Blue buckle easily one of the most brutal sports anime, combining soccer with a game of death, but the movie is actually more brutal because it doesn’t kill its characters. While that’s not unusual in most sports anime, it’s quite peculiar to death game anime. And despite the non-lethal competition, Blue Lock definitely qualifies as a Game of Death anime.
Blue Lock focuses on the radical football training program of the same name, in which 300 promising young soccer players compete against each other to determine who will be Japan’s top striker. The program pits these players against each other in soccer-based challenges to test different aspects of the game and their abilities. While being excluded from the program will not kill participants like in other death games, it will ban them from playing in Japan’s World Cup soccer team. This will effectively shatter their dreams, which is actually more brutal than having them killed.
The blue buckle shows that crushing dreams can be more brutal than killing
After completing the first phase of the show, protagonist Isagi tracks down the players who were eliminated from the Blue Lock facility in bulk. While these players won’t be seriously injured or killed like the usual losers in the death game, they all lost their chance to achieve their dreams, which made them completely broken. Isagi watches these players as they leave and realizes that he should probably feel bad about knocking some of them out of the competition but instead, he realizes that all that he felt was pride as he continued, rejoicing at their defeat. This is something a regular death game anime can never do.
If the main character of the death game anime doesn’t feel remorse for the dead, then they must be a social killer, which would make them very unlikable. While Isagi Yoichi is more of an idiot than most of Shonen’s main characters, his gloating over those he defeats doesn’t make him a social or unpleasant psychopath. So even though Blue Lock doesn’t kill the losers, the series is still able to give its characters a more brutal perspective than most death games can. In addition, the true despair of those kicked out of Blue Lock is on par with the despair of the losers in the most brutal death game in anime. Thus, Blue Lock doesn’t need to sacrifice brutal reactions to removal just because it’s not lethal.
Blue Lock is not alone in this brutal philosophy. Shonen Jump’s popular manga One Piece also makes the point that it’s generally not okay to kill its characters because in the world of that series, crushing someone’s dream is an even worse fate. even death (although One Piece recently revealed the death of a giant character). Blue Lock is said to make this point even better than One Piece, much more brutal in general. Blue buckle is a perfect example of how a death game doesn’t need a lot of gore or death to be brutal, just high stakes that have profound implications for the characters involved.
Blue buckle available to stream on Crunchyroll.