WBK's Overarching Theme (and what it means for Suo)
Windbreaker (Nii Satoru) has a lot of good messages, but the overall theme that plays out through every arc is that you should accept help from others; you shouldn’t try to do everything alone. This is a message that repeats throughout the series.
Now, I’m not gonna go into every little detail, but I will discuss some of the major instances that this theme impacted in the story. This is gonna be long.
Manga spoilers below.
In the grand scheme of things, this is the very ideal that Bofurin represents. This is a gang of delinquents that have come together to help each other and their community. They don’t allow the townsfolk to deal with troublemakers on their own. They always have each others’ backs too (hence patrolling in groups). They fight for the people and for each other. They also help the townsfolk with everyday tasks and errands, like painting walls, hanging decor, etc. No one has to deal with their problems alone.
Kotoha first told Sakura that he could never be at the top of Furin because he was alone. That’s because Furin isn’t a school/gang where people fight for/by themselves. It is at its core a group where everyone helps each other. So Sakura’s original goal was unreachable with the way he was at the beginning of the series. He would first have to learn how to help and accept help from others.
Sakura is introduced to this idea at the same time he’s introduced to Bofurin and what it stands for. He’d been surprised when other Furin students jumped in to help him. He’d been skittish when an older woman tried to attend his wound. Kotoha taught him to accept help from others.
But it’s not just Sakura that this theme affects.
With Shishitoren, Tomiyama was experiencing some issues that he kept to himself (depression, I believe) and tried to handle these feelings himself – which clearly didn’t go too well, as it made both himself and everyone around him miserable. And Togame, who noticed the change in Tomiyama, decided to deal with the change himself (instead of consulting their other friends) by changing himself to match Tomiyama’s new energy. This went very poorly for everyone involved, and the whole gang ended up being terrible for their community and to one another. They even kicked their own friends from the group. It took the Furin guys fighting them (conversing with them) to get them to actually speak to one another about what was going on and accept help from each other. Shishitoren became a good/friendly group again after this.
With KEEL, Nagato ended up in a pretty shitty situation where he is forced to hurt others (via theft) and was hurt himself by other members of the group. He refused to allow his childhood friends to help him, which obviously was not going to change/help his situation. Anzai also tried to handle the situation himself by trying to fight KEEL himself, refusing to tell anyone what was going on, and then attempting to refuse help under the excuse that it wasn’t Furin’s problem. But that denied the whole point of Bofurin – which was to help each other and others in the community. Sakura and the rest of class 1-1 essentially forced Anzai to accept their help. However, they didn’t request help from anyone else in Furin and ended up biting off more than they could chew. Class 1-1 needed the help of the second-years. In this fight, Sakura had to accept help from Kaji in taking down the leader while he was busy fighting others. And Nirei ran away from Suo’s help/protection and tried to fight people himself (despite his lack of strength/skills) and ended up beaten because of it.
Sakura got sick and didn’t tell anyone – because he was used to dealing with illness alone. His vice captains barged in and gently reminded him that he didn’t have to handle everything alone anymore. His classmates even gifted him a bag of goodies and get-well notes to push the message. And Kotoha brought him food and essentially reiterated the same message – that it was okay to accept help from others. And when Sakura came back to school the next day, the very first thing he did was seek out someone (Kaji) and ask him for help.
We learned about Tsubaki’s upbringing – how he’d always been drawn to more feminine things and how it tore him up inside that he was so different from other boys. It was only when an older couple accepted his interests and helped him via makeovers that Tsubaki was truly able to be himself.
In the Roppo-Ichiza arc, Shizuka was being hunted down for human trafficking purposes, and she had purposely tried to keep the issue to herself in hopes that just running away would solve it. It took Furin and Roppo-Ichiza stepping in to solve her problem – otherwise, she would have inevitably been caught. And with Gravel, their issues with money were solved by accepting help from Roppo-Ichiza in finding some of them jobs (which they used to help support the rest of their group).
Umemiya has no problems accepting help in the present, but there’s a reason he told his traumatic backstory to Sakura. He’d lost his family and had fallen so deep into depression that he’d lost his will to live. He’d refused to accept help from Yuki and the others at the orphanage. He hadn’t even told them he’d been feeling suicidal, and instead, he’d tried to handle it himself – via attempts to get gangs to kill him or to take his own life more directly. It was a Furin student that helped him realize his parents had been glad to sacrifice themselves for him – helped him realize he’d wanted to live. And it was with that realization that he’d finally been able to open up and accept help from Yuki and the kids at the orphanage. And it was that whole ordeal that inspired Umemiya to create a community where people would help one another. And the reason he’d told Sakura was because Sakura needed to hear that accepting help from others could genuinely change one’s life for the better.
