Flonne + Tron Bonne

I've been having a lot of meta thoughts about sports anime lately, thanks to Haikyuu!! and Yuri!!! On Ice (what is it with exclamation points in anime titles nowadays). Also Chihayafuru, which feels like a really underappreciated series grumble grumble.

Anyway, today I want to talk about the idea of "Real Life" in sports anime and manga. Ha ha. I'm going to identify some series that are so focused on sports that they are almost escapist, and then sports series that have a lot of Life in them, and then I'm going to talk about how some sports series let you escape for a while and then inject a dose of Life in them through what I call "Life Intrusion Moments." And then I'm going to relate this to other genres, and to writing in general. 

Note: I haven't done enough research to write a real essay here, and I'm going to only cut out the worst spoilers, so yeah, this bit of meta will mainly be for me me me me me. Also, I've never seen some of the really important sports series out there (like most of Eyeshield 21, Hajime no Ippo, and pretty much all of the baseball and soccer ones, yikes), and I haven't seen any series with female stars, so this is going to necessarily be a limited analysis of whatever I feel like and know. Wah. 

 My mom watched 40 episodes of Prince of Tennis over five days. 

Today I saw the prince of tennis at the local courts, I kid you not. I was passing by on the bus when I saw an old man hitting a ball against the wall NITOURYUU style! He had a racket in each hand and was hitting alternately with his left and right without missing a shot for the 15 seconds or so that I watched him. How awesome is that?

About thirty seconds later I saw a girl dressed as a pirate in a parking lot, along with a boy who had a mountie hat on and a man with a skullcap. They all seemed to be together. I wonder if they were going to a costume party? It's probably not kosher to dress up as a Jew though.

...okay, there was probably more going on there than I knew and I'm being offensive.

Overall, had a really good day today. When your prof extends the deadline on a paper it's like you've got a new lease on life. Everything looks so cheerful, the world is beautiful, bird poo misses you by a mere foot and you don't get freaked out (this also happened today) and LJ actually gets updated for once.

Whooboy, where have I been? Er, happy new year? Happy Friday the 13th?

Title: Endgame
Fandom: Prince of Tennis
Characters: Tezuka, Ryoma
Genre: AU. Shortfic.
Spoilers: Very vague ones. Fuhgeddaboutit.
Summary: If Echizen's tennis had been perfect to begin with, where would Tezuka be?

( The alpha and the omega )

This has probably been done a million times, but...

( A PoT Primer )

Inspired by a similar thing that reality_is did for Slam Dunk. I would link to it except I can't seem to find it anymore...if anyone knows where a permanent link to it exists, please drop me a line.

And if anyone has anything to add to the PoT Primer, please also drop me a line!

Also, I KNOW Pokemon can't evolve during battle in the actual video game yadda daya ya. It's only in the TV series that they do that. Though according to shinra_lackey they sorta can. But she knows this stuff better than me. In her words: "total geek."