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REVIEW: Asteroid in Love




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Engineering Nerd



Joined: 24 Apr 2008
Posts: 897
Location: Southern California
PostPosted: Tue Jul 14, 2020 4:36 pm Reply with quote
Thank you for the review that almost perfectly echoes my feeling towards the show.

I like the concept, but I would love the show instead of merely “liking it” if there is some coherence and consistency on the story themes. A slice-of-life story does not necessarily mean the stories are disjointed and pacing is all over the place, because that would reduce the overall emotional impact of this otherwise touching and inspirational story (senpai’s graduation episode is the chief example of this)

Since the anime has well pass the source manga progress, which made the rush pacing of this adaptation even more confusing and nonsensical.
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Dark Mac



Joined: 17 May 2008
Posts: 309
PostPosted: Tue Jul 14, 2020 5:09 pm Reply with quote
I enjoyed this a lot less than most cute girl SoL series (I watch almost all of these). I felt the character development was really lacking compared to most of those, and the comedy wasn't there to make up for it. I wanted to like these characters, and I wanted there to be romance, but there wasn't much there to like, sadly.
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Sisyphusson66



Joined: 04 Dec 2018
Posts: 96
PostPosted: Tue Jul 14, 2020 5:44 pm Reply with quote
While I think I may hold a more favorable view of Asteroid in Love, the issues presented in the review are correct, especially after the cultural festival. Before that point I thought the it was definitely a stronger piece within cgdct anime. It was nice to see the girls genuinely liking their science rather than it coming off as just a prop for them to interact with cutely. I also didn't mind the more standard slice of life sequences in large part due to the characters' personalities and interactions.

While the parts I viewed positively are a constant throughout, the pacing and actions/consequences of the story afterwards was a problem. Nothing was allowed to breath, and things got awkward in some instances near the end, even though the ideas and sequences work fine and are good in theory (i.e.spoiler[Ao's moving debacle and Mira crashing the Shining Star Challenge]. Again, it trips over itself to move the plot forward after the cultural festival that just seems to be a disservice to the characters, old and new. While it was never enough to derail my overall enjoyment of the series, there is no doubt that these issues could hurt someone else's opinion and experience with Asteroid in Love.
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Megiddo



Joined: 24 Aug 2005
Posts: 8360
Location: IL
PostPosted: Tue Jul 14, 2020 7:35 pm Reply with quote
I really liked how the geology and astronomy girls mixed and how they each were able to learn more about the other discipline. I'll never understand why people want more high stakes drama and whatnot in these cute girls/SoL shows. Also the idea that the loss of possessions and treasured photographs isn't enough cause the impact it did is quite insulting. Maybe the reviewer didn't gather around and look at old family photo albums when they were younger but I can easily see why a little girl would be distraught over that.
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Neko-sensei



Joined: 19 Jan 2007
Posts: 283
PostPosted: Tue Jul 14, 2020 9:17 pm Reply with quote
I prescribe a dozen doses of Aria followed by a course of Hidamari Sketch and supplemented with a package of Tanaka-kun is Always Listless, with the course to be continued until faith in the artistic potential of slice-of-life low-stakes stories is restored.

****

Asteroid in Love is not a very good show, but I think we have to be very careful with the mentality that plot progression (as if plots can "progress!"—the plot is the road down which the characters travel, and it is they who make progress) is more meaningful than spending time with characters we like, or that every part of a tale must contribute to a single narrative thrust. In fact, these Draconian concepts are what give us modern, endlessly-serialized "TV" and form the mentality behind bland franchise films and the general homogenization of all entertainment. It hurts my heart to see them held up as the gold standards of "good" storytelling, as if storytelling were something that could be facilely classed as "correct" or "incorrect."

Are audiences so poor in imagination that we require constant crisis moments to understand the nature of the characters? Is our attention span so short that we can't follow a story unless every moment is spent breathlessly moving on to the next crisis, and we must constantly be reassured that we "understand the stakes?" Are we so lacking in empathy that we can feel only for someone who has been orphaned or abused or had her dreams shattered, and can't be bothered to worry about how people react to the small triumphs and joys of acing a quiz or losing a family album? How on Earth are we qualified to judge what "real stakes" are when every human's experience of life is different? If we deny that the quotidian and the "pointless" are worth paying careful attention to, we also deny the majority of our own lived experience. Art has the unique capacity to take us outside ourselves and allow us to look at our own lives reflectively, but it can't do that if we attempt to pigeonhole it into a single rigid format.

