fee_ugh.PNG
[Hide] (327.3KB, 695x496) novelist.PNG
[Hide] (201.9KB, 693x348) Untitled.jpg
[Hide] (183KB, 800x1200) >>4690
The Lunarian girl, yeah. It was nice to see a series that had science fiction concepts like people living on the moon and added details like the health problems a human would face growing up and going through puberty at a fraction of Earth gravity.
>>4692
The number one thing I can say about both the anime and the manga is that they are absolutely gorgeous. The manga was published in 1999, so stylistically it combines the 90s grit with the more human proportions and style that became prevalent in the 00s. Visually, the manga is a beautiful blend of highly detailled mechanical stuff and endearing human characters with incredible detail put into the backgrounds and set dressing. The anime is also very detailled given that it aired in 2003-04, around the time that anime began to lose its way and rely too much on digital shortcuts.
The anime is also incredibly sound on a technical level, which is especially impressive since so much of the series takes place in zero-gravity, low-G, and normal-G environments, the characters often require a fundamentally different approach to how they're animated. It'd be really easy to have a lot of bland, slideshow shots of them sliding across stiff backgrounds, but whenever the characters aren't in normal-G environments they actually move like it. The sound design underscores this too: the characters' voices are muffled by their spacesuits or sound staticky over radio transmissions, and when big things crash into each other in space there isn't any big sound effect because sound can't travel in a vacuum.
Thematically, it was a lot of fun to explore the setting since it combined something as bold and exciting as space flight with the mundanities of modern living. Astronauts aren't heroes: they're working stiffs, garbage men, and mechanics just like the rest of us. They're not exempt from being mobbed by door-to-door salesmen or having to brownnose their way up the corporate ladder, but despite how cynical a lot of the events actually are it never feels like a cynical series. There's serious thought and maturity put into a lot of the little events. Broadly, there is this notion of how w can either live alone in the void and accept the cold purity of space, or how we can choose to live with other people, love and be loved, and enjoy the warmth of human life.
For instance, in the first episode of the anime, we are introduced to the ragtag band of misfits who make up the space debris retrieval section of their company (called Half Section, since they're half-funded, half-staffed, and perceived to be half-witted). The first assignment is to alter the orbit of a memorial sent into space to protest against violence in some third world country so that it falls into orbit and burns up during reentry. The memorial is currently on an intercept course with a military satellite operated by the setting's equivalent of the United Nations who are "peacekeeping" in that region. The young, optimistic new hire girl in Half Section protests against doing this because it's Wrong and Immoral and How Dare You... until she learns that the memorial was installed in space by the UN themselves as a hollow propaganda gesture, at which point she goes along with it. There's even a further small twist that happens later but I won't give that one away.