Stars Align/Hoshiai no Sora
Nov. 30th, 2019 07:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alias_sqbrThis season's queer anime that everyone's talking about!
Turns out it's:
50% Sports Anime (about soft tennis, which I didn't even know was a thing)
40% Cute Boys Being Friends
10% ANGST and serious social issues, including an explicitly non binary character
I have been quite enjoying it! But a big content note for parental abuse as a repeated theme, I think it's handled fairly well but it gets a lot darker than you might expect from the light tone of the rest of the show.
Also, it has the best "cast dance to pop music" closing credits I have ever seen. Everyone dances in character! Which in some cases means dancing for like 2 seconds then sitting down, or refusing to dance at all. The credits don't have any spoilers, and give a nice idea of how cute the show is.
It's streaming on Animelab in Australia, and is on Funimation's website in the US.
I've seen vague buzz around this show for a while but was finally convinced to try it by this twitter post with a (somewhat spoilery) clip from the most recent episode (episode 8) where a character comes out as non binary.
I then sat and watched all eight episodes and it's great! It's also very much a sports anime, and kinda moe. If you're not here for an underdog tennis team of cute, sweet 14 year boys learning about friendship and teamwork while working their way towards The Big Tournament you are going to be very bored.
I'm usually iffy on sports anime, but the characters and relationships are well drawn and it's very endearing and funny. It's a little...softer, I guess, than a lot of shows about guys tend to be, leaning slightly towards the sorts of cute dynamics I associate with Cute Girls Doing Cute Things moe. Which is a plus for me, and given the occasional subtle nods to queerness feels like a deliberate, if mild, subversion of toxic masculinity.
The premise is that the boy's soft tennis team at this middle school is terrible, and faces being shut down if they can't get a win. So the VERY INTENSE AND EARNEST captain Toma hires the naturally athletic but cynically pragmatic new transfer student Miki to join the team, and the two of them form a doubles team and learn a lot about teamwork and each other and inspire the rest of the team etc.
I sometimes get the other team members confused, but that may be on me and my difficulty with large casts >.> They're pretty endearing, regardless.
The structure of each episode tends to be
sports/personal conflict -> cute shenanigans as the problem is solved -> cute closing credits -> SHORT BUT VERY INTENSE ANGSTY POST CREDIT SCENE.
So while the total volume of angst is low, it can hit pretty hard.
A lot of the boys (as well as the non binary "boy", and The One Girl) have messy personal problems, often involving toxic or outright abusive parents. I think this is handled fairly well, and it makes it all the sweeter when they find support and success with each other. But sometimes I feel like there's a jarring disconnect between their typical Japanese teen tendency to evade messy emotions, and the scenes where they decide to open up and suddenly articulate everything with perfect clarity. The emotions themselves make sense, I'm just not convinced it's in character for all of them to express them so clearly. But that's a pretty minor quibble.
The One Girl is pretty great, a cynical nerd who watches their matches because she has nothing better to do, and the non binary character is nice in a Transfeminine Sweetie kinda way, but it's overall very much a show about boys (which isn't inherently bad, but will be off-putting for some people). The other female characters are handled ok, though I'm not sure how I feel about the fat, moderately antagonistic school president.
Asides from the Transfeminine Sweetie, there's a fairly minor but well handled trans man character, and the protagonist Miki is very chill about queerness. If I interpreted him right he seems to be at least vaguely agender, or otherwise Working Through Identity Issues.
Miki and Toma are pretty shippy in a typical sports-anime-duo way, but I'm not sure if the show ships them or sees them as queer. There's some mild tsundere flirtiness between Miki and The One Girl, and I'm not sure what ships if any will get together in the end. The emphasis is on friendship.
Sometimes there'll be changing scenes or whatever and I'll be like "Is this...fanservice? It would read that way if this was a show about girls". But maybe I've just watched too much moe lol.
Overall the show seems aimed at adults who look back on their own early teens with bittersweet nostalgia. It's made by a man, Kazuki Akane, the director of The Vision of Escaflowne, but reminds me of the way a lot of yuri doesn't seem aimed at any specific gender.
