くっつきぼし

KUTTSUKIBOSHI

OVA

STATUS
COMPLETE
EPISODES
2
RELEASE
May 11, 2012
LENGTH
22 min

DESCRIPTION

Kiiko is your normal girl, besides her secret of being able to move objects with her mind. When a new student named Aaya moves in, Kiiko starts to develop feelings toward her. The two will eventually then start their romantic relationship. Although everything seems fine, Kiiko does not know that Aaya has another secret, a secret that could ruin Kiiko's feelings and trust for Aaya.

(Source: Anime News Network)

CAST

Kiiko Kawakami
Asami Imai
Aaya Saitou
Miku Isshiki
Kouta Saitou
Naoki Koshida

EPISODES

Dubbed

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Not available on crunchyroll

REVIEWS

HARO9000
66/100
Stars Intertwined: The Demystification of Sex and The Mystification of Love
Stars Intertwined: The Demystification of Sex and The Mystification of Love

*Spoilers Warning

(please don't take this review seriously, it is merely a spiritual continuation of craptacular)

Kuttsukiboshi, a two-part ova with its first entry released in 2010, shocked millions of Yuri fans across the globe due to its incest-ntr ending, and was forever banned from entering the Yuri canon. However, I propose in this review that the amount of sex/moral deviation in the ova is not simply for superficial shock value, but it does have something interesting or perhaps profound to say about sex and love. I will demonstrate in this review that this borderline hentai of an anime is talking about the secularization of sex and the holiness of pure love, hence recalling the title, the demystification of sex and the mystification of love.

The Process
The most important evidence in support of my argument is the fact that the two different types of sex demonstrated in this show are unproductive. The first one which is the Yuri one, the one we all love, is homosexual love; the second kind of sex is unproductive because it is incestual, and that the Aaya’s brother has terminal illness which led to his ultimate demise, which is evident in episode 2. What we’re beginning to witness here is that the act of sex has lost all of its ties and implications with social responsibility, but simply serves for the act itself. Thus, a process of secularization and demystifying, a drifting away from the orthodoxia.

Eros and Thanatos
Before analyzing the kind of love between the Yuri couple, we must face the unwanted truth of incestuous sex, the sex between Aaya and his brother, which is revealed by the end of part one. Aaya’s brother, I propose, exerts, if not personifies, the fusion of the Freudian idea of the Eros and the Thanatos, which, transcribed in Layman’s terms, is the sex (life) drive and the death drive. His drive for sex (although he always admired his sister’s beauty) was realized once he acknowledged his imminent death, as evident in the opening of episode 2, which becomes more and more desperate as the days go by. An aesthetic parallel I would like to draw is Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice, in which the main character with a Gustav von Mahler’s face named Aschenbach became infatuated with a polish boy, Tadzio, the apollonian figure representing the eros, and this infatuation becomes entangled with a sense of decay and impending death, causing Aschenbach's pursuit of beauty and passion becoming increasingly desperate and destructive, which, as you might’ve guessed from the novella’s title, resulted in death. The relationship of Aaya and his brother in Kuttsukiboshi, although the cause and effect are reversed, can be seen as a Platonic admiration’s catabasis into the destructive Dionysian. Lastly, I would like to highlight, this sexual relationship is ultimately destructive because there is no love present, but only sympathy and possessiveness.

Beyond 'Planet-Orbiting Love'
Now let us get to the fun part: lesbian sex. The title of the show, Kuttsukiboshi, reminded me of a term called “planet-orbiting love” which is from D.H. Lawrence’s modernist masterpiece Women in Love. In the novel, Birkin envisions love as a central force or principle akin to a gravitational pull, around which individuals orbit. The metaphor suggests that people are drawn toward love, much like celestial bodies are drawn toward a planet by its gravitational force. The idea also implies a sense of distance and separation, as each person is an independent orbiting entity. It is a form of platonic love infused with a type of DaVinci-ism distaste for sex. However, the title of the show implies that these planets are not in orbit, but already smashed into each other, which is due to the intense gravitational pull of sex. Similarly in Women in Love, we will see Birkin giving up on this idea of a ‘pure love’ without physical intimacy. This can be explained by the unmisinterpreted definition of Platonic love: “Plato in Phaedrus argued: sensual beauty is the manifestation of archetypal, eternal form; thus, to succumb to sensual beauty, to fall in love, is to gain provisional entrance into the realm of disembodied form. Plato says that the soul ‘grows wings’ and makes a first step toward its own dissolution into pure form--hence its ability to communicate in this state of loving self-abandonment with the eternal archetypes.” And indeed, this love grew wings with sensual beauty, as we see the main characters literally fly to a transcendental realm, the platonic realm, if you will, marked by pureness and infinity. (Transcendence has already been echoed throughout the show, i.e. superpowers, memory infusion, and most importantly, I would like to point out, is the odd reference to ‘forgetting to lock the door with the key’, which is Kiiko’s final line before they reached the platonic realm. Keys has always been a hint to unlocking an otherworldly existence in the western literary canon, such as the poetries of Vladimir Nabokov in his last novel written in Russian, Dar)

