Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Astra Lost in Space
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steelmirror
 Posts: 342 |
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Also, am I the only one who is imagining Polina standing there and watching all this backstory and drama and kids crying about how their clone prince friend tried to kill them with a wormhole conspiracy while saving his dead sister/daughter's adopted clone and being like "wtf guys your planet sounds crazy just drop me off on snowball earth kthnx"
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WatcherZer
Posts: 274 |
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And that parents is why you shouldn't let kids play with Wormholes.
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whiskeyii
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Not gonna lie, I was kind of waiting for Polina to at least point out that when people die for their beliefs, it’s usually a belief they chose, not something forced on them. But she was just like, nah, yup, Charce got it in one. Like, huh????? 
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Merida
 Posts: 1945 |
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^I think plenty of people died for beliefs they didn't actively choose but were "forced" into by birth or other circumstances and even if they did, dying for a stupid belief you chose is still dying for a stupid belief...
I liked this episode a lot. Yeah, they really ramped up the drama and the friendship is magic stuff, but it worked for me somehow. Poor Charce. 
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John Thacker
Posts: 1006 |
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Isn't the proper claim, "in the debate between free will and determinism, Astra Lost in Space tells determinism to bug off?" (I'd say in general it rejects Compatibilism even more than the average anime too.) Considering that Charce was carefully nurtured from birth to be loyal to the king, I don't see how it makes sense to look at this as "nature vs nurture." Heck, you could even reverse it as seeing it as his "natural desire for self-actualization, life, and freedom overcoming a nurtured loyalty to his father, king, and country." (You can even go full bore into some kind of crazy, "he has the genetics of a king, so of course his royal blood's natural desire to be free will win out over some attempt to inculcate him into being a servant." In any case, "nature vs nurture" just doesn't work as a framing.) The consistent theme is about choice and self-determination versus following a path that someone else sets down for you, but the paths that the parents tried to choose for the children involve nurture and trying to raise them a certain way as much as their genetic nature, as the review itself notes! It's not a "nature vs nurture" debate at all because both those forces as commonly conceived are pushing in the same direction. It's really odd to try to force it into that particular dilemma, rather than a freedom versus (parental and societal) control message, a free will vs determinism message. Cue the Rush lyrics. |
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TexZero
Posts: 583 |
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I see what you did there. Your ability to weave in a Dad joke in a show about bad dads was not lost on me. |
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whiskeyii
Posts: 2245 |
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I mean, I get that, but Charce's framing was that he had no choice in the matter, and that he was just adhering to Old Era culture by doing so, which.....yeah, that just doesn't square. I didn't mind that as an abuse victim he saw no way out for himself, the part that bothered me was that he was like "and that's how it was in the olden days, right Polina?" and she just went "Yup". Kiiiiiinda' missing some nuance there, Polina. |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11346 |
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Is "My God commands me" any different from "My King commands me," if either is perceived to be the ultimate and absolute authority? I don't think Polina was wrong at all.
Seems like the biggest threat to life in this universe is not war or asteroids but heights. Of the 9 students, a full third of them have lost people who fell from cliffs or buildings (and two of those were murders!). |
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Fred Lougee
Posts: 127 |
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Yeah, that. As George Patton so colorfully put it, "You don't win a war by dying for your country. You win a war by making some other son-of-a-[censored] die for his." In 1603 Tokugawa Iayasu completed the campaign for unification of Japan, established the Shogunate which bore his name, and enacted a host of reforms. One of these was a massive reduction in force of the samurai. At one point 10% of the adult male population had been samurai, most of those conscripts given only basic instruction in swordsmanship before being sent off to battle. The Tokugawa Shogunate pared that down to only personal guards for the nobility and ranking officials and a number of dojos kept open in case it might be required to defend Japan against a foreign invasion. The rest were all pensioned off gratefully, thanks for you service. Many became gardeners or drunkards, some took up poetry or other forms of writing and it's from those works that the Bushi-do was later formulated by people who had never been anywhere near actual combat. Sending people out to kill one another en masse is probably the most distasteful endeavor humans have ever devised and only a moron or a dangerously unstable demagogue would ever glorify it. The Bushi-do did just that. The most egregious statement in the Bushi-do is that there is nothing more noble than to sacrifice one's self for the Emperor. You only make it easier for your enemy to kill your soldiers if you indoctrinate them beforehand so that they will die for little to no tactical or strategic advantage. The military dictatorship which took control of Japan in the 1920s used the Bushi-do to indoctrinate common soldiers, teaching them that they were the spiritual heirs of the samurai of old, even if the weapons were different. Odd as it seems, this mind set persists in Japanese culture, in the approach to business and personal affairs. It's still in popular culture, even when it's shown at a unconscious level. Charce's actions, willingness to sacrifice himself at the order of his father, the King, were very much in that Bushi-do template. |
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Animegomaniac
