The animation and color palettes are gorgeous, the soundtrack is great, and the story is both cute and poignant, revolving around an amateur artist, disgraced former idol, said former idol's fangirl/stalker, and a failing vtuber starting a band but focusing mainly on their personal alienation and anxieties instead of the music/performance side of that. The four main characters are all pretty unambiguously queer too.
Cons: might be yuri bait, and the rare fanservice shots are weird and tonally out of place with the rest of the story. There's also five episodes left in the season so there's plenty of time left for it to milkshake duck and retroactively ruin the first half.
just started watching it (just watched ep 2) and i have so many mixed feelings about it to the point i'm not even sure I want to continue it.
on one side, the story feels interenting enough and the characters are more complex than the usual in the "group of girls doing things" type of anime.
on the other side, some tropes of the genre are painfuly there. like sexualizing girls in scenes that are very out of place and makes me feel extreme disgust to whoever decided to include them. and the yuri, even if it's not bait, feels fetishized.
worst for it is that I cannot stop comparing it to girls band cry since the premise is similar enough. but that show actually makes me care about the characters and can successfully transmit the emotions they are trying to convey. and also the soundtrack is closer to my preferences.
i won't say it's bad or anything yet, but it's hard for me to continue watching without having strong negitive opinnions at this point. will probably try a couple of additional episodes before having a verdict. i have probably watched way too much anime that i got exhausted of these tropes and might be overreacting here tho
I'm trying to remember what was in the first two episodes, there's the opening scene in the first one where Mahiru's sister is trying to film her in her underwear for ??? reasons, and then episode two is the fangirl who steals Kano's bag and sniffs her clothes? I don't remember anything else or anything particularly yuri until like episode 5 where Mahiru starts trying to work out her feelings for Kano - even Mei's obsession with Kano is subdued and not particularly horny. Episode 3 is where the pathos starts getting heavier and it finishes introducing the main cast.
I didn't go into it expecting yuri and it wasn't until episode 5 that I went "wait, is this yuri bait?" and two episodes on from there and I still can't tell if it's yuri or bait. Kano and Mahiru are both very clearly crushing on each other, and articulating some of that, but it's still just dancing around the subject.