Turns out it's:
50% Sports Anime (about soft tennis, which I didn't even know was a thing)
40% Cute Boys Being Friends
10% ANGST and serious social issues, including an explicitly non binary character
I have been quite enjoying it! But a big content note for parental abuse as a repeated theme, I think it's handled fairly well but it gets a lot darker than you might expect from the light tone of the rest of the show.
Also, it has the best "cast dance to pop music" closing credits I have ever seen. Everyone dances in character! Which in some cases means dancing for like 2 seconds then sitting down, or refusing to dance at all. The credits don't have any spoilers, and give a nice idea of how cute the show is.
It's streaming on Animelab in Australia, and is on Funimation's website in the US.
I've seen vague buzz around this show for a while but was finally convinced to try it by this twitter post with a (somewhat spoilery) clip from the most recent episode (episode 8) where a character comes out as non binary.
I then sat and watched all eight episodes and it's great! It's also very much a sports anime, and kinda moe. If you're not here for an underdog tennis team of cute, sweet 14 year boys learning about friendship and teamwork while working their way towards The Big Tournament you are going to be very bored.
I'm usually iffy on sports anime, but the characters and relationships are well drawn and it's very endearing and funny. It's a little...softer, I guess, than a lot of shows about guys tend to be, leaning slightly towards the sorts of cute dynamics I associate with Cute Girls Doing Cute Things moe. Which is a plus for me, and given the occasional subtle nods to queerness feels like a deliberate, if mild, subversion of toxic masculinity.
The premise is that the boy's soft tennis team at this middle school is terrible, and faces being shut down if they can't get a win. So the VERY INTENSE AND EARNEST captain Toma hires the naturally athletic but cynically pragmatic new transfer student Miki to join the team, and the two of them form a doubles team and learn a lot about teamwork and each other and inspire the rest of the team etc.
I sometimes get the other team members confused, but that may be on me and my difficulty with large casts >.> They're pretty endearing, regardless.
The structure of each episode tends to be
sports/personal conflict -> cute shenanigans as the problem is solved -> cute closing credits -> SHORT BUT VERY INTENSE ANGSTY POST CREDIT SCENE.
So while the total volume of angst is low, it can hit pretty hard.
A lot of the boys (as well as the non binary "boy", and The One Girl) have messy personal problems, often involving toxic or outright abusive parents. I think this is handled fairly well, and it makes it all the sweeter when they find support and success with each other. But sometimes I feel like there's a jarring disconnect between their typical Japanese teen tendency to evade messy emotions, and the scenes where they decide to open up and suddenly articulate everything with perfect clarity. The emotions themselves make sense, I'm just not convinced it's in character for all of them to express them so clearly. But that's a pretty minor quibble.
The One Girl is pretty great, a cynical nerd who watches their matches because she has nothing better to do, and the non binary character is nice in a Transfeminine Sweetie kinda way, but it's overall very much a show about boys (which isn't inherently bad, but will be off-putting for some people). The other female characters are handled ok, though I'm not sure how I feel about the fat, moderately antagonistic school president.
Asides from the Transfeminine Sweetie, there's a fairly minor but well handled trans man character, and the protagonist Miki is very chill about queerness. If I interpreted him right he seems to be at least vaguely agender, or otherwise Working Through Identity Issues.
Miki and Toma are pretty shippy in a typical sports-anime-duo way, but I'm not sure if the show ships them or sees them as queer. There's some mild tsundere flirtiness between Miki and The One Girl, and I'm not sure what ships if any will get together in the end. The emphasis is on friendship.
Sometimes there'll be changing scenes or whatever and I'll be like "Is this...fanservice? It would read that way if this was a show about girls". But maybe I've just watched too much moe lol.
Overall the show seems aimed at adults who look back on their own early teens with bittersweet nostalgia. It's made by a man, Kazuki Akane, the director of The Vision of Escaflowne, but reminds me of the way a lot of yuri doesn't seem aimed at any specific gender.
