A Short Ramble and Fame as it Relates to One Aomine Daiki and the Generation of Miracles

Hello again everybody and Happy New Year! I hope you have good fortune in the coming months. I think that the only people reading this are my classmates, so you know that we all have to do our regularly assigned blog posts. My chosen topic for these past weeks is fame, but I'll come back to that in a bit.

Originally, this was going to be a purely Kurobas blog, but recently I've become enamored with Bleach to the point where I think about what kind of Soul Reaper I would like to be and how nice it is that the life lessons in Bleach are rather straightforward. So occasionally I'll go off on a Bleach tangent, but since I'm basically 80% sure only a few of you actually know what I'm talking about in the first place, I don't think it really matters too much to tell you all this... If the day does come when my readers hold the same burning passions I do, I might explode with joy! Or embarrassment, because I can't interact with real human beings online.

But now, onto the real point of this blog: The Effects of Fame

As I mentioned in the last post, the Generation of Miracles are currently a group of high school first years who have incredible talent in basketball. Their ace is none other than one Aomine Daiki, the one who, outside of Akashi (a topic for another day), was most affected by being a member of the Generation of Miracles.

Aomine Daiki

The definition of fame is to be well known, and the Generation of Miracles is just that. As they won game after game, year after the year, the Generation of Miracles became respected and feared amongst middle school basketball teams. The sheer force of their power led to the teams they were facing off against lose the will to even bother trying to fight against them, and by their third year, the GoM themselves had no will to improve themselves, because their victory was already guaranteed. That aside, Aomine was the one who wanted to stop practicing because he already knew that no one could even offer him a challenge, and that as he got better, the gap between him and everyone else would only widen. As he says, "The only one who can beat me is me." But this kind of mindset only took over Aomine once he reached high school.

 While this Youtube video doesn't exactly make the point I'm trying to get across, as here we see Kise forming his resolve to finally defeat his idol, Aomine, it does have English subtitles for Aomine's quote in the previous paragraph.

But what, exactly, does any of this have to do with fame, you ask? What I'm trying to explain here is chain of events.

First, the GoM "bloom". Their basketball talents become apparent and they begin to win all of their games with ease.

Next, the Aomine is told by their coach that he doesn't have to practice anymore, something that the coach had objected to having to do because the GoM were still children, and shouldn't be treated so laxly. They still needed someone to guide them on their path. The desperation that things brings both Aomine and the coach can be seen in chapters  220 and 221.

The following pages from chapter 220 best represent the eventual price of fame between Aomine and his then closest friend, Kuroko Tetsuya.

 Of course, Aomine and Kuroko aren't they only ones being slowly warped by the pressure of being who they are. The end of chapter 220 shows the seeds of dissent among the GoM, who are beginning to become bored with basketball and falling into the states they are in as high schoolers, just a little too assured that they are indeed, the best of the best.

So in the end, what is the true price of fame?

In Kurobas, the fame of the Generation of Miracles led to the expectations placed upon them to increase exponentially. Teikou Middle School was already a place where nothing except victory mattered, and being the best, the GoM were required to make sure that victory was absolute. However, being told at their age (roughly 13 at this point) that the only thing that mattered was the victory began to destroy them on the inside. Then, because they were so well known, the reputation that preceded them everywhere left their enemies without the will to fight, further warping the psyche of the GoM. There was no challenge for them, and no more fun in basketball.

Their skill lead to their fame, and that fame was ultimately their downfall.

The Generation of Miracles—Or Rather, A Sort-of Introduction to Them

Most people that know me know that my personal obsession is with Kuroko no Basuke, and that if you let me get started, I'll probably go on for hours about it. In my zeal, I managed to convert two more to this fandom, both of whom have now caught up with the manga and season 2 of the anime. But if I go on like this, I don't think we'll get anywhere, so today I'm going to go over a conversation I had with one of those previously mentioned friends about the Generation of Miracles.

But first, an exceedingly brief introduction to Kuroko no Basuke, Or the Basketball Which Kuroko Plays. In short, this anime is about a boy who is "invisible" and uses this skill in basketball as misdirection to pass to the others on his team without their opponents noticing. At Teikou Middle School, the title character, Kuroko Tetsuya, was the phantom 6th man of the monstrous Generation of Miracles, whose genius was so great their personalities became a bit warped. Now they're in high school and as he faces off against them with his current team, Seirin, Kuroko tries to revert the Generation of Miracle to how they were at the start of middle school, when they all loved basketball.