Posts: 4078 |
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Though you clearly neglected to comment on the series' use of heavy handed symbolism. I do find it amusing that most of you seem to really enjoy the latest episode while it has sent me into a kind of a meltdown. Are you ignoring some of the conditions Charce are asserting are true, the least of which is that Seira had a photographic memory like her clone... what sort of conversation between Charce and Seira did that come up? "Just in case you have to identify my clone, here's an incidental fact about me"... but then there's the idea that NOTHING happened to Seira in the time between being cloned and being assassinated and by nothing, I mean the usual events of life among the royalty like, you know, breeding or even living her own life... if you're going to have your daughter do nothing either as a person or a princess then why clone her? Seems only convenient for the story... to her "sudden" assassination by a "faction" to that "faction" learning about Aries to the supposition that they added her to the death camp so she'd die rather than just kill her outright which should be easier than kiiliing a royal princess on royal grounds... but then they know she's a clone and the others are clones and they should be able to do something political with that knowledge... wouldn't "Ah, the King cloned himself and his daughter and now he's trying to hide the whole mess by killing them all!" set off some sort of revolution? What is this "faction"'s goal other then killing Seira for the sake of the story? Why is Aries higher in the line of Ascension than Charce? The clone of the princess is closer to the throne than the clone of the king? Nobody in the conspirators group knew Aries' mother was Seira's handmaid even if she was implanted with Seira's clone by someone? Hey, let's do a checklist of WTFs: No one knew what the princess looked like? No one was suspicious of a late arrival to a group of kids they planned to kill all of? They had to know Charce was the clone of the king as he was their assassin but they didn't know that he knew about Seira's clone? They... thought?... that Seria had disposed of her clone... if they knew about the princess at all... yet somebody made the embryo and somebody placed in Vixia's uterus... but the king made the clone of Seira against her wishes yet it was willingly implanted in her handmaid without Seira knowing? WHAT? And then there's the "How? Why? and WHAT'S HAPPENING?" of Aries being transferred to their group so she's be killed with the rest of them. What kind of "faction" goes from active to passive when it comes to rebellion? And yet there's still more about the wormhole. This whole episode was a disaster of mind boggling proportions. |
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Nom De Plume De Fanboy
 SubscriberExempt from Grammar Rules Posts: 612 Location: inland US west, pretty rural |
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^
Aries is here 'cause we gotta have a pink haired nice girl. It's like a rule or something. 
And to be in the group, she has to be a clone of ... somebody? So Seira had to be created, and she had to be connected to Charce somehow, but she couldn't be a bad guy, and it's more dramatic if she died somehow, and ... it went out of control. 
I get that this show is coincidence city. It's a problem for me too. But it's been so long since I got to see a show set on a spaceship, and they're such a nice bunch of kids, and I guess I'm a sucker for this stuff. 
It is a slow motion train wreck, but it's a really nice train wreck. If it was more ( ahem ) cogently written, there'd be a risk that it wouldn't be so damn nice. |
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steelmirror
Posts: 342 |
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HandofBobb
Posts: 80 |
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I'm pretty sure she's not, but as Charce planned to "go back out to space and die alone", that takes him out of the running... |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11346 |
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Well, just accepting things at face value, this was a nice ending. I liked seeing them grown up but I too kinda chafed at the boys go exploring while the girls go shopping/concerting trope, but whatever.
Problem is, I can't quite overlook the improbability of them being able to erase their history deliberately in only a generation. It's not even just a matter of billions of people keeping the secret. It would also require the elimination or cooperation of several branches of science, like astronomy and archaeology and geology. I suppose they can claim a lot was lost in the war, but everything? And nearly overnight (relatively speaking, to what it would actually take)? I just can't buy it. I wanted to say I liked Animegomaniac's idea about why didn't they just use the wormholes on the asteroid? Don't need an asteroid-sized hole, just drill into it with wormholes and carve out chunks until it either alters its course or is swiss-cheesed enough to burn up on entry. Seems a lot more doable than moving an entire civilization and rebuilding on another planet. |
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DRosencraft
Posts: 665 |
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Sorry, I'm glad for all the folks that enjoyed this series. But it was a narrative abyss. There was so much garbage logic and leaps of faith and nonsense that should not fly that I went into the finale wondering if they were just trying to out ridiculous-plot-twist Trigger.
The entire premise, that you somehow got every person left on nuclear wasteland Earth to agree to NOT share the little secret that they are from another planet, and their history is 100 years older than it is... is immediately defeated by the idea that on blind faith these kids are gonna be able to trust some investigator who is willing AND ABLE to take down a crime ring that includes a monarch and several uber wealthy and famous individuals. That none of that "first" generation would have come out and spilled the beans to the "second," or that this cabal of the rich an powerful in a world that COULD keep such a monumental secret couldn't find a much simpler and quieter way to off a few illegal clones, or keep some rogue detective form outing their plan, and the aforementioned super-duper top secret history, makes zero sense. That doesn't even get into all the other nonsense in the rest of the episode, let alone the rest of the series overall. Again, great if you liked it, but this is not an objectively sound anime. |
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