A review by keyreadz
Haikyu!!, Vol. 45 by Haruichi Furudate

5.0

sigh, i can’t even begin to put into words what i feel after i just closed that last page. mostly, i can’t believe it’s actually over.

i started watching haikyuu in 2020, i caught up with the anime in time to watch the second half of season 4 as it released. i remember around this time was also when the manga had ended. but i didn’t really grasp that because all i really knew was the stuff i had watched. i had seen the time skip spoilers, at times even seeked them out to know more about my favs. but despite that i never really got any spoilers for what would happen next in the anime so there was this huge part of me that was filled with excitement and anticipation for what would happen next. a small part of me did want to read the manga and i actually think i had read just the first volume, but nothing more. 

flash forward 3 some years and the movie was announced and it was like that part of me just got revived again and i feel like i really needed that at the time, so for that i’m glad. and i obviously wasn’t the only one who felt this way because it was like haikyuu twt got woken up from a coma. but still there were obviously a lot of people that had still heavily engaged in the fandom since the end of season 4, naturally that comes with them having read the manga, so they had all this extra information and i could feel just how connected they were to the media and a part of me felt jealous because i kept growing up and all i could do was relish in the forever youth of what i was watching and not grow up with them by reading what i was missing out on.

so i set out to read the whole series by the end of the summer, which i have obviously now done (yippee) and let me just say i don’t regret the fact that i started to read it recently rather than in 2020. i feel like if i had read it then i wouldn’t have truly gotten how deep, loving, and rewarding this series can be. i can say with 100% confidence this is the best story i’ve read or show i’ve watched. 

haikyuu is a beautiful beautiful story about life and dreams told through volleyball and the combination is really not something someone could get unless you read or watch it yourself. every character, even if seen once or twice is so easy to care for because they each have their own little story and you can really just feel how much love was baked into the series as a whole. nothing is better than when an author truly does love the universe they have built.

as someone who’s battling (TRULY I FEAR 😓) early adulthood and feels a little stuck and insignificant in the grand scheme of things, the many many themes of the story each hit home so hard like, i can assure you i’m gonna think about this for a long time. even though the thought of anything potentially being on my body for a permanent amount of time is extremely suffocating, a haikyuu tattoo is not something i would be too against, the thought of holding a reminder of everything ive just read so close to me would be comforting i think. if i had to pick my favorite theme or quote, it would be “today you are the defeated. but what will you become tomorrow ?” something about it kinda just soaks into me and makes me have a little bit more hope and trust in myself

anyways, i wrote a lot, but i feel like i wrote a whole lot of nothing at the same time (the woes of struggling with articulating myself i guess). but yeah 😛 the series is so beautiful it’s really such a shame we won’t get any more full seasons because a movie is really just not enough to capture the details of it all. i’m really glad i was able to read the series myself because now i have all these grown fictional people to catch up to in age. it makes me hopeful that i won’t be stuck in this rut forever and that i’ll be satisfied wherever i end up. if hinata shoyo can gag everyone by making his own unconventional path to his dreams, then i think me getting a little lost in mine will end up just fine 🙂‍↕️