After a relatively tame second episode, Hoshiai no Sora went dark again in its third week. Child abuse is a recurring theme at this point, and I’m already wondering how the series could possibly conclude its scant one cour run when its teenage characters are this emotionally damaged. As if watching Maki’s father assault his son wasn’t hard enough, this time we were subjected to a story where a mother poured boiling water on her infant child’s back. This was brutal stuff – so brutal, in fact, that the episode’s sunny resolution felt wrong to me. Of course, it’s possible to depict parental cruelty without soaking your entire series in despair. Not every anime with strained familial relationships needs to take the Evangelion route. Sora went so far in the other direction, though, that it threw me for a loop.
It can be tough to remember the names of the non-Maki, non-Toma tennis players, since they make roughly equal contributions to each episode, but it’s Itsuki who we’re talking about here. He’s the one with the burn marks on his back, and he’s the one who bashes his racket against a taunting classmate’s forehead after his family situation is mentioned. It’s worth noting that the bully arrives at a time when the tennis club is already in low spirits, with Toma having declared them failures just days earlier. Compound this atmosphere with barbs about his absent mother and his dirty living situation, and it’s easy to understand why Itsuki retaliated with violence. The show doesn’t excuse his behavior, but it does take plenty of steps to rationalize it. Their club advisor says that the bully “needed to understand” that his words could hurt other people, Itsuki’s friend remarks that “he deserved it”, and his sister briefly lectures him before they begin discussing what’s for dinner.
The last of those scenes is the most perplexing one to me, not for its script, but for the soaring vocals and strings that accompany it. This is the sort of song that ought to play when two former friends bury a long-standing grudge, not after a bullying victim’s vicious act of self-defense. Let’s put aside the morality of Itsuki’s actions for a second. Did you see the frightening look on his face right afterwards? Can you begin to imagine how he lives each day, knowing that his mother held so little love for him? Does the magnitude of his past and present scars really deserve to be followed by a bit of optimistic J-pop? What happened between Maki and his father in the premiere was so much more raw, given its placement in the episode and the lengthy silence that followed. It felt heavy. The resolution of Itsuki’s story here was handled in precisely the opposite manner, and I’m mad about it.
At this point, I don’t feel much like discussing the rest of the episode, but there’s one story thread that ought to get a mention, and that’s Toma’s relationship with his mother. The first episode pushed the angle that his mom struggled to relate to him, but this one tells a different story. When Toma comes home from tennis practice after getting frustrated with his own poor leadership, she’s right there to grill him about his early arrival, and asks whether he’s stopped trying. Later, while talking to his brother, Toma says their mom has told him he’s “worthless.” There’s a nice layer of ambiguity to this scene, because we don’t know whether she’s actually said that, or whether that’s just how he interprets the sort of badgering we’ve just witnessed. Theirs is another troubling parent-child relationship in a series full of them, and this one in particular is looking more promising after three episodes. Toma’s life is full of complications already, including monetary ones (as Maki reminds him during the closing minutes), so he’s likely to explode before the show’s end.
