Blue Box can really take it out of you sometimes. This feeling is not new – I lived it in all its forms reading the manga. Some series are consistent across the board – be that great, awful, or pretty good – and deliver roughly the same experience from week to week. Ao no Hako is not one of them. The delta between its Jekyll and Hyde personas is extraordinarily wide. That is more engaging in a way, so it’s not entirely a bad thing. At least you’re always feeling something, even if it’s annoyance.
Do I care about Yumeka? Not, not a whit – only in the sense that I find her annoying as hell. But the rub is that I don’t really get why I’m supposed to care. She does have a role as a foil for Chinatsu, a contrast to showcase her good points and a motivator to drive her forward. But the problem is that Yumeka has way too outsized a role for that to be its only raison d’être. She dominates the narrative for much of this stretch of the story, and drags the series down as a result.
The whole backstory thing yeah, you could have just whipped through that in a flash. The gist of it is that Yumeka only loved basketball when she was the best at it without having to work too hard. When she got to the point where she could no longer coast on talent, she got petulant and quit rather than try to get better. Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme – happens to millions of kids all over the world. It’s not worth the time devoted to it and I don’t especially feel empathy for her. It’s relevant because she projected her self-loathing over this onto Chi, who was everything Yumeka wasn’t in terms of dedication and humility.
But Taiki is a good boy – stop him before he helps again. Despite Yumeka treating him like crap he can’t help trying to patch things up between Chi and her, though I’d like to believe he’s doing it mainly for Chi’s sake. He wanted that ticket for Yumeka of course, and won it fair and square apparently (though there was talk of Matsuoka slipping on his own sweat). And then he goes the guilt trip route to get her to use it (though it’s more his elemental sincerity than any conscious attempt at manipulation, I think). He even gets a push from Yumeka’s boyfriend, who surprisingly seems like an overall decent guy.
What I did like was that scene in the gym where the guys from the other sports were cheering on the girls’ basketball team before their tournament, even giving that a high five line. It’s a reminder of the camaraderie that exists at this athletics powerhouse school, the brotherhood and sisterhood of the gymnasium, the proverbial blue box. That, and Chinatsu copying Taiki by giving him her tracksuit jacket as he’s struggling after the shuttle run. Taiki may beg off Xmas karaoke with Scylla and Charybdis (and Kyou) using extra practice as an excuse, but we all know he dreams loftier dreams than that…
