Let's do another serious one because I feel like talking about this and the last time I wrote about it, I was drunk:
Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere, Season 1 (2011)
Fantasy series based on the first volume of Minoru Kawakami 's series of fantasy novels by the same name. Of the 11 books this series consists of, only the first two have been adapted into an anime and considering that was a while ago... well, it's unlikely there'll ever be any more. It's kind of become my current obsession so let me take a moment to write about it.
So, Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere is set in a far flung future. We learn that before the events of the series, people colonized space, lived through some kind of golden age, something terrible happened and what remained of them had to return to earth where, due to a failure of the machines they created to maintain it, only the islands of what used to be Japan were left inhabitable. They first created a pocket dimension to create enough space for all the remaining people and they left their descendants with a magical documentation of history (although it only ever displays it 100 years in advance as some measure against abuse) and the expectation that they'll have to recreate history so they can regain their former greatness. Or, as someone on Tumblr put it "If you LARP history hard enough, you get to return to heaven".
The story is set after the pocket dimension containing the actual nation of Japan collapsed (which is implied to have been their fault), there was a war against the dimension containing the rest of the world and it left Japan a defeated country whose territory consists only of one city sized fleet of airships and some small enclaves in other countries. The story begins properly when that Airship fleet, the Musashi, docks at one of those enclaves for trade as the Lord of that Enclave, in a grand gesture, announces that the only way to avert an impending apocalypse is to gather the 9 magical weapons he forged and handed out to the other nations and drives home his point by destroying his own territory and killing himself by inducing a mana reactor meltdown which sets in motion a scramble for these weapons. The actual plot, accordingly, follows the student council (which, in this world, is synonymous with the government, just roll with it) of the Musashi travelling the world to claim these weapons and reclaim their own national autonomy against the unstable international alliance that oversees the recreation of history, the Testament Union.
Season 1 spends about half of its 13 episodes setting up this premise and introducing its large ensemble cast and the other half with its first important conflict, rescuing the daughter of the Lord (technically an Android he created for her spirit to live on after her real body died in an accident) who set this all in motion from the Testament Union 's captivity as she holds the secret to controlling these nine weapons and unlocking their apocalypse-defying power. If there is a primary protagonist, it's probably Aoi Toori, the stundent council's chancellor, selected by the occupying forces precisely because they assumed he was an easily controlled simpleton. And he does come off as an oblivious fratboy for most of his screentime (which, due to the ensemble nature of the cast, isn't actually that much) with an edge and cunning to him that isn't immediately apparent. The rest of their, rather large, class consists about half of characters who get fleshed out (Toori 's sister Kimi, who behind her haughty exterior, is about as much of a space cadet as her brother, timid Shrine Maiden Asama, aspiring politician Honda and many more) and ones where I'm pretty sure the entire joke is that they have exactly one defining character trait (An overconfident slime who splatters as soon as someone looks at him the wrong way, a mute bodybuilder with a bucket helmet and an Indian stereotype whose entire personality is that he's obsessed with curry and who'd be pretty offensive if the books didn't introduce other Indian characters later on who have more going for them.)
Horizon is difficult to write about, simply because of how much you have to explain about its setting, lore and setup before someone who hasn't read or seen it is even on the same page but I suppose the tl;dr is
"teenagers on an airship travel the world to retrieve McGuffins so they can stop the apocalypse and assert their independence as a nation".
The first books afterword by the author ends with the words "I handed in a folder of 780 pages of A4 documents to describe the setting and it made my editor cry." and I did my best to convey the basics using less than that. So, this is what it is. Now you're probably wondering what I find so dang fascinating about it. Well, hear me out.
People sometimes describe something as "a stupid story written by a smart person". Which gets about halfway to describing what Horizon is. But more comprehensively it's really more like "a smart story written by a smart person, constructed entirely out of stupid parts." And at some point it starts to feel like reading the fantasy fiction equivalent of listening to a Thelonius Monk performance, where you're just in awe, wondering how something this chaotic and improvisational still manages to sound like damn good music.
