The Weekly W: Where 2 - The Final Frontier

Hey everyone!  I did an earlier post about where, but I didn't get to touch on as many different kinds of places as I would have liked.  So here we are, traveling to a far-away place, and looking at anime that take place there.  Get your rocketships ready!  We're going to space! 








  This spring, I watched two series that took place in space.  One of them you may be familiar with.  Space Dandy was simulcasted on Toonami, and actually aired in English each week a few hours before the Japanese language version.  That's pretty cool.  Space Dandy is a dandy show after all.

Dandy Trying to Look Cool

Our protagonist for this epic space journey is Dandy, who travels in his spaceship, the Aloha Oe.  He's an alien hunter, searching for new aliens to catalog them and get the finder's fee for registering new types of aliens.  Overall, he's just "a dandy guy in space" with a dandy crew (a funny looking outdated robot named QT and a cat-alien named Meow).  In his free time, he likes to go to his favorite restaurant, BooBies.  This group travel through space, and each episode focuses on the group attempting to find a new alien to bring in to register.  That usually doesn't go so well, and plenty of hijinks are usually the result.  It's a hilarious show, and easy to pick up and put down, since the plot doesn't cross between episodes besides the Gogol Empire subplot which develops a bit over the series, but doesn't really move quickly.

What Dandy Actually Looks Like

 Space Dandy is a crazy show, but it's genuinely funny, and pretty interesting.  If you haven't seen it, you might want to try an episode or two.  It's certainly something else.



Our second show in space is an older series titled Glass Fleet.  At first, it looks like your typical military spaceship nonsense.  We've got the figurehead leader (Michel) of the People's Army, a resistance group of the common folk against the Holy Emperor (Vetti).  Cleo, captain of the "Glass Fleet", a special glass spaceship, is a merchant-pirate type guy who ends up housing Michel and some of Michel's servants due to the conflict.  The war between the People's Army and the Holy Emperor continues, and there's tons of intrigue and nifty plot twists.  It's a really cool concept, and the spaceships look really awesome.

Michel (left) and Cleo (right)

Vetti (and his roses)

Some things are just a little off in the Glass Fleet universe.  This show doesn't seem to take place in a universe where the laws of physics and matter work the same way.  I'm not even sure if we can say it takes place in space.

Let's take a look at the facts.  Fact 1: There is air in space.  Spaceships have cherry-picker like platforms that people can stand on to talk with other ships (even though they have radio).  There are no spacesuits anywhere.  Fact 2: There is more air inside spaceships than in space.  The windows of multiple ships are broken during the plot of the series, and there is always air rushi

Michel in space

ng out into space.  Combine Fact 1 and Fact 2 and we get Hypothesis 1: People have extra personal gravity here.  The reasoning behind this is that people can stand on their spaceships and yell to the other spaceships without dying of oxygen deprivation.  This obviously suggests that they are getting more oxygen than we should expect based on depressurization of the spaceships after windows are broken.  Therefore, there must be more air around those people outside of the spaceship than general space concentrations.  This leads to Theory 1: People have gravity that brings extra air to their mouths to allow breathing and monologues in space. 

High noble fashion in Glass Fleet

The fashion sense of the nobles is sort of hilarious.  The outfits make no sense, and they're really goofy.  This series has a bunch of other stuff that just adds character.  The architecture and the less ridiculous clothing sort of revolutionary Europe.  The plot is really fantastic, and the show is a great watch, especially with friends.

So our wacky space adventures have come to an end.  See you next week for another edition of the Weekly W!

Hope Burns Bright