YMMV / Stars Align

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• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: After Maki and Touma's confrontation with Kenji, the series switches to the student council president at home spending teatime with her grandmother. There, she reveals that her grandmother and mother disagree about her schooling (her mother got her to attend a "commoners" school to understand the townspeople better while the grandmother wanted her to go somewhere richer) and even had a physical fight about it... which the president recorded on her phone and apparently plays whenever she writes in her diary. The two also call her by different names, but she prefers to call herself Kaori. This scene is unrelated to anything previously shown in the series (all is stated is that Kaori's scene with her grandmother occurred a few days before Maki and Touma's), and no reference is ever made in future episodes, which is possibly a result of the anime getting Cut Short.
• LGBT Fanbase: The anime was already gaining many LGBT fans thanks to Yuu's crush on Touma being treated sympathetically, but it was further cemented in Episode 8 with Yuu admitting that they're not sure what gender they identify as and Maki's acceptance of that (along with Maki revealing that his mother's boyfriend Shou is a trans man who often looked after him while growing up). The episode marks one of the very few instances in anime where terms like "non-binary" and "FTM" are explicitly said out loud and discussed.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Rintaro's insecurities about being a failure and a burden because he's adopted are very indicative of the legal and social stigma towards adoption in Japan, due to the strong belief in carrying on family bloodlines and seeing adopted children as "inferior" because of that.
  • Domestic abuse is already a difficult situation to handle in real life. Japan's laws on divorced parents and child custody make this much worse (Maki's father still holds legal responsibilities for Maki and so is allowed to see him and know his whereabouts), and is why resolving Maki's situation is harder than Western viewers may think.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Nao has a Gender-Blender Name, a soft prepubescent voice, and long androgynous hair. He's a boy like most of the other characters.
• The Woobie: Maki, Touma, Nao, and Tsubasa became this to the fandom. They’re all endearing boys suffering from some type of parental abuse and unable to escape their situations. It’s easy to see why people feel so sorry for them and think they deserved better. This was made worse by the ending; due to the series being cut down from 24 to 12 episodes so late into production, the story ends with what was intended to be the mid-season finale. There is ultimately no resolution to anyone’s issues, and we end with Touma being disowned by his mother and Maki about to murder his father. And Nao and Tsubasa will likely continue to be abused by their parents with no intervention. Poor Maki, Touma, Nao, and Tsubasa is right.

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