Watching Science Fiction Anime 21 Years Later
It's 2025, and we've been sinking further into a capitalist dystopia. So naturally the main backlog shows I watched this year were Planetes, a show about corporations ruining space, and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, a show about corporations ruining Earth. Really just had to make sure every base was covered, you know? Spoilers for both to follow, by the way.
Ghost in the Shell was of particular interest for me. The first Oshii-directed movie (which I watched after S1 of SAC) is one of those seminal pieces of anime sci-fi that broke through to the west earlier than most. It's always felt like the kind of thing that maybe one of my weirder high-school teachers might have seen, something from an earlier generation. Meanwhile, Stand Alone Complex was an Adult Swim staple... long before I had access to cable television. Over the years, multiple people have reacted with genuine and utter incongruity when I said I'd never seen any Ghost in the Shell. You, an obvious Anime Freak, have not seen Ghost in the Shell, one of The anime?? Inconceivable!
Well now I have, so take that, dude I met at WorldCon who was building a 1/48 Mega Size Unicorn Gundam in the dealer hall. Eat shit, guys camping the manga aisle in Barnes & Noble who told me that Negima was better than Dragon Ball back in high school. I have seen your precious naked robot lady anime and I appreciate it way more than any of you ever could because I am in my 30s and you are half-remembered strawmen.
Planetes is a bit more obscure, but with a strong reputation among hard sci-fi fans. Its 2003 anime adaptation was so well regarded as to give director Goro Taniguchi and writer Ichiro Okouchi a blank check for their next major work, Code Geass. The Vinland Saga anime also gave me a fresh interest in mangaka Makoto Yukimura's work. I'm glad I finally sat down to both watch and read it.
The narrative of Planetes orbits around the "Debris Section" of the Technora Corporation. As the name implies, their job is to deal with space debris. Due to the speeds and forces involved in getting things up there in space, even a tiny nut or bolt can lead to utterly catastrophic consequences if it hits something in the wrong spot. And if one thing in Earth orbit breaks apart, that means there are that many more pieces of debris flying around to break everything else. Bad news.
The show is animated by longtime Gundam and Brave studio Sunrise, and it's fascinating to see the full weight of their mecha experience being put towards spaceships that decidedly aren't zipping around and firing beams at each other. They know how to board, block, and shoot mechanical stuff over there. The ships are very cool despite - or perhaps because of - their mundane and utilitarian designs, and the attention to detail in how things actually move in zero gravity is striking.
And yet, one specific image from Planetes sticks out in my mind more than any other. In an early episode, the crew finds some people doing illegal space dumping. There's some conflict and whatnot and eventually the space cops show up to save the day. One of them tackles a guy and pulls out this fucking thing:
I find this implement to be viscerally upsetting. Consider the use case and end result. This is like if instead of nightsticks the cops carried around the jaw-ripper trap from Saw (and don't worry, they still have guns too). What the fuck, man.
And that's worldbuilding, isn't it? It strikes me as such a specific thing, so the gears start turning. In the alternate world of Planetes, someone designed this thing. They had to test it. What do the cop pressers say when they kill someone via blunt force decompression rather than by simply shooting them (and while we're at it, I suppose the space guns would have to use some kind of special caseless ammo)? Is this somehow considered appropriate force considering the harsh conditions of doing anything in space? Hell, I'm not even sure if the Orbital Security Agency works for the corps or the international space organization. What kind of accountability do they have?
These days, it's already wild to think that a corporation would bother to run a space station that coordinates space travel, or even have a Debris Section to be underfunded. That shit would probably all be subcontracted out to even less funded groups. Plus the anime ends with Space-NATO acquiescing to a terrorist group whose demands are... that resources mined in space be distributed fairly to all nations. Imagine egalitarian organizations winning for once; borderline comically idealistic. It's already crazy enough that they'd be divvying up space resources at all other than the superpowers in the room hogging it all.
What I've noticed about dystopic-or-adjacent sci-fi works is that they're all way too cool and fun with their fucked up bits. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex's first season is all about the "Laughing Man" case, where an unknown super hacker abducted and threatened a CEO on live television whilst completely censoring his identity. Much of the main plot is about discerning the true identity of the Laughing Man, distinguishing the real one from the copycats, and investigating the supposed conspiracy he meant to reveal in the first place.
A major point of conflict here is that Section 9, our nominal protagonists, are a task force working for the government, and yet the Laughing Man case orbits around a government conspiracy. But Section 9 are the good cops, so they're all about finding the truth even if it bites the hand that feeds, et cetera. Again, almost comically idealistic these days. Though the blow is softened a bit by the revolving last few episodes around the current administration trying to silence Section 9 by any means necessary, whether they be social or violent. I imagine the hackers around Niihama were telling each other "Motoko Kusanagi didn't kill herself".
Cyberpunk and the world have changed quite a lot since 2004. In some ways it's downright quaint to have an episode about... gasp, hidden cameras! People are being monitored without their consent! The authorities are collecting data from people of interest for their own gains! What could this all mean? What deep secret are they trying to hide by keeping tabs on everyone assigned to the Laughing Man case!? Meanwhile, in reality, literally any company will gladly sell all your information they've collected to advertising firms. They'll give it to the cops for free. The government will monitor your social media for seditious thoughts. They'll pull you off the street in broad daylight no matter how many people are filming them. It's all perfectly legal, you know.
Stand Alone Complex takes place in a world of killer cyborgs and mega hacker crime, but the big conspiracy ends up dreadfully, pointedly mundane. The government was colluding with big pharma to suppress cheap and effective treatment for cyberization side effects in favor of making money off more expensive methods. That's it. All the hits and power armor and black ops teams sent to wipe out Section 9 were to hide the kind of stuff that real governments do out in the open.
Insulin prices, the EpiPen bullshit, vaccine suppression. I've seen it all happen and I've seen people stumble over themselves salivating to tell you how it's for our own good. The movers and shakers in American society are openly pedophiles and creeps and everybody knows it. The first episode of Stand Alone Complex 2nd GIG has the new right-wing reactionary administration scrambling to make sure they don't look like they're cowing to conservative anti-refugee terrorists... because they aren't, they were already planning to stop helping refugees, they just don't want to look weak doing it. Imagine a government giving a shit about the optics!
It's not as if I didn't think backlog shows could hit hard like this. Legend of the Galactic Heroes was deeply compelling because everything in it resonated with reality, felt like it had some applicability to the greater tides of history. That's common with speculative media, nothing new. What really sticks with me after watching Planetes and Stand Alone Complex isn't the ways they may have "predicted" the current world; it's how they're so much more ambitious about it. Reality is so much more boring, and consequently more upsetting and relatable.
I almost wish the shit the bad guys were up to was at least like, crazy stuff. I would rather worry about whether someone in a cyborg body truly has a "ghost" than worry about whether a chatbot is going to steal my job because dipshit techbros want to jack off in their Scrooge McDuck vaults. I would rather worry about sociopath CEOs making engines to Jupiter than worry about them dismantling our health care system. It'd be better if the cops were shooting at each other instead of rounding up innocent people. If the problems affecting our society actually felt big and insurmountable, instead of feeling so small and obviously stupid that the inability for an individual to affect them becomes even more depressing than it already is.
But we live in boring old reality. So instead I sit here and realize Stand Alone Complex and Planetes are, all joking aside, from 2004; literally old enough to drink. And sometimes all a guy can do is derive what joy he can from sitting down and watching some goddamn science fiction. I'll drink to that, at least.
Here's to 2025. May the coming year be a better one for us all.
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