Crowdsourcing No Longer Enough, Bring Back Renaissance Style Patronage

Back in 2019, in my somewhat odd mission to watch a variety of sports anime despite having absolutely zero interest in athletics myself, I end up becoming enthralled with Stars Align, which focused on the complicated lives of an all-boys high school soft tennis team. Now, I am completely unable to tell you anything about soft tennis other than it looks mostly like tennis, but I can tell that Stars Align was one of the most brutally effective examples of vignette character studies. The 12-episode single core season managed to give deep dives into the lives of the eight players, student coach, and friend of the team while managing to tackle gender identity, trans issues, the stigma of adoption in Japan, parental neglect, parental abuse, and more which all ultimately corresponding to the one of the most heart wrenching cliffhangers I had seen in the last five years that to this day and that was it.

As it turns out, Kazuki Azane, the director of the series, originally planned for the story to be a single 24-episode season before the production decided to cut it in half at the last minute. Rather than upend the entire story, they gambled and kept the original version hoping it would get enough traction to wrap up, but that never happened and the closest thing we got was a three-and-a-half minute movie that vaguely showed where the characters were two years after the fact, and I remain sad about it.

Stories have to end. At some poi…