Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Stars Align [2019-10-26]
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DuskyPredator
 Posts: 15505 Location: Brisbane, Australia |
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Mitsue invited the bad intention onto her a little bit, getting physical was not cool, but the harassment the other girls were then putting on her was not cool either. It was an escalation, and as they said they were older than her, and should not have been taking it as far as trying seeming to lead it into a fistfight.
Mitsue clearly sucks at social interaction, and I think that is a part that has likely lead to her being a target of bullying before. Following her bad social abilities she pushed that girl and called them names, I don't think she is any more skilled to have used a more controlled method. And clearly Mitsue was much more affected by it than one might think from how she started the confrontation, be surrounded like that probably scared her quite a bit, and stepping on her shoes is probably along the lines of other girls that have tried to make her feel small. Yes, there probably could have been a better method to give the chance of moving those girls away for an unobstructed view, but probably too much to expect Mitsue to have been able to do it, she did it for her friends, she was very scared when she was being ganged up on and was about to get worse. |
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John Thacker
Posts: 1006 |
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That's the distinction between the former, the 教育ママ kyôiku mama or "education mama," and the latter, the Japanese coined English term "monster parent." (Incidentally, since the term is 和製英語 and much more common as a set phrase with that meaning, it's completely correct and I would argue better to translate it as "helicopter parent" when translating to English.) |
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TsukasaElkKite
 Posts: 3960 |
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I am LIVING for the compassionate and realistic portrayal of LGBTQ content in this series.
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AA751
Posts: 72 |
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My enthusiasm for this show is dropping every episode. Seemingly every episode some character issue is raised...and then nothing happens.
We have 4 episodes left, we are running out of time to resolve adequately the character plots of Touma, Maki and then Nao. Now on top of this we have Yuu and Mitsue issues. Its like, where is this going? Its very difficult for me to really care. |
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Panino Manino
 Posts: 747 |
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How "nothing happens"? The issues with the characters being raised is the happening. And of course, the principal characters get the last episodes for resolution, like in every other anime. |
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A Mystery
 Posts: 1887 Location: Netherlands |
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Well, maybe true to life, their problems and situations will not be resolved. The end game might be some hope that with social support they will learn some other things than their caregivers taught them. So they have more resilience to become somewhat happy adults.
I do dearly hope that one day an anime will include health care as an option. One day... |
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AA751
Posts: 72 |
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The series has juggled too many character arcs for 12 episodes on issues which individually are that serious deserves an entire series by themselves. But since its stuffed everyone and their issues in one short series its not going to give everyone the story they deserve. Thus nothing is going anywhere. We just keep introducing new issues. I know everyone loves this because its introducing issues that aren't touched on often, but I expect more from such shows. I don't think it delivers so far. |
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AA751
Posts: 72 |
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This isn't a documentary. Its a written drama. In a drama with an ensemble cast you introduce character backstories in the first half and then bring able some type of resolutions in the second half. If you are still introducing these backstories more than halfway through it thematically becomes difficult to bring about a fictional resolution that satisfies all the arcs. Unless we get another season...who knows. |
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DuskyPredator
Posts: 15505 Location: Brisbane, Australia |
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So, you want everyone to have resolution to their arcs? All their bad parents should be removed from their lives, or have a life altering experience to now do better? I am more of a hope that they will all find coping methods, ways to help each other, without them necessarily being resolved. I said before that I could kind of pick up the gender themes from earlier in the show, so all the LGBT revelations of the recent episode should not be a big surprise, nor Misue's relationship with drawing, if you were paying attention to the details. Because I am likely to compare this to other series, especially now that trans issues were specifically brought up, I am going to think of Wandering Son, which I am going to think as a matter of fact did not really have the nice tied up in a bow resolution. Bit of a spoiler, Characters move forward, but in other ways thing get a bit tougher, or some more ambiguous. I think it is even brought up that getting answer at this age can be tough. Although I am aware that the manga went further than the anime. Rather than expecting everyone's arcs to be closed up by finding answers, probably the most expect how the club can act as a support unit, and if they can keep it going against the club president. |
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yuna49
 Posts: 3804 |
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I'd like to see closure on the deadbeat dad plot thread myself.
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Panino Manino
Posts: 747 |
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I think that "introducing" and "resolution" are the wrong words here. The key word is "addressing", and for this young cast this is enough. |
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Panino Manino
Posts: 747 |
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#9
The patter repeated. Tsubasa's father first appearance (I believe) and... the usual. And that makes Shingo's family feels supper uncanny. No way that they're are "normal"?! That scene in the infirmary was scary, for a moment I feared "the worst". BTW, the boys talking while walking home about what Nao had done, and explaining that it's a disorder was unnecessary. To jump to "he lied this one time" to "he is ill" is the anime trying a bit too hard to be serious.[/b] |
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Time Bandit
 Posts: 203 Location: Raleigh |
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I don't normally comment on episodes as they air, but 09 hit me HARD (I won't lie, I cried for a good bit after this one...still am actually)... This is gonna get personal...
