Unless it’s Firefly. Oh wait, that got canceled didn’t it? Never mind the qualifier then. Well now, this isn’t about to become Chizumatic, and I’m no Steven Den Beste, but rather than discuss the latest attempt by the city employee’s union to get me to sign up, or another whiney film critic, I thought I’d add a new category to the blog and discuss some anime.

Now I’m not exactly a full-blown otaku, but I would rather watch Japanese animation over anything produced in the USA today. I usually can’t sit still in front of a TV to watch Adult Swim on the Cartoon Network unless I’m with a friend (and frankly, as badly as it’s going downhill, I don’t want to at all), and my limited budget keeps me from buying boxed sets. For that matter, I tend to regard time in front of a TV as totally wasted, no matter what. Yet I’ll waste it in front of a computer playing the same old games. (Finally finished Homeworld2 this weekend.) Go figure.

Well, in an effort to break that paradigm, I’ve started hunting up older releases in the bargain bin, and settled on Crest of the Stars. Of course, it’s got something like two sequels, which I’ll probably buy before they get to the bin, so this strategy is of dubious benefit. I only found Vols. 3 and 4 of Crest, so I had to order #1 and 2 online. Unfortunately, I made a poor choice of supplier for vol. 2 and had to re-order. In the meantime, I bit the bullet and watched the remaining three from sheer boredom last Saturday night. (I have no life…) So I missed episodes 5, 6, &7.

I don’t think this was a major problem, as episode 8 finished up the arc from 6 & 7, and we kind of know what happens in 5. It would have made things from #1 much clearer though, and it would be interesting to know if something I figured out in #4 was stated explicitly in that episode. I hope it wasn’t, simply because it would have been more dramatic/effective to leave it until later, but after re-watching the end of the last episode, I suspect it was.

I’m not going to go into the plot much; SDB covers parts of it here and spoilers really suck. Somehow, it never stops me from reading them, though. What I will discuss, is my reaction to it and, if you will, a critique.

First off, I liked it a lot. I haven’t viewed lots of animé, but it’s one of the better series I have viewed. This is despite a very confusing beginning, where Jinto is narrating from one time frame and we’re viewing two, maybe three other time frames, one of which he’s in as a 10 year old, and one as a 17 year old. Making it even more confusing, there is an action sequence at the beginning involving a battle Jinto was not at, and I suspect it is the battle from episode 5. In close conjunction with the conquest of Jinto’s home world, it was all hard to follow. I coped… but it was a near thing. Combined with the awful, grainy, and near colorless battle sequence, poor subtitling (the English dub grated on me; worse there was an older subtitle set “beneath” the current one at times, to translate the Abh script), and some minor sound problems I was having with disc 1, I was rather down on CotS by about the ten minute mark. “What horrible quality!” I thought. Actually, the picture issue wasn’t quality, it was Plane Space, but I didn’t know that at the time.

Fortunately, the narrative stopped jumping around, and although Jinto is obviously still narrating past events, it stops being so annoying when the time-flow is linear. Then Jinto’s friend shows up to see him off, and the setup starts to truly unwind. It requires the remainder of Episodes 1, 2, and 3 to complete the setup; the story doesn’t really start until Episode 4. But it works, because Jinto is a likeable guy, and Lafiel (La-fee-el), when she shows up in Episode 2, is quite likeable herself, if a bit odd. For a girl whose introduction to Jinto was nearly a baseball to the face, she jumps into the action alongside him quickly in a sequence that shows off her superior physical ability–as well as the prejudice against her race.

Doing my own narrative jump here, I will go back to Episode 1, and here I have to engage in a bit of a spoiler to discuss something. Jinto and his friend have been attending a “basic” school for citizens of the empire. (Everyone is a citizen of their home world, but even if it’s ruled by the Abh, that doesn’t make them an Imperial citizen.) Due to circumstances, Jinto is a noble of the Abh Imperium, yet he has never met one and knows almost nothing of them. It’s not stated outright, but he is probably supposed to be ruler of his homeworld eventually.

