Varying Degrees of Whut

I find Sora Kake Girl or Sora wo Kakeru Shoujo or The Girl Who Leapt Through Space quite enjoyable, for reasons which escape me. The staff are poking heaps of fun at other anime, past and present, from the same studio, and I suppose I’m in a position to appreciate at least some of that poking process. Plus my lack of anything approaching good taste in music helps me tap my foot to the Ali Project opening. But there are also odd hints in the show that it might turn out to be, like Code Geass, a fertile ground for the parlour game of crackpot theories.

Here’s my first contribution.

Leopard, the somewhat deranged, self-aware and deserted space colony (his design makes him the punk cousin of UC Gundam’s cylinder colonies), has provoked much amusement. I’ve noticed that a common complaint about the story is actually that he hasn’t featured enough in the three episodes aired thus far.

One of the characters uses a chess metaphor (we shall have to wait and see quite how metaphorical a metaphor it is) to explain to the heroine, Akiha, why she should help Leopard: he’s the King, important but vulnerable, and she’s the Queen, a powerful and fast-moving piece who’s (meant to be) defending him.

As has been widely noted, Jun Fukuyama voices Leopard; you do the mathematics, as they say.

Another thing that’s been widely noted is that the second episode tasked Akiha with retrieving a pair of giant golden balls to power Leopard’s otherwise useless Colony Laser rip-off. Any elements in this schoolboy image that were left implicit in the second episode are made firmly explicit in the third, in which we learn that jarring Leopard’s balls (why am I even typing this?) causes him intense pain, and that firing the Colony Laser leaves him in a state of passive euphoria which seems, frankly, post-coital.

The Colony Laser's power sources being installed.

So far, so quotidian. Here’s the crackpot bit. Leopard’s a King, he’s impotent and his land is a wasteland (there aren’t any inhabitants, remember). Then Akiha turns up and is able to restore him. But Leopard’s a self-aware space colony: the land that he rules is his own body. Sora Kake‘s writer(s) just ‘de-metaphored’ (literalised?) the connection between the Fisher King‘s wounded body and his territory.

I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry, but I am sure that I’ll watch the fourth episode . . .