THREAD: how haikyuu delivers on its promises, or why oikawa tooru might win it all

one of the “rules” in how haikyuu is written is that ultimatums from main characters are handled as narrative promises. this is how shounen works, and furudate's writing is no exception. the series literally starts with hinata making a narrative promise:

hinata's promise to kageyama is the driving arc of the whole story, so it gets put on the backburner during their time in high school, but in chapter 77 hinata promises ushijima he's going to beat him, and in chapter 188, the story makes good on that:

atsumu makes two slam-dunk narrative promises back-to-back in 291 when he tells hinata that he's going to 1. toss to him one day, and 2. defeat him at the inter-high next year. again, atsumu is a main character with dramatic lighting saying this, so it comes true:

in chapter 365 hoshiumi promises hinata that he is going to "wait for him," and in chapter 378, in consistent haikyuu fashion, this comes to fruition with the bj/adlers match:

the examples above are far from a complete list, but they're some of the best narrative loops in the series. there are two, however, still "hanging": the first is hinata's original promise to beat kageyama, which i believe is currently being delivered on in the bj/adlers match.

i'm almost 100% certain that the black jackals are going to win that match, simply because hinata said this in the first volume, and that's how haikyuu works.

and THIS is the second currently unfinished promise. this panel is the most haunting thing in haikyuu to me. haikyuu has a ~400 chapter history of delivering on ultimatums like this. it's something that the story has always had the reader take at face value.

furudate had oikawa tooru show up out of nowhere, narrate to hinata in a long emotional flashback about his dealing with defeat, and leave with the kind of dramatic-lighting whole-page-spread verbal ultimatum that haikyuu has always made good on: that he’s going to win.

unless haikyuu suddenly stops being the story it has always been, this is a narrative promise that is going to be delivered on. which is why i, *adjusts tinfoil hat on head* would not be surprised if oikawa shows up on the argentinean team at the 2020 olympics and defeats japan.

when i half-jokingly tweeted about this earlier, some people looked it up: most countries let olympic-caliber athletes fast-track to citizenship if they want to play for them. oikawa would need an argentinean passport to play on "the stage" he's talking about, nothing else.

do i think this is a 100% guarantee? no. do i think it would be a bold choice? yes. do i think it fits haikyuu's narrative "laws," so to say? absolutely. haikyuu has always rewarded hard work. this is another rule of the story. hinata's character arcs, yamaguchi's character arc+

are all defined by this. the ball boy arc and the brazil arc are built entirely on this. yamaguchi's journey from the bench to being a pinch server to captain in his third year obeys this law too. you see this in naruto, in hxh. it's another part of how shounen works.

but there's one character whose hard work hasn't quite been delivered on. we make "seijouh never made it to nationals" jokes because in a story like haikyuu it's shocking, i think, to see a character like oikawa--who is defined by hard work--never reap the benefits of it

and that's why i'm confident in speculating that furudate might deliver on this. to have oikawa, this guy with the unfinished character thread, appear out of nowhere and promise that he's going to win: that's furudate shouting at us with a megaphone exactly what going to happen.

the olympics have always been the sort of "final boss" looming over the series, and with the suspiciously convenient timing of the timeskip, it would surprise me at all if the final panel in this series is one of oikawa showing down with the japanese team in 2020.

i know this thread is big long and analytical, but fundamentally i believe that haikyuu is a story of hope and passion and the rewards of hard work, and the kind of thing that rhymes with itself, even over the span of years. and does anyone work harder than oikawa?