Anime Dreamin'

[coraa]

I had a dream last night that was very anime-like in its style and outline, at least from my not-hugely-knowledgeable-about-anime point of view. The moral of this story: do not watch Excel Saga before bed. The whole thing was in an anime/manga-type art style, full-color, with an actual (if rather silly and very cliche) plot. I honestly can't remember if I was dreaming it in English or with subtitles.



The starting cast of characters included a brother-sister pair of wisecracking mechanics (who didn't do much but crack wise), an extremely earnest teenage computer programmer girl with red hair (who I, at times, was, while at other times I was a disembodied 'viewer'), Commander Petrelkov (who was pretty clearly ceph drawn in an anime style and wearing a military uniform and a beret, and who Kicked Much Ass, also a ceph attribute), and an ambiguously gendered probably-man with long white hair who was maddeningly oblique and opaque about Deep Dark Secrets. We all worked for a military-industrial space-faring copropration thingy called APX (actually, I think it might have been Alpha Psi Chi, and I have no idea what it stands for).

The 'universe' was very life-heavy (almost every solar system had at least one planet harboring life, although only Earth had birthed intelligent life of any kind), and the job of APX was to travel around looking for sources of Numina, a badly-defined possibly-psychic power source that ran almost everything. Planets with a lot of numina sources tended to be colonized, while planets with few or none of them were more or less ignored. (Earth was an interesting exception, because it was the birthplace of human life but had only one mostly-inaccessible source of numina -- so a lot of people visited Earth as sort of a historical monument but mostly everyone lived on other planets. I think the discovery of Source One, Earth's numina-source, is what fuelled the initial push outward to the rest of the galaxy.)

So anyway, early in the dream/plot we discovered that APX, not too surprisingly, was secretly Evil and was perpetrating horrible experiments on young girls in an attempt to create some sort of hyper-talented possibly-psychic genetically engineered human, and that they'd succeeded with a young girl named Anya, who was pretty clearly an amalgam of Alvis from Last Exile and Momo from Xenosaga. Anyway, we felt morally obligated to stand up for Anya, which only got us kicked off the ship (well, all of us except Commander Petrelkov, who was severely reprimanded and passed over for promotion to captain of her own ship, which she'd been promised and was eagerly awaiting).

Unsurprisingly, we decided to rescue/kidnap Anya, which, after a lot of derring-do we did. Commander Petrelkov had a monologue about how she knew this would kill her chance of ever captaining her own ship, but that the rights of the innocent were ultimately more important. So we break out Anya and steal a shuttle and high-tail it down to a planet that isn't slated for colonization because it only has one source of numina. Meanwhile Captain Petrelkov stays on the ship to cover our tracks, use creative accounting to make the stolen supplies 'go away' in the records, and so on. She is discovered by a young man who turns out to have secretly been in love with her (even though she has always ignored him) who helps her out, much to her surprise. Then she joins us on the planet, after some harrowing escapades attempting to escape.

On the planet, everything is happy, blah blah, time passes. We gradually find out a little at a time about Anya's mysteeerious powers and about Androgynous White-Haired Man's deep secrets. Then it turns out that APX is coming after us. We hide in the catacomblike caves, but they decide to hit is where it hurts by destroying the planet's one numina-source, which is doubly bad because not only will it make it a lot harder for us to survive, it turns out that Anya's meddled-with brain requires numina to continue functioning.

So the corporation sends giant robots, which we try to destroy ewok-style, but it's pretty clear we're going to lose. So Commander Petrelkov leaps on one to follow it to the others to blow them all up, while we yell, "Noooooo, Commander, it's suicide!" and she yells back, "It's the only way! It's what I have to do!"

I'm a bit fuzzy on the end, but I think boy-in-love-with-the-commander defects and sacrifices himself to destroy them, she grieves that she never took him seriously enough, and Anya reveals some magical power that Makes Everything Okay.

I do not know what caused me to have this dream -- although vivid, full-color dreams with plots aren't unheard-of for me -- but I want some more of it, darnit.

Comments

[thumbie.livejournal.com]

Holy crap. That was epic. Even when I have epic-length dreams, having such a coherent plot like that is usually not quite a happening thing. I'm trying really hard to imagine not-ceph-we-swear leaping onto a giant robot and crying out in Japanese that she has to do it with subtitles flashing below on the screen.

...okay, I can imagine it now.