Knights of Sidonia is a freakish manga. Some have called it Tsutomu Niheis sellout work. They hate it for the notably haremesque organization of the cast the high school romance style gags and the resulting flaccid interpersonal drama. In terms of its characters and their greater social context and relationships its no Gundam Zeta. Its not even a Code Geass though thats closer. Yet theres not a charismatic sort like Lelouch assuming thats your type of course to take the spotlight here. If youre looking for a good character driven drama perhaps this series isnt the one. In spite of that a good portion of the series is devoted to Nagate Tanikaze our hero missing love signals from the girls he works with or eventually lives with. When hes not pulling out a miracle on the battlefield hes accidentally peeking in on a gaggle of naked girls in the photosynthesis room or getting his lip hooked on a fishing line. How typical. This splicing of high school slice of life and fanservice with breakneck harrowing action sequences amid bleak apocalyptic circumstances has become conventional in anime at least since the dawn of Evangelion. While Im painting that as a negative in this series case so far because I think many people wont believe themselves capable of bearing Knights of Sidonia due to its adherence to these conventions alone it occurs to me that a good number of fans love it for how it handles the blend even while they ignore or miss some things happening beneath the surface. And thats fine for them. Just like there are fans who care for arguing about whether Rei or Asuka was best girl more than they are concerned with what Anno meant when he said that Reis character was already over when she smiled in episode six. What I suspect is knowing that these conventions have been done to death and that hed basically be stuck dealing with them nevertheless Tsutomu Nihei said to himself you know what? To hell with this unstoppably powerful yet loveably oafish protagonist and to hell with any relationship he has. You cant have an interesting relationship with a guy like this if its with some stock cute girl anime character. He knew this was doomed to be the weakness of the manga anyway so he threw it all out the window and decided to make this into the most twisted and strange manga he could despite its vacant youth protagonist and all the time he and his friends have apparently got to kill just screwing around. If anything its drawn by the guy who made Blame so youre bound to get a world of astonishing scale and detail delivered through his art. Almost everything takes place on one ship everyone lives in one tower of residences but it feels massive like theres much more to explore beyond what we see in the manga. Theres a whole freaking ocean in one part of the ship. Nihei cleverly begins most of the chapters with a drawing of a random scene from inside Sidonias residence area allegedly borrowed from a book entitled 100 Sights of Sidonia which the characters also refer to themselves as a real book. We see about 50 of those sights throughout the manga so were left to imagine whats been left beyond our perception. Furthermore the mangas got its hideous monsters and even a fair dose of unsettling body horror while going for a less scratchy more poppy and clean look than Blame Though most unsettling are those reaction shots wherein Tanikazes face goes from cartoonishly simple and flat to uncannily realistic and detailed with bulging veins and everything in moments where hes been burned by a pot of water or some girls got him in a choke hold. If youve heard that the ending is the worst part that its an incoherent asspull fanpleaser Im here to tell you that thats not true. The ending is the most horrifying and twisted part of all. If youll bear with me Ill break down the major players in the narrative and some of the more crucial scenes in order to bring out how Nihei takes Tanikazes optimism sense of righteousness and duty and charming obliviousness typically ideal traits for an anime hero and subtly turns them against him over the course of the story. Knights of Sidonia is a manga rife with contradictions and ambiguities displayed so brashly that you have no choice but to carefully consider what the authors intentions truly are. The rest of the review will contain an extremely massive amount of spoilers Gauna Gauna are a force of nature. As a lifeform I think theyre most akin to a kind of mold. A single entity yet a colony of smaller units. It isnt clear whether they share a consciousness or each have their own. It isnt clear that theyre fully sentient at all or merely acting on instinctual drives except in the cases where a Gauna is replicating a human. In those instances it seems that a replica of the copied persons ego arises almost as a side effect from the placentas replication of the persons physiology. Gauna copying human form just seems like a random outcome in their unending development of new and better weapons for to defeat Sidonia. Other than the ones with emulated possibly phony? human consciousness or is it our own consciousness that is more automatic than we like to believe? Gauna are guided by the same goal: to chase down and consume dense concentrations or emanations of Higgs particles. The curse of the Gauna is a result of humanitys harnessing of the machinations of the universe for our own ends using higgs particles as a power source. Its like the universe itself is keeping us in line. This is a story of the struggle of humanity against nature attempting to overcome master and subsume a new part of nature with science as our primary tool and weapon. Is our intellectual adaptability and our alchemical manipulation of resources from our environment a match for the