Glass Fleet

Glass Fleet is another older series.  It’s a space opera that occurs within a weird “space” that has an atmosphere.    People can stand outside their spaceships with no protective gear and people live on asteroids that are not possibly big enough to hold an atmosphere if they needed to.  So the premise takes a little getting used to.

The story follows a young nobleman named Michel Volban who believes the ruling class of Nobles have too much power and fights with a group of rebels for the rights of the commoners.  Michel’s chief opponent is another young nobleman named Vetti Sforza, who is a megalomaniac determined to rule everything in existence and is well on his way to doing so.  Michel is also up against a pirate named Cleo who owns a glass spaceship that bears the seal of the Royal family, and who doesn’t care about politics.  Cleo only cares about living his life the way he wants to live it.  His glass spaceship is crewed by a gang of his pirate friends and they go around taking what they need from other ships.  In the process they run across Michel’s disabled ship and get saddled with Michel.

Like most anime, nobody in this series is quite who they seem.  Michel is actually a girl named Racine who has taken her brother’s place when he was lost in battle.   Cleo is actually the son of the previous ruler who was raised in exile by the ruler’s friend when his family was over-thrown and killed.   Vetti was abused and tormented as a homeless child, causing him to wish for some payback.

During the series, Vetti’s forces roll over pretty much everyone in their way, making him ruler of pretty much everything.  To solidify his position, he woos, wins and marries the daughter of the powerful head of the religion, even though Vetti actually prefers males and is doing everything in his power to possess Michel.   Vetti and Cleo resonate to each other and try to kill each other whenever they come into contact, but both are hampered by having some of the universe’s elemental power source embedded in their bodies.   That power source in their bodies reacts badly under certain circumstances, and causes them immense pain and loss of consciousness.

The basic plot underneath all the surface plots is that the asteroids that everyone lives on and the universe they live in are all spiraling toward a massive black hole-type formation.  The very powerful religion maintains that they will pass through the blackness and arrive essentially in paradise.   In reality, they will all die if they reach the black hole.  The asteroids that everyone lives on turn out to be all part of a massive spaceship designed to get them away from the black hole.  The catch is that all this information was lost over the years or covered up by the church, and no one knows that they should be trying to escape.   A lot happens before they figure it all out.

At the eleventh hour, Vetti and Cleo discover that they were a single entity before birth and were split into two babies, each containing some of the elemental power source.   Thus they are at least brothers, if not closer.  They discover that by working together they can save the universe.  To that end, Cleo essentially donates his life force to Vetti to accomplish this.  So in the end a combined Vetti-Cleo (who looks like Vetti, not Cleo) lives and Michel lives and they rule the universe together.

As usual, there's a lot I've left out of this synopsis, including the love story between Michel and Cleo. The series kept me interested all the way through despite the weirdness of space with an atmosphere.  Enough was going on, and keeping me guessing about what was going on, to make it worth watching.  Also, the music from the series is outstanding and the characters are pretty.  I enjoyed it overall, although I could have wished Vetti-Cleo had ended up looking like Cleo and not Vetti.