Imagine how much poorer the world would be if Beowulf were stripped of all its "extraneous" stories about other kings and other clans, if the hero were forced simply to march to the dragon's lair and not given the time to pause and tell the heartbreaking, but tangential, story of a king who has lost his only son ("In care and sorrow he sees in his son's dwelling the hall of feasting, the resting places swept by the wind robbed of laughter—the riders sleep, mighty men gone down into the dark; there is no sound of harp, no mirth in those courts, such as once there were"). Imagine a world in which Gravity's Rainbow built to a single enormous climax instead of settling into a dozen unconnected tales—the whole message of the work would be lost. Imagine a world in which Godot actually arrives! Or in which 2001: A Space Odyssey limited itself to 90 minutes so as to tell its story more "efficiently!"

I for one believe that discursive, messy, low-stakes stories are a beautiful means of helping us appreciate our own discursive, messy, low-stakes lives. (If you believe that your own life is tightly-controlled, well-put-together, or high-value, then you are either a sociopath or a very dangerous individual.) Of course, stories of this type can be told badly, as is the case for most of Asteroid in Love, but that does not mean that they should not be told at all. I should add that there is also room for taughtly-wound, driving narratives in this world! Such stories serve an important escapist function, allowing us to imagine a world in which everything actually does fit together. We should have every kind of tale available to us. But ultimately all stories are about people (or at least the world as people see it), not, as the creative writing class myth goes, about conflict. To reject the low-"stakes" (whatever that means!), the meandering, the slow-paced, and the subtle entirely is to restrict our imaginations, curtail our empathy, and throttle our own spirits.
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AholePony



Joined: 04 Jun 2015
Posts: 330
Location: Arizona
PostPosted: Tue Jul 14, 2020 9:20 pm Reply with quote
Dark Mac wrote:
I enjoyed this a lot less than most cute girl SoL series (I watch almost all of these). I felt the character development was really lacking compared to most of those, and the comedy wasn't there to make up for it. I wanted to like these characters, and I wanted there to be romance, but there wasn't much there to like, sadly.


I agree with you that the comedy was lacking in this series. With the wondering the plot does before it gets to the camp part at the end, better writing around the jokes likely would have made the rapport amongst the cast much stronger. Absent of consistent laughs I also found myself checking my phone during episodes and feeling a little bored much like the reviewer did.
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Engineering Nerd



Joined: 24 Apr 2008
Posts: 897
Location: Southern California
PostPosted: Tue Jul 14, 2020 10:40 pm Reply with quote
Megiddo wrote:
I really liked how the geology and astronomy girls mixed and how they each were able to learn more about the other discipline. I'll never understand why people want more high stakes drama and whatnot in these cute girls/SoL shows. Also the idea that the loss of possessions and treasured photographs isn't enough cause the impact it did is quite insulting. Maybe the reviewer didn't gather around and look at old family photo albums when they were younger but I can easily see why a little girl would be distraught over that.


Also @Neko-sensei

It's NOT about drama or story/narrative progression, Asteroid in Love suffers some serious pacing problem (which should not happen in a Slice-of-Life series) that prevents many people (myself included) to be fully emotionally invested into those characters and thus some touching scenes lack emotional punch. I like this series as it is, but given how much I love the subject matter on a personal level, this series could become much better with more careful handling on the scripts department.

The pacing of this series is uncharacteristically quick for its genre, that may seem like a good thing on paper, but in Asteroid's case, it causes little time to settle-in and appreciate the character interactions, therefore ultimately left many viewers out of the show due to quick tonal shift (the cultural festival episode is the prime example of this, I should be in tears of the senpai graduation moment, yet the anime adaptation decides to leave it in the middle of the episode and quickly gloss it over in a workmanlike manner)

I am never an advocate for panel-to-panel straight adaptation, because that is not how faithfulness work; but Asteroid in Love's quick pacing (can you believe how many chapters they cram in an episode and in the end they already finish adapting everything in the source material) has hurt the series especially in the immersion department, and frankly, that should not happen in a slice-of-life series, NEVER.
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maximilianjenus



Joined: 29 Apr 2013
Posts: 2858
PostPosted: Wed Jul 15, 2020 10:28 am Reply with quote
Sisyphusson66 wrote:
While I think I may hold a more favorable view of Asteroid in Love, the issues presented in the review are correct, especially after the cultural festival.


