Romance is one of the most important things an adolescent mind has to go through in its youthful years. You might get turned off by the idea as other interests pile up, but it is an inevitable thing for most people that they will experience these inner feelings and conflicts. However, romance is not an easy journey since it has to be calculated and rely on a stroke of luck for things to work. Although I would like to say that Blue Box presents its amateur romance as a sport,.

Before entering a match, you would get up and prepare your body in various ways. Some people have different methods to do so, from building their bodies in capable manners to straining themselves through training until they get the technique right. In the world of romance, people always push themselves too hard because they want their efforts to be translated to the person they want to convey their love to. However, in the world of sports and matchmaking, if your opponent is stronger than you are, then chances are you won't be able to win. You push yourself so hard in such extreme ways that you wouldn't be able to see the growing cracks that are behind you. You feel so flimsy and insecure about yourself that you wouldn't be able to discern whether, if you had taken the chance right now to confess, everything would have worked out?. You keep training and training, and you wouldn't have noticed that the opportunity that you have been planning to take has passed you by. You lost this match. In a world where everything is competitive and chasing the best, you have to move forward with it and make the right decision, or else you will fall behind.

I think Blue Box is a brilliant manga that uses sports as an analogy for the journey of adolescent love, especially for our main character, Taiki Inomata.

Taiki Inomata is a badminton player who is in love with a basketball player named Chinatsu Kano, the person who trains alongside her every morning at the gym. In order for him to confess his feelings to Chinatsu, he tries his hardest on badminton to prove to himself subconsciously that he is worthy of being by her side. This creates an interesting moment for our characters whenever there is a chance that he is visibly available to make a move but has to hold back because he subconsciously thinks of himself as “not worthy” yet. Romance isn't all about "worthiness," but it is about the feelings within you and the consistency that you can provide to satisfy your partner and yourself throughout the relationship. In the mind of an adolescent who is experiencing love in its early forms, it might feel like a sport that you need to achieve to be worthy. Chinatsu, on the other hand, is the bloomer on the receiving end. Acting more as a viewer on the side that slowly becomes a fan is where you get to be at the player’s back and support them with the battles they will face. In the analogy of love as a sport, the player is someone who is the sender of love, and a specific viewer is the receiver, who will later turn into a passionate fan if the tide of the game is right.

The manga also has an interesting supporting character named Hina Chonou, who is in love with the main protagonist. She is also a great example of someone who takes her chances and lets things happen to fate, like a seasoned benched player who's hoping that they'll get to play on court. A youth’s perspective like Hina and Taiki on romance is a delicately fragile thing. An optimistic person takes the heavy stakes on their shoulders, and the only way to overcome the heavy feelings is to keep building yourself up to be the ideal version and keep scoring in the sport so that you feel worthy to walk alongside the person that you love. As you have progressed in understanding romance, you will eventually realize that your efforts will be thrown away when the receiving end turns you down.

When there is a winner, there will always be a loser. Blue Box also explores the losing side of the romance. This is mostly told through the supporting characters' experiences and perspectives, but there is enough care and attention given to them that it becomes part of the narrative while watching the series. You get to feel the character’s defeat when they keep pursuing something that's already a losing game, and you are able to empathize with the stories told of these characters and why their personalities are the way they are in the present day.The existence of these characters not only grounds the manga series but also creates relatability for the readers.

Eventually, the characters get to embrace their inner feelings and are able to understand that love is not being the best first, but being there with them so that they'll become the best together, abandoning the idea of love being a sport to “take a step forward." Blue Box explores adolescent romance in a natural, realistic, and slow character development that you get to follow from start to finish with worries and blush grins. ***

Analogies aside, Blue Box is a wonderful and beautiful-looking manga series with characters that are charming in their own right and act realistically with the given situations they'll experience throughout, as well as a captivating adolescent romance that keeps you hooked and interested. Despite being a shounen manga, it abandoned the cheap shounen tropes and embraced realism, which is a risky gamble, especially with a shounen audience that wanted spices, but a huge respect for keeping the series grounded as it needed to be. The sports tag of the series is not the main focus but it is used as a main spectacle and keep the plot moving forward, but it is still a worthy read for sports, romance, and drama fans alike. Essentially, this feels like your classic Shoujo manga masquerading as a Shounen romance manga.

I highly recommend Blue Box for romance junkies with a puristly serious and non-trashy direction. ***