So, I recently watched Scavenger's Reign, an excellent animated show with some of the most amazing creativity I've ever seen, complete with a beginning middle and end. It follows 4 people(and a robot) who have been stranded on an uninhabited(kind of???) planet full of strange plants, beasts, and fungi, and each and every one of the things we see feels both strangely unimportant, and the most consequential thing.
But what I want to talk about is the way the show handles life and death. The planet they're stranded on is a complete ecosystem, and the show runners did a fucking amazing job showing us how the planet works without directly explaining it to us. There isn't anyone reading a guidebook or an elder of the planet that exposits information. This, I feel, is the most important part of the structure of the narrative. The characters are mostly smart enough to figure things out, but they're also, in a lot of instances, really fucking dumb.
As someone who grew up going into the forest and camping and playing at survivalism, dealing with the unknown should be well-ingrained in these humans. And yet, the fact that they're either colonists or scientists or space-truckers gives them a sense of confidence in the unknown that feels very in-character for all of them.
Which leads to the meat of my love for this story: The life cycle on this planet is fucking nuts. One species of predator tends to prey on a single species, and their own life cycle is symbiotic with their hunting. Their surroundings are built for it. And yet the entire process is brutal and beautiful at the same time.
There are parasites and fungi that live in the decay of the dead and contort the minds of the living to continue on. Like half the things that feed on animals are insidious and terrifying but outwardly stunning in the beauty of nature.
To tie this back into our own nature: there's a fungus that is symbiotic with nearly every plant on Earth. It's all over in the soil. I'm not a mycologist so I can't speak to the accuracy of that statement, but something similar exists in Scavenger's Reign. I won't spoil you as to what, but it becomes apparent later on in the series exactly what I'm talking about.
And the second you see it happen, you'll understand what I mean. I'm not smart enough or eloquent enough to tell you how fucking profound a realization it was, nor the way it made me feel even more like we are killing out planet when something so interconnected could exist on another planet. That in the ideal, we could exist alongside our wilds, rather than in opposition to it.
The life, the death, the way they're interconnected and inseparable. The way the show handles the intervention of humans as simultaneously completely ignorable to the vast ecosystem and what happens when one is thrust into the cycle and causes a massive imbalance. It is... Oh gods I cannot find the words.
It's like seeing a rainbow. It's like knowing how that rainbow is made and yet still staring in awe. I cannot recommend this show highly enough. It is wondrous and sonorous and emotional and so so many other things that my mind can only find a single word to describe it: Magnificent.
i adore this show. highly highly recommend.