Just today I got to see a chess book that I remember reading as a little kid. While it didn't give me a lifelong passion for chess, it did give me a lifelong passion for fantasy for its artwork.
The book is "Chess for Young Beginners" from 1975, and here's some of the artwork:
Like, this artwork goes hard. I especially appreciate the colour scheme for the black pieces, with its browns, bronzes, reds and oranges.
This artwork is amazing, evocative, exciting and dramatic. I recommend giving it a look if you have a chance - you can probably scrounge up a PDF of this thing with a bit of searching.
fathers: amaro | the crime of father amaro (2002) • charlie mayhew | grotesquerie (2024) • jud duplenticy | wake up dead man (2025) • malthus/santo | hilda furacão (1998) • the priest | fleabag (2016) • ignatius | lambs of god (2019) • john pruitt | midnight mass (2021)
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 8 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.
