Have you watched or read Blue Box? It’s about 1/3 sports anime 2/3 romance but I think the romance is better handled in Blue Box than in any other Shounen I’ve seen, other than maybe Dan Da Dan. That said you’ll likely want to wait for Season 2 since Season 1 left off in such an awkward spot.
Comment on Anime General Discussion Thread, Favorite Summer Season OP/ED Edition [2025, Week 32]
Endmaker@ani.social 3 days ago
Meta
Can we please have a tag for community discussion posts like those from @molave@reddthat.com? Perhaps have one for episode discussions and one for news too. It would help with filtering of posts on Photon.
Can we also have a tag to indicate that there are spoilers in the tagged post? Sometimes, people want to talk about the content of anime they have watched freely, outside of episode discussions. Spoiler-tagging a post allows people to be warned before seeing the comments.
Past Seasons
I completed Haikyuu!! season 1 over the past week. Instant 10 / 10.
Only this anime can get me as hyped up as Umamusume: Cinderella Gray.
Writing-wise, Haikyuu is basically the volleyball version of
meta spoiler; another anime + Haikyuu
Sound Euphonium. Kageyama Tobio is essentially Kousaka Reina, except that he learnt his lesson of actually working together with his teammates. Reina got off easy because she had Kumiko doing all the EQ-required work behind the scenes. Both anime also ran the plotline of having a talented junior taking away a senior’s spot. Based on how similar their stories are, I can make a fairly confident bet that Hinata Shouyou would become the captain of the volleyball team by his third year.
On a more meta note, I think sports anime are the best suited to the shounen demographic. Other forms of shounen anime have tropes that I find annoying, but these tropes actually make sense in the context of sports.
For example, in many battle shounen, the hero tend to let the villain get away instead of finishing them off when they had the chance. The villain would then live to fight another day. It’s so stupid because the villain would cause so much preventable suffering later. I’m sure it’s because they want to reuse the same character instead of coming up with a new one, but that’s just an excuse to justify subpar work.
This is not a problem in sports anime because even if the stakes are high, it would almost never be a life-or-death situation. There is no real villain. Even if the protagonist lose a match to their opponent because they failed to end it decisively, it is alright; they can get their revenge in a subsequent match. Nobody is really getting hurt.
Another genre that I dislike when targeted at young boys is romance. I read somewhere that young boys don’t have much experience being in romantic relationships, so they relate to “the chase” better. I wholeheartedly agree.
My watching experience tells me that the protagonists of such anime take multiple seasons to get together and once they get together, the story ends. Personally, I find it too frustrating.
This is not a problem in sports anime at all. The focus is on friendship and camaraderie, something that shounen are more than familiar with.
Unboxious@ani.social 2 days ago
mo_lave@reddthat.com 2 days ago
Chihayafuru, meanwhile is 2/3 sports anime and 1/3 romance. Will recommend that as well
Unboxious@ani.social 2 days ago
Oh yeah, just watched an episode over dinner. It’s been fun.
Endmaker@ani.social 2 days ago
Thanks for the recommendation.
wjs018@ani.social 2 days ago
Post tags are kind of an unofficial thing that (afaik) only photon supports. So, posters should feel free to use tags as they wish. I can add some recommendations to the sidebar/rules though, like in !manga@ani.social. When lemmy 1.0 comes out, or if this community ever ends up needing to move to a piefed instance, there will proper post flair that can be used instead.
As for the episode discussion threads, I can modify the bot’s template to include a tag. The manga community-style tag would be [DISC] or [Discussion], but the anime subreddit uses the [Episode] flair. I don’t have a strong preference and would be open to feedback on which way to have rikka go.
mo_lave@reddthat.com 2 days ago
Afaik it’ll only work if Lemmy has native support for post flairs
wjs018@ani.social 2 days ago
Official flair support is coming for lemmy 1.0…sometime later this year. In the meantime, the photon frontend will parse parts of a post title in brackets as a tag. Take a look at the manga community in the photon frontend for an example. It removes things like
[DISC]or[Discussion]from the post titles and puts a little tag in the upper right of the post to act as a flair of sorts.
mo_lave@reddthat.com 2 days ago
You’re not wrong. From my POV, the connection is made for a different reason. Pasting my recommendation reason in MAL:
spoiler
“Haikyu” is like a very detailed version of “Sound Euphonium” S3. There is an untold story of how the captain Sawamura Daichi helped develop a flightless Karasuno High School volleyball team to a national contender in his final year of high school. Sound Euphonium explores Kumiko’s entire school journey as a member of the concert band to her life as their captain. Or maybe, “Sound Euphonium” S3 is like a condensed version of the entirety of “Haikyu”, including the yet-unadapted parts. One can analogize Mayu with either Kageyama or Hinata, the genius newcomers who are the crucial pieces of a powerhouse team. Mayu’s story isn’t told much in Sound Euphonium, but Kageyama and Hinata’s is a central plot of Haikyu.