This Week in Anime

Stars Align is Here and It's Hella Queer

Micchy
Y'know, Andy, now that we're nearly at the end of 2019, it's nice to finally see anime catch up a bit on the state of the discourse. I certainly didn't expect Stars Align to be so up-to-date on the important things, like the real appeal of anime boys.

Crushing on ikemen anime boys is out, it's all about bullying your faves now.

Let boys wear dresses!

SUCH terrible parents, and in such myriad ways! We've got physical abuse, emotional abuse, neglect, ignorance, you name it, every kind of crappy parent is here.

Luckily the good kids (and the trash boys) are holding on somehow, even if figuring themselves out under the watch of parents who can't or won't give them freedom is a daunting task.

Itsuki might be an acerbic jerk, but he's an acerbic jerk with a load of trauma to unpack, so I can get behind that.

Stars Align is all about these kids figuring out their identities while the people in their lives try to fit them into neat boxes - those boxes range from the roles of "perfect son" and "model student" to more nebulous ones like masculinity or binary gender altogether.

Physical violence happens to be how the Worst Dad in the series exerts power over his kid, but the other parents in the series have their own ways of putting pressure on their kids, albeit less overt or incontrovertibly abusive. And the worst part is that it's not always entirely deliberate!

The poor kid is convinced his parents took on a burden when adopting him, so he's trying to prove himself worth their while. As far as we know, his folks are nothing but kind to him, but kids like Rintaro feel they need to earn basic respect and tear themselves up when they feel they don't deserve it. And the knowledge that his bio mom couldn't care for him makes him all the more aware that he's a responsibility that other people chose to take on.

In theory, the kid deserves to know the truth, if only for healthcare reasons. Rintaro's real problem is the stigma against being adopted. He sees himself as a burden that his adoptive parents volunteered to take on, but honestly, that's not that different from how biological parents decide to have a kid? Blood ties don't make a parent's responsibility to a child any more real, and the lack thereof doesn't invalidate a parent's job. Whether by doing the sex or going through bureaucracy to adopt, a parent who chooses to raise a kid has the same duties to fulfill.

I just want to shake the kid by the shoulders and tell him he's not an investment! That's something I myself grew up believing, that I somehow owed it to my family to be successful because they spent all that time and money raising me. But while it's totally fair to be grateful for the love and labor, it's ultimately not a kid's responsibility to prove themselves worth the effort their parents chose to put in. It's never a kid's choice to be born, and for parents to pretend otherwise to exert control is emotional abuse, plain and simple.

Yeah like, I totally acknowledge that parenthood is hard, and that parents are complicated human beings with their own faults and weaknesses. But children aren't simply extensions of their parents but independent human beings with their own needs and wants, and they deserve to be treated as such.

I'm sure she justifies it to herself as all for Nao's own good, but it's really telling when she lets it slip that she found the club's performance embarrassing. That's not a good reason to go all PTO mom on the school's administration!

No wonder Nao's stress-scribbling instead of paying attention to club meetings.

"How can a barbecue be fun without booze" is such a wine mom Karen thing to say.

Truly priceless that her supposed "concern" is overwork when she insists that Nao study every free moment.

Hopefully off getting mental health treatment somewhere? Odds of that are low given the stigma around mental illness, but y'know, just a suggestion.

She's a garden-variety ojou-sama with two generation of women who can't leave their kids alone preceding her.

The thing with this kind of inter-generational struggle, though, is that it doesn't really stop. It might be amusing to her to watch her mom and grandma at each others' throats right in the moment, but once Grandma's out of the picture I'm certain Kinuyo Ririha Kaori and her mom are gonna replicate the same dynamic to some extent.

Our favorite gremlin is finally admitting to herself that she actually has aspirations beyond dunking on the boys and mooching off their dinner (and unwittingly being a trans ally).

She's basically made a #brand of ironic self-deprecation out of fear - it's easier to accept failure and rejection when you pretend you don't care - but some people absolutely see right through her act. Not coincidentally, those that do are also huge losers and social outcasts.

Like me, Mitsue is pretty much allergic to sincerity but is actually a big ol' softie under the veneer of irony.

Also literally me.

Ah yes, gender crisis Yu.

Knowing that Maki was basically raised by a single mom and a trans man does help to contextualize how he's so chill about everything. He's seen people struggle in a bunch of ways, and he takes all those observations into perspective when he meets people whose experiences differ from his own. While I would've preferred to hear Shō's story directly from him rather than filtered through Maki's interpretation of it, it is incredibly heartening that not only is Stars Align familiar with how the transgender community talks about this stuff, but also acknowledges that for some kids, questioning their gender or sexuality is just another aspect of figuring out who they are.

Maki doesn't have any hangups regarding his gender identity, but the important thing he tells Yu is that it's perfectly okay not to be 100% sure about it, especially at their age. He has the perspective to know that at 13, they have plenty of time to figure out what they want to be - what gender they are, what career path they want to pursue, what makes them happy, all of it.

This scene goes so far to normalize being LGBTQ+ as not an inherently political statement, but as a lived reality that some people grapple with and some people don't. It's not any more "adult" or agenda-driven than any other identity crisis that kids face; being LGBTQ+ isn't a choice (though participating in communities formed around shared identities is). That is, trans people don't have identical struggles to cis people, but they're not inherently like, cryptids for other people to deal with; they're here, they exist.

The kids can do a lot to support each other! But yeah, that only goes so far; I'm fairly sure that two 8th graders wouldn't be able to hold their own in a fistfight against a grown ass man.

And it's super nice of Mitsue to make a scene to keep scrutiny off of Yu, even if she doesn't realize she's being an ally. But she wouldn't have to if not for transphobia altogether.

Protecc this gem of a trash child, she's trying so hard to be shitty.

I mean, Maki has the right idea.

Thankfully we always have more dumbasses to distract us from the pain. Can I just say I adore how Shingo and Tsubasa's big strategy is to be so obnoxious that their opponents can't focus.

Meanwhile our bosses just look at us like