天下制覇

I know someone who's going to be dead from stress by age 25.

Impressions:

Lord. The melodrama is cranked up to eleven here. Outside the weirdly overanimated opening segment, which is what about 95% of the promos were apparently, and also bore as much resemblance to actual badminton as Dragonball bears to judo, it was moping 24/7. The only time it wasn't a character angrily clenching their teeth, lamenting the angst that badminton was bringing to their lives was when someone was hitting the male lead for 'comic' relief. And good god, they spent almost 15 minutes solely on how the spikey haired one is a frustrated self-destructive jackass. Her entire deal was obvious after about twent seconds, but let's spend two thirds of the episode hammering it in over and over. It only gets to the motivational part at the absolute very end in about a ten second speech from a random member of the peanut gallery. You'd only need to cut out like .1% of the episode and it would be nothing but how much badminton and all the people who play it suck. I highly doubt that's what they were going for.

Even for a sports drama, it was plodding and excessively angsty, made worse for being based on high school badminton. You've got real work to do to be this deadly serious about that, and this did none of it, no doubt wanting to hold back so they can share tragic stories about friendship later. As far as this episode was concerned though, it's just wallowing piled on top of more wallowing, without giving any reason to want either of the main characters to succeed. They're in a sports show. That's apparently supposed to be reason enough. And I should mention that they explicitly do the thing where they call out "You mean acting like this is a sports show?" at the end.