I'm noticing this, along with Hunter X Hunter, is one of the saddest Anime/Manga to have a discussion about. While HXH might be too complicated for the average people to understand (not really, but whatever), POT is too dumb for the average person to understand. In volume one it's said that "Tennis is a form of martial arts separated by a net". The average person is too smart (or perhaps too dumb) to understand this is the whole premise of POT. The point was never about playing tennis. The point of POT is to reduce your opponent's HP to 0 with a racket and a tennis ball, and occasionally you get a TKO if you managed to win 6 (or 7) games but the vast majority of the games in POT is won by knocking out the opponent physically or mentally. Yukimura can basically fight any of the eye power guys in Naruto straight up with his massive array of eye powers, and he doesn't even try to play tennis as his strategy is to use his eyepowers to mentally knock out all his opponents. Atobe, the x-ray eye power dude, doesn't even attempt to explain why whenever he turns on his x-ray eye power he always scores a point. It's a world where pulling out a gun to shoot your opponent is considered a totally legitmate move. The only reason people don't do that is naturally because tennis ball is the most dangerous weapon known to man (it killed the dinosaurs) so a mere gun wouldn't really even be useful.
And once you get that POT is supposed to have a ridiculously dumb premise, it's actually surprisingly well-executed as a martial arts manga. I think the author originally wanted to write something Naruto but there were too many Naruto-type manga at the time POT was serialized so he decided to be creative. Compared to the stuff that just drags on forever with no hint of ever improving, POT is always trying to outdo itself as some kind of sci-fi martial arts thingy that happens to involve tennis balls. The latest match features the '3on1' in a doubles match, which pretty much nobody saw coming, showing POT still retains its edge at coming up with totally crazy concepts.
Honestly, if people wanted a sports manga, there has yet to be anything better than Slam Dunk from like 20 years ago. As a martial arts variant, POT is surprisingly good, but I guess most people don't abandon their common sense enough to understand that POT is not supposed to be about the sports in any shape whatsoever, even though it repeatedly tells you nobody is actually trying to play a game of tennis.
And once you get that POT is supposed to have a ridiculously dumb premise, it's actually surprisingly well-executed as a martial arts manga. I think the author originally wanted to write something Naruto but there were too many Naruto-type manga at the time POT was serialized so he decided to be creative. Compared to the stuff that just drags on forever with no hint of ever improving, POT is always trying to outdo itself as some kind of sci-fi martial arts thingy that happens to involve tennis balls. The latest match features the '3on1' in a doubles match, which pretty much nobody saw coming, showing POT still retains its edge at coming up with totally crazy concepts.
Honestly, if people wanted a sports manga, there has yet to be anything better than Slam Dunk from like 20 years ago. As a martial arts variant, POT is surprisingly good, but I guess most people don't abandon their common sense enough to understand that POT is not supposed to be about the sports in any shape whatsoever, even though it repeatedly tells you nobody is actually trying to play a game of tennis.
