It’s often said that sports anime aren’t really about sports, but about the characters who play them. Not every show in the genre is so dedicated to its cast as to deserve such an assessment, but series like Cross Game, Ping Pong, and this year’s Run With the Wind prove that sometimes it holds true. At the beginning of the fall 2019 season, Hoshiai no Sora looked as though it would join their ranks as a sports anime that put people first and athletics second. Unfortunately, it ended up prioritizing not its characters themselves, but the creation of uniformly damaging family lives for nearly a dozen middle school kids. What’s worse, these difficult situations were often introduced in a given episode, only to disappear for weeks at a time, and in some cases never to be revisited. And when the show finally began to focus on tennis near the end of its run, it paced itself far too quickly, resulting in a wholly unsatisfying finish. Were I to describe Hoshiai no Sora in three words, I’d go with overstuffed, unfocused, and inconclusive.
