Anime: Hanebado! n3p5g

Review
Hanebado! is, at first glance, the default sports shounen. It gets a gifted protagonist, school clubs, high school tournaments, and a random sport to boot which doesn't really matter for the tale to be told. In fact, Hanebado! is so distant from its sport that it doesn't even bother explaining the rules, competition's formats, tactics, or anything, not even telling the audience the objective of the sport: which is not letting the shuttlecock touch the ground.

That's a reason for that though. Before being a shounen sport's show, Hanebado! is about terrible parenting. Yes, you read it right: terrible parenting.

This goes towards Hanesaki Ayano, a genius bton player who is taking a break from the sport as she enters high school. There, however, she meets a previous opponent whom she completely beaten half an year earlier. Ayano has a lot of problems though, the major one being her absent mother, who is a great professional player, and a trauma with the sport and her swinging mood whenever she gets into a match.

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1. That's... deep?
   Surprisingly, yes. Hanebado! is quick to present us Ayano as a person faking her happiness and being a fucking asshole, which makes sense when she has a mother who left her years ago with no reason whatsoever and right after Ayano had just lost a match. The show gets this duality from Ayano and tries to make us hate her from being a cocky genius yet cheer for her for having such a dreadly awful mother. It doesn't help her that her father is not ever mentioned in the show and it gets even worse later when she learns her mother is having a sweet time overseas teaching other girls to play bton while not even texting her damn daughter.
   
   Seriously, fuck her mother
   God. She is damn awful as a parent. While the show makes that clear at some points, it also tries to give us a "oh, she did that so her daughter would mature by herself!", I tell you fuck that! She left her daughter right as she reached puberty, she cut all communication with her, and left a young girl by herself to figure out why she was abandonded right after a lost match. This layout is decently explored in the show's thirteen episodes, yet it is sadly sugarcoated with shounen spirit and love for the sport, which is a shame, because it could give room to a much more intricate, mature, and damn awesome tale about absent parents and adolescence.
   
   Oh, it's about bton too
   Well, the school has a club, the club has a rival for young Ayano, and the people there serve to help the girl develop from being an asshole to be a friendly teenager. There is also a few other rivals in the tale for our protagonist, one of them having a very powerful reason to be in the show but sadly being left to the sidelines more than she should. As for these few episodes, we get a decent amount of matches, from Ayano's to her schoolmates', especially Aragaki, which ends up being sort of a co-protagonist with the spirit of a male shounen lead.
   
   It's tricky though
   Hanebado! is mostly about girls and the reason becomes obvious during the first set of episodes. There are plenty of scenes happening as the girls are changing, boobs bouncing from every sort of movement, and even some pantsu shots here and there. This sadly detracts the overall experience, especially because the second half is basically void of those things and much more on the rivalry and match tension as we would expect from a sport's show. At the same time, being about girls means a lot of them have much more complex and different personalities from what normally happens to a male crew, especially with Ayano and her mood swings and trauma, which is a complete departure from male shounen leads in this kind of show.
   

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Comments
Hanebado! can be a surprise. Those expecting a show about sports can get a somewhat lesser experience that falls short of some great ones such as Haikyuu!, yet what makes it shine amongst the competition is the fact this is a deeper exploration of parenting and the consequences of that on a teenager. Sadly though, this interesting point is just sugar-coated through the episodes and the final result is the same we have always seem: loving the sport is what matters and high school students must make the most of their pitiful lives because they end right when they become responsible adults making the gears of society work for the rest of their days.

A sad lack of use, but still a great refresher for a sports show. If you want something with less stupid jokes and more real sports vibe and drama, perhaps Hanebado! is the right thing for you.