instinctual adaptations of the Gauna whose own endlessly transformable and restructuring physical makeup seems to be the only resource they depend on? The protagonist The protagonist Tanikaze is something like a walking repeat plot device Hes not much of a real person. I would argue that hes not even meant to be. There are a few actual characters resembling people in this story like Kunato Yuhata Izana ironically even Hiyama but Tanikaze isnt one of them despite apparently being the main character. Hes a bot with three functions: eating ravenously fighting to save Sidonia and its citizens regardless of the potential risk to himself and accidentally seeing the women of Sidonia which there seem to be many more of than men the likes of whom on the other hand he never accidentally sees naked naked. Nobody in Sidonias illustrious and tribulated history is more capable on the battlefield yet incapable of conducting himself around women. Even if he doesnt know there are women behind that door or around that corner hes bound to trip over his own feet or the building theyre inhabiting will suffer some sort of structural mishap and theyll be exposed to him. He is thus adored by his Sidonian harem for his chivalrous adherence to his duty and astonishing success as a heroic soldier even while they treat him as a punching bag for comic relief. Hes like a testtube grown action hero and harem nucleus and he has only the precise qualities necessary for fulfilling those roles. Other than that hes a blank. Hes ostensibly a sort of lower class citizen at the start of the story but he was actually selected before his birth to be Sidonias savior so that doesnt matter. We dont catch many glimpses of other proles so the dimension of class struggle is really only nominally present even while he occasionally peripherally brings up the differences between his new life and his old life underground which in any case seems to have mostly consisted of his playing virtual reality pilot training games. While he has countless potential love interests he recognizes only the most ridiculous possible partner: a scientific weapon a chimera between Gauna and human with the mind of a child. Shes capable of transferring her mind into and is frequently represented as one of her tentacles outside of battle which even Ichigaya Teruru the sexy android points out looks like a penis. Tanikaze is not really aware of the fact that all of the other women on the ship are attracted to him anyway even his close friend Izana whos actually intersex until she becomes a woman due to her attraction to Tanikaze no matter how obvious they make it. Ill go more into his fascinating but limited sex life later on. https://ur.com/PJSmHCF.png What is a human? Who is the real me? In Knights of Sidonia the parameters of what defines human are expanded well beyond contemporary boundaries. Some of us live forever at least until were killed and regenerate quickly even when seriously injured. Most of us only eat once a week and all of our other sustenance comes from photosynthesis. Some of us are born sexless and develop sex characteristics according to who were attracted to like Izana. Theres a family of sisters who are all clones bred for combat although what that exactly means why this specific individual whoever she was was chosen for cloning for the sake of combat isnt really clarified. Early in the narrative its explained to Tanikaze that as far as he and Sidonia are concerned no matter what degree of intelligence or resemblance to Hoshijiros original psyche her placenta clone seems to develop she can only be looked at as a hunk of placenta and a potential threat to Sidonia. Much later Honoka Shous placenta clone doesnt realize shes not the real Honoka Shou and is horrified when she learns the truth. In these cases is the central Gauna consciousness or whatever form of consciousness or instinct seems to guide Gauna toward the same convergent goal fighting for bodily control with the accidentally generated ego relics of Hoshijiro and Honoka Shous placenta bodies? In any case it seems on the one hand were meant to believe that the ego is directly tied to individual physiology. If you copy the body and brain perfectly a likeness of the original ego will form too. However were also expected to believe that blood nematodes can contain transferable copies of a persons ego and thereby we have to suspect that a persons psyche may have nothing to do with their physiology per se. An alternative explanation is that blood nematodes DONT copy a persons ego they merely copy things like memory and knowledge and the person possessed by a blood nematode just thinks theyve become whoever the blood nematode says they are based on their possession of that knowledge those memories. In that sense the main antagonist of the series isnt Ochiai at all but just a blood nematode that contains his will knowledge and memories. Likewise maybe the Tsumugi copy Tanikaze ends up with at the end of the story just thinks shes Tsumugi but shes really just a blood nematode whos turned Hoshijiros cloned body into a meat Gundam with the illusion of Tsumugis personality. Is an ego in general a mere construct that disguises and facilitates our unconscious drives? Maybe if these characters or any characters asked themselves who they really were they would grow deformed and paralyzed by doubt just like Honoka Shous clone when it realizes its a Gauna: https://i.ur.com/GO9Y2D8.png?1 On the other hand there are other clones in the story who clearly dont share the same ego. Tanikaze is a clone. ALL of the Honoka sisters are clones. But their brains all developed from scratch without experiences preencoded while the Gauna clones included clones of their referents brains at