Seiya storms the barricades as we open Blue Flag’s fourth volume, first challenging his brother Touma on his reckless actions, then turning his barrels towards our other leads. As in his first appearance, Seiya cuts through all this adolescent anxiety like a hot knife through butter, casually dragging Taichi aside and challenging Futaba on her relationship with the pair of them in one easy gesture. When high school dramas only feature high schoolers, their perspective can get a bit myopic, naturally embracing the sense of consequence and finality that attends untested adolescent emotions. Emerging from childhood into anxious self-awareness, adolescents can naturally feel overwhelmed or paralyzed by the choices before them, seeing in each choice made an endless hall of potential doors that have all slammed painfully, permanently shut.

This is understandable; not only are they thinking about how their presentation and actions affect others’ impressions of them for basically the first time, they’re combining that understanding with the natural anxiety of high school, the first time in most of their lives where the stage after this one isn’t known or guaranteed. So they really do have the chance to screw up their lives in lasting, consequential ways, making it all the harder to make any key decisions.

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The first image of Blue Flag’s third volume, presented before we even get to its opening chapter, is of Taichi and Touma playing happily as friends, captioned with “Together as children despite the differences in their interests.” It’s a moment that captures a great deal about Blue Flag – the manga’s veneration of the incidental, deeply specific moments that survive in memory and ultimately shape our perception of our own life, as well as its indifference to the superficial markers of alleged kinship or similarity that define so many adolescent relationships. No common interest could equal the bond of shared experience and sympathy connecting Taichi and Touma. The people who are most important to us are not necessarily the people who are most like ourselves – they are those who inform and expand our understanding of both ourselves and others, securing their position among those dazzling incidental fragments that encompass our life in retrospect.

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Blue Flag’s second volume starts off with a reminder of the first thing that struck me about the first volume: the careful attention this story pays to the way clothes hang on the body, and project confidence, insecurity, or any manner of other emotions purely in the fit of the fabric. 

It’s fitting for a story about adolescence to be preoccupied as well with the awkward physicality of our outfits – how some of us seem to exude natural confidence at all times, while others seem perpetually uncomfortable in their own skin. It’s also fitting for a story by KAITO, who is so capable of conveying emotions through presentation, as with their masterful use of paneling. Gaining comfort with both our bodies and our feelings is a circuitous learning process, and though some of Blue Flag’s leads seem more confident in their clothes than others, they all struggle with the difficulty of presenting an authentic self.

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