Today on Crunchyroll, I finally took my first stab at a Planet With article, which will hopefully be the first of many. There are a million possible angles to tackle this show from, but I went with a pretty central one to start: the moral ambiguity of the various shifting factions in this very unique show. There are no clear villains in this one – even the friggin’ dragon has his own ethos, as horribly violent as it is. I’m excited to see how alliances shift in the second half!
Planet With’s Villains Are Right
I’ve actually been a bit hesitant to pick up Planet With, specifically because from what I heard it might try to tread into these sort of waters and… well…
Look, it’s not like I’m opposed to moral ambiguity, not if the author can actually make the moral situation actually ambiguous. It’s just that I heard that this was done by the same guy who did Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer, and… while that was a cool manga in a lot of respects… that manga’s attempts to play around with a similar sort of thing just fell utterly flat for me, souring a big part of the experience, insofar as the show seemed to expect me to like the main characters. (When you spend most of the story just hoping the main characters get run over by a truck before they can accomplish their ostensible goals, it tends to diminish the enjoyment of the read.)
I mean, there’s a difference between “exploring a genuinely complex moral situation that makes me honestly mull over who’s in the right” and “having a monstrous main character that wants to murder literal billions of innocents for unbelievably selfish reasons, but who we try to make seem likable by authorial sleight-of-hand and liberal invocation of ‘a billion is a statistic’.” The latter felt (to me, at least) more like emotional manipulation than genuine moral ambiguity–like the story was trying to make you think less clearly about the moral aspect by employing those sort of obfuscating tricks.
So I’ve been a bit leery of diving deep into Planet With, for fear that it would be more of the same sort of irritation I had before.
I don’t think Biscuit Hammer ever tried to go for moral ambiguity at all. In fact, I’d say it’s probably the Mizukami series in which the character actions and goals are most often clearly defined as Right/Good or Wrong/Evil. The protagonists proclaimed to have a clearly Evil goal, but still acted for Good in the meantime. The series wanted the readers to like them, despite not really wanting the readers to root for them to win. That’s where it seemed to lose you.
That’s not really the same thing with Planet With, though, as most of the conflict here is based on philosophical disagreements, with no side being fully Right or Wrong.
Hmm, I guess I was thinking of “ambiguity” in a broader sense. I mean, even in works that could be said to be ambiguous, there’s often (usually?) ultimately a side that the author comes down on as preferable.
So even if, in Biscuit Hammer, the story came down on the side of not destroying the world, I guess I still personally saw the whole “trying to make genocide come across as more sympathetic than it’s usually portrayed as” aspect to Biscuit Hammer still felt like what I’d think of as trying to introduce “ambiguity”.
That’s just an issue of how I personally thought of the definition, though, and I can totally see where you’re coming from. Going by your recommendation on it being handled differently, then, I think I will give Planet With a shot, see how I like it.
I can see what you meant by “ambiguity” in that case. That’s kind of a trademark for Mizukami, I’d say, trying to make most character decisions come from some sort of relatable, emotional core, even the villains and/or antagonists. So that is certainly present in Planet With as well.
But it does have more “ambiguity” in the sense that there are valid arguments for all sides of the conflict (even if the author will indeed favor one in the end).
I hope you’ll enjoy it more than you did LatBH.
Oh, almost forgot to add, thanks very much for taking the time to give some more insight!
Hah, no problem. I’ll gladly talk about this guy’s works. =D