Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Stars Align [2019-10-26]
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DuskyPredator
 Posts: 15462 Location: Brisbane, Australia |
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Episode 9 hit hard with its ending little arc with the dad.
I don't agree that the characters feel inhuman. People praise Black Clover, and you are calling these characters as feeling manufactured? General anime can have ridiculous coincidences to create a setting, and you can't buy a bunch of kids could have at least one awful parent each? You also never met people who can't take a hint? Such as why a teenage boy might choose to talk to his friend who just got back from the hospital with an injury in the middle of the night in the park instead of sending said friend straight to his family? I think she is more set in a ways of necessary strictness of raising her young daughter, and not her teenage stepson.
Why do you need a most? Isn't some parents like that enough? She is a mother who has some sort of weird insecurity about her stepson, who from late in the episode we find out probably reminds her of the other woman. Pretty sure that I can say I am familiar of recounts where kids felt that they were treated like not part of the family by step parents. Step parents that make them feel like a stranger in their own family. Perhaps made here a little exaggerated to make it clear there is a problem, but most anime do such things.
Well, I would assume that the toilets are on the ground floor, and she really would not know what direction the girl might have wandered off to, so better to spread out the search as quick as possible rather than probably go to the furthest area of the school building. At this point, I am kind of hoping that we might get a second season. This is an anime original series, so rather than selling manga I kind of hope that there is enough attention to go further into everything, as there seems to be plenty of possible material. |
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Panino Manino
 Posts: 739 |
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@DuskyPredator
I wrote the wrong name. It's not "Tsubasa", it's "Nao". I maintain what I'm saying. Of course, to other telling that the characters feels "inhuman" makes no sense, but it's an exaggeration to convey what I feel watching some times. I approve what the anime tries to do, I just disagree about how it's doing. They go all the way when they didn't need, not with all the parents. They don't need to be "ALL BAD", almost evil, they just need to be bad parents. Instead of thinking how they can make these bad parents looks convincing they are always thinking in how they can make their behavior more extreme. Shingo's mother is a good example of this, it's like these characters are divorced from common sense. Because it's so extreme it's harder to identify with the situations. Other thing I want to repeat is that the creator should had cut some of his ideas. Nao's looking at that lizard as if suggesting that he would start to hurt animals looks to me like another idea that he wanted to use in his "complete" story and resisted to cut. |
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Alexis.Anagram
 Posts: 278 Location: Mishopshno |
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I agree, and I think one major problem is that the show prioritizes extremes (or maybe more accurately, it prioritizes "issues") over context. We don't need a justification for Maki's dad's behavior (there is none), nor does he need to be qualified as "sympathetic" in some way-- but in order to make him credible as a character, there has to be some indication as to his logic and the reason he's motivated to pursue his family and inflict these emotional and physical injuries on his son. Instead of leaving us to decipher the human causality behind his actions while simultaneously stacking the deck against us by blaring his pathology in the loudest way possible and reducing him to a kind of "abusive dad" trope, it would help to make sense of Maki's circumstances (and his best options for surviving them) if the familial, cultural, and personal dynamics that coalesced towards abuse in this relationship were better informed. That goes for characters whose story beats aren't explicitly tethered to extremes of personality, as well: Yu is nominally genderqueer, but what does that mean for Yu, personally? What are the obstacles and areas of growth for Yu, not just in relation to their gender, but as their gender relates to their larger goals and aspirations? Their queerness has been isolated from an essential, human context: I would love to see a story where Yu grapples with (or better yet celebrates and affirms) their identity, their attraction to Toma, and how to express the way they want to be seen by the people they love, but all we've gotten is a really broad conversation that strains for relevance without making the connection to the kind of personal journey that elevates this material beyond the realms of "ideas" and "issues." |
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DuskyPredator
Posts: 15462 Location: Brisbane, Australia |
