Planetes

I was just thinking that many of the shows in my favorites list are there because they are the definitive exploration of a relatively simple concept. Attack on Titan is freedom, Takagi-San is 恋 or young love, Assassination Classroom is teacher and student etc. Then for this hard is-fi about collecting space garbage, this one is about love.

Space exploration is being used as a vehicle to explore love because space is metaphorically the perfect opposition of love, it is the ultimate isolating, hostile and unforgiving environment, yet at least for some time, humanity was fascinated by space. This story is genius because it makes use of that contrast perfectly on all levels of the story, from the overall plot to the small episodic conflicts. It is also an example of perfect balance between having each episode be a tight self-contained story about something, and also have that something come up extremely relevant to the overall story. This is not an easy balance to strike, many shows tend to lean either toward a long movie but cut up into episodes, or villain of the week you defeat but they're really irrelevant to the central plot.

There are of course many anime waifu I like, I have figures of Saber, Miku, Rem, Asuka etc, also the less popular ones like the drawing girl from Shirobako but if the question is which anime waifu would I seriously marry, It's probably going to be Tanabe Ai from this show. Ai is a real name and a common anime girl name, and of course it means love, but Tanabe is probably more suited to this than all others. Over the course of the story we of course get Tanabe loving the protagonist Hachi, but that's almost secondary to how she is used to argue for other kinds of love. Love of dreams, of space for example, love between parents and children, love of one's country and ethnicity, love of and by those who are gone. Being able to connect all these adjacent ideas back into the core argument, which I won't spoil, is the magic trick of this show.

The male lead Hachi is unattractive and sometimes aggressively so, but that's the other core theme of the show, it is about how ugly the things you thought you love, really are. As you can see from the posters, the space suits in this show are realistically fat and clunky. Mechanically this is because a space suit is a very high pressure balloon in the vacuum of space because we need the pressure to survive. But thematically it is because everything has an ugly side, the show spends so much time to show you the ugly side of space development and exploration, your classic "how many starving kids in Africa can this space budget save?" questions. This is I would say more important than showing the good sides, because real serious love, the kind you can marry someone over, is more about the ugly side than the positive ones. This show will make sure you understand that, which is so much more mature than most others.

The hard si-fi in this show is some of, or even the greatest ever put to screen. If you're a space flight nerd, you'll be having nerdgasms over how accurate many of these space crafts, designs and interactions are. There is no sound in space obviously, space ships are full of reaction thrusters and pay no attention to aerodynamics. If you’re a real space nerd you might even notice how much consideration went into specific impulse and fuel fractions. Unfortunately though, much of this detail will probably not be appreciated by most people and just look like regular set decoration.



Technically the show is not perfect, it has some wonky frames in some episodes, they probably got the specific impulse wrong by an order of magnitude in one of the lines, there's one episode about a group of side characters that aren't super relevant or meaningful. Then at the end there's on specific character development I felt was mechanically far fetched. Two character/theme related flaws you could say disqualifies it as GOAT on an objective levels, there are certainly more perfectly written stories.


However I like this one the best because it is somehow both realistic and idealistic, it is both grand and made of self-contained episodes, it is both ugly and beautiful in visuals, the conflicts are both mundane and apocalyptic, it is also both playful and sincere. Maybe the execution was only at 99% but there was no lack of trying to include every aspect of the human experience.