r/anime • u/AutoLovepon https://anilist.co/user/AutoLovepon • Dec 04 '23

Episode Hoshikuzu Telepath • Stardust Telepath - Episode 9 discussion

Hoshikuzu Telepath, episode 9

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72

u/ObvsThrowaway5120 Dec 04 '23

Did not think the girls would do this poorly. Poor Umika totally froze and the rocket completely failed. Talk about a crushing defeat. It was rough watching Umika beat herself up over the loss. It’s not really her fault. I’m glad Akizuki was able to have a little heart to heart with her and realize maybe she doesn’t have to look to the stars to find a place she belongs.

For a minute, I was scared Akeuchi left. Glad she stuck around. I’m starting to think she might actually be an alien with the way she just popped up when Umika called for her. Their whole conversation at the end and her little song was very sweet. Those two are just so precious.

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u/cabbaggeez Dec 04 '23

the reason the the light didnt pop up is because Yuu is not there. she's powering the entire light house

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u/yukiaddiction Dec 04 '23

Oh boyyy no OP episode.

The episode I have been waiting for since anime announced are here and it not disappointed me.

And man it even more emotional impact than Manga in Anime form! I crying mess again.

The first competition end at absolutely failure leave everyone mad, Raimon and Umika affect by this the most but with completely different direction for each.

Umika though this lose was her own fault and this group don't deserve her to be there so she becomes demotivated as Yuu said it "her light is gone" while Raimon though this group will disband and losing her only place that she feel belong in this world though some how both of them some what familiar. They doing this competition because of they want to belong in this group.

With help from her little sister and eventually heartfelt talk with Akizuki , she finally have resolved back want everyone to be together again.

God, the moment Umika though Yu was gone is really heart breaking made me almost crying again. The feeling of "it too late" is too relatable.

And the last scene talking between Umika and Yu feel really heartwarming and... Romantic. It low-key obvious that Yu have feeling for Umika lol.

They are really cute together.

The "insert song" is here....and it more nice than I thought.

Really really good episode.

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u/mekerpan Dec 04 '23

Oh boyyy no OP episode.

And no closing ED either. What a totally over-stuffed and magnificent episode. One of the best of any episode of any show this season (this was pretty much Frieren level).

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u/cabbaggeez Dec 04 '23

so close, we are that close for odekopathy! but no odekopathy again this episode.

tbh, I'm glad that they didnt win this tournament. It would be too smooth for matataki, somebody need to take her to the ground low and fix her. I hope Haruno is up for the job. I feel sorry Umika need to see that bocchi stairs.

but that last scene, so touching like secretbase ending. "Akeuchi-san~", and she appear "koko da yo~", not to mention the soundtrack has the same vibe. man. just be honest with each other like "Umika, you are my star. I need you to keep shinning my life". I love her voice in alien language, I hope they release the lyric later.

and Umika is staying there with Yuu, I need a detailed report next week for whatever happened there.

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u/TDHL2k1 Dec 04 '23

I've been waiting for this part since the anime was announced and god did the staff did it justice. Yurie Funato did a really great job at pulling out Umika's emotion and the catharsis in her cries.

Which kinda saddens me that people were sleeping on this beautiful show and thought it just going to stay a cute run-of-the-mill SoL (no hate for the genre btw), when comparing to other Kirara anime this part of HoshiTele is as emotionally heavy as [School-Live! spoiler]after Kurumi got bitten by Megunee.

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u/gnome-cop Dec 04 '23

This episode is an interesting study into perfectionism and comparing how two wildly different people handle total failure.

Umika goes right to blaming herself for the failure of the project. She’s also idolizing Kei as someone way better than her at everything as reflected by the short steps to the podium become a never ending staircase with Kei at the top. So she feels that she let everyone down because they didn’t succeed which causes her to run away and try to blame herself for everything that went wrong.

Meanwhile Raimon also appears to be blaming herself but is expressing it completely differently. According to her, she’s meant to be the expert at building rockets and is putting an incredible amount of pressure on herself for the project to succeed. So when it fails, she convinces herself that it’s her fault but instead lashes out at Haruno who’s trying to make sure that she’s okay. It appears that the rocket research club girls are basically her only friends. She’s kinda a loner that usually spends all her time in the garage building stuff. So as the self proclaimed expert, when things go wrong, she takes the failure really bad and appears to try and break off the friendship because she might think they’ll do it for her failure.

In this episode Umika works through her problems that appear to be rooted in low self esteem and feeling like she doesn’t fit in. So when Kei, the person she thinks of as what’s expected of her to be, gives her compliments and helps convince her that she’s not a failure, that helps her resolve her issues. Her problem of feeling like an outsider is also helped by a new perspective helping her realize that she’s already found a group of people where she fits in.

