Blerdy Otome

[OWLS “Failure” Blog Tour] Taking Aim Even if You Miss: Exploring Minato’s Target Panic in Tsurune

It’s time for another OWLS Blog Tour, most of you were probably directed here after reading Megan’s personal post about Welcome to the NHK and if you haven’t read her post I definitely recommend giving it a read!! If you stumbled upon this post by chance, welcome to Blerdy Otome!

The end of the year is fast approaching and we’ve hit our 11th Blog Tour of 2019. For those of you just joining the party, OWLS is a group of bloggers and vloggers that hope to spread a message of acceptance and understanding through thoughtful community activism! We use our love of pop-culture and other media to discuss a wide range of topics. Each month we host themed Blog Tours where we discuss topics we feel are important to the greater fandom community.

One of the best ways we can learn is through failure. This month we will be talking about the failures of our favorite characters in pop culture media and what we can learn from them. We will also reflect on our own mistakes and failures and how those experiences have allowed us to grow as human beings. 

–November 2019 Blog Tour Prompt

This month we’re looking at Failure and you know, it’s kind of fitting that the penultimate Blog Tour of 2019 would be a topic that would require a bit of self reflection… The truth is, failure sucks. No one wants to admit that they didn’t make the cut, but rather than looking at failure as a negative, I like to think of it as a foundation for growth. No genre embodies this notion like sports anime, regardless of the sport there is always a point in the story where someone loses. But, just because you lose one tournament or match doesn’t mean you’ll lose them all and that’s fundamentally what’s so appealing about sports anime. You see a group of characters learning to overcome their failures and ultimately achieve something better than when they started.

In Haikyuu Karasuno lost to Aoba Josai at the Inter Highs in season 1, it’s a crushing blow after all their hard work and training. They could easily let this defeat define them, but they don’t give up, they work hard and when they face Aoba Josai again in season 2, they’ve learned from their past mistakes and manage to come out victorious. In Yuri On Ice, after experiencing a crushing defeat at the Grand Prix Final, manages to turn it all around the following year and place second in the Grand Prix Finals. The road to that point wasn’t easy and there were plenty of mistakes made along the way, but Yuri never let that keep him from giving it his all! And don’t get me started on Diamond no Ace… Eijun is practically defined by his failures…

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