“Suisō” (水槽; Aquarium) by Megumi Nakajima

Totting up the best series of this season isn’t going to be an easy task, though in effect I’ll need to do that at the end of the year (although with two-cour shows that gets complicated).  Hi Score Girl II will be massive but it’s just gotten started.  Kono Oto Tomare is staking a strong claim, and Chihayafuru has undeniably come out of the gate at full sprint – all this as BnHA sports a new sense of style and wit.  But it’s going to be hard to top Hoshiai no Sora, I think.  This is a show that seems to check an awful lot of boxes, and it’s free of the burden of trying to adapt manga material to the screen.  With that kind of freedom Akane Kazuki can be a beast, and he is with Stars Align so far.

I’m returning to the same emotional place I was in watching Noein, which I still remember quite distinctly, as long ago as it was.  One of Akane-sensei’s gifts is the ability to make us care deeply about the children in his stories, then rip our hearts out by doing terrible things to them.  None of it is gratuitous (though Noein came close at times) – this is Akane depicting growth through the crucible of suffering.  Noein was incredibly powerful but pretty deeply flawed, but my hope is that Hoshiai no Sora can avoid some of those pitfalls.  Noein was too ambitious for its own good, probably, and stumbled by trying to do too much.  Hoshiai seems like a series stripped of excess and focusing on the narrative essentials.

Like Ping Pong, this show is functioning as a sports series and a psychological drama at the same time.  It does the sports very well, both in terms of animation (Takanashi Yuuichi is a special talent) and detail.  Maki is a supremely confident boy, and his troubled personal history has taught him how to read people (not uncommon with kids from abusive homes, as it’s a survival mechanism).  He’s divvied up the squad into pairs which don’t seem to make a whole lot of sense – guys playing with new partners and in new roles, the two passive shy boys together and the two arrogant blowhards as a pair.

But – it works.  Maki, naturally, sandbags when he and Touma take on the three new pairs in order to give the new teams confidence.  But he also recognizes the power of anger as a motivator (especially with the Tsubasa-Shingo team).  One of the new teams finds the budding psycho Itsuki paired with the affable Futsu Rintarou (Sato Gen), and they do (with a little nudge from Maki) win their match.  But Rintarou is clearly troubled by something here, though it’s not clear what just yet.  His home life seems pleasant enough – his Mom is certainly affectionate, if perhaps a bit smothering.

Meanwhile Sakurai Takahiroyuki-sensei is feeling a little guilty about the boys’ renewed motivation, and puts in a call to a former kouhai to set up a practice match with his powerhouse school.  There’s more to this story too – something happened 5 years in Sakurai’s past which he refers to as “the incident” (with everything but ominous music), and seems to involve pushing his club too hard.  But his conversation with the girl’s coach Murou-sensei reveals that his desire to help his charges is genuine, if hesitant.  She also hilariously refers to middle-school boys as “grasshoppers” – they just hop around without any thought (which while a bit of a generalization, is basically true in my experience).

Indeed, things seem to be progressing nicely on most fronts in a wave of seishun exuberance – although the seitokai does seem a bit alarmed that the boys’ club might not be disbanded after all, as the club budget assumed they would be.  Touma, Yuuta and the ever-snarky Kanako have become a regular part of Maki’s household (and addicted to his cooking), and there’s definitely something in the air between Maki and Kanako, though it’s too early to say just what (or indeed in which direction Maki’s interests may fall).  Maki even manages to convince the boys that getting slaughtered in the practice match can be a valuable experience (it can), the ED rolls, and everything is rosy.  But this is Akane Kazuki…

One of the worst feelings for me as an anime viewer is the helpless urge to protect a character (the actual meaning of moe, which is a term we don’t hear as much as we used to) we know is about to be hurt.  The agony of all this is that for all Maki very much needs to be protected – in the presence of his father all of his confidence and articulateness disappears and he becomes the same small, terrified child he was.  His mother is obviously trying – a restraining order is not nothing – but she frankly seems pretty scatterbrained, and leaves Maki at risk almost all the time.  Help is not coming from her, I don’t think – which means it’s going to have to come from his friends (most obviously Touma and especially Kanako, his neighbor), which would be consistent with thr way Noein was written.  I hope it happens soon, because too many more epilogues like this are going to wipe me out.