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I am not sure what you are asking for here. Do you want Maki's dad to be complex and have a reason for the way he acts, or do you want him to be a trope of a terrible father? Your last sentence kind of sounds like you want Maki to have some sort of more way to fight against (survive) his father, but in my personal opinion a major factor of the dynamic is that Maki is pretty much powerless. If you want the reason why Maki's dad acts that way, I actually have a pretty good idea. When he smashed the racket I think he said something about himself being a failure and thus Maki having to share in that. My personal opinion is that Maki's dad probably shares aspects of a number of the other characters, especially males, where the boys were a failure of a club at the start of the series. And we learned that their teacher may have been an athlete or something at a point, the teacher from another school making a comment, but something ended it, which probably lead to his low confidence "let them be" attitude. My take is that all these guys are victims of toxic masculinity, where they have become losers in the eyes of what is seen as masculine and thus gave up, their teacher going in one way that he was kind of becoming spineless, Maki's dad going the other way. Where he decided to exercise power on someone powerless, that he treats like a possession, and try to make feel as bad as he does. You could also in ways connect this to Tsubasa's dad who might have failed at being a soccer player or something, who forced the dream onto his sons, being happy that two of them became good player. But being downright brutal against his one son who decided soccer was not for him, super imposing insecurities onto Tsubasa, and taking any talking back as something awful as talking back.
He is in the 8th grade, and having to try and understand himself, while not really being able to do anything out in the open. His mother looked like she is about to have a breakdown at the first sign Yu being found with girl clothes. From the discussion Yu had with Maki, it sounded like the obstacles for Yu can simply be the confidence to try, to tell someone, to be able to express themselves without fear of harassment. Those might seem like small things to you, but can mean a lot for self discovery, and I can attest to that. In regards to his attraction to Toma, what guy they like means less than who they are, and probably how they may want to be seen by such person. Again though, they are in the 8th grade. |
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AA751
Posts: 72 |
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This series continues to be melodramatic and continues the misery.
I won't be surprised if we have a suicide and sexual abuse and some more violence next. Just pile it on. 'Less is more' ISNT the motto of these writers. I keep watching it in a detached way because as I said, its difficult to feel for so many plotlines. Its difficult to care for so much. I guess people will argue and say, this is realistic. I say, yesI, I guess if you want to pile on a bunch of abuse cases one after the other it is, but a lot of people are going to check out because there is a limit that some people have to abuse, and I've seen many people complain about it. Im not alone in this critique. In the end, barring some amazing finale Im going to give this series a 6 because the animation is great, the music is great and when we were focused in the plot of 2 or 3 characters it was compelling and I wanted to see the drama play out then. But now...yeah. Its too much. Too bad. |
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CrowLia
 Posts: 5504 Location: Mexico |
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I hope Rebecca doesn't take this personally but I am slightly bothered by the lack of, well, reviewing going on in these reviews -at least the last two episodes-. It's like Rebecca just describes the events of the show but doesn't inject any opinions on it. No remarks about the quality of the animation, whether she feels the story works or the character development is interesting, or if the themes of the show are well-executed, etc etc. The reviews feel very detached and, in all honesty, i don't really see the point in just reading a beat by beat summary of the events, specially in a show like this one that lends itself to so much analysis and discussion
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Princess_Irene
ANN Reviewer
 Posts: 2607 Location: The castle beyond the Goblin City |
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Not at all, and thank you for the feedback. To be perfectly honest, this show has gotten more and more difficult for me to be...objective isn't the right word, but I'm having a very hard time with it. That's because it's been hitting very close to home on a number of issues - I know a lot of people feel it's been a melodramatic ride, but it's very real to my experience in middle school. Not the familial abuse (unlike the boys, my family was my refuge), but I had my left arm broken in a similar way by other kids while the adults in the school did nothing and I was in constant fear. Add in being on the "Q+" bit of the LGBTQ+ spectrum and a lot of the show has in the past two episodes been way too close to my experience for easy or comfortable writing. Clearly I thought I was doing a better job hiding that than I was! Anyway, I'll keep that in mind when I'm drafting on Thursday. |
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Panino Manino
Posts: 739 |
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#10
The biological mother, the unwanted pregnancy, the class exploitation... everything will be only suggested? The created should really had let go of some of his planned plots. And Taiyo's mother saying "it's the other boy fault" is another example of the drama in this going a step too far and why I called it "forced" and the characters "inhuman". But these are nitpicks, it's good. |
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rizuchan
 Posts: 975 Location: Kansas |
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I think at this point my biggest issue with the show is that there's so many different little plot threads going on, I can't remember who's who. Especially since all the "disapproving mother" characters seem to have really similar faces to me. They're like all medium length hair with lines under their eyes.
