I don’t have an image from Dennou Coil, and I’ve chosen not to find one. Because I don’t have copies, legal or illegal, of any of its episodes.
Thing is, you see, I’ve been watching it at an anime club. I used to avoid those, but, having returned to university after graduating and working a desk job for a spell, I was feeling sociable and gave this one a try.
It’s true that these societies don’t have the practical function that they used to, allowing the efficient showing of rare VHS material. But it’s fun! Everyone I’ve met seems to be able to hold down a conversation. People make jokes I couldn’t have thought of myself, which I think is one of the most excellent, most gracious functions that humans perform for each other.
Speaking of humour, the club also solves one of my anime-watching problems: usually I only find comedies funny if I watch them with other people. And the club is also a useful device which makes me watch titles such as Dennou Coil. I’ve known it’s good for ages, but left on my own I’d never have managed to tear myself away from my solid diet of giant robots for long enough.
* * *
This is likely a short-term membership, because the wheels have been coming off my postgraduate career lately. I think I’ve become a bad investment, and I’ll probably be leaving again within the year. But I’m nevertheless glad I returned to university: I’ve learned I was wrong about a lot of things, and one of them was my judgement of social watching.
‘Mantles and sabres are so passé nowadays’
Writes ak of Mouretsu Pirates‘s first episode:
And of course the fact that Space Pirate Captain Harlock was referenced is good: the “password” that Ririka trades with her old friend is the very first line of the Harlock OP song.
This is indeed good, and, as he goes on to say, it would be almost ungrateful not to acknowledge Harlock in a space pirate anime. What interests me is that this isn’t just thrown in the background somewhere: it’s being used as a passphrase. In a show more po-faced than Mouretsu, a passphrase would be something inocuous and definitely not related to piracy. But that show would be boring. In this show the phrase is a bold identification.
Taking the opening words of SPCH‘s opening—which is I think fairly obviously a creed from Harlock himself—as the phrase the pirates use to identify themselves to one another suggests that what makes an anime pirate piratical is that they are in some way Harlockian. Or, more narrowly restricting this to the phrase itself, that they have the Harlockian attitude to space: not a threatening final frontier, but a manageable ocean, and moreover my ocean, for my yacht. Taken this way I think it functions as a nice tribute, intentional or not.
(And was that first episode as a whole any good? Goodness, I don’t know. Ask someone else.)
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Tagged apparently the only mouretsu post not using the word 'anachronism', captain harlock, mouretsu pirates, space pirate captain harlock