The circumstances that brought around his enoblement leave him outcast, and while at the school, he was incognito to avoid problems. His identity was revealed at graduation, and only the one teammate from school came to see him off. But I don’t think it was as big a secret as he thought. The reason why is that his schooling seemed… deficient. He knows how to speak, read, and write Abh. And that’s about it. He has zero training on Abh protocol. He doesn’t know how to address Abh officers or nobility. He’s not even sure how he should be addressed, and when confronted with a huge manual on Abh table manners, he’s totally mystified. These are very strange omissions, even for someone who became a noble under his circumstances. He doesn’t even know (nor does the viewer until later) a clear and obvious physical trait that should have told him something important about Lafiel. All these point to one conclusion for me: his education was deliberately sabotaged. Whether through predjuice against Abh ways, or something more sinister, he wasn’t taught things that he should have been. And I suspect I know who was behind that sabotage.

The ironic thing is that it backfires in two major ways. The smaller of the two is that his ignorance but natural aptitude, manners, sense of responsibility, and the fact that knows he’s a fish out of water, but determined to get it right, quickly impress the Abh. There’s no clumsy “wrong fork at the table” or “inappropriate dinner subject” scenes; it’s just little things like trying to come up with the right thing to say when surprised by an honor guard while boarding ship. And he does, even if it comes off a bit pompous for a 17 year-old. One thing that stands him well; he quickly picks up on an odd speech pattern of the Abh nobility that alone would earn their reputation for arrogance. In their parlance, “you shall” means “please” even if it’s delivered in a haughty tone. So when Lafiel tells Jinto — not at all contritely — “You shall forgive me,” he understands that she’s admitting she offended him, and he forgives her without hesitation.

The larger of the two ways is what drives the series’ real plot. Not the war, but the developing relationship between Jinto and Lafiel. Because Jinto doesn’t know the obvious thing any imperial (and some non-imperials) would, he asks Lafiel a simple question that she’s never been asked before. And she answers. Which aside from Jinto’s thought, “Why did she sound like she was declaring victory?” is all I am going to say about that, because it’s a major spoiler and I wish I hadn’t known it coming in. You want to know, go order it; I bought through DVDSDoneRight, whom you can find on Amazon.com.

Now, on to other thoughts. The Abh are pretty good warriors, but it seems that to reach flag rank, you need to be totally nuts. The lead admiral of the fleet seems to have no idea of tactics, needlessly insults subordinates, strikes ridiculous poses (complete with sword), and if it weren’t for his chief of staff, would probably spend all day dithering over probabilities of 0.03%. His idea of battle planning reminded me of young Anakin going, “I know, lets try a spin!”

If he’s totally insane, his subordinate, in charge of a small-but-powerful sub-fleet is totally maniacal. Take James T. Kirk on speed and in a sexy woman’s body, add a fair amount of Admiral Thrawn, more than a dash of Miles Vorkosigan, and stir vigorously. Sprinkle with Admiral Helmut* (“Dark Lord of the Sixth….Fleet”), then add more speed, and you’ve got Admiral Spoor. She’s an over-the-top riot. Carries a sai and poses with it about every fourth sentence. But she’s damn effective too–her method of convincing the enemy to surrender was hilarious, and left her poor assistant gibbering. She teases him mercilessly throughout her scenes. The only time she seems human, uh.., Abh, is when she confesses to being sad she never saw war as a ship captain. (Another reason I hate the English dub: she was called a captain in it, even though she’s obviously an admiral — although apparently junior admirals also command their own ships.)

*There’s no good link to explain him. A mix of Thrawn and an older Miles Vorkosigan, brilliant, ultra loyal. He’s actually the author’s nod to the latter.

