skygiants

aquamirage, this is a post for you!

In other words, this is my post about the sci-fi anime Planetes, which I finally got around to seeing this summer.

Planetes is not space opera; it's hard sci-fi about a bunch of everyday employees on a giant space station going about their everyday jobs. Most of our protagonists are debris haulers who go out and pick up junk that could get in the way of scheduled flights. It is SUPER GLAMOROUS work, by which I mean they are just about the lowest people on the company totem pole.



These are Ai and Hachi. Ai is energetic and enthusiastic and wants to do her best and in love with LOVE! Hachi is cynical, grumpy, ambitious, and in love with SPACE.

Ai is sort of our viewpoint character, but a lot of the second half of the series focuses on Hachi and whether it's possible to balance an intense desire to achieve one dream with interpersonal connections. It's a really interesting examination and deconstruction of SPACE DREAMS, but he is not my favorite and I sort of wish he was less the protagonist than he was, especially since the rest of the ensemble is so great.



Like Fee! Fee is team boss and she is GREAT. She could probably be promoted like twenty times over, but eh, she's happy where she is, so why bother? She has a husband and son somewhere back in Florida, and she's a total nicotine addict, and in one episode she saves the entire space station because she REALLY NEEDS a place to smoke. It is the best episode.



Or Arvind Ravi, who spends a lot of time as a comic relief character -- company shill, constantly anxious about protocol -- but, you know, the reason he's worried about pay grades and getting promoted is because he has around eight kids and wants to make sure they all can follow their dreams because he is the best dad.



Or Edel, office temp, who does not care about your problems and is more competent than anybody else in this show. And has a ~secret past~, but mostly spends her time doing paperwork and quietly rolling her eyes.



Or Claire Rondo, most heartbreaking character -- an ambitious, brilliant space executive who immigrated to America as a child from a small South American country. Her arc is about struggling with the knowledge that space development is consistently increasing the privilege gap between global superpowers and less wealthy nations, and wondering whether she has to choose between rejecting her background, or rejecting her dreams. CLAIRE! She may not be the protagonist of the show, but she is the protagonist in my heart.

These are only a few characters from a huge and varied cast, and you may notice something: it's really diverse. Planetes is a show with a global scope, and it's grappling with a lot of incredibly complex issues about privilege and power, the benefits and the costs of space development, and how much human misery can be justified by human dreams. And obviously it doesn't have answers, because there aren't any good ones, and it's sure not perfect in everything it does, but it has the right amount of ambiguity in how it handles the questions. There are terrorists, their methods are terrible -- but their points aren't wrong. And the show knows that.

So that's why you should watch Planetes!

( Now here are some personal spoilery thoughts that much of my flist may disagree with. )