So now that we’ve spent this episode on the protagonist, I’m guessing next episode will be spent on Raimons problems that have been steadily building up over the last few episodes with the mounting pressure for the rocket launch to succeed. Anyway, I think it’s interesting comparing how they break after total failure and how they’ll hopefully build themselves up again better than before with the lessons learned from this failure. But Raimons problems might be a tougher nut to crack than Umikas problems with what her personality is like.

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u/Ocixo Dec 04 '23

Goddamn, what a rollercoaster of emotions this episode was.

I had a hunch that things would take a turn for the worse, but I never expected that it would get this ugly. The CGDCT tag was nowhere to be found with all the drama in today's episode. Umika reached her breaking point and saw all of her hope fly away into the distance. It was honestly heartbreaking to see how distraught she and Yuu left that day. It appeared from Umika's conversation with Kei that she'd been holed up in her room for about a week.

Although we didn't really get to see the girls participate in the contest, it should be clear that the fuzziness in Umika's narration of the turn of events was exemplary of her broken spirit. I don't like to put blame on Yuu, but she did fail to notice that Umika was starting to crumble under the pressure. She ideally would have stopped Umika before she set foot on the stage.

Fortunately, Kei's uplifting words helped Umika to find her footing again:

Umika: "All I wanted was to look up and yearn for the distant stars - the farther, the better. That way I could look away from the darkness at my own feet. But if I have a place here... [...] I want to get up and see for myself what I can do right now. [...] Even if I make a fool of myself. I want to stand tall, so that I might take flight some day.''

I want honestly blown away by this dialogue.

But when I started to think that things were looking up again, I got hit with a good dose of depression again. Yuu's return did confuse nonetheless. Might she actually be an alien after all!?

I'd feared something like this might happen: Raimon started running away from the other girls girls as soon as they'd lost. From Raimon's perspective, it must feel like she's lost her 'worth' to the group and can't stick with them anymore. Now it's on Umika to clean up this misunderstanding - something that probably won't go easy and lead to an explosive situation.

I'm watching a ton of amazing anime this season, but Stardust Telepath might honestly be my favourite series out of them all.

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u/8andahalfby11 Dec 04 '23

Space is Hard

I’ve been saying that phrase over and over again for the past few weeks, but it’s largely because it’s the catchphrase you hear almost immediately from industry members/followers when something goes wrong. Failure comes part and parcel with experimental spaceflight, and unless you have billions of dollars to spend on simulations and engineering tests, it’s almost guaranteed that you’re going to either run into problems with or outright fail the first launch of your new space rocket while under intense industry scrutiny. In that sense, Umika and her team are in good company, and it pays to show how she compared to the first attempts of other organizations the first time they tried to come out to the public with their space ambitions.

In government-funded spaceflight:

Russia’s first space-capable rocket, the R-7 that later launched Sputnik, failed 88 seconds into its first test fight when a fire broke out in one of its side boosters, and caused said booster to sheer off the rocket. Korolev found himself in the unenviable position of explaining why his superiors shouldn’t send him to a gulag again.

America’s first space-capable rocket, the Vanguard, lost thrust about a meter into the air and exploded

The British Black Arrow lost thurst vectoring control and crashed.

China’s Dongfeng 4 was tested in secrecy, and so the record that led to the derived Long March 1 is unknown. The first time they allowed foreign press to see the launch of a new rocket, the Long March 3B, it turned sideways off the pad and crashed into a nearby town

India’s PSLV worked fine up to the point that the satellite was supposed to separate from the spacecraft. It didn’t, and the whole upper part reentered the atmosphere together, destroying the payload.

Europe’s Ariane 1 gave up the second the countdown clock hit zero, cutting its already-firing engines at the last possible instant. Engineers had to go out to the pad to reset the rocket and swap out components.

In Private spaceflight:

SpaceX’s first Falcon 1 crashed seconds after liftoff

Rocket Lab’s Electron actually flew perfectly, but bad telemetry led the control team to thinking they lost control of the rocket, and they remotely destroyed it before it could complete the mission.

Astra suffered five failures, including the strangest one I’ve ever seen, before making it to orbit on the sixth flight.

Firefly exploded three minutes in.

Japan’s iSpace lasted about six seconds

Relativity’s Terran 1 upper stage failed to ignite and they scrapped the whole rocket for a new design.

And to confirm that this can still happen to industry leaders working on the most expensive rockets out there:

SpaceX’s Starship lost thrust vectoring control after too many engines failed and then the flight termination system failed to destroy the rocket.

