Think, for a moment, about the concept of Aliens visiting Earth. How is this handled? Well, usually the aliens are depicted as being in at least some ways superior to mankind. After all, they’ve mastered some technique of interstellar travel and we have not. Whether they’re more or less friendly or decidedly hostile, it’s easy to see them negotiating from a position of power.
Some years back, though, there was a film called District 9 that depicts a very different scenario. There, the aliens are shellshocked refugees that largely don’t understand and can’t repair or reproduce the advanced technology that brought them to earth. To make matters worse, they stopped in apartheid South Africa, becoming the subject of all the social stresses of that nation. It’s not pretty, but it’s a very good film that uses a typical tool, the space alien, in a fairly novel way.
Five years before District 9, though, (7 years if you want to count the first release of the manga, rather than the show) there was an anime with a similar take. DearS has a pitch and setup that’s very familiar to District 9: Aliens arrive, but for neither invasion nor uplift as, in fact, they’re stuck with the fact that their space ship has broken down and seemingly can’t be fixed. Some time after first contact, we follow an initially anti-alien fellow as he gets to know one of them and ultimately empathize with the plight of the alien in question, all while some larger conspiracy might be in play. There are, of course, some differences based on the genre and target demographic – in DearS we’re dealing with a high school student and a cute girl in a fairly functional modern Japan, not an office worker and an a creature described as a “Prawn” in the dark underbelly of Africa.
Does DearS manage to do its concepts justice and, like District 9 or not, bring us something of intelligence and value with a rare treatment of aliens, or is there a reason why it’s been largely forgotten?
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