What are we watching: Land of the Lustrous
What’s it about: In the mysterious future, crystalline organisms called Gems inhabit a world that has been destroyed by six meteors. Each Gem is assigned a role in order to fight against the Lunarians, a species who attacks them in order to shatter their bodies and use them as decorations.
Phosphophyllite, also known as Phos, is a young and fragile Gem who dreams of helping their friends in the war effort. Instead, they are told to compile an encyclopedia because of their delicate condition. After begrudgingly embarking on this task, Phos meets Cinnabar, an intelligent gem who has been relegated to patrolling the isolated island at night because of the corrosive poison their body creates. After seeing how unhappy Cinnabar is, Phos decides to find a role that both of the rejected Gems can enjoy. Houseki no Kuni follows Phos’ efforts to be useful and protect their fellow Gems.
Studio: Orange
Director: Kyougoku, Takahiko
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIYgPnSvnCE
Where can I watch it: https://twist.moe/a/houseki-no-kuni-tv/1 , https://nyaa.si/view/991627 , https://cytu.be/r/chapochat (At select times)
Spoilers beyond the current episode are :haram . Please use the spoiler tag if you would like to discuss past the current episode. Everything in this episode and before are fair game.
I actually only just finished 6 so I'm going to write that up here, then do 7 afterwards. This is my episode 6 commentary:
Yellow is practically invincible it seems. She just shrugs off hits.
Continuing on with the theme of one of my earlier posts where I said all the gems have some sort of mental problem represented in society. Yellow's mental health problem? Survivor's guilt.
Something about the gems knowing of humans realllllly upsets him.
Amethyst
On the them of mental health/problems. I have always thought that Amethyst might represent an autistic person as they have rather odd and unique behaviour, in particular the slurred/elongated speech they have. With that said however there's a more interesting piece of trivia about this pair: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_twinning
This kind of trivia about the gems is riddled throughout. It's all meticulously researched, the gems, their strengths and weaknesses, all the details about them are relevant to actual properties of real gems.
Also of note -- Amethysts are prone to crystal twinning as an occurrence more than other gems.
The Lunarian Structure
I think the structure of these "special" types is important to take note of at this point. The internal parts of these special types of Lunarians look like the internal parts of a Lotus Rhizome, this is probably not an accident.
I also think it's important to take note of something else. Rhizome is also a philosophy about gene transfer. This PROBABLY plays a significant role in the themes of the story, the things expressed within it and so on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizome_(philosophy)
Horizontal Gene Transfer is explicitly mentioned in the rhizome philosophy, this is probably what occurred with Phos gaining powers through gene transfer of the Snail, and it is probably the underpinning basis of the gem society.
Underpinning all of these is what a Rhizome's roots are, literally its roots -- Rhizomes grow as networks of roots with no explicit center.
Rhizomatic writing is also an experimental style of writing and structuring work.