Outlaw Star

As promised, I'm a-gettin' another review out—though it ain't a new show.

Remember Outlaw Star?

Now let's do this properly, bad stuff first.

Um...

Nope, nothing. No, wait, maybe they could've stood to have more Ctarl-Ctarl. And Suzuka is a little Sue-ish, but female characters in Sunrise series that aren't strictly comic relief, or Yamato Nadeshiko love-interests like Melfina or most Gundam heroines, are always insufferable. It's like an iron law of the universe. Same goes for Hilda, now that I think of it—and Faye, in Bebop.

As for the good...first, how about the pirates? I'm a sucker for any SF that incorporates magic, as such, without pretending it's something else. And those ones are Taoists—their chant, Bagua Sanfa, is not, as you may have heard, nonsense. The "Bagua", or rather "Bāguà" is definitely "Eight Trigrams;" "Sanfa", if it's "Sānfǎ", is probably the Three Seals in Buddhism, Impermanence, the No-Self, and Nirvana. It's less weird that they're mixing the two than it probably seems—Japanese Taoism, in the form of Onmyôdô, is heavily mixed with Shingon Buddhism. I don't think this is quite as much the case in Chinese Taoism (where the rivalry with Buddhism sometimes got ugly), but Japan could make "generalization from the self" their official national fallacy.

Similarly, the caster: a gun that shoots magic spells! Oh, hell yes!

And then there's the SF. Yes they fudge it here or there for the story, and of course there's the flat-out magic, but the show's still more serious, literary SF than 2001: A Space Odyssey, and yet it's not boring. How about the magnetic monopole in the prison episode? Right outta Niven, my friends. How about when the Outlaw Star passes between the two atmosphere-sharing gas giants, and they nearly get hit by a big wave of metallic hydrogen?

The characters! All of them really, except Suzuka, and even she's not bad, just Sue-ish. But Aisha? Seriously, find me anything American with a ditzy jock-girl. Yes, I'm a sucker for the catgirl, but most catgirls don't make you suspect their real job title is Speaker-to-Animals (except, you know, without Niven's raving misogyny). Melfina is up there with Armitage and R. Dorothy Wainwright as a robot, and Harry's a great character, too: he's basically a nice kid, but he was raised by a family of assassins, so his default reaction to disappointments is to kill something. Also, he manages to make giant pink bows look downright manly. Jim is one of the few good boy-genius characters (if that episode with the cats doesn't make you cry, you have no blood and no tears), and Gene is a sort of "Shonen hero who didn't have his adventure yet".

Finally, I'd like to point out how good a show this is...and then you consider it's mostly just an elaborate ad for model-kits!. Why are Japan's thirteen-hour toy ads deeper than the stuff we make to show how smart we are?