ST&RS: Unedited Audio and Recording Notes (Patreon)

Manga Details

• MAxybee and tucker both say just call it stars, suck it jordan!
• Writer - Ryosuke Takeuchi
  • Notable people they were an assistant for:
    • Kei Kawano (Yuuto, Grand Slam)
    • Akira Akatsuki (Medaka Box, Shounen Shoujo)
    • Kimiya Kaji (Meister)
    • Yusuke Murata (Eyeshield 21, One Punch Man)
    • Mizuki Kawashita (Strawberry 100%)
    • Tohru Uchimizu (The Love and Creed of Sae Maki)
  • Other works:
    • All You Need Is Kill (2014, 2 vols, Weekly Young Jump) with Takeshi Obata on art.
      • Based on the light novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka. You may have seen the Hollywood film adaptation Edge of Tomorrow starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt.
    • Moriarty the Patriot (2016-present, 19+ vols, Jump Square) with Hikaru Miyoshi on art.
      • What if Moriarty from Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories was the protagonist. Has an anime, stage plays, and a spin-off novel/manga series subtitled The Remains.
• Artist - Masaru Miyokawa
  • Notable people they were an assistant for:
    • Yusuke Murata (Eyeshield 21, One Punch Man)
    • Kohei Horikoshi (My Hero Academia)
      • on Oumagadoki Zoo (credited in-volume)
  • Notable people they had as assistants:
    • Yukinori Kawaguchi (Hoop Men, Tokyo Revengers: A Letter from Keisuke Baji spin-off)
    • Teppei Fukushima (We Are Magical Boys)
  • Other works:
    • My Capricorn Friend (2014, 1 vol, Shonen Jump Plus) story by Otsuichi
      • Adaptation of a novel. Matsuda is a student whose veranda attracts unbelievable items. He harbours Wakatsuki, a classmate who killed his bully, partially out of guilt for never helping Wakatsuki, but also because a newspaper clipping from the future blew onto his veranda reporting Wakatsuki’s suicide following the incident. It’s an incredibly good read, highly recommended.
    • Murders at the House of Death (2018-2021, 4 vols, Shonen Jump Plus) written by Masahiro Imamura
      • Adaptation of a novel. Has a film. A mystery-solving university student gets caught up in a locked room murder mystery, WHILE ALSO BEING TRAPPED IN A HOUSE BY ZOMBIES FROM A NEARBY FESTIVAL.
• Publishing
  • Run Dates:
    • July 4th 2011 to April 16th 2012
  • Chapters/Volumes:
    • 39 chapters/5 vols
  • Series it replaced:
• Märchen Ōji Grimm by Kizuku Watanabe (2 vols, flop)
• Series that replaced it:
  • Koisome Momiji by Tsugiro Sakamoto and Tadahiro Miura (4 vols, flop) FLOP ELIGIBLE
    • Artist is the creator of Yuuna & the Haunted Hot Springs
• Series that started at the same time as it:
  • Harisugawa in Mirror World by Yasuhiro Kano (3 vols, flop. Episode 83)

About the Manga

• Plot
  • In 2019 humanity gets a message from aliens saying to meet on mars in 2035. At that same time a little baby named Shirafune Maho says his first word: Mars. Flash forward 15 years and Maho is now a kid obsessed with space. He’s got his childhood friend Megaru who’s definitely not his girlfriend and a stoic smart guy named Wataru and together they’re gonna try and go to the space academy so they can go to Mars. Maho misses his application deadline but Wataru sends it and thankfully it allows him to bring two other people for some reason. When they get there they find out that the principal of the school is Fifi collins who discovered the original message as a little kid but is now a hot lady. All of that was the first chapter. Then they do an exam to get into the school and they do. All of that was 12 chapters. A girl named Izumi appears to take Megaru’s place as the token girl. She’s been working to decode the message and discovers that there’s supposed to be children with the power of “map,” “sound” and “memory.” Izumi did the same thing Maho did where her first word was mars on the day the message was sent. They’re pretty sure that Maho is the map kid and Izumi is the sound kid, but who’s the memory kid?
  • 
    
