The Totally Epic HikaGo Reread - Vol. 1

[effex]

Happy Wednesday, everyone!
ARE YOU READY FOR SOME HIKARU NO GO?

Yes? Excellent. Let's get this party started - to the comments with your thoughts, observations, revelations, etc!

(A reminder - there are several people who are reading the series for the first time, let's try to keep spoilers to a minimum.)

A question - how did the one volume/week work for you? Was it doable, difficult, ridiculously easy? Do we want to stay with it or kick it up to two volumes a week (or down to chapters a week)?

Comments

[zanzando]

I've been having thoughts about a certain aspect of Hikaru no Go and HikaGo fandom over the last couple of days.

This is related to re-reading and re-watching the first few episodes, and reading bookshop's very first reaction to it. (Basically: "It's a board game, for God's sake.")

Hikaru no Go transcends that. It's not just a board game. It's not just people competing over territory.

I have to admit that I never saw it as ironic in any way that these characters, these people would care so much about a board game in the first place.
I didn't need to be drawn in, I didn't need to be convinced.
But: I'm biased. I spent most of my time in school competing in the IMO (International Maths Olympiad), up to the national level. There were rivalries*. There was passion.
I never thought being passionate about a board game was ridiculous or laughable in the first place.

HikaGo doesn't just rob you of your irony. It sands down a layer of jadedness.



* Yes, I *did* have my very own eternal rival. ;)

[dancing_serpent]

If it was "only about a board game" I wouldn't have fallen in love with HnG. Because I'm someone who hates board games and doesn't really care for "sport manga" . So, I actually came to HnG via painless_js enthusiastic rec - I don't think I would have touched it otherwise. And boy, I would have missed out on something awesome.

[zanzando]

Yes! There's this disconnect. Because *obviously* it's not just about a board game, but playing a board game by itself is not just about the game.

A big part of the greatness of HikaGo is that it makes people see that.

Any human activity, and any social activity especially is always more than just the thing itself.

[effex]

I <3 this comment.

[zanzando]

See, ha, you're faster than I am. :D

[troisroyaumes]

Hee, I'm glad I'm not the only person to draw that connection! I first read this series while I was a senior on my high school math team, and that was definitely the angle from which I connected to the series.

[zanzando]

Cool! Math geeks ftw.

For me there's a whole layer to it that you can (maybe?) see more easily if you already come from a competitive activity that other people don't take very seriously.

[effex]

[nods] It's not something that works on paper - a shonen series about a boardgame should should flop so hard. But it was fantastic and speaks on a deeper level then most of the stuff in Shonen Jump, so.

[zanzando]

Yeah. Like I said to dancing_serpent, part of it's greatness lies in making people see those things.

[twig_tea]

This is totally fascinating to me because my approach to this (and pretty much all shounen manga) is based on my experience playing football in junior high school, which was never competitve at all; we were just a group of kids who got together every day and played football, no matter the weather, no matter the fact that we almost never actually got the field and had to play on the 'spare' field (which had all kinds of hazards because it was unkempt and not actually part of the school grounds) or on the pavement (which has its own hazards being pavement, particularly since we never compromised and refused to play anything other than tackle). We would stack the teams so that the game would be the most interesting, even if that meant the best two players against everyone else.

The whole thing was about our *love of football* and our passion for the game, and trying to get together to work as a unit to create the best, most pure form of that game that we could; we were searching for football's version of the hand of god every lunch hour.

So for us, it really was 'all about the game', in that sense. We didn't get to experience the rivalry thing in the same way, though there was some internal friendly competition.

I never saw the love of this game as ironic either. And the way Hikaru gets interested, by being exposed to this intense love for something he thought was boring and uninteresting, resonates with me so well because that's exactly how I got involved in the daily football games (well, minus the being haunted by arguably the best player in history thing).