Bye Bye, Earth – Episode 1

Content Warning: bullying, fantasy racism

What’s it about? Belle is one of the few people in her world who does not have some kind of animal features. In fact, she has superhuman strength, which she uses to fight monsters such as fish flowers. Encouraged by her mentor and adoptive father Sian, she has decided she must find a way to meet other of her kind. At what cost, though?

To start: this show is yet another example of fantasy racism, which is one of my least favorite forms of social commentary in anime. I will not spend too much of my review explaining why I find it tiresome, but suffice to say: it often serves as an excuse to exclude actual depictions of people of color in the show, and boils down the complexities of racism into an oversimplified mush. A particularly egregious example is Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts, which seems to answer the question of “How do I make racists not hate me?” with “Be the goodest good girl who ever girled.” Not exactly a satisfying answer (though your mileage may vary, I guess).

Does this anime continue this pattern of oversimplifying racism? Only to an extent. The closest real-world analogue for Belle’s situation would seem to me to be that of transracial adoptees, who often face exclusion at school while being robbed of their cultural heritage at home. Bye Bye, Earth is uninterested in making Belle out to be a perfect victim–as a child, she fights back against her bullies (with super-strength), and then she is looked on as a monster. In fact, her super-strength, one of the things that originally made her into a pariah, becomes the source of her ability to progress in society–being cultivated by her adoptive father Sian into a potent weapon.

Sian himself seems to be very cognizant of Belle’s experiences as a marginalized person. In fact, in by far the best dialogue of the episode, he describes the process that she might have internalized the racism she experienced, and articulates how difficult it would be to let go of it without connecting with others of her race. Her relationship with Sian is the heart of this episode, and I wish honestly that it had had more time to be explored before he was killed suddenly and brutally (in the first moment of the episode that reminded me that the source material was, in fact, written by the writer of Psycho-Pass season 2). It is unfortunate that so many shows are only getting 12 episodes because it leads to this style of Hero’s Journey writing, where you have to kill the mentor within the first episode before you’ve even had a moment to care about them.

Other than that conversation about racism between the master and Belle, the writing was extremely lackluster, consisting of such an astonishing degree of exposition dump that the various proper nouns the show introduces are literally put on-screen to telegraph their importance to the viewer. The visual storytelling fares far, far better, particularly in the flashback sequence towards the middle of the episode. I’m hoping that it stays this way, given Lidenfilms’ visuals can sometimes truly stink to high heaven. The score is somewhat boilerplate, which is surprising coming from Kevin Penkin, but hopefully he will show us more of the experimental touch he brings to soundtracks like Made in Abyss as time goes on.

As I close out this review, it would be remiss of me not to mention that the writer of the original novel for this series, Ubukata Tow, has been accused of domestic abuse by his wife, charges which he has denied and which were dropped by the prosecutor. How this affects one’s engagement with the show is up to the individual reader, but it certainly makes me much more hesitant to engage.