Behold, the Universe is Full of Blessings!

Now that we’re in our own version of the apocalypse…what did Owari no Seraph, Parasyte and others predict about the end?

Meta note: This Planet With post finally came to life by splicing it with a more stream-of-consciousness kind of post which covers several anime (I called it “[an] Irina-like post”) I had in my drafts. If it seems disjointed, that might be why.

There’s a quote in my digital copy of Parasyte which goes like this: “As the human population continues to expand, something like this [alien invasion] might actually happen.” (from the perfect edition 1) Now, Parasyte originally hails from the 1990s but I can’t help feeling like the person who was quoted here was on to something…I mean, COVID-19 kinda looks like other diseases? Check. People get used to the sensationalist news after a while? Check. Next, we’re gonna get strains of COVID-19 that can teach maths…

…okay, that was a terrible joke that only people who know Parasyte will get.

The Perfect Insider, originally from 1996, predicted how we’re all going to be locked inside and using video and virtual reality to communicate with each other…if those work meetings in Animal Crossing are any definition of “virtual reality”, at least. We joked about that in #AniTwitWatches, but even with the anime adaption being almost 20 years after the source was published, the technology hasn’t really changed from that.

That all sounds a bit depressing, so let’s change tack a bit from here.

Rewatches are a nice bit of comfort and a change of pace to consuming new content, so it makes sense that my rewatch project has continued to drag on through 2020. However, I’ve been doing a lot of these rewatches while doing chores and Planet With is not the kind of anime you should watch while doing chores, so I’ve been stuck on this post I’ve been promising since I completed the rewatch in May. (Thanks, COVID-19, for taking away the times where I can do chores and focus on my rewatch in silence.)

However, when I thought about it, Planet With is also a nice anime to have during this time of lockdown. Its central premise – people becoming slaves to the enemy through complacency and people being saved through being considerate of each other’s feelings – seems pretty pertinent.

In this mess of a 2020, it’s nice to remember that the universe is full of blessings, no matter how small or insignificant – whether that be the release of a new manga you can’t wait to dig into or the start of a new anime season (and the fact anime and manga are still coming out as normal, despite almost everything creative being put out of commission in some shape or form!). So, even if you feel lost and alone while you’re stuck inside, make sure to count those blessings…

…and of course, stay safe as much as humanly possible.

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You’re probably complaining, “Why another post about the experiences of lockdown?”

To be honest, when I was told I was going back into lockdown earlier this month (July 2020), I was wondering if I’d wished it upon myself – I did end up missing AMQ, enough that I ran my own mini-session for it, even after I got the avatar skin I wanted. There’s that and this weird slump I’ve been apologising for in a lot of my recent posts – when I’m raring to go for the new season but can’t write about it, but I also have this pending Planet With post I have no freakin’ idea what to do with, I read through the notes I took and saw COVID-19 crawled into there, too, so that’s where my bright idea to splice my two partially-done posts came from.