YMMV / Stardust Telepath

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Is Yuu truly an alien? It is easy to disregard Yuu's actions as her believing that being an alien was cool, but there are moments that are not easily explained away like Yuu "teleporting" into Umika's room — which would require her to intentionally perform a crime (breaking and entering) if she was lying about her abilities.
• Common Knowledge: Thanks to some misleading advertising, on the internet the series is routinely referred to (mainly by people who haven't read/watched it) as being part of the yuri genre, even though it's published in a seinen magazine and has the exact same "It looks a little gay if you squint hard enough" Pseudo-Romantic Friendship aesthetic as its non-yuri contemporaries.
• Fan Nickname: "Bad Alien" for Yuu, due to her Heel Realization in Chapter 33.
• Friendly Fandoms: With Bocchi the Rock!, the previous Manga Time Kirara series to be adapted into an anime, having been released in the proceeding fall season. Given both series have Shrinking Violet protagonists, it shouldn't be too much of a shock.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The manga's premise and its Cerebus Syndrome, about a group of amateurs who come together to build a space rocket only to be undermined by overconfidence and incompetence, feels oddly prescient of the backlash against adventure tourism resulting from the OceanGate disaster.
  • Although this series, about girls launching homemade rockets, first started running in 2019, the anime had the extremely bad luck to air in October 2023, right as tensions flared up between Israel and Hamas. Naturally, after episode 2 aired, 4chan had a field day coming up with memes portraying Umika & co. as Hamas members launching homemade rockets at Israel.
  • In chapter 14, Matataki teases Umika by telling her that not attaching the engine properly will lead to a misfire. In chapter 21, Matataki bungles the first round of the qualifiers by causing a misfire, which leads to an intense bout of self-loathing on Matataki's part.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In one chapter, there's a flashback to Matataki's childhood where her classmates dismiss her for her otaku interests and say they want to talk about television dramas (which are considered more "mainstream" in Japan for women) instead. Come 2024, Stardust Telepath would actually get a television drama of its own.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Bona vii~!" "Mati vii~!"^Explanation Online, fans of the series — and even Rasuko Okuma herself, during her livestreams — liberally spout the Cosmic Language's cod-Esperanto call and response greeting to each other.
  • Haruno's character design has gotten quite a number of people thinking she looks almost exactly like Pekora.
• Spiritual Successor: The anime is shaping up to be one to Yuyushiki. Not only are the manga published in the same magazine, the two adaptations have the same director, writer, and composer, and Yuu, Haruno, and Matataki are all extremely similar, personality-wise, to the three main characters of Yuyushiki. Or, in the case of Yuu/Yuzuko, mutual expies of Miyako from Hidamari Sketch, which Okuma Rasuko has referred to as "my bible".
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The end of chapter 11 hypes up the girls' two-day rural field trip, implying we're in for some epic Fish out of Water comedy about four suburban girls having to deal with nature. Instead, aside from The Teaser, the first half of chapter 12 takes place inside a room brainstorming a research project and the second half is a heartfelt conversation between Umika and Yuu that could've just taken place outside the lighthouse, rendering the whole "rural field trip" aspect totally pointless.
• Tough Act to Follow: In the wake of this being the Kirara anime adaptation following the surprise Sleeper Hit of Bocchi the Rock!, it can be seen as this. While the anime was well-received, it never reached the high popularity or critical acclaim as Bocchi did in the previous fall season, and failed to hit the same surprise hit status as its predecessor, where it became overshadowed among the highly anticipated animes of its season.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Little Girls?: It's a series about cute girls building rockets and is fairly chaste, but it runs in a seinen magazine. Strangely, though it airs at Otaku O'Clock, some episodes have a disclaimer◊ about how kids should be careful when launching bottle rockets, even though no kids would be awake to see it.

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