I pretty much hold the same opinion; funny thing you mention the school festival, because it had the most interesting omake of the series, one club had a battle to the death event and I have been curious what it was about.


Neko-sensei wrote:
I prescribe a dozen doses of Aria followed by a course of Hidamari Sketch

Hidamari sketch has this weird climax in season 3(?) where yuno and miyako finally become girlfriends in uch an accidental, yet elaborated and natural way it comes as a weird shock. I have yet to see a show that does a love confession as good as that one.
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Yuvelir



Joined: 06 Jan 2015
Posts: 1529
PostPosted: Wed Jul 15, 2020 4:35 pm Reply with quote
I guess it was a mistake to set discovering an asteroid as a goal for the girls so prominently because it absolutely wasn't the goal for the series, which is more concerned about connections, both interpersonal and between science fields. But rather than all this the issue is really... time. Pacing on one side, but the passage of time too. For a show about high school, the whole year going by so unceremoniously was weird. Specially so because Mika and Monroe were going through their respective character arcs and... suddenly they're gone but the arcs are somewhat still going? That was weird.

But ultimately I like the Kirara flavour too much to care (last year was rough, just Machikado Mazoku and WataTen as a kinda close substitute), but I'd still say Koisuru Asteroid but slightly above average for the family? Although definitely not in the highest tier. Its passion for its pet sciences and how they interact was just so contagious.

maximilianjenus wrote:
Hidamari sketch has this weird climax in season 3(?) where yuno and miyako finally become girlfriends in uch an accidental, yet elaborated and natural way it comes as a weird shock. I have yet to see a show that does a love confession as good as that one.

... I'm too tired today to parse this.
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stefand



Joined: 24 Mar 2015
Posts: 53
Location: Germany
PostPosted: Fri Jul 17, 2020 2:49 am Reply with quote
I overall liked the series, but i also agreee, that the pacing was strange. They sometimes used half an episode on topics where they could (and perhaps should) have spent several episodes.

Yuvelir wrote:
I guess it was a mistake to set discovering an asteroid as a goal for the girls so prominently because it absolutely wasn't the goal for the series, [...].


Here i disagree. Yes, the discovering of the asteroid was not the goal of the series, but the goal of dicovering itself was one of the main themes. The show was for a big part about setting goals, even big and nearly unattainable ones, and how these goals influence our lifes.

spoiler[They did not discover an asteroid, and that itself was remarkable. Even the viewer could not know guess untill the end, if they would achieve their goal. In a show with the usual drama mechanism, they would have found one during their last observation night. That they did not makes the show more interesting for me.
And it was interesting to see, how they went forward after this. They still have their goal and having this goal will shape their further life.]
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Cardcaptor Takato



Joined: 27 Jan 2018
Posts: 4787
PostPosted: Fri Jul 17, 2020 11:40 pm Reply with quote
I personally like this show because it was a fluffy cute slice of life show and that it didn't have too many emotionally dramatic moments, especially with how stressful real life is nowadays, I appreciate these shows as an escape from all the real world stress and it makes me happy. These kind of shows exist mainly to be calming fun and I think it would clash with the light hearted tone of the show if it suddenly went into this dark traumatic moment out of the blue when this is a cute silly show about girls running a school science club. I like the show's focus on science and that they gave equal time to both the astronomy and geology clubs and it was fun just to see how excited the girls were to learn more about science. I do wish the show pushed the yuri undertones further but I've seen enough of these kind of CGDCT shows that I wasn't expecting it to go further with it as again these shows are mainly meant to be escapist fluff and to sell character goods to otaku. But I think if you're looking for a CGDCT show that has more emotional substance, you might try something like A Place Further Than The Universe. I also really like Laid Back Camp. And personally I found Comic Girls to be under-rated.
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FireChick
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Joined: 26 Mar 2006
Posts: 2385
Location: United States
PostPosted: Wed Aug 12, 2020 6:11 pm Reply with quote
Personally, I honestly liked this show for what it was. Although I do agree that the way it solves some really significant conflicts that should be given more time and substance is way too convenient. Especially with Ao almost moving away. I mean, I'm pretty sure IRL no family would ever just let their high school age child move in with their classmate, even if it was a friend that they really trust, just to get out of moving to a new place. I know that if I tried something like this with my parents at that age, they'd have shot it down immediately, especially because I'm autistic and they'd worry about me like hell spending months, if not years, out of concern for my safety.
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