When I was 12, I took my 80+lb dog outside on leash (I was about the same weight as he was at the time). He saw a squirrel, and lunged off the porch and he pulled me onto the paved walkway and I fell fully on my left wrist. I went back inside and showed my parents but they didn't care...never took me to the hospital or our primary physician...nothing. I'm almost 38 now...and I still have bone pushing through my skin (it's ugly). I have so much pain and my genetic arthritis is so much worse because of it. This episode hit me HARD. I don't blame my dog, and I never will. But my parents (who were abusive) didn't care...they just let me suffer. I wish I had friends like Tsubasa has. This episode, and this show in general, hits me hard. I still watch it though, because it's one that speaks to me (not always on a 'good for me' level, but it speaks). Anyways, sorry for getting real. This episode really did me in over all the others. |
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Alexis.Anagram
 Posts: 278 Location: Mishopshno |
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I think that, generally speaking, there's nothing wrong with this sort of an ending, but to back up a little of AA751's frustration in which I share, this show in specific hasn't really done the legwork to earn that sort of ambiguity-- really, it's trended in the opposite direction. It has laid out some very specific, immediate crisis issues and positioned them as backdrops for the development of these characters, without doing a particularly good job of coloring in the internal processes that might inform their responses and the sort of thematic directions one might intuit absent a firm conclusion. This is also true for those characters who experience a more generalized conflict, like Yu: there's a lack of distinction mapping out an individual trajectory which could clarify this character's particular needs. Because it's not readily apparent what Yu's personal interests and inclinations are, the sense is that Yu needs "whatever any nonbinary person needs," which is, I guess, support and acceptance? That's nice, but it's not particularly meaty or dramatically satisfying: it makes Yu seem superficially representational, but not all that eminently relatable. It doesn't really connect as closure, even of the open-ended, food for thought sort, to leave it at that. And to draw a little bit more on what AA751 mentioned, I think the larger issue is that these characters haven't really had arcs; they've had momentary, episodic blips where they shift into relevance, but it ultimately feels like so much narrative material getting tossed into the ether because there's little to nothing in the way of follow-up, particularly with these big ticket dramatic items. There's a lot that has been insinuated with regards to these characters that makes me curious about them, but little that makes them memorable as personalities or, indeed, protagonists. Before we can consider how the tennis club can function as a support group, I think it's important to ascertain what it is that drives these youths: that is, an identification of their points of resilience, and what it would look like for them to thrive. That's why Mitsue is in the best spot to make her story land. Her writing still feels somewhat anemic and isolated, but at least there's an experiential component to it that has culminated decisively for her. Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, we have Touma, who at this point either needs to kiss Maki or kill his dad to justify still being in the show. |
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Panino Manino
Posts: 747 |
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I think I understand the "problem" with this anime. At least one of the root causes (for my problems with this anime): the author refused to give up his characters.
Remember the student council president? Where is she? Maybe we'll still see some scene with her by the end because she needs to approve the maintenance of the boys club, but she as a character needed to be cut if the creator couldn't get all the episodes he needed to tell his full story. But he couldn't, that's why that scene in her house exist. One more child in problems at home, with bad parents. This anime is all about bad parenting, right? And this anime is also ambitious, this anime wants to show the max number of bad cases as possible in it's short time. This is a mistake. I don't know if this other problem is caused because of this or not. I already had said how unnatural it feels at times, right? Watching this last episode don't you also feel that the characters feels a bit "inhuman"? Because the anime "tries too hard" to make the parents bad, because they don't receive the time they deserve to be fully developed, they end coming out as forced and "inhuman". Even on Shingo's normal household they still tried to force his mother to look unreasonable. Why she couldn't even understand why her son went to talk privately with his friend, after said friend had just come back from the hospital with him? Tsubasa's mother is unbelievable, in a way that for me undermines what this anime appears to be trying to do. I believe that really mentally ill persons like her exists, but most are not crazy like her, and this weakens the educational quality this could had. And another little thing that it's bugging me... when they're searching for Shingo's sister, Mitsune looks at the starts and thinks that she could had gone to the roof. Why didn't she climbed the stairs right there to look? Instead she ran all the way back to ask for a boy to look with her, wasting time. If the situation was dangerous and urgent, why she didn't looked by herself? 
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