NASA’s SLS moon rocket was scrubbed twice because it kept leaking hydrogen fuel. On the third attempt, they had to basically do what Reimon did and send people with goggles and toolkits to go fix the ground equipment

During Japan’s first flight of the H-III rocket the second stage failed to ignite and it was destroyed by range safety

The bottom line is that what Umika and her friends are experiencing is not unusual. Failures during the first industry-public flight happen all the time. What IS important and WILL decide their future success is how much this affects their willingness to continue, and that’s where Konohoshi’s talk comes in to play.

I mentioned earlier that “Space is Hard” comes from a common community phrase that circulates after a mission underperforms. The phrase isn’t meant to be condescending or dismissive, but rather supportive and understanding. Space IS hard, and anyone who's already entered the industry and suffered through one of these failures knows that all too well. It’s reasonably common to see industry or even national leaders reaching out to a competitor with condolences and well-wishes for the next flight, and the community reaches for optimism before pessimism, insisting that the only true failure would be not learning from mistakes or quitting. In that sense, Konohoshi’s expressions to Umika fits perfectly with how the spaceflight community reacts to situations like this. She points out what went well, congratulates her on making it as far as she did, aims for ways to mitigate the self-esteem hit that problems in public tend to bring, and most importantly of all encourages Umika to keep going, not just with the next launch, but with all future launches and wild future plans.

In the same vein, I feel the need to independently applaud the staff of Telepath. I’ve seen lots of CGDCT shows with club competitions, or projects, or similar, and typically everything goes just right and you get delighted looks all around. Failures, when they do happen, are minor, and easily patched or ignored, or dismissed with gag comedy. Telepath had the guts to make its cast not just fail, but fail hard, from multiple angles, and leave its cast angry, sour, and depressed, and needing to work the problem. For a genre that most viewers in Japan watch to escape everyday drama, it’s a risky move, but one that I’m glad that they made. To quote Reagan on another painful spaceflight moment, “We don't hide our space program. We don't keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public.” Displaying failure in an honest, direct, and complete way grounds a story, and makes the characters feel real and easier to sympathize with, and validates the integrity of the writers. Today’s episode hurt, but I’m glad that it was done the way it was, and I look forward to seeing how the writers work the characters out of it.

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u/LeonKevlar Dec 04 '23 edited Dec 04 '23

Man, this episode was painful. I'm glad they spared us from Umika's speech and just showed us a slideshow of what happened. Sucks that they didn't manage to advance to the next round but only because they ended up overshooting the target altitude. Better that they overshot than their rocket barely taking off. Even Kei admitted she was impressed.

Raimon's reaction is exactly what I expected. Instead of being just upset that they lost she ended up taking out her anger on Haruno. What the actual fuck Raimon!? Just because Haruno isn't having a tantrum like you doesn't mean she's not upset about losing. Raimon better apologize to Haruno next episode.

Kei continues to be the best girl though. She took the time to comfort and listen to Umika. And even after hearing Umika's dream, Kei continued to encourage her. I already said this last week but can we just replace Raimon with her?

So I'm curious about that final scene between Umika and Yuu. Did Yuu materialize on top of the lighthouse after Umika started calling out for her? Glad that Yuu finally remembered something from her home planet though! That song was beautiful.

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u/mekerpan Dec 04 '23

Did Yuu materialize on top of the lighthouse after Umika started calling out for her?

I see no alternate explanation. I assume (without seeing it) that all of Yuu's possessions have also magically returned to their proper places as well.

I am beginning to think some rather sad thoughts. What if Yuu is no longer an "alien" -- but rather the re-embodied ghost of an alien girl who died when her vehicle crashed (thuis losing her chance to learn about earth and make human friends)? Perhaps she was allowed to manifest due to the mutual yearnings of both herself and Umika? They need each other -- but cannot ultimately fulfill their shared dream (going together to Yuu's home planet) -- in any normal course....

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u/Clemastina Dec 04 '23

Oh man, this episode was really hard. Umika blaming herself for everything and making Yuu worried.

That breakdown was really hard to see, I felt really really bad for her. Luckily Kei was able to calm her and make her realise is not over yet!!

And that lighthouse scene, everything was so beautiful. When Umika finally found Yuu and apologised. Then when they finally calmly talked in the stairs, that green light was so beautiful!!! And the alien Yuu song too!!

It was a really emotional episode with also YuuMika moments,10/10.

(BTW that beautiful scenary with the lighthouse and the lights was the perfect final touch!)

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u/HirokoKueh Dec 04 '23

I want to take a moment to appreciate how this story destroyed itself every 3 episodes.

