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

[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).