#maybe some of the more egregious names are anime-original; but the El Tanika part is in the manga

[arbitrarygreay]

Okay, I can't just ignore this. Planetes is a hard science fiction manga and anime about a timeline where the Earth's geopolitical situations already deteriorate a lot by the early 2000s, WW3 happens, and people are regularly going to and working in orbit and on the moon by 2075. Planetes is pretty critically acclaimed! Both the manga and anime are award winning! The writing is quite conscientious about nuance and research and thinking seriously about how various systems make it unfair about the common man all across the globe. For example, for a global corporation working in space, it makes sense that the staff is equally global. We've got Americans, Russians, Chinese, Japanese, Indians, and English all working together on the same station. The aspects of living in space, in low-grav and no-grav, as well as the hazards of space walks, debris, and radiation, are all intricately detailed. Except we have a gigantic problem, demonstrated in the anime in episode 11. The story has set up this beautifully complex woman, Claire Rondo. In episode 11, we learn that she fled to the US as a child refugee from South America. She was illiterate at the time, so she doesn't know how to speak or read her native language. Her hard work ethic (determinedly climbing the management track) and very controlled demeanor speaks to a fear of falling back into poverty, which sometimes manifests as a disdain of lower class behavior. Nonetheless, she is drawn to the ideals and integrity of our blue collar protagonists. So far, so good, right? It gets better! In episode 11, she is confronted with a person who also fled the same country as a kid, just like her, but instead of remaining an expatriate, he returned as an adult to try and make things better for his native country, willing to battle international discrimination and classism in the process. Claire is forced to confront her own conflicted third culture kid feelings. This is great! Except, which South American country is this? Well, this is a world in which WW3 has obviously devastated the global south, so the expected areas of conflict have fractured into entirely new nations from what we know. So, what imaginary country will this well-researched, nuance-driven story come up with? Will it be a pidgin creole of Spanish, Portuguese, and English, or perhaps it will be a return to a local indigenous ethnicity? El Tanika. Featuring Lake Wagutchi. Has its own spoken AND written language, El Tanikan. Featuring such names as Caligan Parak, Sistero Tados, and Nurgan Ogran. This is a South American nation. And the most frustrating part is, no one else on the internet has apparently picked up on how this utterly undercuts the entire story, taking it from "well meaning empathy" to "staggeringly racist" in one fell swoop? Some people even cite 11 as their favorite episode, as incisive and powerful political analysis? "What if the Harry Potter books featured an entire arc centered on anti-Asian racism, but her name wasn't even Cho Chang, it was Zacki Gato, and she had immigrant feelings about not knowing her native language, Swatokaa? (developed and spread, including an entire writing system, from scratch within 4 decades)"