Kageyama's backstory only being revealed near the very end of the series is really interesting from a meta perspective.
For reference, his chapter is 387 out of 402. That's 96% of the way in.
To contrast, other characters like Tsukishima and Yamaguchi's backstories are shown in Chapters 87-88.
Now, we do get the explanation for his "King of the Court" title in Chapter 6, at the start of the series, but we don't see how he got to that point, or why he started playing volleyball in the first place like Tsukishima's and Yamaguchi's stories show.
It creates this situation where, despite being the deuteragonist, the character our protagonist, Hinata, is practically glued to the entire series, we barely know anything about him.
We don't even know he has a sister until that point whereas other characters' siblings like Natsu, Saeko, Akiteru, Alisa have all made appearances way before then. Even Oikawa's sister, though we don't see her, we at least know she exists because of Takeru.
He's both closed off to us (the audience) as well as the other characters in the series, and this results in them finding him rude or disliking his character in general (see: the "Kageyama is abusive" discourse that somehow keeps popping up even now).
Chapter 387 takes place in 2018 and was published in 2020 so it takes him 6 years of in-universe time and 10 years of irl time to really open up.
And the catalyst for all of this is Hinata fulfilling his promise of beating him.
You see, another thing to note is that, whenever Hinata thinks of Kageyama, he's always looking at him from behind.
His internal image of him is someone who's always up ahead, someone he needs to catch up to, meaning Hinata can only see one side of him, he cannot see all of Kageyama until he catches up and passes him.
Which he finally does here.
In this shot Hinata is finally the one who's looking back at Kageyama. At this moment, Hinata (and by extension the audience) can see him for all he is, can see how he was just a lonely boy who's been waiting for someone to meet him where he is, to keep running alongside him and not quit the race.
Someone he doesn't have to go easy on. Someone who would actually tell him to hurry up instead of slow down for a change.
yeah i thought about this too. like you're right that kageyama didn't technically need this. he already had a wonderful character arc of growing from a tyrant king who would rather do everything himself to one who trusts in his team and is trusted by them in return
it does feel like fanservice in a way, similar to how we got to see how everyone else was doing post-timeskip, except they showed us his whole life story instead lmao (like i think he's the only character we've seen as a baby? lol)
also going back to this panel i thought about mentioning it in the post but then i was like no maybe this is reaching too much lol but like why are hinata and kageyama shown between miwa and kazuyo? like it's giving "introducing your bf to your family" and "your family going through your baby pictures to tease you in front of your bf" lol
plus considering kageyama was the pov character in the original haikyuu oneshot i think furudate just loves him a lot and this was a treat for long time fans of the series as much as it was for them
anyway niche reference incoming dan and phil discussing bat facts in the chained together vid was v much jin and jimin arguing abt how dolphins breathe
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