The Generation of Miracles, known as the Kiseki no Sedai in Japanese, is an elite group of basketball players that bloomed while they were in middle school. I think there's a really interesting dynamic between them, and even though I was impartial to them at first, I've really come to like all of them (except maybe Akashi and Murasakibara, who haven't been in the series as much as the others have.)

How I feel about the characters:

Kuroko Tetsuya

I feel connected to Kuroko's invisibility sometimes, like people forgetting that he's there or getting creeped out when they realize that I'm behind them, but I'm also glad that I was able to make good friends at school, like Kuroko and Seirin and the relationships that he's been building back up with the Generation of Miracles. Sometimes he's a bit plain, but it's not like it isn't exciting when someone who used to catch nobody's attention is now at center stage. It basically destroyed his purpose on the court, but there was only so much a shadow could do before he realized his own "light".

Unbelievable as it was, Kuroko was made even more useless than normal, killing the hearts of his fangirls everywhere. Poor Kuroko can't even pass a ball without getting stopped anymore.

Kise Ryouta

Out of all the characters, I feel connected to Kise the most. He's bored with life because he's too good at everything, and he picks up skills easily. So naturally he masters every sports with his "Perfect Copy," and he thought little of basketball until he saw Aomine playing and was amazed by it and the fact that he couldn't beat Aomine. So they practiced together everyday, and Kise was finally inspired to do something.It was really sweet, watching this bored guy finally want to do something, and after the final episodes of Season 1, I think that a lot of people came to like Kise, especially those that didn't think much of him before. I mean, Kise had this whole declaration about how in order to beat Aomine, he would stop admiring him, which means that since their second year of middle school, or for over 2 years now, Kise, who isn't impressed with anything, has been admiring Aomine. Even I can't help but ship this.

Midorima Shintarou

This guy, according to his essentially-best-friend, Takao (see picture below), is a tsundere, and there are quite a few reasons why nobody denies this. Midorima is more of a tsuntsun than anything else, I guess, but I don't feel like looking up the scenes to prove this at the moment, nor am I talking to that friend that keeps getting mentioned (you know who you are), so it's not like I'm looking through the manga for things to explain the relationships between the Generation of Miracles either, but whatever. Sorry Midorima, you don't get an actual introduction either. If anyone cares, his star sign is cancer and his position is SG, or shooting guard. In the series so far, he's never missed a shot in which the basketball wasn't touched.

Takao Kazunari

(Takao isn't a part of the GoM so he doesn't get an introduction. However, he's a Scorpio and his position is PG, or point guard.)

Aomine Daiki

This guy is a beast when it comes to basketball. His skills are the highest of any character's, as you can see from the chart below that the Internet won't allow me to freely move within this text. Anyways, Aomine is part of Touou Academy, a school with a generally free curriculum. He doesn't show up to practice, and his hobbies include looking at models in magazines. His favorite model is Horikita Mai. His hair is technically both black and blue, and since the Generation of Miracles' names correspond with their hair color (a post for another day), but Aomine and Kuroko's hair colors correspond with each other's names, there has been tons of fan speculation about what this could mean, especially among the fangirls. (This references the manga, in which Aomine's hair is black, however, it's established that Kuroko's hair is blue from the start, even though in manga it's white. Anyways, this is an inside joke so whatever.)

Murasakibara Atsushi

Murasakibara loves eating, and essentially, when he's not playing basketball he has something in his mouth. As you can see from the picture. It's a "Maiubo," directly translating to "tasty stick". This guy is freakishly tall, and out of the all the GoM, he's the most loyal to Akashi. However, Murasakibara is easily lured to do his friend Himuro's bidding with food, and will follow "Muro-chin" wherever as long as he has enough snacks for the trip. As Kuroko Tetsuya says, "When he is not playing basketball, he is basically a kid with a screw loose. Sometimes you see a sportsman like him. A genius in one area, and totally incapable in anything else." One of Murasakibara's skills is scooping goldfish.

Akashi Seijuro

Akashi is the leader of the Generation of Miracles, He has a dominant personality, and the pressure on him from his father to be successful in everything is great. His "Emperor's Eye" is an ability that was forcibly awakened in him one day when Murasakibara challenged Akashi's leadership, saying that he wouldn't play under someone weaker than him. Akashi had to show him who was really in charge, but he almost lost the game that decided their fates. Murasakibara has not rebelled again. As of right now in the manga, Akashi is the only person in the Generation of Miracles who hasn't had a change in heart caused by Seirin.

So, as you can see, this is a bit of a ridiculous blog post giving you information at the same time as my ramblings. Until next time,

Mothhawk~