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←←Previous Topic (“Someday, My Revolution Will Come” Let’s Play) -- Next Post→ Next Topic (Paranoia Agent)→→ Phase 01 -- Outside the Atmosphere Or: Hey, Do You Remember That Movie Gravity? 2068 The accident with the Alnair 8 suborbital passenger line focused public attention on the problem of space debris Abandoned artificial satellites… tanks jettisoned from shuttles… refuse generated by space station construction… This debris is travelling around the Earth at speeds approaching eight kilometers per second Should this debris collide with a spacecraft, it could result in a terrible accident And so, to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again, as well as for the sake of future space development, disposal of this debris has become a necessity This is the story of people who live in such a time as this I don’t really have an “in” with Planetes like I did for the past year and change with Revolutionary Girl Utena. That is to say, despite really liking the show and really wanting to share it with people, like, it’s not that deep. I don’t mean that like it doesn’t have things to say, but it wears its heart on its sleeve most of the time -- Planetes is that sort of melodrama. I can’t share links to a legal place to watch this (though I can help make your search easier if you DM me), so it’s not like I can take that “rewatch party” angle either. On the other hand, I haven’t really been able to encounter a Planetes “fandom” in the same way I could with Utena -- most Planetes posts I could find after a bit of googling are either “Hey, remember that other space anime Sunrise made besides Cowboy Bebop?” or “Just finished Planetes! Loved it!”, even in supposed Planetes-dedicated spaces like the subreddit -- so maybe that makes me an actual authority here, a champion of, well, I’m not sure I would call it a “forgotten classic” -- Bebop definitely has more style to it, I can see why it attracts more people -- but still something good. I want to share something good. If I’m rewatching an anime for this blag. I want it to be something I like. This is all a bit ramble-y, but I suppose the real reason I’m rewatching this is, before spending over a year immersed in Revolutionary Girl Utena and its fandom, I considered this my favorite anime. Regardless of any other reason I can put here, I’m rewatching it now to recalibrate my rankings. So, what is Planetes? Planetes (pronounced “plan-eh-tes”) originated as a 1999 manga by Makoto Yukimura (perhaps now better known for Vinland Saga) and was adapted in 2003 into an anime by Sunrise Entertainment (too many other credits to list, though Cowboy Bebop is the one that’s probably going to come up a lot here) directed by Gorō Taniguchi and written by Ichirō Ōkouchi (both would later team again up for Code Geass). Set in 2075, seven years after a piece of space debris destroyed most of a low-orbit shuttle, the series focuses on a ragtag band of misfits making up Technora Corporation’s Debris Section -- space garbagemen. What most people introduce this series as, and, in fact, how it was introduced to me, was as very hard science fiction, that anything that didn’t exist already was something that had been speculated on in real life. And it is that… mostly. But in terms of the hierarchy of things Planetes is, it’s certainly more interested in exploring its characters, and the show is willing to forgo the science to serve a character beat every single time. I used the word already a few paragraphs ago, but the word of the series is “melodrama” in its classic sense. It’s a melodrama about space. I don’t know how many above-the-break sections I’ll be able to manage about this show, but I’m running out of (pun intended) space on this one, so that’s something to explore next time. Hey, here’s an interesting fact about my experience with this show: I was kind of dreading starting it again because my perception of the perspective character, Ai Tanabe, was that she doesn’t really “click” with the rest of the show until the fourth episode or so, and until then she spends most of the time going on grandiose speeches (saying the theses of the show out loud, but we’ll get to that) and not doing much else. That’s the nice, “for the blag” way to put it, anyway. In casual conversation, I simply called her “annoying”. After starting this rewatch, I don’t think that anymore, though. Ai is certainly naive, sure, but there are a few reasons I don’t find that annoying anymore. The first is recognizing the narrative importance of a person who’s entirely new to space. After all, the world of Planetes is very much like our world, but it is not our world, and so must be explained to the viewer, and one of the more comfortable ways of doing so in the narrative is to have a character equally as new to explain things to. The second reason is I was probably dealing with some latent misogyny (I likely still have some, for the record -- that’s just how the world works -- but I like to think I’ve gotten better since my first watch over five years ago) because hoo boy Hachimaki isn’t exactly introduced sympathetically and I definitely was ignoring that before. Like, he stumbles into the room a few moments after Ai wearing nothing but the top half of a spacesuit and a diaper, and, as she points out, does start making gestures that could be perceived as sexual harassment, and while the harassment dies down once the scene does, he doesn’t exactly get better this episode. Hachi is the “space is mundane” sort of expositor, a counter to Ai’s wonderment, and that definitely comes across as antagonistic in these scenes. Even during the actual conflict of the episode -- what to do with a peace memorial on a trajectory to collide with a military satellite, especially when the NATO-analog INTO put both of them up there? -- the reveal that he spent most of the time wondering how much he’s being paid doesn’t paint him in the best light. I suppose we should talk a bit about the conflict of the show then, since, even to my surprise, it’s come up already. The show is very pro-space travel. Most, if not all of the characters in the show agree: Space is pretty neat. But at the same time, Planetes is not blind to the fact that just because we can go to space doesn’t mean humanity’s problems are suddenly solved. While all of the third-world countries mentioned in the show are fictional, they are still war-torn or otherwise resource-deprived. Hachi mentions that INTO started the conflict that the memorial is supposed to commemorate. How then, the show will ask, can we reconcile the desire to uplift our fellow man and our desire to explore the stars? That’s just one of a few themes the show will touch on. Like I said, it won’t be subtle about them, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot here to talk about. -r Next time: Hachimaki’s a rascal, but what does he dream about? ←←Previous Topic (“Someday, My Revolution Will Come” Let’s Play) -- Next Post→ Next Topic (Paranoia Agent)→→

When this card leaves the Field, you can add 1 "Spellbook" Spell card from your Deck to your Hand.

It's an original story non-canon to the games

my nerves has been killing me lately. i'm finally, actually doing some writing again, that's great, i finished a one-shot story in a day, roughly 10k words. it was nice to get something done. then i close it and go about my day. then i start thinking about how anxious i am about the quality, i do some editing. i'm just not happy with it. despite being happy at first. i find things to nitpick, to get upset about. the entire reason i finished it one day, though i didn't wanna admit it at the time, is that i think i would've deleted it halfway through if i didn't. now that it's finished, i still have that urge to delete it, to make sure others don't see it, cause i don't think it's worth putting out there. and here I am, rambling about it, cause i feel like if I hold it in anymore I'll explode. it's really starting to grate on me and my nerves are more shot than usual, even though i've been productive, it feels like i made no progress.