Tag Archives: anime

Jun 15 2013

Starship Operators

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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:

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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.

 

Jun 7 2013

Divergence Eve

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Those who know me know of my love of anime. Hard to believe a 40 year old man can love it as much as I do, but it’s true. I have had the opportunity to see many interesting series. Divergence Eve is one of them.

I have heard the complaints about the amount of fan service, which is a large part of the series, but it is far more than that. They use realistic theoretical science to explain FTL travel and the characters are interesting. Ships travel through what one could call a wormhole that passes through another universe to reach another point in our universe. However, the inhabitants, called the Ghoul, are opposed to all life, which makes them a dangerous foe. They make several appearances through the wormhole and are pushed back to their dimension each time.

This doesn’t remove their being dangerous, which leads us to the main character Misaki. I won’t give anything of the plot away but she is a fascinating character that makes the two part series. For things to make sense, though, you’ll have to watch “The Misaki Chronicles,” which is the second half of the series. I challenge folks to watch and follow the plot. Do not let the fan service turn you off, or the first episode, which foreshadows things in the future. I think most science fiction fans will enjoy it if they sit down and truly watch it.