YMMV / Carole & Tuesday

• Arc Fatigue: While the Mars Brightest arc has its moments, more than a few people complained that it brought way too little plot or character progression to justify its 6-episode length and killed the show's momentum, on top of cementing Carole and Tuesday as Pinball Protagonists.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Judging by comments on YouTube, there's a rather distressingly high number of people who still want Cybelle despite knowing how she is.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Most of the Mars Brightest contestants are pretty popular because of their backstories, personalities and singing ability. Standing out among them is GGK and the Mermaid Sisters.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Those that did not like how the series ended, or how it handled its political themes, have compared the performance of "MOTHER" to the infamous video of celebrities singing "Imagine" amid the COVID-19 Pandemic.
• Les Yay: Carole and Tuesday, big time. Tuesday moves in with Carole the day they meet and they immediately start spending all their free time together. Probably the biggest example is what looks suspiciously like a Falling-in-Love Montage in episode 3, which includes coffee dates, Carole teaching Tuesday to skateboard, a Sleep Cute, and a bathroom scene that has Carole brushing her teeth in a towel while Tuesday is in the tub.
• LGBT Fanbase: Unsurprisingly, considering the astonishing number of LGBT+ characters in the series, from Marie and her fiancée to the bisexual Ertegun to the apparently intersex and transgender Dahlia, the androgynous Cybelle, the ambiguously gay Pyotr, the asexual Tao or the Mermaid Sisters who claim to be "neither men nor women". Plus Desmond, initially a gay man who then came to identify as non-binary after being affected by Martian Androgyny. The two main characters, however, end the series without any confirmation of any romantic relationship happening to them. Carole doesn't show any type of romantic feelings for anyone, not even for her childhood friend (though it’s implied Ezekiel had strong feelings for her with the song he wrote and filmed before he was deported to Earth) and her strongest feelings were shown to be for Tuesday. Tuesday herself fell in love with an older man, only to be comforted by Carole as soon as she saw that she didn't have a chance. It's left open to interpretation if Tuesday is bisexual or not.
• Magnificent Bastard: Tao is an elusive, multi-talented genius with a background in neuroscience who now seeks to create soul-touching music, and becomes Angela Carpenter's songwriter-producer. Putting her through tortuous training sessions, Tao nevertheless shows shrewd analytical assistance, winning her a singing contest by assessing a judge's mood and later catching her stalker by predicting his behavior. Arrested for prior illegal human experimentation, Tao bails himself out and exposes the corrupt CEO who incriminated him, later revealing to Angela they are both Artificial Humans, then encourages her to start singing again, before escaping.
• Memetic Mutation: The previously-mentioned Mermaid Sisters' song, actually called "Galactic Mermaid" aka "Fucking Bullshit", spread around the anime community like fire following the episode it premiered in, often accompanied by comments like "my brain during an exam" or "Mermaid Sisters should have won." And of course, fans of the wrestling web video series Botchamania immediately associated it with The Iron Sheik's famous soundbite.
• Refrain from Assuming: The Mermaid Sisters' song title is actually "Galactic Mermaid". Good luck remembering that when people are more or less thinking the name came from its catchy lyric: "Fucking Bullshit".
• Superlative Dubbing: The English dub features a solid cast all around, but the leads are particular standouts. Jeannie Tirado and Brianna Knickerbocker maintain the duo's heartfelt, playful dynamic and inject a lot of soul into their spoken dialogue. The casting not only keeps their singing and spoken dialogue with similar vocal ranges to avert Singing Voice Dissonance, but flows smoothly between the musical numbers.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Angela is set up to be the leads' rival. Outside of some snide comments, the leads and Angela barely interact, and the most acknowledgement they get from the other is Gus occasionally telling the girls that Angela's songs are doing well on the charts. Carole and Tuesday have almost no impact on Angela's character arc and she only sings with them after her arc finishes, and she provides no pressure outside of being a rival - which the leads don't really care about.
  • In the finale, Tao reveals that he and Angela are Designer Babies and possibly related. Despite being a big twist, this has absolutely no bearing on the story and is dropped immediately.
• Values Resonance: Within a few years of the show airing, AI-generated music of the kind highlighted in the show became a reality, and with it, many of the show's associated concerns - such as singers being rendered obsolete by AI models of their voices, or whether AI music counts as "real" music at all - were catapulted into the mainstream.

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