Before I was an anime fan, the genre of entertainment that I was most into was science fiction, especially of the classic mid-to-late 20th Century variety, for the most part, set in space. Maybe it was because I saw Star Wars in the theater as a young child (can’t remember much about that at all, but I think I still have the ticket stub, a real stub that is just the ripped half of a small ticket that bears only the name of the theater and the price of admission—remember, this is about summer 1977). Maybe it was because I watched lots of Star Trek (the original series) re-runs on a small black-and-white television on a UHF station that barely came in if you fiddled with the antenna enough. Maybe it was because I then continued to consume all kinds of space-based science fiction, from the campy Battlestar Galactica on TV to the classic science fiction novels of the 50s, 60s, and 70s my dad read and which I then devoured as a teenager. Asimov, Herbert, Heinlein, and many others less known today. Space was the place to be for fiction for me.
That’s why when I first started to watch some anime in the 90s (I had loved Star Blazers as a kid as well, but at the time didn’t really think of it as “anime”), I was drawn more to the space-fiction side of things, even silly stuff like the Dirty Pair, over other works. And when I started to get deeper into anime at the end of the decade it was Cowboy Bebop that was my main gateway into taking the medium more seriously.
Eventually, my tastes broadened. They had to, or I would have stopped being an anime fan long ago since good, or even mediocre, space-based works are much fewer and far between than they once were. That’s why I was quite excited about nine years ago when Geneon licensed Starship Operators, which from the look of it promised something along the lines of real space opera and adventure, something I had been missing since Cowboy Bebop and Outlaw Star had come and gone (I have never been much of a Gundam fan, however, and so my desire for space-based stories was never satisfied by its many incarnations, no matter which version I tried and I tried several).
What I got was both different and somewhat more interesting than I had expected. For SSO is not just a classic space opera involving warring planets and fights between capital ships (cruisers and battleships, no dinky little starfighters here). It is one of the very rare times that anime seemed to notice that reality programming had caught on in the real world and so the show incorporated a dual nature: on one level, the show is a straightforward David v. Goliath story which pits a group of recently graduated military cadets from the Planet Kibi against the powerful Henrietta Alliance, which has just forced Kibi to surrender and become part of its alliance of worlds. The cadets, however, refuse to abandon their posts and instead work out a deal with the Galaxy Network (based on Earth) to purchase their battleship for them and enable them to carry out a guerilla war against the Henrietta Alliance.
The other side of the deal is that the GN will broadcast their actions on a dedicated channel, “The Starship Channel” and have an embedded reporter accompany them during their fight. The rebellion will be televised, literally. While you might think this is slightly insane, there’s actually a logical reason why the cadets agree to this rather outlandish scheme: they hope to gain the sympathy of other worlds, perhaps even the powerful Earth Federation, and convince them to intervene and restore Kibi’s independence.
So much for the politics. There is plenty of action, but the original creator Ryo Mizuno (perhaps better known for a little thing called Record of Lodoss War) and the adaptation team at JC Staff decided to keep the space battles real. Very real. What does that mean? The ships do not just swoop through space at what would be in real life breakneck speeds, but instead crawl slowly through the vast void at movement rates that are more believable for chemical propulsion systems, basically the level of technology that we currently have (how then were faraway planets colonized? Wormholes. On a basic scientific level, sure this is still fantasy, but it’s less fantastic than “warp drives” and “light speed” and all other manner of propulsion by phlebotinum that most space opera employs). When it comes to attacks, they occur at long range using weapons that must be precisely timed, both as to when they are launched and where you think the enemy ship will be by the time the shot or missile will reach its intended target zone.
Some will probably find this show slow and boring, but I found the more “realistic” space battles intriguing in comparison to the usual Itano Circus or swift moving ships of most shows. You have to wait longer for the payoff, but it does a decent job overall of building anticipation, at least it did for me about a decade ago, as I haven’t seen it since.
Looking back, from a now more jaded–okay, perhaps I should say experienced–perspective, I can see some of the true faults of the show. While they may be military cadets recently graduated, they really are just another group of teenagers, not much older than high school students, who have become super-empowered (their ship, the Amaterasu is state of the art, fresh off the assembly line and bearing both weaponry and defensive capabilities that are superior to most older ships out there). The cadets themselves fall in the full range of stereotypes known well to anime fans. Their unofficial leader and tactical genius is a hot girl, outstanding in both face and figure (while their official leader, the cadet they choose as captain is straight from central casting for a “leading man”). Other crew members fill out other roles and there’s even a supergenius child hidden in their midst who plays a vital role late in the run. Tropes and cliches abound.
But…who cares? As a whole, the entire package works quite well and is bookended by Mami Kawada’s rousing opening theme “Radiance” and ended by KOTOKO’s quiet, serene “Chi ni Kaeru ~on the Earth~.” The pacing may be slow, but the show is thoughtful about what it is doing. And most of it, it’s cool to see battleships slugging it out for control of the human realm in space. I wish there were more scope for decent space-based action in today’s anime world.