  • One day Maho has a dream that he sat in a chair. He tells Fifi this and she flips out because they found this weird structure on mars and damn I guess it looks like a chair. Unfortunately a big tornado covered the structure up so the kids come up with a plan to smash a satellite into it to take a picture, destroying billions of dollars worth of equipment, and the head of st&rs is like holy shit that’s genius. So they do that and discover that a huge shadowy figure is building some kind of tower. Maho immediately passes out and when he wakes up he starts drawing a huge blueprint nonstop. Then Wataru suddenly gets powers because he’s the memory guy. He goes where Maho is, points at his blueprint, and is like “I remember that something’s there.” Then the 3 kids and Fifi go to Mars and go inside the structure where they sit in 3 chairs and a really nice alien named peropunyan appears. He uses Izumi to speak for him because she’s sound girl.
  • 
    
  • Peropunyan explains that he’s lonely and wants to save stars from dying because they’re alive, so after teaching the kids how to astral project he brings them to Betelgeuse, which is about to supernova. They see a cute little girl stuck inside the star and crying. She is the personification of the fucking star and her name is Betelgeuse-chan, or Bel-chan. She’s lonely and scared so Wataru says he’s lonely too, and everyone works hard to pull her out of the star which like, okay. Anyway Peropunyan explains that Bel-chan is a “hoshi,” a spirit of the star, and his people discovered that if you make two Hoshis touch then they fuse into one being, so his people want to make all of them fuse together for some reason. Then the humans bring Peropunyan and Bel-chan back to earth where they’re celebrities, and then Peropunyan brings them all to his planet where they’re celebrities. Wataru wants to make a hospital in space which sounds way cooler than anything in this manga, and it’s over.
• Characters
  • Shirafune Maho
    • Family name means “white ship” (obvious spaceship reference)
    • Personal name means “pitch-black sail”
    • 
      
    • First word mars
    • Destined to be an astronaut
    • Dad is very based
    • SPACE
    • First man on mars
  • Hoshihara Meguru
    • Family name means “star-field,” and personal name means “to go/orbit around”
    • 
      
    • Childhood friend
    • Is just kind of there
    • Seems to not want to do the space stuff and is forced along with it?
  • Amachi Wataru
    • Family name written as “space-earth,” personal name means “to ferry across”
    • 
      
    • Sauske
    • I Like how he was motivated by this weird astronaut dr
    • Golden boy
    • Embodiment of memory
  • Fifi Colins
    • Principle or something
    • Just along for the ride
  • Izumi
    • Special earth child
    • In school on special recommendation
  • Peropunyan
    • Space beeing
    • Very nice?

Why it failed

• This is a lot of text
• I fear space bros eats this series lunch
• Written out details like childhood friend are kinda lame
• I can tell Maho is going to be too dumb? Also the three people can attend thing is weird
• I’m not a fan of this destiny kind of shit
• Really an exam arc
• I hate when there's oddly specific confidences like wow a team of three like hxh did it right having to fit in a random character in the exam arc
• It's just not clever like nothing challenging happens like imagine if the Lego blindfold thing had a step missing and they had to deduct which part was needed
• So much tell don’t show. This series has so much fucking dialog for no reason
• Everyone is bad is so bad like literally told one of the “nice guys” to kill himself
• Why are we shown highschoolers asses
• There is no moral gray area, everyone is just super nice all the time or if you aren’t you’re a bad person and bad people do not succeed!
• Honestly I’m disappointed the blatant ignoring of science in this series
• This series is really up it’s own ass about trying to be this big message about humanity but who actually cares about anything going on
• It’s just so much text I struggle to really know what’s going on because I can’t handle reading all the text
• So little science we learn like on fact on chapter 35?
• I do not understand the scene with Amachi at the end he enrolled in space academy and he’s on the ship at the end despite saying he isn’t going?
• NOOOOTHING HAAAAAPPENS AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