In conclusion, the show was great, I liked it.
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HidamariSeashore
52/100
In 2014, I found this to be average. In 2025, I found this to be bad.
Happy Pride Month, everyone! I don't think I can take pride in the fact that I watched the subject of today's review, though, especially not for a second time. Yes, I rewatched an anime for the sake of reviewing it. I don't remember exactly how I found out about this particular yuri OVA, but I did originally watch it back in 2014 and think it was so-so, apparently. However, I recently decided that it might be a good idea to re-evaluate some of the anime I gave an average score to in the past, and this OVA particularly stuck out in my mind; I didn't remember much about it, but something told me that I rated it too highly at the time, especially given the little bit of it I did remember. Unfortunately, I was proven correct; I don't see what it was that made my younger self see Kuttsukiboshi as anything more than....well, not good.

Kuttsukiboshi, or "Stars Intertwined" in English, follows the relationship between two high school girls named Kiiko Kawakami and Aya Saitou. After an accident a year prior, Kiiko gained the ability to move objects with her mind, and the new student Aya just so happened to find out her secret. This leads to them conducting daily experiments revolving around Kiiko's powers; all the while, Kiiko develops a crush on Aya. Aya ends up reciprocating Kiiko's feelings, and soon enough, they begin a sexual (and I guess romantic?) relationship. Things threaten to fall apart between the two of them, though, when Kiiko stumbles upon Aya's own secret.

This OVA series only has two episodes, and between the two, I'm not sure which is worse than the other. The first episode is mostly very boring, establishing a relationship between two characters I don't give two figs about; meanwhile, the second episode has a lot more going on yet is much more frustrating to watch due to the choices characters make and an ending that makes no sense. I will give the writers some props for attempting to foreshadow a certain aspect of the anime's ending in the first episode, but at the same time, that aspect felt very forced. To make up for this poorly-done plot, there is plenty of "plot" to go through (though it's not explicit enough to be a hentai), and.... Well, going into detail would lead to spoilers, but I will say that anyone who was aroused by certain "plot" scenes - specifically in episode 2 - should probably get their heads checked out.

Talking about each of the characters should be easy enough, considering there are only three "real" characters in Kuttsukiboshi. Kiiko is kind of a bland protagonist; aside from her having psychic powers and being in love with Aya, there is nothing to her character that could make her endearing to the audience. Aya is the more developed of the two, but the choices she makes and the way she treats Kiiko makes her very unlikable; the series tries to paint her as a sympathetic character in the end, but the damage is already done at that point. You can imagine just how unpleasant and uninteresting their relationship is when all of that is said. As for the third character, Kouta Saitou (Aya's older brother), his only purpose in the series is to cause drama between Kiiko and Aya; what becomes of him after he has served his purpose is almost laughable. Almost.

The animation in Kuttsukiboshi was done by Primastea, a studio whose only animation work seems to have been for the Issho ni Training OVA series (and even that's only in a producing role). This lack of experience from this studio really shows in aspects like the rough and off-model at times animation and the bland color grading. The sound of this anime doesn't fare much better. Asami Imai, the voice of Kiiko, has done some pretty decent voice acting work before and after this - Chihaya from "The iDOLM@STER" and Kurisu from "Steins;Gate", anyone? - but her performance here left much to be desired; the other two named characters are voiced by people with little to no other voice acting experience, and it shows in their weak performances. (Miku Isshiki sounded kind of cute as Aya, though, even if her voice acting was weak.) Each episode has its own ending theme, but neither are anything to write home about; "Hatsukoi Kasoku Kuukan", in particular, is probably one of Asami Imai's weaker songs.

Overall, Kuttsukiboshi is a bad anime, and I can't even recommend it to the biggest yuri fan out there. That said, if I had a gun pointed to my head and was forced to choose between this and Netsuzou Trap, I'd gladly watch this a third time; at least the yuri couple in Kuttsukiboshi doesn't ruin other romantic relationships (and Kuttsukiboshi doesn't have Fujiwara). In any case, may everyone in the LGBTQ+ community have a good Pride Month, and may I find something that's better than average in any other re-evaluation I do!
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