Hoshiai no Sora – 09/10

With these two episodes in the books, Hoshiai no Sora is preparing to enter its final set. There are still half a dozen unresolved plots involving members of the soft tennis club, though, plus the most crucial tennis match of the show thus far is coming up next week. I’ve said this multiple times in the past, but surely *this* must be the point where Sora stops adding abusive parents to the character roster. Director Akane has an axe to grind and that’s fine (except when it isn’t), but at this point it’s going to take a herculean effort to wrangle the events of the last two episodes. The show’s production is in trouble, too, but it’s been fairly well-disguised in my opinion. The staff got away with all the stills in episode 10 by properly setting expectations for the weaker pairs’ performances, plus consistent use of on-screen text to summarize the matches. A much bigger challenge approaches, however, in terms of both animation and scripting.

This will be a short post, despite all the C and D plots crammed into these two episodes. I just want to focus on the main events, the first of which was little An’s visit to her big brother Shingo’s high school. An is cute as a button, to be sure, but she’s more trouble than a missing button on your only clean dress shirt ten minutes before work. (There’s a metaphor more tortured than the cast of Hoshiai no Sora.) When she grants herself permission to explore the school and ends up napping in the infirmary, Nao locks her in to cancel the match against the girls’ team and assuage his guilty conscience. He’s burdened by the lies he tells his mom to keep participating in the tennis club, which is a sad state of affairs, but he gets off way too cleanly here. Maki uses his superpower to rescue An, everyone dogezas to apologize for wasting the girls’ time, and they end up laughing like they’re in the final seconds of an Arthur episode.

Then comes the kicker, a public service announcement about pathological lying that reads like a paraphrased recitation of a Wikipedia paragraph. I have no doubt that Nao’s mom has subjected him to years of dismissive treatment, which would be terribly damaging. But where’s the accountability for purposely concealing a young, vulnerable child from her family? Only Maki and Taiyo know what he did, but smoothing things over and jumping into a tennis match is a cowardly narrative decision. This plot had team-shattering potential, but it seems it was written as a closed loop, with the sole intent of demonstrating of how harmful a parent’s neglect can be. I was so disappointed by this story that I couldn’t enjoy Tsubasa’s contribution to the back half – a violent encounter with his father that ends with him tumbling down the stairs. He lands on his wrist and earns himself a two-month timeout from tennis, which lands the team in a rough spot for the upcoming summer tournament.

I’ve only got one paragraph left in me, so let’s jump to the tournament itself, which pulls the same “They’re winning! But they lost in the end” stunt that the show used in episode 7. Rintaro/Itsuki take a huge lead in their match, but lose three straight sets after Rintaro’s leg starts bothering him. (Knowing this show, it was probably because he had recently learned that his birth mother wants to talk to him. Moms ruin everything.) Much better was the Nao/Taiyo combination, whose weird strategy of constantly shifting positions was a credible distraction to the other team. It was a nice touch that, even though they were blown out 7-0 in the final set, their opponents still praised their performance as “unreal.” It served as both an acknowledgment and an affirmation of their gimmickry, which is the best that could be expected from two players that have been established as Not Very Good. That just leaves Maki to save the day as usual, since even one pair advancing to the second round will keep the soft tennis team afloat for the foreseeable future. Oh, and I guess Toma will help out, or something.