Hajime no Ippo

I was about to go read before bed, the way I usually do, and instead I was watching this, and at some point I just thought, forget it, let me talk about Ippo. I have not even finished it. I watch a couple of episodes at night, some nights two, some nights none, and I am somewhere in the Dante fight, around episode fifty something. So this is me partway through, not from the end.

Here is the thing I have to start with, because it is the whole reason this one matters to me. I had never watched an old anime. Never. I have watched a lot of the good modern ones, Hunter x Hunter, Orb, Chainsaw Man, the well animated stuff, and I always told myself the old ones would let me down, that they would look rough, that the animation would be nothing next to what we have now. I have the same fear with old films. I tried Fullmetal Alchemist once and did not get into it, or did not get it, and that kind of sealed it. So I just avoided the whole shelf.

And I did not even come to Ippo through Ippo. I found a guy on YouTube who made a four hour video about it, and he narrated it so well that I sat and watched three hours of a recap before I had seen a single real episode. I had seen Ippo before without knowing it, the shadowboxing at the lake, the sunset, the bullying scene, somewhere, socials probably, and I never knew where it came from. After the recap I just thought, I need to actually watch this.

And it is not what I expected at all. It is not really about boxing. It is comedy, it is brotherhood, it is a hundred things a man just relates to. I lose it every single time Ippo runs into Mashiba, every time. And the face Ippo makes when his crush is around, his cheeks all puffed up, it is so stupid and so funny. Then the next episode you are locked into a fight and it is all adrenaline and the comeback, and the one after that is pure comedy again. That is the rhythm of it. Some episodes hit you hard and some just put you in a good place, and I like it exactly like that. It is a mood.

Every fight is its own little story. Each fighter has his own background, his own thing. The Russian, Volga, I really liked him. And the fights got me curious in a way I did not expect. I started watching real boxing on YouTube, highlights, looking at the actual moves, the technique. It even got me thinking I might box one day.

The fight I am in now, with Dante, hit closer than I thought it would. Dante is the old one and Ippo is young, all stamina and flexibility, and the old guy is just trying to keep up with the youngsters. I relate to that more than I would like. I would love to play football the way I did at eighteen, when you would get hurt and the next day it was just gone. Now I am doing rehab for my ankle, there is a whole thing called injury management, you do not just play, you manage. That is the fight, basically. That is what I like about this anime. It keeps turning out to be about real life.

I will be honest about the parts that bug me, because I do not want to pretend it is flawless. There is plot armor, you can feel it. There are holes in the story, moments where I think Ippo could have done the obvious thing and did not. And the money never sat right with me. He is one of the best in the country and his mom still has to work, he almost quit to cover for her when she got sick because she cannot afford to stop. That does not add up for a top boxer. Maybe boxing paid less back then, or was not as big, I genuinely do not know. But it is a little fishy. And somehow none of that ruins it. If anything the fact that it is not perfect gives it its own thing. Nothing in life is perfect, and this is the same.

What gets me most is the animation, on an old anime. The Volga fight, especially the end, is just peak. And I am watching this on my Mac at some tiny old resolution, it is not 1080p, it is barely pixels, and it still looks legendary. Whoever made that, kudos, seriously.

But the real reason I am grateful for it is bigger than the anime. I avoided the old ones for years because I was scared they would be worse, and the first one I actually sat with turned out to be one of the best things I have watched. It killed that fear. Now I have a list of old ones a friend kept recommending that I used to nod at and ignore, and I actually want to watch them. That is what Ippo did. It was never just boxing. It taught me to stop flinching at the thing I had already decided would let me down.