The male lead is junior high student Taiki Inomata. That's him on the right, with the badminton racket over his shoulder. He's quite devoted to the sport, and works super-hard at it, going to the school gym early every morning to practice.
Someone else is also always there early, practicing hard at her sport: Chinatsu Kano, a first year in high school who is already a basketball star...and extremely popular with the boys at their sport-centric school (That's her on the left, obviously).
Taiki is smitten with her, and after a kinda sorta first page meet-cute, wherein she accidentally throws a basketball into his face and then, to make it up to him, gives him a candy bar, Taiki tells his friend and teammate "I'd sure love to marry her". He then spends a panel imagining what it might be like to be an adult living under the same roof as Chinatsu.
He'll get his wish before the first volume is over...well, sort of.
We learn early on that both Taiki and Chinatsu's mothers played on the same basketball team when they were younger. Taiki is briefly distraught when he learns that Chinatsu's family is moving overseas, and he thinks he will never see his crush again. And then he is relieved when he finds that while her family is moving, she will be staying to attend school and play on the basketball team...she'll just be staying with a family friend. And then he is shocked when he wakes up one morning to find Chinatsu in his kitchen; apparently his own mother is the family friend Chinatsu will be staying with, and now Taiki and Chinatsu actually are living under the same roof...! (As to why Taiki's parents didn't mention this fact to him beforehand, I guess because it was more dramatic if they didn't...?)
The guy-living-at-close-quarters-with-his-crush seemed a bit of a cliche to me, and I found that a lot less interesting than the pair's budding friendship (and maybe, eventually, more...?), and the fact that what seems to attract each to the other isn't their looks or anything else so much as their dedication to their respective sports, the lens through which Taiki seems to see the world (When first talking to his friend about his crush, for example, they use sports metaphors to discuss the possibility of a relationship with her; "Set your sights on advancing to the quarter-finals," his friend Kyo advises him, "Like, get her to know your name. Or ask for her number.").
Eventually, he sets his sites on getting to nationals in badminton, and extreme longsho. This, of course, means training super-hard, even harder than before...which seems to endear him to Chinatsu further.
The pair isn't on a glide path to being happy couple, though. There are, of course, complications.
One is Hina Chono, Taiki's teasing classmate and a rhythmic gymnastics prodigy who might have a crush on him...at least, it sure seems like it to some of their classmates.
And then there is Haryu, who is Chinatsu's classmate and friend (and who calls her by the nickname "Chii," while Taiki calls her "Chinatsu Senpai") and who is also on the badminton team. In fact, if Taiki really wants to make it to nationals, he's going to have to beat Haryu, making the upperclassman a potential rival in more ways than one.
So even at this early point, we have potential romantic rivals in the cast, and the makings of various love triangles. What Haryu and Hina have in common with the leads are that they too are completely devoted to their sports too, making them admirable and attractive, and giving them things in common with the leads as well.
Now, as little as I knew about high school boys' volleyball before reading Haikyu!! (which I loved) or soccer before trying Blue Lock (which I decided wasn't for me), I know still less about badminton, and found it a weird sport to feature in a high school sports romantic comedy comic (Is badminton big in Japan, perhaps?). Odd, and a little funny, if I'm being honest.
Still, manga-ka Kouji Miura tries to make it look cool and action-packed. This isn't a sports manga in the way that Haikyu!! is—sports occur within, but the playing and outcomes of the matches aren't the focus—and so when Taiki and Haryu play badminton against one another, we don't see how each point is scored, but just a few moments of the match as it's played.
But what we do see looks pretty cool, the lines that compose the characters' arms and rackets blur to show their movement, the backgrounds occasionally become speedlines, and Miura draws the "path" the shuttlecock takes from racket to floor with the same kind of focused, laser beam-like line that Haruichi Furudate would draw the volleyball during spikes.
Near the end of the volume, Miura draws this double-page splash during the Taiki vs. Haryu match, the volume's most obvious attempt to make the playing of badminton seem cool and maybe even a little badass:
There are a few scenes of the girls and their sports too, but only very short sequences in this volume.
Perhaps I will come to understand and appreciate badminton in future volumes, as I came to understand and appreciate volleyball before. So far, we see one key different between it and basketball; badminton is basically a solo sport when it comes to competition, whereas basketball is a team sport, and Taiki mentions that what he likes about badminton is it's all on him to succeed or fail (My high school sports were cross country and track, which are both technically team sports, but which your performance is down to you as an individual, rather than a team, for the most part).
It's all pretty well-executed and does what a first volume should: It makes me want to read the next one (I've actually already ordered volumes 2 and 3 from the library!). The romance/sports hybrid nature of it turned out to be just as appealing as it seemed.
Now, why do you think it's called Blue Box...? Is that some badminton or sports reference I don't get...?
