(OWLS Post) Survival on the Mud Whale

I’m never going to take a month off from OWLS, am I? I keep telling myself that I am going to take the next month off from OWLS, but each of the prompts that show off each month are just so interesting to write about. Maybe I will do it next Month, but I highly doubt it at this point. Umm anyway, welcome new comers to my May OWL’s Post. My name is Scott and I run a little blog called Mechanical Anime Reviews. I do like mech shows quite a bit, hence the name of the blog, but that isn’t all that I watch and it’s not something that I am writing about today. Hope you enjoy this post focused on Children of the Whales.

OWLS Info
For those of you who haven’t heard of it before, what is OWLS you might ask. Well, that’s an easy question to answer. OWLS, also known as Otaku Warriors for Liberty and Self-Respect, is a group of otaku bloggers who promote the acceptance of all individuals. This is all regardless of gender, sexual orientation, religions, race, and disability. All about humanity for humanities sake. Each Month, our members are given a topic to write about and each of us approaches that through our own personal views. If you want to know more, please click here and look at the OWL’S Blog Page.

Prompt

This month’s prompt was suggested by the fun and full of personality, Auri and converted into something really breath taking by our great Chief Creative Officer, Lynlyn. This week’s title prompt is called movement. To be more specific:

“We join movements, organizations, and systems that align with our own personal values and beliefs. Sometimes we join these groups because they believe in doing good and making positive changes in society. However, these movements can turn sour when a dictator arises or behind the good intentions, there’s a hidden agenda of oppression. It is in these groups that individuals start to shape their identities by questioning their values and beliefs or conforming to the system. This month, we will be examining “real and/or fictitious” movements, organizations, or systems in anime and other pop culture mediums, and the positive and negative effects they have on individuals and society.”

Understanding Children of the Whales

Me liking this show displays to everyone how to get me to like a series. I realize that Children of the Whales is possibly just an average series in a lot of respects, but it has so many things that I like in it. Children of the Whales is a fantasy dystopia series that revolves around a bunch of people that live on a ship, called the Mud Whale, and have never seen any other human contact. The show revolves these people dealing with their past in a lot of ways, including how the society that abandoned them deals with the Mud Whale. I really like this show, even if the characters aren’t the best in the history of fiction.

This is your spoiler warning people. If you haven’t watched Children of the Whales, but plan on it eventually, don’t read on from this point. I have to spoil some story elements of the show in order to talk about the society that lives on the Mud Whale..

Beginning of the Show/An Established Order

The world we see at the beginning of Children of the Whales was full of mysteries. Yes, there is an established order. A council of elders standing at the back of society who rule by the shadows, a mayor of the city who is merely a figure head of the Mud Whale that stays in power until they get old enough to the join the council, the group of younger folks with super powers that day at a young age called the marked, and everyone else. It’s a dystopia society that barely holds itself together. Even if you take away the terrible aspect about people with powered abilities dying at a young age thing, the Mud Whale is a ship that nobody can steer. That means the ship has gone for years without contact from the outside world at all and there was no way to resolve that. Well that was the case until the plot happened.

Backstories and Actions

At the end of episode two, the Mud Whale was attacked by an outside force we’ve never seen before. Suddenly, the lone Mud Whale was alone no more. A lot of people died and suddenly the Mud Whale was at war with the people from the continent. Maybe the people of the Mud Whale shouldn’t have wished for contact with people from the outside world. That would have saved all the people living on the Mud Whale a lot of pain and misery. Then again, maybe their encounter was inevitable.

It turns out that the people living on the Mud Whale are descendants from people that committed a huge and unspecified crime. Well, it turns out that their crime is that these people wanted to keep their emotions unlike every other person in their society. I guess if you are into that non-emotional thing, that could be a crime. I still can’t believe that is a thing, but then again, I don’t know the rules of the society being put in front of me. Maybe their society has a reason why they don’t go for emotions.

Faced with at threat that they’ve never encountered before, the people of the Mud Whale hold themselves together by relying on their system. It’s the one familiar thing that they know in an uncertain territory, so it’s how they survived.

Conclusions

Without talking about all the character things that occur in Children of the Whales and giving away the ending, that’s the show. If there is anything that I picked out from this show, it’s that societies keep people together. All societies carry a little bit of good and bad with them. Maybe they are made to keep people living and breathing, like the society that lives on the Mud whale, but there is a reason why they exist. They keep people organized and working together. None of them are flawless. Sometimes the reason why these organizations of people exist and how they change through the course of a large number of years are never completely clear. For good, for bad, or for indifference, that’s the world we live in today. It’s not fun, considering that the United States is dealing with a lot of growing pains from the original constitution. *sigh*

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Thanks for reading everyone. If you liked this post and want to read more, please read Zoe’s post ,which came yesterday, here and read Karandi’s post tomorrow. If you need more posts, here is our OWLS schedule for the month of May where you can see everyone who is posting this month. Once again, thanks for reading.