What it did well

• You can tell tue author did his research, like reporting in UTC
• Good art
• Nice color page
• I like the contrast between the intelligence of the MCs
• Fukami being a badass but still super into space is hilarious honestly he would have been a better Sasuke rep
• Mars airplane task was actually really cool
• Connection the neuron looks like universe thing is a cool idea
• The text and pacing really improve at the end and the art gets even better
• Wait nvm

Where it could have gone

• It really needed some behind the scenes backdrop otherwise it's just kinda seeing them doing tests
• Have one of them not pass like seriously too many things go right, shit have the MC not pass and he has to find his own way which doesn’t fucking rip off space bros
• Get into the magic shit way faster having scifi elements differs it from similar series, what if it was like a hard-science magic where it’s magic but with very strict rules
• Not a serious idea but imagine if it was record of raganarok but aliens vs humans solving problems
• Make this all about how mankind has to race to reach mars in 15 years and the dynamics of that
• Imagine they played up the alien merchandise and the series turns into the capitalist abuse of aliens

Misc Thoughts

• 
• it's funny how that isn't technically what UTC stands for but what it does stand for Coordinated Universal Time also doesn't make the initials UTC
• Ever think about how insanely expensive it would be to set up the underwater test
• What an insanely lame reason the mc is the first person on mars to
• Homie definitely accidentally jerked off an aloen
• Maxy Bee thoughts:
  • ST&RS is notable in how it fell from grace in the magazine. Editorial pushed it hard for its first 11 chapters, giving it really healthy placement in the magazine and colour pages, and then they just… gave up, and it spent the remaining 28 chapters dwelling in the basement.
  • Remember your ST&RS, which definitely could not have been anything better than:
    • S: space agency for
    • T: transcendent
    • &: and
    • R: revolutionary technology of
    • S: spaceman
  • Translation stuff:
    • The translation is imperfect. Some stuff is missed outright, or weird word choices are made. The planetarium in chapter one isn’t described as ‘spoiled’ by Maho, but ‘broken’. Because that’s how words work.
    • Marka’s introduction! She says she’s “licking Japanese”. It’s a gag! To be fluent is to be “perapera”. The action of licking is “peropero”. Did not translate well.
    • Chapter 15! Mikura says “please hell me along the way”, messing up saying ‘help’. In Japanese this is her saying “onegaiCHImasu” instead of “onegaishimasu”. I would have translated this as “cheesed to meet you” because I’m a monster.

Final Verdict

• Six Word summary
  • Community
    • Tucker: Psychic stuff came out of nowhere
    • Maxybee: Cancellation, the final frontier for ST&RS
    • Chickenwarlord: Special spatial scion seeks starstudded schooling
    • Diego (Phantom Seer): Reach for the St&rs, actually no.
    • duderocks the earthchild stan: Protag is literally galaxy brain huh
    • LordAnubis, #1RedHoodFan/Mourner: Still waiting for a sci-fi battler
    • Meru (Charly): Wait, there's no Gundam in it?
    • Portal man: Close encounters of the manga kind
    • Resident Warhammer Nerd: Wait, this isn't about Resident Evil?
    • Riel: Hey did you hear about space?
    • Sbubby: Okay Alexa, play “Feel So Moon”
    • Spike: When the St&rs're out of reach...
    • The Duke Of Dumbass: Instead Watch Space Battleship Yamato 1974
    • The Grey Potter: Evil JAXA enjoys casual child endangerment | We have Space Brothers at Home
  • David: Author read “show don’t tell” backwards | Kids really jerked off an alien
  • Jordan: Space is actually really fucking boring
• Flop or not
  • If flop, what they could read instead
  • If not, how it compares to Chainsaw Man
• Is this the best/worst series we’ve talked about