It’s partially a language thing, partially something else…

After starting to watch Blue Thermal (Buru- Sa-maru), since I narrowly missed out on watching it with Jon Spencer and friends thanks to a work shift, that brought me back to a thought that’s been nagging me for a while – why “blue spring”?

I mean, there’s (among other titles)…

• Blue Spring Ride (Aoharaido)
• Blue Flag (Ao no Flag)
• Blue Box (Ao no Hako)
• Aoharu x Kikanjuu (Aoharu x Machinegun)
• …and as mentioned earlier, Blue Thermal.

In Blue Thermal‘s case, it somewhat makes sense because the cliched colour of the sky is blue and the anime is about gliding, but there’s more to it than that.

First of all, “blue spring” would be the literal translation of the kanji for “youth” (青春, read seishun). Read these kanji another way and you get ao haru. Once upon a time, the “blue” meant “green” (see: how Japanese calls traffic lights “blue” instead of green). The imagery of “green spring” suggests…well, vibrancy, life and new beginnings. The epitome of youth, no?

Blue Thermal stands out from the list of series we’re talking about because it’s more removed in terms of how far the wordplay goes (seishun -> ao haru -> blue spring thermal). (Maybe that wasn’t intended and the creators just used “blue” for the colour’s connotations, but I like to make connections where there are none. That’s what I do.)

Also note the first few are slice of life/romance types of series which focus on this concept of “youth” and living your best life. It’s sort of like anime’s obsession with high school in that a collective set of rose-tinted glasses make high school-aged characters popular choices for anime and manga protagonists.

There is also Blue Period, explained in the series proper that Picasso had an entire…well, period where he painted with blue. From what I’ve consumed of this series, it does seem to co-opt a lot of the “youth” vibes by initially being set in high school (it also has a lot of shonen vibes from Yatora trying to get into art school, but it’s seinen), as well as draw upon blue as a melancholy and cool colour (the latter in the artistic sense, although I do think blue is a cool colour otherwise…LOL). It doesn’t have romance, as far as I know.

I lumped Aoharu x Kikanjuu in there because as far as I’ve consumed it, again it doesn’t have romance (unless you want to think of it that way *raises eyebrows*), but it does still have the “youth” thing going for it, plus it explicitly uses the kanji for “youth” in its title with the reading aoharu.

So basically, it’s a play on words as to how blue got associated with youth.

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Welp, I said I was on hiatus, but this post seems to have come together alright, plus I need to test whether what I did with the comments works. It’s a bit on the short side, but hey – I’ll take what I can get after a few months of not blogging.