Today I’d like to discuss a series I stumbled upon called Starship Operators. I found it after doing a Google search on science fiction anime with female protagonists. It is an interesting piece of anime that I will go in depth over. First off the main character is a girl named Shinon and this is what she looks like:

It starts off with the battleship emerging from FTL and she’s on the bridge alerting the Captain that everything checks out. As a Cadet, she’s nearly finished with her courses and will be graduating soon. The Captain proceeds to tell her: “I’ve always found your voice to be soothing, Shinon. It’s like listening to a digital recording.” He then goes on to basically insult her and tell the girl she’d make a miserable secretary.

A aggressive Kingdom attacks her home world and the government surrenders without fighting back. The senior officers abandon ship-per orders from the conquerors-leaving Shinon and the cadets behind. From there things get interesting. The Cadets decide to fight back but they need to own the ship, so they make a deal with the Galactic Network to air themselves as a reality show.  I won’t give the rest of the plot away but Shinon isn’t your typical female lead. She’s conflicted, confused by emotion and a more realistic portrayal than most are.

The series also plays fair, for the most part, with physics. Lasers aren’t seen until they strike-which is what would happen in real life.  It also has ship battles taking hours before they fight due to the large distances involved-as would real life.

So, in a nutshell, if you want a science fiction anime that plays fairly nice with physics and has a different type of protagonist, then this is for you.