Land of the Lustrous’ third episode opens with vivid colors in a shimmering visual stew, as Phos is seemingly digested by a great creature’s stomach acids. The scene is simultaneously beautiful and horrifying, capturing the contradiction at the heart of all this show’s many transformations, and demonstrating Land of the Lustrous’ own greatest visual strengths in turn. In conveying the roiling emotions of its gemstone heroes, Land of the Lustrous is often at its best when it leans into abstraction like this – angular shapes and colors spilling over each other, rather than direct, neutral visual representation.
It’s an interesting quirk of Land of the Lustrous’ style that you could argue it is visually diminished by its translation to animation. Lustrous is a story about messy, unsolvable emotional conflicts, and characters who cannot be fitted into the world they inhabit – a world of hard lines and brutal clarity, emphasized by the black and white contrast of the manga itself. Translated into color, Lustrous’ characters feel less isolated, their conflicts less angular and inescapable.
This visual downgrade is mitigated to a great extent by the production’s evocative, alienating focus on angular compositions, as well as its heavy use of symmetry, emphasizing both the “rightness” and clear boundary lines of this world. Phos and Cinnabar aren’t just separated in an emotional sense – they literally don’t belong in this world visually, their appearances coming across as intrusions against beautiful wilderness, or perfectly symmetrical, clear white architecture. And frequently, color is actually used to echo and amplify the emotions of Lustrous’ cast – like when Dia, in their darkest moments, reflects on abandoning Phos against the cold blue glow of the mountainside.
But most dramatically, Land of the Lustrous counterbalances the loss of black and white media’s strengths with one of animation’s most distinct, unique aesthetic powers: the joy of characters in motion.
Episode three’s opening emphatically demonstrates Lustrous’ delirious motion, as Dia and Bort fight back against the creature that swallowed Phos. Low-angle shots and dramatic horns echo the drama of a kaiju battle, leading into a fantastic twisting shot as the two gems descend from a pillar, the camera spinning to follow them along the arc of the creature’s tendrils. It is easy for a rapidly spinning camera shot to devolve into pure visual noise, but here, the steady throughlines of the characters’ movement, as well as the useful visual orientation provided by the temple’s pillars, keep the characters’ momentum perfectly clear. Camera movement is common in Lustrous, but the camera always gives you something to follow – like its frequently employed “slide” conceit, where the camera’s journey is given a sense of tangible progression through how it curves and weaves to slide along the snail’s neck.
After the crashing visual crescendo of that opening act, Dia is left with a new and unexpected problem: Phos has apparently transformed into some kind of slimy slug creature. It’s a dramatic and extremely funny shift, but also a natural extension of everything Land of the Lustrous has explored so far. Even before they became a slimy slug creature, Phos essentially felt that way about themselves; the optics might have changed, but the sense of inferiority and purposelessness in this world are much the same. And after all, it was Dia who said Phos ought to try changing themselves from the inside, before seeking a change from the world.
That suggestion hangs heavily over Dia’s head as they urge Bort to “give Phos a little credit” regarding the defeat of the snail monster. And at the same time, Dia is almost certainly speaking out of their own desire for acknowledgment from Bort, and the sort of purpose Phos also seeks. Bort isn’t trying to be cruel; as a strong person, they likely feel it goes without saying that the weak must be protected by the strong. But Bort cannot understand the pain of that distinction from the other side, and the shame of feeling your only role is to not inconvenience those who protect you. As the overarching nature of this strange, sad island emphasizes, even a gentle cage is still a cage.
In search of a cure for Phos’ unique condition, Dia carries their slugified friend to Rutile, prompting a fascinating discussion on the nature of gems versus animals. Animals are described as beings that “rot away when they’re cut into. They are built to replace one another, with the older ones dying off,” to which Bort bluntly responds “what inferior beings.” The gems might seem strange to us, but we are undoubtedly even more strange to them. This conversation, like so many in Lustrous’ early episodes, clearly demonstrates this story’s confidence of worldbuilding. Characters are written not as tour guides, but as genuine citizens of their reality, complete with the biases that growing up within this society would instill in anyone.
Of course, an even more crucial takeaway than “naturalistic worldbuilding good” is that worldbuilding and characterization are not actually separate elements of storytelling. It is precisely the context of this world and these roles that have given Phos, Dia, and Cinnabar their identity issues and inferiority complexes. Characters do not exist apart from their worlds; they are born into and shaped by them, and their context for what is righteous or devious or noteworthy or mundane are all reflections of the world they’ve experienced. Great writers understand that when you conceive of a fantastical world, you are inherently shaping the perspective of its inhabitants, as well – and if you want to make a story about, say, our complex relationships with our bodies, and how our selfhood is perceived by others, focusing on gem characters who are evaluated on a hardness scale is a pretty good start.
As for Phos, their gem compatriots could largely take them or leave them. Dia has little luck convincing the other gems to really invest much energy in Phos’ predicament, and ultimately ends up sprawled on the beach side, lamenting Phos’ lack of friends while the slug-creature munches on grass. And seeing so much of themselves in Phos, Dia can’t help but question whether things might be better this way. “You don’t have to compare yourself to anyone. No need to be jealous or put on airs either, is there?” In this world where your hardness and thus “value” is so easily assessed, the idea of those who don’t stand at the top simply opting out of the system, and embracing formlessness, is a tempting one.
Why try when the system is designed to assume you fail? Why exert yourself, when people like Bort have already acknowledged you were born to be an invalid? Utilitarian systems are remarkably good at crushing those who feel they don’t possess much social utility – and by tying your productiveness to your virtue, systems like these often make people feel they have no reason for living at all. All but a handful of any society’s inhabitants suffer when your work is your worth; and to those who slip through the cracks, these systems offer the ready consolation of “they just didn’t try hard enough.”
Dia’s answer to this brutal equation, which strips both Cinnabar and Phos of any agency or personhood, is the same as Phos: “I’m sure there’s someone out there who needs you.” Even if the system doesn’t value Phos’ identity, someone’s life could surely be made better because Phos was there. In a system of pure utility, none of us are essential, and all of us are only so valuable as the resources we produce. But as individuals sharing a common society, each of whom hope and dream and fail and try again, we can make ourselves essential to the world through one simple act: kindness.
It is Phos’ kindness, in the end, that manages to bring them back together. When Cinnabar comes across the sleeping Dia, they can’t help but reveal, even in their anger, how much they care about Phos. And though Dia is deeply unsure of their own value and feelings, they are able to reach Cinnabar through a strength this system is not designed to evaluate: empathy. Through their actions here, all three of these characters demonstrate themselves to be absolutely essential; not to the self-propagation of the society they inhabit, but to each other, as sources of comfort and hope.
Phos offers hope to Cinnabar, and through this, Phos gains unquestionable value. Dia believes unconditionally in Phos’ right to exist, and through this, Dia becomes essential as well. Through helping each other, we become indispensable; and through inspiring each other en mass, we change the world. As Dia rushes off to reconstruct Phos, having been given the crucial clue by Cinnabar, Cinnabar constructs a tiny Phos out of mercury – a symbol of their fragile, essential link. Hope is a strange thing in that way; even two people without hope can still offer it to each other.
This article was made possible by reader support. Thank you all for all that you do.