the times of their deaths. So do experiences leave physical traces in the brain? By my estimation there are just no irrefutable answers. Is it intentional ambiguity on Niheis part or symbolic sloppiness? There are things we call egos here and their apparent avatars. The third essential ingredient for a self to be accepted other than physical construction and experience seems to be recognition of and belief in that self. Whether Ochiais ego is inhabiting Kunato or Kanata hes Ochiai if he believes he is and if others believe he is too. The body is just the avatar. Meanwhile Ochiais ACTUAL clone captain Kobayashis right hand man is not Ochiai since he lacks Ochiais experiences and everyone knows it. But who is Tsumugi and what is her avatar? Is it her big feminine biomech form is it her inquisitive tentacle is it her true body or is it the blood nematode in Hoshijiros clone? Maybe all of them. How do we save ourselves? Humanity are painted as utterly utilitarian. We use higgs particles even after we know the Gauna are attacking us over our usage of them. Among the other bizarre science experiments we put ourselves through photosynthesis immortality cloning genetic manipulation of course we are not going to have reservations about fucking placenta clones or living on a placenta planet if the potential benefits outweigh the dangers or the drawbacks are simply invisible and easy to ignore which is the ending the story gives us. Placenta is too powerful and valuable of a tool to look down upon. This is despite humanitys apparent reluctance to accept Ochiai and his perverse experiments as our potential source of salvation. After his experiments prove themselves to be safe enough we get rid of him because its his ego thats the true threat to humanity despite all its done for us. Unlike with higgs particles the dangers of keeping Ochiai around outweigh what he may contribute going forward. However is Ochiai that different from Kobayashi? https://i.ur.com/A0O69jR.png?1 Isnt the bitter irony here as Ochiai partially points out that Kobayashi an immortal who killed off most of the immortal ship committee and who has been gracefully deviously manipulating the course of Sidonian civilization as well as the information available to civilians from behind the scenes in many ways is the exact same as Ochiai? She has ultimate faith in her view for how Sidonia is to be saved and is ruthless in bringing it into actuality. Sidonias reliance on her and on a clone of its former hero Hiroki Saitou a reliance enforced by Kobayashi herself doesnt exactly imply a willingness to leave the fate of Sidonia to the next generation. Her egalitarianism and will to trust are nominal. Theyre political aesthetics that are undermined by her choices but her choices are made allegedly in the name of those ideals. Just as Ochiais ostensible goal to assure that humanity lives forever really just depends on him living forever by himself in an immortal indestructible chimera body. Whether he lives or dies though humanity itself will become chimera. We will incorporate placenta into our technology into ourselves just like we previously incorporated higgs particles and regardless of the cost we will undergo another evolution into a new type of humanity under a new paradigm. Deeper into desire In the world of Sidonia sex has all but disappeared. There are a handful of occasions throughout the series where sexual activity nearly takes place or is potentially implied to have taken place. Sex and eating have been combined into one urge: photosynthesis. Tsuruuchi is practically begging Samari to give him a shot with her throughout the whole manga. Anytime Tanikaze stumbles on the girls photosynthesizing he pays the price. It is unclear if photosynthesis is innuendo i.e. Tsuruuchi really wants to bang Samari but photosynthesis is a cleaner and cleverer way of suggesting it or if photosynthesis is the entire sexual act. Is penetration expected or is it just the mutual gaze and flesh made bare? The women eat naked together daily. Doesnt the repeated sexualization of this task imply a sort of homoeroticism is present in their daily meals? There are humans with both genitals who can asexually reproduce. There are clones everywhere and a handful of immortals. Sex more than ever is an activity of pure pleasure. It has no utilitarian function. Perhaps the same is true of romantic relationships. This seems to have had a devastating effect on Tanikaze. The one time its implied Tanikaze actually has sex although we dont see a second of it its with Kobayashi after she reveals to him that hes a clone of his grandpa Hiroki Saitou who was actually a centuries old hero of Sidonia. Afterward she tells Tanikaze to spend the night as she lets her hair down. Its clear that she loved Saitou and is treating Tanikaze as a surrogate lover. Tanikaze is Saitous avatar for her sexual fantasy and as hes a physical clone of Saitou hes ideal for the job even if his persona is totally different. Sexual fantasy necessarily involves this separation of the psyche from the physical object of desire. For both participants. Once in the midst of sex a person thinks about what theyre actually physically doing it somehow ceases to feel all that sexy. Its rather sort of ridiculous and strange. And the stranger the sex the more haunting is the post nut clarity. A couple days later Tanikaze blushes when he sees her staring intently at him in an important meeting hes been invited to as a newly crowned highest ranking officer in Sidonia. Sounds like he performed his duty to the best of his ability. Of course Tanikaze would sleep with Kobayashi if she commands him to. He listens to everything his commander tells him to do. This is after his relationship with