any opinions on daishou?
I have a lot of opinions on Daishou, the problem is that I struggle to get them into coherent sentences!!! So I apologize if this isn't intelligable!!!
I love Daishou's role in the haikyuu story SO MUCH because there is ALWAYS a nasty teenage boy willing to cheat at games. I mean I'm pretty sure anyone who says that they've NEVER even WANTED to try and rig a game in their favour is a lying little prick, and so as silly as it sounds, representation of how some teens actually feel about sports (where winning is the only thing that matters) is important!! The classic storyline of "its about playing and having fun thats important" is only so powerful when talking about a shitty team that needs to learn its not all about winning, or a powerful team that needs to learn to chillax. Its EQUALLY important to preach that lesson to people who have to make the decision - consciously - to play fairly even if it means losing when they have the option to rig it to win. If there was NEVER an arc that covered lying to the refs, it would have been this fairytale world where 17 year old boys are all just so nice and such good sportsmen with no bad instincts.
That being said, this character specifically works well BECAUSE they give him Mika. I think if she hadn't been a part of the story, his character would have just been a sort of interesting footnote about how some people arent good sportsmen and its a fact of the game. BUT allowing him to be one of the ONLY characters who dates in high school gives him this weird charm that gives the character so much more depth and interest. He loves and is obsessed with volleyball to the point in which Mika had initially broken up with him - what is driving him to cheat, then? The complex he must feel for desiring so strongly, having lost his girlfriend, to chase this sport that he loves so much, all he wants to do (all he has) is to be the best, and it drives him to secure that at all costs. To lie and trick and manipulate the playing field because, look, if this is going to severe all his personal relationships he HAS to be the best, right? He has to, losing isn't an option for him. But he does lose. Of course he does, and I like to imagine that before Mika finds him, when he's sitting alone, he's not just feeling anger and frustration at being knocked out of the tournament, but the anger and frustration at being knocked out of the tournament and having cheated. Shame, guilt, the horrible realization that their cheating WORKED, nobody ever called them on it. He tried to rig the game - he DID rig the game - and Nekoma still beat them. So now he's a loser, but he's also a cheater and he's not even very good at that.
Now I don't typically like to adhere to traditional media tropes or cultural stereotypes for women and girls, but there IS a literary standard set for the love of women and the way men can be redeemed through them. A good woman, a pure one, being a "reward" for the hero. The knight gets the princess, the hero gets the damsel, etc, etc. To inverse that here, and allow a woman - who is portrayed in every way as a "good woman", pastels, traditional femininity, soft spoken, sincere - to approach and reach a hand out to him, is that same trope in reverse. Here, instead of the bad man rising to the love of a woman and becoming better, the good woman is reaching a hand down to him, to offer him understanding and compassion first. She apologizes for breaking up with him over volleyball - she addresses it directly, she address his passion for it directly. The passion he had JUST had shattered in front of him as a loser and a cheater (and the reason he lost his girl) and admires it as something valuable. Daishou's next appearances are all still tainted with that same villainous archetype, but Mika always appears to temper his bad habits. He talks her through the rules of the game as they watch the other games, she gives him a chance to use his incredible game knowledge in an honest and just way and rewards him for it with attention and affection.
It is a CLASSIC trope of the woman "redeeming" the man, but one that I find incredibly well executed BECAUSE it is done in such a small scale. The problem with this trope is usually "evil shitty man gets a girl way out of his league and then lowkey abuses her" but instead we get "teen boy feeling completely overwhelmed by the terror of being inadequate realizes that sharing his time and interest with the girl he likes makes him feel like the world is ok" and thats way better you know.
I guess that answer was more Daishou/Mika (the internet says the ship name is ShouMika???) focused but I feel like it does a good job of encapsulating my interest in Daishou as a character. I think overall he fits a really interesting niche that is often overlooked in power of friendship stories (which haikyuu lowkey is dont even deny it. Power of homoerotic tension? Whateve) and thats just "not everyone has heart of gold tendencies but that doesnt make them any less complex or interesting and they just need the right people around them to draw out their best."