I think that Lafiel broke character a bit around this time–maybe. I’m undecided. She and Jinto were trying to shoot their way out of an empty amusement park (don’t ask!), and Lafiel felt guity about shooting the mechanical guards. In her defense, they were quite cute, but she had been too no-nonsense up to then for it to come off quite right. A lot of this sequence was included for something that’s hard to bring off: dramatic comedy. The CotS team does it, even with a bit of pathos as a helpful mechanical horse gets shot taking them to safety. And it’s funny too, as Jinto seems to be caught between an emotional need to say something to console the horse and the rational thought, “We’ve got to get out of here, there’s PEOPLE SHOOTING AT US!!”

There are three issues I disagree with SDB on, provisionally. However, since I don’t have three of the episodes, something in there might well render me incorrect. Pending that, I didn’t see (or perhaps interpret) things he claimed to. The first, I’m going to hold off discussing, until I see the other three episodes. (UPDATE: I didn’t need the fourth disk, it was in the insert of #1. I misunderstood an explanation in episode 2; the Abh do have a sixth sensory organ. I had thought it was a headpiece they all wore, combined with a cyborg implant.) The second was that there were no scenes of the United Mankind fleet leadership, just the Abh. Provided that the detatchment chasing the Gosroth wasn’t what he was talking about (the final battle occurs during Episode 5), I saw nothing of the fleet leadership. There was a lot of the local cops chasing Jinto and Lafiel on the planet Suffugnof (groan), and a UH agent attached to them.

I suspect it was done to give us a peek inside the thinking of the UH, and that leads me to the third issue: I disagree strongly with the “no good guys, no bad guys” concept that SDB claims to see here. It’s possibly a matter of taste, but to me, the UM and its three allies are meant to be the bad guys. The Abh are portrayed as fairly odd, quite insular, and they really are arrogant– in their own weird way. They’re slowly taking over control of space to guarantee peace in the galaxy. (No, really. They’re serious.) And despite the fact that they’re pretty adamant about it, even to the point of sending large fleets to annex independant worlds at gunpoint, they are fairly benign. Planets can do whatever they want, but the Abh control space; they aren’t really interested in the planets and regard the need to conquer them as an honorless necessity. They’re perfectly happy to appoint a local to be in charge of the planet, take control of local space, and be done with it. The Abh are loyal, straightforward, responsible, and have a strong duty ethic, if aloof to the point of arrogance. But the humans are even more arrogant, and their methods are harsh. They’re portrayed as inflexible, untrustworthy, scheming, fearful, bigoted, and aggressive. (The political parable at the beginning of episode 11 evoked some modern-day political realities.) They set up a repressive regime on a planet they conquer, start harassing people, and broadcasting propaganda. They even antagonize and attack natural allies, like an independence-minded local group.

Notice the complexity of the universe, despite the mundane plot? I mean the plot is about as ordinary as you could get: Boy meets girl. Boy goes to faraway place and has many adventures with girl. Boy becomes hero. Do they fall in love? It’s not that simple, yet it’s not some overdone soap opera either. It’s not the basic plot, but it’s how the Japanese execute it, with all the little touches. Granted, this was an adapation (by the author, it seems) of a novel, but we’ve all seen crappy adaptations before. This isn’t one, and on top of that, as I said before, the Japanese understand that animation isn’t just for kids. (I could see Joss Wheedon doing this for TV. And it would get canceled as fast as Firefly was. Remember, I said I don’t watch TV?)

And in that vein, I’ll leave you with Lafiel’s words to her father. After they discussed the secret I’d guessed in Episode #4, Lafiel cries over her loss. Her father tells her that no one can ever see her cry, to which she responds: “But Father, that’s not fair. . . ”

“…You’ve never taught me how to cry without showing tears, like you do.”

Update 11/29/05: I have watched it a third time, and realized something. Compared to most shows out there now, it is paced very slow. Even the battle scenes proceed with a sense of deliberation. This is very much a character driven story, which translates to “lots of talking.” And if you are an adrenaline junkie, that equals “boring.” Just something to keep in mind if you think about buying it.