Entry tags:

manga

So I finally finished Prince of Tennis. I started off really liking this series, but by the end I was just reading to get through it. The problem is that it turns from a story about regular tennis (even if it's rather unbelievable that all these kids would be so good at it they're as good as the pros) into this magical realism thing where they all have super powers...except it's still talked about as if it's perfectly normal tennis.

I don't really like this sort of magical realism where there are no rules and stuff is just random. It confuses and infuriates me. If it had been established that this is a world where people have super tennis powers, then okay, sure. But it just kept getting more and more ridiculous as the story went on. I know most mangaka are writing whatever comes into their heads without really having a full plan, and that's fine. I generally enjoy it (except if you're Takei Hiroyuki and write yourself into a corner and so just stop writing altogether instead of trying to think of a solution), but this just feels like really sloppy writing.

I can't help but compare it to Hikaru no Go and Slam Dunk, the only two other sports manga I've read, and it just really doesn't hold up at all. Slam Dunk's final game is one of the few fictional scenes I've ever gotten teary-eyed over, yet I really couldn't care less about the final game in PoT. I knew Seigaku was going to win and I knew it would be through Ryoma's magical moves, not through any actual skill. (And it turned out to be even worse; remembering that tennis is fun made him invincible? WTF ever.) On the surface PoT appears to have hard work and teamwork, but somehow they don't really seem to affect anything because it's magical powers.

And this is totally not anything new, but something that annoyed me all the way through the series. If you are going to draw a manga where all the characters look (and often act) like adults, why set it at a junior high? Why not at least set it at high school so as to be maybe slightly more believable. The idea that any of these people are junior high students is laughable.