Put simply, Horizon consists almost entirely of over the top, ridiculous anime nonsense. There are robot maids and mechs and magical girl transformations and chibi spirits and most of its female characters have huge breasts and skin tight body suits, and giant weapons and there's a space pope, elves, anthropomorphic dragons, slimes, militarized baseball teams and the most peculiar mishmash of Asian, European, futuristic and postapocalyptic aesthetics and Kawakami looks you straight in the eyes and says "Yes, these are the elements I want to build my 12,000 pages fantasy epic about warring nations out of and I can explain in exhaustive detail how all of it works and fits together. Any objections?" Like, all this nonsense coexists with long elaborations on economics and agriculture and international relations and, like, five different types of magic with their own convoluted rules and its own weird retelling of the history of the 30 Years War and the Japanese Sengoku Period.
Straight up, this shit is bananas and someone wrote 12,000 pages of novels and animated 9 hours of television about it. It's one of the few things that I almost feel transcends any dichotomy of good or bad because of how astronomically weird it is that it actually exists. This is the equivalent of "The Story of the Vivian Girls" becoming a highly profitable movie franchise.
Listen, I'm not sure whether I can in good conscience say it's "good". Parts of it definitely are. Honestly, the whole idea of a society based on religiously reenacting history from the beginning, even though the material conditions, level of technology, actual geography and factors as fundamental as species of the people involved are completely different is a genuinely brilliant bit of satire. Especially when it comes to how the different nations try to force interpretations that would be beneficial to them. The amount of thought that went into the shandyfication of this absurd world is staggering. I do really like how it averts the unfortunate nationalistic undertones of its story by depicting the Musashi as a multicultural melting pot. Then, on the other hand, the numerous sexual harassment jokes are are in rather poor taste and so are some of the national stereotypes it plays for humor.
But honestly, I admire the fact this exists greatly. This is J-Pop Tolkien, or Akihabara Frank Herbert. It does for the aesthethics of low brow Japanese pop culture what Lord of the Rings did for those of European myths and fairy tales. It uses them as building blocks for an archetypal story about the struggle for freedom and puts them into a setting where they're contextualized by millennia of painstakingly constructed history and world building to the point it becomes more than the sum of its parts. For me as someone who's both a loony postmodernist and a shameless fantasy nerd it's like I just stepped through the looking glass. Whether it's good or bad, there's nothing else like it and I think that's beautiful.
![[LowPower-Raws] Dirty Pair - FLASH 01 (BD 1080P x264 FLAC).mkv_snapshot_09.55.390.jpg](https://eg-forums-escapist-data.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/data/attachments/12/12368-bfc422457e630b91a153c73abb021fb2.jpg "[LowPower-Raws] Dirty Pair - FLASH 01 (BD 1080P x264 FLAC).mkv_snapshot_09.55.390.jpg")
![[LowPower-Raws] Dirty Pair - FLASH 01 (BD 1080P x264 FLAC).mkv_snapshot_05.52.936.jpg](https://eg-forums-escapist-data.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/data/attachments/12/12369-8613a2c06e90be7891f29ccd84d7b799.jpg "[LowPower-Raws] Dirty Pair - FLASH 01 (BD 1080P x264 FLAC).mkv_snapshot_05.52.936.jpg")
![[LowPower-Raws] Dirty Pair - FLASH 01 (BD 1080P x264 FLAC).mkv_snapshot_07.53.803.jpg](https://eg-forums-escapist-data.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/data/attachments/12/12370-f078b8407be70c7eeaefce59ef99afd9.jpg "[LowPower-Raws] Dirty Pair - FLASH 01 (BD 1080P x264 FLAC).mkv_snapshot_07.53.803.jpg")
![[LowPower-Raws] Dirty Pair - FLASH 01 (BD 1080P x264 FLAC).mkv_snapshot_07.41.961.jpg](https://eg-forums-escapist-data.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/data/attachments/12/12371-fff990b21c6f461af593a963891a84b4.jpg "[LowPower-Raws] Dirty Pair - FLASH 01 (BD 1080P x264 FLAC).mkv_snapshot_07.41.961.jpg")
