Wind Breaker: The Agency of Heroes
Saving the world is a team effort.
Preface!
Some of my all-time favorite pieces here on MangaCraft were inspired by Wind Breaker. Particularly, the one about how Sakura isn’t in this series to save the world, but rather to have the world save him. Inverting the Hero’s Journey, as I called it.
This piece is an extension of that. In my eyes, Sakura remains the best protagonist in modern manga for the originality of his situation and the way he handles it. He is not your typical hero, and that makes for such fascinating case studies.
In fact, when you look at where the series is heading following the dramatic conclusion to volume 20, you can only wonder where Sakura goes from here.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Preface over.
One of the absolute best developments in the expectations of modern publishing is the shedding of this notion that a protagonist has to have complete agency over their journey. They have to save the world, everything has to be driven by their actions, it’s the only way.
That’s just not realistic. Not even Batman can capture every criminal in Gotham City on his own. Even Aragorn can’t slay every Uruk-Hai coming out of Isengard single-handedly.
Heroes need help. Sometimes, they need help even being heroes. And sometimes they aren’t even really heroes at all, they just play one on the page.
That’s where we find Sakura.
Before we get into Wind Breaker, here’s what you need to know.
Sakura comes to town with no backstory, no family, no trust, no support base. He joins Furin High School to be the best fighter in the best delinquent high school, but as it turns out, Furin—while still top fighters—is a nurturing community of friends supporting each other and their town. Sakura doesn’t understand this, nor does he know how to handle it.
But even as Furin is woven together, there are still enemies out there who want to disrupt civil society and be a menace.
And that’s all you need to know.
I’ve spent a lot of time gushing about the way Wind Breaker does things. About how their character growth doesn’t usually come during fights, but during the team building. About how Sakura has to begrudgingly accept that he has kindness in him, when any previous instance of kindness before coming to Furin has likely gone unrequited.
But another thing Wind Breaker does that I adore is their use of Sakura’s agency as a protagonist. As I mentioned in the intro, for so long, the expectation in storytelling is that the hero, or protagonist, is going to drive the story. Their choices are going to alter everything, it’s up to them to save the world.
Wind Breaker doesn’t necessarily do that. Sakura still plays parts in the advancement and protection of Furin’s values, but in the major moments, he’s not always the driving force. Which is kind of the whole point.
Sakura wants to be top dog, but his expectation on how to get there is having to fight his way to the top. That’s not how Furin operates, so even though Sakura does indeed fight well, his ability to win fights doesn’t advance him as a character or grow him as an individual.
Which creates this cool dichotomy of what it even means to have a protagonist with agency. When Sakura does have agency, when he pushes back against an action Furin is taking, or pulling against the direction they’re going, it goes unanswered.
He doesn’t want to be his class’s representative, but they elect him anyway. He doesn’t want to go with Tsubakino to visit Ito, the old lonely widower. And even when he does get in a situation to have the defining fight of the series against Endo (which Sakura wins, of course), that fight doesn’t have much of an impact, if any. Not even on Sakura. All it gives him the opportunity to do is watch the more important fight alongside Endo afterwards. Another opportunity to learn lessons.
And yet, it’s through being elected as class rep that Sakura learns about community and trust. It’s through visiting Ito, the old lonely widower, that Sakura learns kindness and the importance of companionship. And it’s through his fight with Endo that he learns that there is always another fight.
These aren’t lessons Sakura sought out, they were forced onto him. He’s not a hero looking to learn, he’s just a regular kid reacting to what life hands him. And honestly, not reacting too well, though he’s learning.
In that sense, Sakura is a similar protagonist to Harry Potter.
Harry doesn’t want to be the hero to take down Voldemort. He tries to avoid it. He wants a normal life. Yet everywhere he goes, he’s forced to step up because it’s his destiny to do so, and it’s also the right thing to do. Only he can do these things. And what big steps he takes (fighting a troll, for instance), he doesn’t do to outright combat evil, he does it to help his friends.
It takes Harry a lot of convincing and a lot of lesson learning to get him to accept his charge of taking down the big bad guy. That, in turn, makes Harry a quintessential reluctant hero. Not unlike Frodo, though Frodo came to terms with his fate a bit quicker than Harry. In the end, both of these characters, Harry and Frodo, did deploy their own agency to win the day. Frodo took on the ring in Rivendell. Harry was willing to sacrifice himself to defeat Voldemort. That’s agency. Reluctant heroes turned into full-bore heroes.
Sakura isn’t even a reluctant hero. He’s not a hero at all. He hasn’t accepted any charge to be anything bigger than himself. He has no destiny to do anything, no fate to face in time. He tried to create a destiny for himself—to fight to the top of Furin—but that is quickly dismissed for its irrelevance, and subsequently he has to accept that the world he wanted to conquer isn’t the world he’s even in. There’s nothing to conquer. And also, he doesn’t actually want that.
Basically, everything Sakura deploys his own agency for is… well, wrong. Not just that, but it doesn’t exist.
Which literally removes all sense of agency from the “hero” of the series. He is a part of Furin, that’s it. That’s his gig. Just like everyone else in Furin. All the good things that happen to him often have to happen in spite of him. The things he doesn’t want to do, doesn’t want to accept. Those are the things that make him as the “hero” of the series grow and improve.
In closing, I just want to highlight a particular episode in Wind Breaker that really drives this point home. Sakura has decided to lead the Furin first-years to fight a rival gang, Keel, in order to support a fellow student whose friend was taken by Keel. Sakura leads the battle, but he can’t win it, they have to get bailed out by the second years. Furin ends up winning, but, while Sakura fought well, he didn’t really drive the victory or grow from it. Not in the way that he wanted to, anyway.
After this fight, Sakura gets sick. He has to stay home and he has no food, no water, he just sleeps on the floor in his empty solo apartment.
And that’s when he grows. When all his friends come to help him. They bring him food, water, support, company, everything. Sakura pushes back, as he always does. He doesn’t need help, he’s the hero. But by learning to accept help from his friends when he truly needs it, Sakura grows. More so than he grew in his stomping of Keel.
Again—the fight is merely a step in his reluctant growth. It’s the community that really does it. And that is not by Sakura’s design. Nothing in Wind Breaker—at least nothing yet—is by Sakura’s design.
I love Windbreaker so much, and I love that you love to write about it as frequently as you do because I get to nerd out over it too 😄