once and the floating crack fairies, I’m really a little afraid to ask.

I was probably asking for trouble, when I started considering all the ways in which Echizen does not, as initially indicated by the early story, seem to find a tennis that is not a copy of Nanjirou’s. Now my Echizen-muse is insisting that I figure out what his own tennis would look like and write it.

Incidentally, spoilers ahead.

So let us meditate on this. The last reference point we have in the original “become not-Nanjirou” trajectory is the Regional finals. There we see a move of Echizen’s own invention, Cool Drive. It’s a move born of necessity, of needing to get up high enough to smash back a ball with the right spin and of figuring out exactly how to do that, however it takes–by climbing the referee, in the event. This move comes after Echizen has already pretty much burned himself out of muga no kyouchi, and it is, as Sanada notes after, a gamble. Using it gives Echizen an even chance of returning a shot he has no other way of getting, and he takes it without hesitation.

And then, of course, the story shears off into Nationals and the internal AU and focuses on muga’s “three doors”. And Echizen achieves the third, which no one but Nanjirou previously had, and thereby alters the progression of his skill from “finding himself” to “finding True Tennis is his father’s footsteps”.

Bah, I say; that isn’t nearly as interesting. Let us, therefore, take muga in its initial, less fantasy-esque, application, as a state of heightened awareness or response and leave it at that. What interests me more are the implications of Cool Drive.

For one, developing it shows that Echizen has started thinking in terms of evolving his own game. That’s a major hurdle right there, and indicates to me that he’s already reached beyond simply perfecting and reflecting back everything Nanjirou does to actively striving to find new ways to do things for himself. The alphabet drives in general show that, and the way we see him working on Cool Drive shows the importance he’s started to give the project (before Konomi lost his mind, anyway).

For another, the shape of the move shows something about Echizen’s approach. He doesn’t bother with conventional wisdom, which might be to work on strengthening his legs enough to jump for the height required. He also doesn’t choose to cultivate the strengths of his own body type, which might result in working on his ground speed to catch high shots when they come down and apply a different spin on return. Instead he takes all shots head on, and finds a way to meet and return them directly. And then he takes that way despite it being a risk and a gamble.

From this I take the conclusion that Echizen’s tennis doesn’t have a reverse gear. It doesn’t even really have brakes. He will just keep moving forward, believing that the skill and strength he has will find a way, and taking whatever way presents itself.

Really, it’s no wonder he does so well at Seigaku.

Echizen throws himself into the breach. Translated into actual martial arts, I might say that his style is purely aggressive, moving straight in and directly blocking rather than diverting or avoiding counterstrikes. He’s a stubborn little cuss.

So, for all his penchant for adopting everyone else’s moves, I don’t think he will ever use things like the Tezuka Zone or Fuji’s Triple (and counting) Counters very much. They’re not his own style. And, as he moves away from copying his father, I think the modality of copying in general may become a secondary rather than a primary tool for him. I don’t doubt he’ll use whatever move he knows that will do the job to win whatever game he’s in. But his own game, the moves he develops on his own, those I think will mostly be drives.

So I think what I would expect to see, in the future that is not a cracked canon-AU, is Echizen working to develop more such moves and using them with determination and forward momentum. Damn the torpedos and full steam ahead.

So I’m rewatching the Fudoumine matches again, and listening, as opposed to reading the initial translations, a few things catch my attention.

One is that Nanjirou is referred to as “flawless” or “perfect”, that is ten’i muhou, repeatedly.

The other is that, at this point, both Nanjirou and Tezuka state that Ryouma will have to move beyond merely copying his father if he wants to progress in his spiritual journey tennis.

So… how, again, is it moving beyond merely copying his father if Ryouma’s Final Ultimate Supercalafragalistic move is Ten’i Muhou no Kiwami?

I do not expect this to be answered, having long since concluded that if Konomi ever had a clear idea of how he wanted to conclude this story he lost it round about the time he started the National arc.  But, as a fic writer who wishes to make some little sense out of canon for my own nefarious purposes, I fret.

I also note that, right from the first, there’s this pattern of players being willing to injure themselves to secure a team win.  Kawamura doesn’t notice what he did to himself immediately, but Ishida is knowingly courting injury after being told it could permanently impair him to use Hadoukyuu too often. I could see this being a commentary on the way it twists the game to play it for nothing but victory, if I believed that was Konomi’s moral from the start, except… Ryouma does it too, when his eyelid is cut.  And we’ve just been told, repeatedly, that he’s exactly like Nanjirou, our exemplar of Pure and Innocent Tennis, so that determination being negative doesn’t fit in nicely.  This is especially so seeing as Ryouma’s stubbornness is the occasion for a heart warming round of team bonding and mutual support, as per standard shounen sports practice.

So I suppose I will just continue to consider canon Nationals some kind of strange AU and accept the pre-Nationals story trends.  There’s more of them anyway.

So, I finally got around to reading the full translation of Yukimura’s 40.5 profile (*tips hat to Ai*), and the tarot reading at the end caught my attention.

For one thing, as divinations go, it was considerably less corny than most of what shows up in these profiles.

Over and above that, though, I found this bit absolutely fascinating. It really looks like either Konomi is a tarot geek with a complex conception of Yukimura’s character (and just can’t translate that into narrative to save his soul), or else got really lucky.

Disclaimer: I had to make some assumptions about which spread Konomi was basing this on; there are dozens of different ways to interpret which card falls where and how they relate. Since this was divination for Yukimura’s profile, though, and since there are only the five cards, I assumed it was a fairly standard “who is this person and what are their circumstances” reading.

Well, the break seems to have made for some nice turning points.

Once more, because it seems to bear repeating, we cannot gauge the strength of shounen sports characters by comparing their performance in matches if there has been any time at all between the matches in question. The name of the game, whatever game it may be, is “evolution”.