Roving Thoughts archives

Why the fleet battles in Last Exile - Fam have no drama for me

One of the things that Last Exile - Fam, The Silver Wing features relatively prominently is fleet battles with those flying battleships. Unfortunately I find them essentially completely free of drama, which robs the whole thing of a lot of the point.

The direct reason that I find them mostly free of drama is that in an earlier clash with the Silvius, it's been solidly established that the fleet gunners of the Ades Federation have all of the accuracy of Imperial Stormtroopers; despite outnumbering the Silvius many to one and having it dead to rights, they failed to score any really meaningful hits. When you know that one side can't shoot straight, it's hard to take battles involving them very seriously.

The deeper reason is what this demonstrates about the fleet battles themselves: the outcomes of the fleet battles are arbitrary. What happens in a battle and what the outcome is is based purely on what the scriptwriters need, not on any internal logic of the setting and forces involved. If Ades needs to be strong and beat people up, it will; if it needs to be weak or lose, it will. One day Ades can shoot straight and is terribly dangerous, the next day not so much. An outnumbered ship may or may not escape or may or may not be harmed, and there's nothing about the scenario that will let me predict that. Clever twists are guaranteed to materialize when necessary, generally out of nothing. Improbable events will happen as required. This arbitrary nature of outcomes and lack of logic has robbed the fleet battles of most any drama or tension for me; what happens will happen and that's just it, so there's no point in doing anything more than maybe enjoying the scenery.

(It's not quite deus ex machina outcomes, but it's close. A few times it's literally been that when Guild members show up.)

The problem of interpretation: what I indirectly learned from Alien Nine

(There are spoilers here for Alien Nine.)

Once upon a time there was an anime called Alien Nine, which was a four episode OVA series about three gradeschool girls who are 'volunteered' to be their school's alien control officers. Especially it's the story of Yuri Otani, who really hates everything involved with the job; she hates the symbiotic Borg that now lives on top of her head, she hates the dangerous alien animals that they have to fight (and ideally capture alive, and then the girls have to tend to them too), and so on. Although it looks cute and has perky songs, Alien Nine is in many ways an almost unrelentingly brutal series; for all the pastel colours, these are sixth graders being forced into significant danger and the show does not pull its punches. Yuri doesn't deal well with the situation at all while the other two girls hide their own secrets which the series peels back over time.

The series builds to a crescendo of character tension and explosions, reaching its height at the end of the fourth OVA episode. The ending of the show has one of the girls rollerskating faster and faster through the school corridors, then the show cuts to the other two girls reacting in sudden alarm; they burst outside to find the first girl's body lying on the ground. Cue the end credits. That's it, that's the end of the fourth and last episode. When you watch the anime, this is a huge 'wait, what? what just happened?' moment.

Once upon a time I read an analysis of the Alien Nine OVA which ran down all of these events and came up with a solid, convincing explanation of what was going on and what happened (I think it was this one); the short version is that the first girl snapped and ran out of reasons to live. It's frankly a great explanation and makes perfect sense all through.

There is only one problem with this beautiful interpretation of Alien Nine: it's wrong. Alien Nine was a manga before it was an OVA series, and the OVA series is very faithful to the manga. Too faithful, because the OVA series ends abruptly halfway into a manga storyline, and of course the manga storyline continues on to explain what happened to the first girl. And what's going on is nothing like what the analysis came up with from the OVAs.

Reading the analysis (even the first time around) was a very salutory bucket of cold water to me, because by the time I encountered this analysis I'd already read enough of the manga to know it was beautiful, convincing, and incorrect. I of course already knew that our interpretations of anime are filtered through our own views and we may be reading things into an anime that aren't there, but this was the first time I saw it so very vividly happen before my eyes. And it's not as if the interpretation is wrong, in a sense; everything that the person writing it saw in Alien Nine really is there, either in fact or if looked at from the right angle. It's just almost certainly not what the actual creators of the anime intended to be there.

I am far from immune to the problem of interpretation myself, and ever since then I've tried to bear this in mind. What I see in an anime may be far from what the creators put there, especially with the cultural and translation gaps. In the worst case, I may be basing my flights of fancy on a translation nuance or mistake that's not even present in the original Japanese.

(I don't know why Alien Nine was only a four episode OVA and ended in such a bad place. Possibly it was planned for more episodes but didn't sell well enough.)

Noise in space: handwaving Moretsu Pirates some

Via Author, lolikitsune tweets:

watched Mouretsu Space Pirates 3: noise in space. SEEMS LIKE THE SUCCESSOR TO STARSHIP OPERATORS IS NOT HERE YET

I like handwaving, so let me make an excuse for Pirates here. Actually, two of them. The first excuse is that a certain amount of noise might come through contact with the hull and thus with hull vibrations caused by the various machinery operating. But that's probably not good enough.

The second excuse is that everyone was in what we're told are very automated spacesuits, in an environment with fairly smart computers. People notice and react to sound cues. Thus, there is a good case for generating entirely artificial in-suit noises that correspond to important things going on in the outside world, things like airlock doors opening or potentially dangerous mechanisms in operation that you should steer clear of. So far all of the noises in space we've heard in Pirates have been noises from the ship itself, things that could plausibly be faked in the suits for this reason.

(By the way, I understand why shows love their sliding airlocks but I think it's a stupid design. As I picked up long ago from reading Heinlein juveniles, in theory the safest airlock door is one that opens inwards because then it's essentially impossible to accidentally open it until the inside has been depressurized. If the inside is still under pressure, you have many pounds per square inch holding the door very firmly closed. But inwards-opening doors would not make for good staging and good scenes, so we have the kind of sliding ones that we see in Pirates. This has been your digression of the day.)