Between the Sky and Sea – Ep. 1 (First Impressions)

I know we’re early in the season but Between the Sky and Sea made me want to drop it even before I finished the first episode. Just…wow is it bad.

Let’s start with the conceit of the show. It’s requiring you to suspend your disbelief by an insane amount. I could maybe go along with it if it was just “there’s no fish left on Earth so we went fishing in space”. I mean, I’d find it odd that nothing happened to the world’s ecosystem apart from people wanting fish on the menu but whatever, I could roll with it by a slim margin. Finding out that humanity developed these fish tanks in space, however, is complete nonsense. Just how exactly were we able to populate them with fish if there are no fish to begin with? Even if you counter that by saying we engineered them, why even put them in space? Just throw them into the goddamn oceans! I’m just saying, this seems like a lot more work than needed. It’s honestly up there with Darling in the FranXX‘s understanding of magma on the “Are you fucking serious?” scale for anime.

And the best part? That’s not even the hardest thing to wrap your head around. See, later, you find out that people go fishing in this world by summoning Personas on a app that power up their submarines and give them weapons to combat the sea life. I swear, I wish I could make this up but that’s actually in the show! And again, this seems like more work than necessary. What happened to using a fishing rod or a net?

I apologize if this might offend anyone but the subplot about the girls dealing with sexism in the workplace feels incredibly forced. I don’t know the male to female ratio with fishermen/fisherwomen or astronauts but there are women who fish or go to space for a living. Did anyone making this anime even realize that? It just seems like a serious leap in logic that in the future, Japan (apparently the only country addressing the lack of fish in the world) only allowed men to go space fishing and later needed to pass a law to allow women to join the profession. Frankly, it just seems rather tacked on. Something to give girls a conflict to overcome and apart from that, there’s no reason to even have it in the first place. Also, if this anime really is going to preach about gender equality, maybe don’t fetishize the space suits? Who made them vaguely look like leotards and stockings?

As for the characters…what characters?

I am perhaps a bit more annoyed because there’s been CGDCT anime with premises this odd and made it work. Why, this year, we had an anime where teenage girls get sent to Antarctica of all places and that ended up being one of my all time favorite anime. But alas, this series doesn’t seem to know how to make its absurd premise work without coming across as ill-conceived and stupid. I can maybe see someone appreciate this on a “so bad it’s good” kind of way. Personally, I think it’s time to abandon ship.

OP: “Sora to Umi no Aida” by Haru Soramachi (CV: Karin Takahashi), Rubi Azumi (CV: Honoka Inoue), and Maiko Sakura (CV: Momoko Suzuki)

ED:  “Ao no Kanata” by Konomi Suzuki

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Watch Between the Sky and Sea on Crunchyroll and HIDIVE

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