Sakura learned a good bit from these past experiences, and he utilized this theme of accepting help from others by reaching out and asking their new allies for help in the Noroshi War. It was also in his fight with Endo that Sakura nearly gave up and went with Endo – to which his friends offered to fight for him because they weren’t going to allow Sakura to fight alone. This decision also pissed Sugishita off because Sugi had actually accepted Sakura’s help in this battle by leaving it to him (despite not getting along), and it was a betrayal of that trust for Sakura to just give up.
Super minor thing but I still wanna point it out – Sako and Hiragi would probably still be awkwardly dancing around one another if Inugami hadn’t basically (enthusiastically) forced them to make up.
Anyway, Sugishita reached out to Nirei because he needed help figuring out his issue with Sakura – and accepting Nirei’s help also encouraged him to engage more with the class, which will help him in the long run (given his only friends prior to this would be graduating in less than a year).
Kiryu tried to handle his dad’s disrespect alone (not knowing that his sister was also handling it, just in her own way). He then tried to handle the gang planning to harass his sister on his own, but Sakura showed up and made it known that Kiryu would not have to handle things himself.
Sakura doubted his original goal of becoming the top of Furin. He tried to deal with those feelings himself, but Togame extended an offer to talk to him about those sort of things & Sakura actually opened up to him about what had been bothering him.
In the past, Kotoha was reluctant to accept help at the orphanage and would act out. It was because Umemiya accepted her feelings and even agreed with them that she was finally able to accept everyone’s help. Same with Natsuki, who wanted to deal with her feelings herself and felt hurt by the others’ trying to welcome her – Sakura got her to accept that she didn’t have to deal with all of that by herself.
And Sakura had gotten so good at accepting help from others that he’d even been willing to share his life story and trauma with a huge group of people (and then later with Momijikawa).
Momijikawa, having lost everyone and everything he loved one after another, was dealing with his dying grandmother who also had severe dementia. He didn’t confide in his classmates. No one knew what was going on with him because he was dealing with it all himself – and “dealing with it” to him was essentially throwing himself into fights, which didn’t actually solve any of his problems. Not only that, but it nearly cost him his last moments with his grandmother. It was only because of Sugishita (and his grandfather) that anyone else knew what was was going & that the Furin guys were able to track him down and get him to the hospital in time. And after that, they didn’t let him handle the grief alone. They were there for the funeral and cremation. Sakura (probably seeing a bit of himself in Momi) even chased Momijikawa down afterwards to talk with him. He shared his story, they fought (had a conversation), and Momi ended up accepting Sakura’s help more than anyone’s – even invited him over and cooked dinner.
Anyway, I know I’ve definitely left some stuff out, but you can see the overall theme of the story – Accept help from others. Don’t try to handle your problems alone.
And this is paired with the occasional theme of conversations via fights (which we primarily see in Shishitoren arc, Noroshi arc, and a little bit at the end of Momijikawa arc).
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These themes seem to affect just about every character – except one.
Suo.
He doesn’t seem to ever need help from others in battle. And he puts up a front that makes him appear emotionally in-control and reliable – Someone that is always willing to help others but silently claims to never need any help himself (even Sakura has trouble imagining Suo ever needing to be saved).
Suo hides information about himself. He doesn’t like people knowing what truly goes on in his mind, and he uses jokes and other manipulation tactics to avoid topics that might reveal more than he’s willing be share. He refuses to be seen as weak, and he refuses to be seen as someone who might need help.
Not only that, but he actively avoids being injured in fights. If fights are a conversation, then Suo is doing all the listening by beating his opponents down and revealing their weaknesses – all the while not allowing them a single hit on himself. In other words, it’s a one-sided conversation. And that’s exactly why he refuses to fight Sakura, knowing that Sakura is the type of person in which a fight becomes a conversation – Sakura always tears into his opponent’s core and reveals the truth.
So, following the overarching theme of accepting help and not facing things alone as well as the underlying theme of a fight being a conversation, I think it’s safe to say that Suo is going to be thrust into a situation that he tries to handle by himself, and it may take fighting Sakura (and possibly Nirei?) before Suo can finally accept that he needs help. And looking at how drastically some characters have changed since they accepted help – Togame, Tomiyama, Umemiya, Suzuri, Kotoha, Momijikawa, etc – I think that “conversation” could possibly reveal an entirely new side of Suo that he hasn’t allowed to be seen before.
Reading aftg once again without looking at my pile of +300 to-read books because life is hard and then you die and because nothing makes me feel the way these disastrous and problematic queer people playing with sticks make me feel.
