So today we’re finishing up ‘Reality in Anime’ week with a decidedly unreal anime. ^_^

Umika is a high school student with severe social anxiety -so severe that she feels completely alienated from her fellow humans. She’s unable to respond even when a classmate is kind to her and bids her a good morning. Umika avoids most of her classmates, and their banal concerns, spending her time wishing she could meet an alien, for surely she would be able to talk to one!

When classmate Akeuchi Yuu declares herself an alien – and announces that she can read Umika’s mind when their foreheads touch – Umika’s life begins to change. Last spring I found time to read the first volume of Hoshikuzu Telepath manga ahead of this season’s anime…and I found some things that surprised me.

So now that the anime has premiered, what do I think of Stardust Telepath, streaming on Crunchyroll?

Well, to begin with I should note that, as Sean Gaffney so cogently put it, I don’t Kirara as well as I used to. I have a harder time with extremely high-pitched voices, and while I have found value in watching cute girls doing things cutely, series centered around people with severe social anxiety make me very anxious. But I also knew that the story wasn’t going to stay centered on Umika’s anxiety. So I cleared my slate and began to watch. As I predicted, Episode 1 was a little rough going, but by the end of Episode 2, as the story shifted away from how crippled by social anxiety Umika was, to the ways people around were making her feel included… my own anxiety about her anxiety lessened.

Additionally, in conversation on the Okazu Discord, at least one person felt that Umika’s character read autism-coded to them, especially in her interactions with the teacher, who treats her like she’s lazy or unmotivated when that’s not the issue at all. I also resonated with Umika’s desire to find a solution to her loneliness outside human society, although my particular forms of escapism in adolescence never included me wanting to be in those worlds, they were nonetheless critical to my surviving my teens. ^_^

So, at first we are presented with Umika, who is having a very hard functioning in the society of school. When Yuu arrives and is everything that Umika is not, it could have been a devastating blow to Umika, but instead Yuu reaches past Umika’s inability to communicate and makes it easy for her to get her ideas across. This theme is an important one, as new personalities are introduced in future chapters. Whe class president Takagi Haruno uses friendship with Yuu to be able to create a friendship with Umika, we can see the power of making a place for people to be themselves. None of the three girls have to be something they are not, but all of them can still be friends.

It very much seems that the direction the anime is taking is “amateur rocketry is fun!” which is a terrific focus for this series. Since I have not yet read the rest of the manga, one hopes that her interest in rockets will actually one catapult Umika to the stars in the form of JAXA, the Japanese space agency. But even without that focus, this story is off to a good start, despite a very difficult premise for a launchpad.

The animation is utterly not to my taste, although the OP is quite lovely. Still I have hope that we’ll get some shots of rockets reaching new heights.

Ratings:

Art – 6
Story – Begins at a 5, hits 7 by Ep. 2 and has potential for more
Characters – I’m not even sure what I think of them yet, let’s say 7
Service –  3 Not as such, but skirt/legs/beutt shots and pan-ups do get on my nerves
Yuri – 1 as of now. This series is always on Yuri lists, so I’ll trust

Overall – 7 seems like a good place to start

I have hope that this story will be about making friends with neurodivergent classmates and building hope along with rockets.