Stop comparing Slam Dunk and Kuroko no Basket.

Alright, so, here’s a history lesson for you. At some point in the 90s, when basketball was extremely irrelevant in Japan, a manga series called Slam Dunk came out, and it was fucking awesome. So awesome, in fact, that it helped to popularize basketball over in the land of the rising sun. Which isn’t all that surprising to those who’ve read it – after all, it’s greatest strength was how amazing it managed to make basketball look without even embellishing it (sans the average skill of Japan’s highschool teams), and putting focus on fundamentals over flashiness. It remains one of the most famous and critically-acclaimed manga ever made to this day.

It also had perhaps the best art of any weekly series ever.

Fast forward almost 20 years. Another manga comes out in Weekly Shonen Jump about basketball – specifically, Kuroko no Basket. It is now extremely popular, and constantly compared to Slam Dunk. And why shouldn’t it be? After all, they’re two hot-blooded stories about basketball from WSJ. How different could they possibly be?

Very.

See, here’s the thing: Slam Dunk lives and breathes basketball. It is the lifesblood of Slam Dunk. That’s what made it work. For Kuroko no Basket, however, the basketball is a vehicle. The real purpose of Kuroko no Basket is characterisation and character interaction,  and basketball is just the method they use to create that, creating teamwork, rivalries, and, uhh… jealousy over a former teammate turned rival in a relationship that resembles that of an appropriated and repainted shoujo plot. All of which revolves around bishonens. You can see where the monolithic Yaoi fandom around it comes from, I assume?

Be very careful googling it with safesearch off.

Does that mean that Kuroko is to Basketball as K-ON is to music, essentially a “cute guys doing cute things” show that happens to involve basketball? No, it doesn’t, because Kuroko has plenty of basketball… sort of. Remember how I said that Slam Dunk focused on realism and fundamentals rather than flashy techniques? Well, unlike that, Kuroko…

…Yeah.

The very friggin’ premise of Kuroko is built on there being 5 players from an amazing school that Kuroko used to be a part of and will now gradually defeat, who all have MIND-FUCKINGLY INCREDIBLE BASKETBALL SKILLS THE LIKES OF WHICH HAVE NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE. The premise itself promises insanity and flashy techniques, and it delivers – in terms of believability it’s pretty much the exact opposite of Slam Dunk.

So am I saying Kuroko no Basket is bad? Hell no, I love Kuroko no Basket for the big dumb insane fun that it is. But my point isn’t that either series is better than the other, it’s that despite seemingly having the same subject matter, the two are incredibly different. As they are by far the two most prominent basketball manga, it’s understandable that they’ll be compared – but it’s really apples and oranges here. All you’re doing by comparing them is fuelling the idiotic fandom rivalry.

Quit it.

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