I don't mind of not all of these plot threads get wrapped up though. I feel like most of these familial issues are so complex that it'd feel cheesy to wrap them up in just an episode or two anyway. |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11352 |
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When would he have done this? Neither came to him with their problems and he wasn't there when their parents were giving them grief. Was he supposed to charge over to their homes and knock on the door to confront them? Their situations are very different from Maki's. I'm not disagreeing with the point that Touma is possessive of Maki, but I don't think this is a good illustration of that. Taiyo's parents were actually pretty hilarious in their ultra-supportive attempts, shoving a first-aid kit at him before the game even starts. Kind of a mixed message there, Dad.  A different, less destructive kind of helicopter parents than Nao's controlling mom. But it's refreshing that they're proud of him even when he stands up to them. Unless I've forgotten a major plot point around him, he seems to be the least issue-laden kid on the team, suffering only the usual teenage embarrassments regarding his weird parents who insist on existing around his friends.
Speaking of Nao, he seemed awfully much better this week. I feel like I forgot or missed something important in that transition. I wonder if the same disclosure rules apply when you take in relatives as when adopting non-blood related people? I was thinking that Touma might actually be his father's nephew, and Ryoma asked them to take his baby cousin in when his parents were killed by truck-kun or something (but child of a mistress works too, I guess). His mother said she didn't want to be his mother, rather than she didn't want to give birth to him. I can't figure out how a young Ryoma could've interfered in her decision to get an abortion or whatever. Even if she is his birth mother, her antipathy and even fear of him don't match him just being an extra child, given how she dotes on Ryoma. I can see her resenting him changing her life, but she treats him more like a stranger than someone she wishes hadn't been born. |
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Princess_Irene
ANN Reviewer
Posts: 2607 Location: The castle beyond the Goblin City |
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You're right - I was thinking about the idea of the open secrets of their difficult home lives and that in almost any other show the Touma character (or rather, a hybrid of the Touma and Maki characters) would have just charged in, but a better example might have been that Maki has been one of the few people to consistently not treat Touma like anything but a friend (as opposed to the captain or the guy with the temper). |
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yuna49
 Posts: 3804 |
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To me, Touma's sullen reaction at the barbecue was the most telling indicator of his possessive feelings for Maki. He was upset at how well Maki and the kid from the other school got along, and of Maki's generally easy-going relationships with all of them. Some of that is Touma's natural tendency toward isolation, but I think jealousy also played a role.
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11352 |
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So nothing about the tag on this episode? Was that a flashback? I'm not even sure who the guy in the scene was. Is that her husband, meaning Ryoma and Toma are his little brothers? Or was it present day and that was Ryoma...and there's another brother we don't know about? I was hoping someone with better eyes than mine could explain that scene to me.
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futuresoon
Posts: 68 |
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I'm not sure if I'm right, because the voiceover on the letter didn't really sound like her, but what little we saw of Rintaro's bio mom had an awfully similar haircut to Toma's--so I'm guessing that when Ryoma talks about brothers, plural, it means the other one is Rintaro.
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whiskeyii
 Posts: 2245 |
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Yeaaaaah...my head is equally abuzz with theories about Rintaro and his bio-mom, none of them good. |
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