Watching this anime reminded me one of the several things that got worse in anime over the years. It shows the most in One Piece, because it lasted long enough to see the shift. When it began it had a simple setting you could understand. Each character had a unique role, a specific backdrop, and was coming from a different part of the world. Fast forward a decade, and now the setting is one big mysterybait that never explains what is going on, the characters became shallow stereotypes of rule of cool, and all of them do the exact same thing.
That’s what’s going on with Land of the Lustrous; the setting is unexplained, and the characters all do the exact same thing. But, hey, it’s a mysterious creepy world and it has one-dimensional cute girls who are suffering. That is enough to label it amazing by today’s standards, as it happened with a bunch of other anime doing the exact same thing (Kemono Friends, Shelter, Girls’ Last Tour, Made in Abyss).
And before any of you complains, yes, the characters in this anime are not really girls because they are made of crystal and don’t have breasts. They are still presented as cute, with female voices that make them sound like typical moeblobs in some slice of nothing happens time waster. Also, saying they are not sexualized because they are genderless is an overstatement. The camera is zooming on their ass, and they are blushing even if that is impossible because they are made of crystal. Also, the whole thing is obvious queerbait for gender fluid people, so be ready for a lot of cringe when it comes to its fandom.
The number one reason it got attention and wasn’t ignored like so many other anime about girls fighting monsters, is because of the CGI. They finally made a 3D anime that doesn’t look like complete dogshit and all the sakugafags lost their minds, as if that is the only reason to go watch something that still looks mediocre when you compare it to Pixar movies. But, hey, it looks better than Berserk, so let’s give it a 10/10. Also, nice looking 3D is not a merit. If you are a fanboy of something you’re gonna make it seem like even bad CGI is amazing because it makes a show stand out from the rest. That’s what they were saying about Polygon Pictures for their low frame monstrosities (Knights of Sidonia, Ajin, Blame, Fist of the Blue Sky). What’s the point in praising the visuals when you are going to praise a show even if it looks like shit? Also, as we all know, CGI becomes dated much faster than hand-drawn animation. All this talking about making it stand out or looking great won’t mean a thing if after a couple of years everyone will consider it eye cancer and will never give it a try as they would with something hand-drawn from 60 years ago.
Now, let’s move to the reason everyone was bragging about for following the show all the way to the end. There is character development for the heroine! She becomes a completely different person by the end of the series. Yeah, what they usually don’t tell you is how said development did not come gradually through life experiences. It came suddenly when she got smashed to pieces. Which is extra bullshit when you are constantly told she really wants to change, and yet acts like a 10 year old for several centuries. She didn’t change because she wanted to. She just got rebuilt with different pieces of crystal. It’s not really development since every crystal has a different personality in the show. Therefore she didn’t develop, she got rewritten into a different person because the parts of her new body belong to a different crystal. The will to change, my ass! It’s obvious to realize this bullshit, unless you are a fanboy of the show and you’re skillfully ignoring the obvious.
As for the plot, it’s very simple and repetitive. Every episode has the exact same structure. Phos is doing silly moeblob things for 15 minutes, with the camera usually zooming on her gender fluid butthole. Then the Lunarians attack. They fight with okay CGI for a few minutes, then another gender fluid moeblob appears out of nowhere and saves the day in the last moment. Rinse and repeat. The only difference comes at the end when it’s Phos who saves the day by being rewritten into a different person. That’s it, that’s the whole plot.
So down to it, you have a show that deliberately doesn’t explain shit so you can make up your own theories and symbolism overanalysis, has one-dimensional moeblob characters so you can easily write your own fan fiction without ever making them out of character since there is no way to get two lines of character wrong, everything is gender fluid to attract queer people, development is the same as rewrite, the plot is repetitive, and the story leaves you with blue balls, since it’s incomplete. If that’s all it takes to have an amazing anime, then just imagine what a bad one will be like.