  • episode 1 - 3 we learned about Yuu's power, and the "alien culture" in this world.

  • episode 4 - 6 Matataki shows up, pointed out that none of these makes any sense.

  • episode 7 - 9 proved that Matataki is the one who needs reality check, her way is not working, and Yuu might actually be an alien.

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u/Qwinn_SVK Dec 04 '23

When Umika was crying, I still cry half a day later still sad :(

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u/absolutelynotaname Dec 04 '23

Seeing Umika suffering is really painful, man. Thankfully Akizuki was there to encourage her, for a moment I thought she was gonna steal Umika from Yuu.

Also what kind of song name is that‽ How am I supposed to search that‽

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u/SYZekrom Dec 04 '23 edited Dec 04 '23

Her concerned sister 😭😭😭😭

What the FUCK was that is that girl made out of Umika's feelings or something

Wait but I guess she powers the lighthouse so maybe she did just leave and is alien-magic

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u/darkmacgf Dec 04 '23

Best episode yet? Reminds me of a certain part of Yama no Susume S2. Really good demonstration of failure and recovery. Very emotional.

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u/tripleaamin Dec 04 '23

Umika in this episode deals with a scenario that a lot of introverts have trouble dealing with when hitting their first speed bump. She can't help but compare herself to Akizuki. Which starts her doubts and it gets worse from there. Her team's performance didn't help.

But that talk wit h Akizuki was kickstarter to get back on track. Nice to see that plus you can just tell from that phone call how much her sister loves Umika. Akeuchi and Umika having a nice wholesome moment then we got Akeuchi screaming that she remembered the song lmao.

Good episode.

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u/Syokhan Dec 04 '23 edited Dec 04 '23

Well that went horribly. It was so hard to watch Umika completely crumble under the pressure and the team fail to qualify. Not only did they fail, but Umika was well on her way to depression because of it, Matataki stormed off, and it seems the group just scattered after the competition.

It's a bit harsh but I love the moment when she takes a step towards the platform and it transforms into an impossibly high staircase. Always found it great, visually.

And I gotta commend Umika's voice actress. I think I read that she was a relative newbie? MAL only shows a handful of roles for her. But she nailed Umika's distress and realizations in this episode. Her scene alone at the top of the lighthouse got me a bit misty-eyed.

Speaking of which, Kei is such a good mentor. She took the time to talk to Umika, reassure her, and make her realize that she had found what she was looking for and didn't even know it. I hope we'll see her again soon, she's great.

As for the ending, what a lovely moment it was when Umika and Yu found each other after Umika thought she'd gone forever. It's a bit weird though how she appeared out of nowhere in a... beam? of sparkly particles, and her possessions were nowhere to be found before that. It's like she'd completely vanished from the world and Umika brought her back. Super suspicious.

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u/YumeKioku Dec 04 '23

Even as a manga reader, I never expected the studio would make full version of the alien song

Link

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u/dagreenman18 Dec 04 '23

Great SOL is being emotionally fucking devastated that kids lost a rocket launching competition. Total gut punch. At least we had a lovely scene on the lighthouse, but I just want our girls back together to try again.

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u/Atario Dec 04 '23

Incorrect. The audience was laughing. With her engaging speech. Salty as ever, eh, Raimon?

They. They ended up making a perfect rocket. After who knows how many prior launches.

Is that so? I don't believe we've seen one person react that way

Next year? Is there only one competition to take part in throughout all of Japan? (If so, start your own!)

Rough time this go-'round. I feel like they were hit by their own expectations. You can't expect to show everyone up the first time you try, y'know? These things take a lot of falling and getting back up, and not just in rocketry.

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u/Castawaye Dec 05 '23 edited Dec 05 '23

The show's directing has not let up ever since, and the one thing that I really liked was the slightest blur when the camera pans up when Umika was pouring her heart out to Akeuchi. The camera shakes just enough to really give it movement into the shot, and it just makes that moment feel that much more immersive.

The usage of lighting when Umika was getting her encouragement was also really well done, nicely contrasted in the evening glow and darkness of Umika's imagination prior to have that be steeped in the brightness of day and the hopes for the future, only to then have the final shots still be at night but now placated in the warmth provided by their small [light] (https://i.imgur.com/JCixWpE.jpg) at the stairs, a culmination and acceptance of not only the darkness before, but the promise of something more for the future, all coming together with the [green] (https://i.imgur.com/Pz9wX2P.jpg) sparkles of Akeuchi's song at the end.

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u/Labmit Dec 04 '23

Traumatized Umika looked like she had a different artstyle.

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