Asteroid in Love is a show about cute girls doing cute things in cute ways. This is a fine agenda. I have liked many series about these same things, from Girls' Last Tour to Sweetness and Lightning. And yet, I struggled to get through Asteroid in Love, even with all its genuine, fun delights. Why? Well, the main, overriding problem is that Asteroid in Love is carefully curated, manufactured and purposed to be as stakesless as possible. Its conflicts are always resolved in the most clean and perfect ways, nothing affects the characters for long, and any real, lasting hardship is always glossed over for the sake of getting back to adorable hijinks. It's this core of refusing to let characters have an emotional range, of never showing them in moments that might not be pretty or idyllic or flattering, that kept me putting off episodes for days at a time.

But, even if I'm not a fan of the show's approach, Asteroid in Love's fundamental cuteness cannot be denied. This is a show where the character's love for the sciences (in Ao and Mira's case, astronomy; in the case of the other club members, geology) shines through in their every action, in the way they discuss their craft. Ao's shy reservation stands in opposition to her real passion for the stars and space and makes for a fun dynamic where her explanations and knowledge often come as a shock, while Mira's more energetic, affable approach provides for good jokes and a fun contrast. The supporting cast, such as a baker with a crush on Mira's student council president sister, a girl in Mira and Ao's class who wants to be an astronaut, and a lazy teacher, round out and heighten the main cast's passionate eccentricities with even more amusing circumstances, such as visits to museums and barbecues. These are all fun archetypes who create for fun situations, and it is often quite nice to watch them live out their lovely days.

The animation is also remarkably consistent and often quite pretty. While I'm not a fan of the same-faced, moeified characters designs—all girls with the same, slender figure—the drawings themselves are crisp and colorful. The limited action means the show never has to stretch itself thin for big set piece moments, and it results in a series that, from the glimmer of the sun, the shine of the girl's multicolored hair, and the glint of the telescope in the dark night, evokes a sense of wistful, pleasant days in every frame.

But cuteness and nice art can't solely sustain a series for 12 episodes. When the core story of discovering an asteroid feels like it's only meaningfully advanced in the last two episodes, you have a problem. When the rest of the series consists of idle faffing about unrelated to the main narrative, you have an even bigger problem. Asteroid in Love spends most of its time on visits to restaurants, studying for tests, and field trips in a way that often puts Ao and Mira's goals on the sidelines. This makes it hard to care and left me very bored. Without a clear narrative hook, the viewer is just watching people live kind of nice but also extremely uneventful days. That might be what some want, but it leaves the premise, which is actually extremely clear and fun (imagine if the series instead better emphasized Ao and Mira doing research, entering competitions, meeting even more people from other schools and even more scientists), being given short shrift and the characters stagnating, never being really challenged.

In a way, however, this is part of the point. The show is about how the friendships you form in the pursuit of your dreams are oftentimes more important than fulfilling the dreams themselves. There's a monologue from the teacher who hosts the club about how she went to the observatory Ao and Mira visit at the end of the show, and how she ultimately never discovered an asteroid. This didn't matter, though. She was still with her friends at the end of it all. This is actually foreshadowing. The series ends with Ao and Mira in the same position and coming to the same realization. I like this ending. I like its realism, and I like how the most important thing was, even if they failed, that Ao and Mira finally got to know each other and know the rest of the club. The problem is that this is a singular moment that the rest of the show doesn't back up. The connections Ao and Mira have with each other, and with the rest of the cast, are shallow. We never understand how much Ao and Mira matter to each other (especially since the show is called Asteroid in Love and seems really hesitant to depict any kind of romance between the two), how the initial rivalry between the astronomy club and the geology club fades away as they discover their common interests. We're told this, sure. We're shown it in slight, piecemeal fragments of girls going to the beach and house parties. But that's not the same as digging in and understanding these feelings, these relationships, articulating them in full. Without that greater depth of emotion, the theme of the power of friendship is made a lot less impactful and valuable.

This shallow approach is made worse by how the series glosses over its more depressing elements. There's a point towards the end where one of the newer members of the club—an aspiring meteorologist—explains her interest in weather sciences. She wants to help, study oncoming storms and warn people, specifically because she had family who was directly impacted by harsh weather. But all the hardship these folks underwent is that their house got flooded and their pictures were ruined. I remember seeing this moment and feeling like I was watching reality, the real hardships people undergo, papered over. It would be one thing if the show took it just a single step further and said they lost their house, but their pictures? Their things? This character talks about this event like it was something that altered her view of the world, and, while sad in a certain respect, it is nothing close to the real heartache and havoc wrought by weather destruction.

This is Asteroid in Love's whole approach to conflict: something to be articulated as the most slight, inauspicious thing (like how Ao's family is about to move away) that can be solved almost immediately (it doesn't even take an episode for Ao to move in with Mira and the whole conflict to be tossed aside). It makes for a show that feels insincere, like it is deliberately avoiding more grim and bleak things just so it can maintain its façade of eternal charm. And it robs so many of these stories, so many of these relationships, of real, lasting impact.

I wish Asteroid in Love had an emotional range beyond sweet, charming and cute. I can't dislike it because its intentions of depicting adorable, relaxed slice-of-life where the stakes are always low, the conflicts always slight, are clear and executed well enough. But it's all so superficial. It never digs deep, shows meaningful relationships beyond ‘charming friendships’, or depicts emotional conditions that have real impact and resonance. This the goal, of course. It wants to be pleasant and it wants to make people smile, and it wants to never sully those things with turgid extremes. But this means it will never leave a real, lasting impact, beyond maybe the occasional grin or chuckle. And for a series to really give me something meaty to chew on, such that I'm still gnawing even after the final frame, I need a whole lot more than that.