English Dub Review: Ahiru no Sora; “Manager,” “The Boys’ Stubbornness and Girls’ Pride,” “Team,” Differing Enthusiasm”

 

 

 

Overview (Spoilers Below)

With their team seemingly assembled, the boys soon find themselves with a new manager and coach. The commotion surrounding this new addition results in a tense practice match between the boys’ and girls’ teams. 

Our Take

The tenth episode opens with the team having to witness Tobi let some rival delinquents beat him up, which is something of a repeat of the events in the previous episodes. The team will get disbanded if any of its members get into fights, so if anybody wants to start something with them, they have to sit there and take the pain. 

When this familiar scene showed up once again, I kind of lamented it at first as we had seen it before. Are they just going to keep showing this every once in a while to remind us how hard they have it? In retrospect though, not only does that not seem to be the case, but I think this scene serves as a more general reminder as well as some foreshadowing. Trying to obtain something worth having means going through some pain, even if that pain is unjust.

Sora’s very old heirloom basketball shoes get torn during practice and he goes to see if they can be repaired. At the last store he visits, he runs into Nao Nanao (nicknamed Nao Nao), a female classmate of his who he shares many similarities with. They are both short for their age and their love of basketball is slightly dampened by this fact. A healthy amount of reciprocal romantic tension emerges between them, which is quickly ruined by Sora who can’t help but be an oblivious goober about it. 

Sora’s overreaction causes him to miss the school day, which means he also misses Nao deciding to become the boys’ team manager. The presence of a female also immediately sparks awkward behavior in the rest of the boys on the team. This is played with a comedic angle, but it quickly overstays its welcome as it just becomes tired and a little unsettling.  

Nao lists her observations of the boys’ team and finds them very lacking. Over time, this conversation results in a practice match between the boys and the girls, with the losing team having to strip naked for the winner. If you thought this scenario didn’t already have enough gross teenage sexual tension, then this will surely sate the most perverted minds. Fortunately, nobody ends up stripping in the end. 

For this practice match, Nao decides to coach the girls’ team instead of the boys’, to display the boys’ weaknesses for them. What she determines is that the boys’ biggest point earners are also the members with the most distinct weaknesses. Sora is great at scoring three-pointers, but his short stature can readily be taken advantage of. And Tobi, though his footwork is immaculate, acts too much like a lone wolf and lacks teamwork. The girls employ a solid defensive formation that not only deftly exploits Sora and Tobi’s flaws but also displays that the entire boys’ team lacks cohesion and trust overall. Chiaki counters this by subbing out the problem children. His adept playmaking skills poke some holes in the girls’ defense, but the lack of overall skill and experience on the boys’ team loses them the game. 

The boys’ team’s loss results in most of the team members heavily losing motivation, which will form the majority of the plot for the rest of these episodes. 

Among all of the people involved, Nao is the one who suffers the most from this loss. This is because of her personality; she is a person who obsesses over winning to the point that she will disregard the feelings of the players. As seen through a flashback, her personality has caused rifts in a team before. She does not want to see it happen again here and decides to quit being the boys’ manager. But through a couple of convenient circumstances, Nao is warmly welcomed back onto the team.

Nao’s introduction is a little bumpy, but I think it works well enough at portraying her as a pensively enthusiastic teenager. She has a strong passion for basketball, which leads to her wanting to learn and analyze every last bit of it she could find. In the process of this though, she unintentionally upset someone close to her, which served as a shocking wake-up call. With her shortcomings revealed to her, she relented by taking all of her analytical ability and directing it back onto herself. This made her overly self-critical, which is a very cumbersome and demoralizing trait to have, especially as a teenager. 

Despite all of that, she wants to continue pursuing what she loves most. In trying to advance her basketball studies while coping with her wavering certainty in herself, she adopts some fake self-confidence. During her conversation with Madoka, she admits she was reticent act this way. But as the results show, if you truly want something to accomplish something, you have to fake it until you make it.  

With the new manager watching over them, the team decides to start preparing for their journey to the inter-high tournament. They work odd jobs to raise the money for supplies for a training camp, which takes place at the school’s gym over the extended holiday weekend. Nao wastes no time working the boys to the bone. Madoka joins in on the fun and is enlisted to help cook the meals for the team. Her culinary skills are revealed to be horrendous, resulting in some cliche purple gunk and unsavory dishes. It seemed this was just being played for a quick laugh, but the food ends up incapacitating Momoharu and sending him to the hospital. Now that he’s out of commission, will his absence at the training camp hurt the team’s performance? Though this is a legit question, I doubt it, and he will show up in the next episode just fine. This effects of this little incident are almost a bit too dire for the team. 

Sora heads to the gym after the day’s practice to do some solo training where he finds Tobi doing the same thing. On the surface, this scene is an opportunity for the two boys, who normally butt heads, to find something in common and form a bond. This has the intended positive effect but also proves to have a negative one. 

Tobi enters the locker room to find most of the other boys goofing off, acting derelict of the off-time training Nao told them to do. He chides them for this, to which they push back, saying they value enjoying their free time over getting better at basketball. This causes the team to come apart at the seams, as the members’ differing motivations drive them apart. Sora and Tobi want to dedicate all their waking time to get better, whereas Chucky and Nabe see this as a more casual activity and feel their vacation is being wasted. The two groups are unable to reconcile in the heated moment, and Chucky and Nabe decide to abandon training, potentially even leaving the team altogether. 

This exchange serves the dramatic purpose of finally taking stock of all the motivations of the characters on this freshly assembled team. We’re now able to see where everyone individually stands. This is not only important for preparation in advancing the tournament plot and establishing character dynamics, but this is also a chance to finally and properly define Chucky and Nabe. The two young men were Momoharu’s lackeys before they joined the team and up until now basically served as background characters. The other former lackey, Yasu, is also given more space in the spotlight as he receives training tips from Tobi. 

What we learn of Chucky and Nabe is that the two of them are standard, undirected high school boys who just go with the flow wherever their instincts take them. They goof off and frequently gamble their money away, living something of a precocious unstable lifestyle. They do have a righteous, if a bit questionable, set of morals though. When they see middle-schoolers harassing younger kids over who gets to use the public basketball court, they step in and try to rectify them by playing against them. However, they fail miserably against the younger boys as their basketball skills are quite lacking. It is here that perhaps they have realized the value of working hard for something. 

Meanwhile, Sora is idiosyncratically willing to bury the hatchet for the sake of the team and resolves to go find them to attempt to ameliorate. This will hopefully prove successful and the training camp can get back on track with the team stronger than ever.