#this also goes hand in hand with misinterpreting oikawa as i mentioned

[clementinecoastline]

Been thinking about Haikyuu and the characters again, and how people interpret them, and…

I think Ushijima gets overlooked because most of the fandom decided ‘oh he’s just a wholesome guy who’s bad at expressing himself,’ and pinned the immature label on Oikawa instead.

To be fair, when people call it a one-sided rivalry, they’re not necessarily wrong. But it’s not because Ushijima sees Oikawa as an equal and Oikawa unnecessarily feels like he needs to prove himself. It‘s just because Ushijima doesn’t see the point in a rivalry at all - he sees himself as better.

Yes, I do think that Ushijima’s character has more to him, and I think that the environments in which he was raised should be taken into account, but it’s this aspect of him that is more ‘filling in the blanks’ than the outright fact that he is literally just. A jerk.

Ushijima isn’t bad at expressing himself when he says these things about Seijoh and Karasuno. In fact, he’s pretty eloquent. Not many people would go all the way as saying, ‘it’s like trying to grow in barren soil,’ when it comes to saying someone else’s team is crap and isn’t going to win. Ushijima is very effective about expressing himself most of the time. And that’s because he just thinks he’s right about most everything we see him discuss. Shiratorizawa is objectively better in his eyes. Anything else has no chance. Anyone who goes anywhere else isn’t good. He flat out says Oikawa ‘could have reached his full potential�� somewhere else, which is just another way of saying that going to Seijoh made him not be good enough.

And I’m not really bashing Ushijima, because I like the guy a lot! I love his character. I think he’d give good hugs. I think he’s a bit misled. And it makes sense, given the context of how he was raised (what we see of his family is very... perfectionist and pretty arrogant) and ESPECIALLY, Washijou’s attitudes and coaching. Season 3 gets described as a battle of concepts because it is one, and no one represents Shiratorizawa’s concepts in all their entirety more than Ushijima does. Brute strength. Irresistible force. This air of natural superiority.

Of course Ushijima mimics those attitudes. It’s how he was raised. He goes to school and his coach blatantly dismisses anyone who isn’t tall or strong or the like as just. Inferior. Lacking potential. Ushijima wins at every tournament he’s played in. Shiratorizawa is just. The strongest school, because it has the strongest players, and that’s that. He sees this as an immutable truth. And so he behaves in this arrogant, stuck up way where he thinks everyone else is making a mistake because they don’t comply with his worldview.

Which he starts moving past in the show, but like. Yeah, he’s a jerk. And it’s not as if we can’t love him as his little jerk self at the beginning! It’s his growth as he starts realizing that he was wrong, that a school like Karasuno could best him, that a boy nearly a full foot shorter could be his rival, that makes him an interesting character, in my opinion.

Yes, this means that Ushijima’s worldview is not as mature as people tend to think it is. To be honest, Oikawa is probably one of the characters with a more realistic grasp on characters’ potential if you don’t count his self-perception. He sees potential in all sorts of characters and sees how to amplify their skills in ways Ushijima wouldn’t consider because the latter is so stuck in his beliefs of there being specific ways of playing and winning (the most he deviates from this belief is probably the way Tendou plays, but that’s stilla show of skill and brute force, so…). Honestly, it is very funny to see this get twisted around in the fandom’s eye.

In other words, yes Ushijima is the one being an immature toddler about the entire rivalry.