Tsumugi has already begun but its Kobayashi who makes him a man. Yikes? The closest Tanikaze comes to a genuine sexual encounter before serving his commander is when Benisuzume penetrates his Tsugumori and Hoshijiros placenta clone forces herself on him. This is one of the most densely layered scenes in the entire series. https://i.ur.com/rsY33BS.png?1 https://i.ur.com/s1qp9zp.png?1 Is it just me or is this scene as hot as it is grotesque? It is unclear here what exactly it is about this scenario that is so painful and provoking for Tanikaze. He has stood outside of the false Hoshijiros tank gazing at her wondering about her in the Outer Sidonia Research Lab on the ship for countless hours and now that shes in front of him he cannot breath. Is it the fact of being confronted with her unbound desire that he cannot handle? The proximity of her naked body? He does subsequently end up choosing the one girl in the cast Tsumugi who doesnt have a womans body after all. Until after his experience with Kobayashi he is prepared to accept Tsumugi uploaded via blood nematode into the false Hoshijiros body. That implies he also doesnt have a problem with the fact that her consciousness and her body are copies. Perhaps he has no idea what sex actually consists of at this point having lived his entire young life underground just like he knew nothing about all of the biological and social structural changes humans had gone through. Perhaps he is enjoying it after all and its his own arousal despite himself that terrifies him. As she penetrates his mouth with her tendrils he uses Tsugumori to penetrate her true body prematurely cutting off Hoshijros sex dream. https://i.ur.com/CrW5CS3.png?1 When Tanikaze sleeps with Kobayashi its Saitous body that Kobayashi wants. Tanikazes most romantic moments with Tsumugi are when theyre clasping hands or flying around the residence tower on their one date. Tsumugis tentacle interacts with Tanikaze on a daily basis but their most precious moments together are when Tanikaze is inside a mech. What is it that we provide one another through love and sex? I give you my body my avatar to project desire onto and my ego has to deal with the consequences of your treatment. Before we can do it right we have to learn the rules of the game. We must learn to be aware of our desires and considerate of the others ego which persists beneath our projections whether we want it or not. I cant help but think of the iconic Hokusai shunga image The Dream of the Fishermans Wife a crucially formative work in the tentacle fuck canon. The sexual encounter depicted is typically taken to be mutually pleasurable rather than forced and some have touted it as feminist at its core for its depiction of a womans sexual fantasy totally bereft of a human at least male pleasure source implying the womans independence in her ability to satisfy her sexual urges. The problem with Hoshijiros placenta clone is that we dont know if its a woman or not but it looks way too much like a one Tanikaze knows. Anime and manga hentai and doujins have established themselves as sources of male pleasure independent of any reliance on real female bodies. Its when one gets too close to their fantasy and one is no longer in control that it becomes a terror. Tanikaze reticently longs for Hoshijiro but her lust for him takes on a monstrous form that hes not prepared for. This is the end my only friend The way Knights of Sidonia treats the questions desire and identity leaves me feeling that its ending is not a dream come true but a revelation of the nightmares that hide in plain sight. https://i.ur.com/Je5fDF4.png?1 Is this truly a happy ending? Isnt it rather quite disturbing and even absurd? Tanikaze now accepts a relationship with the placenta Hoshijiro which both he and Sidonia were initially meant to reject no matter what all because its now controlled by a blood nematode that seemingly contains Tsumugis consciousness. Weve provisionally decided these entities blood nematodes and placenta are useful enough that well just accept them as safe and normal. Again isnt it quite possible that its not Tsumugis true consciousness but the illusion of her consciousness? Is that just as good since we cant really tell the difference? Whether its truly her or not isnt the fact that shes sharing a placenta body with fragments of Hoshijiros mind which she can still sometimes feel the presence of and which we never really determined definitively to not be a genuine copy of Hoshijiros ego enough to undercut the purity of this so called fantasy ending? As we become increasingly chimerical and stretch the boundaries of what it means to be human do we indeed remain human? The questions this series poses have always been too complex for a moron like Tanikaze to wonder about. He waits for Kobayashi to tell him who his grandfather was why he was chosen for his job why his body regenerates. He doesnt ask questions himself. He cant sense the feelings of the people around him. He has essentially no awareness whether about his internal environment or his external one. He just does his job both as a citizen and soldier of Sidonia and on the level of the narrative as a hapless singleminded but powerful protagonist. He waits to be told who he is and what hes supposed to do. The truth what we take as normal both in Tanikazes case and for all of humanity is whatever we choose to take for granted what ever makes living life most convenient. Perhaps its better not to ask if higgs particle technology was really worth it. Perhaps its better not to ask if my wife is actually just a blood nematode creating an illusion of my dead girlfriends personality in an alien replica of my other dead girlfriends body. Perhaps its better not to ask.