Anime Recommendation: Bodacious Space Pirates

Originally based on a light novel series Bodacious Space Pirates was originally titled Miniskirt Space Pirates in Japanese, which, incidentally, is also still basically accurate — at least where most of the female characters are considered…

A cursory look indicates that at least some of the novels are available in English and don’t seem too hard to track down on various retailers.

Much like its classic genre forebear Space PirateCaptain Harlock, Bodacious Space Pirates pretty much delivers exactly what it promises. Which is Space Piracy.

Which is a lot like Regular Piracy, all things considered, except in Space.

Incidentally, I had a university Professor off-handedly mention watching Captain Harlock as a kid, which furthered cemented my opinion that it was going to be a good academic year…

Strictly speaking, the cast of Bodacious Space Pirates – not unlike my own pirates in Realmgard – are actually privateers. The short version, as established in the opening narration, is that the Space Pirates were hired by the various colony planets during their wars of independence to supplement their fleets by being granted letters of marque sanctioning their activity on behalf of said colonies.

Most simply, a privateer is a pirate who’s been hired by someone else, basically the nautical version of a mercenary.

This is, as it happens, largely consistent with the actual Golden Age of Piracy.

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Although Bodacious Space Pirates basically boils down to “Regular Piracy, but in space,” the series does go into a lot of detail into its depiction of piracy actually works. All in all, despite being set in the far future and light years from Earth — specifically in Tau Ceti — the depiction of (bodacious) Space Piracy feels pretty plausible to me, though the spaceships behave maybe too much like sailing ships…

On the whole, the Space Piracy industry in Bodacious Space Pirates is a really interesting depiction — both in terms of what the job itself is, and how ship-to-ship combat in space would work, and the writing even takes into consideration fairly mundane but reasonable aspects of the job like the fact that high-schoolers aboard a ship working under a legally-defined sanction would probably not be able to get around child labour laws.

As presented in Bodacious Space Pirates, following the professional becoming largely obsolete, piracy has essentially become an elbaorate form of dinner theatre.

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The series follows a high-school girl named Marika Kato, who spends about half of the first episode as a typical high school student, before promptly finding out that 1) she’s actually the daughter of a famous Space Pirate…

… and 2) she’s being conscripted by her father’s old crew so their ship, the Bentenmaru doesn’t get decommissioned.

Sidebar: maru literally means “circle”, but can also mean “enclosure”, so it’s applied to the names of defensive fortifications (cf. the Sanada Maru) and also to ships with the implication that ships are basically floating castles (cf. this double meaning being a major thematic point in the NHK drama Sanada Maru)

I love that this post gives me opportunity to use “shanghai” as a verb in its original nautical context.

Quoth dictionary.com:

verb (used with object)

Nautical.

shanghaied, shanghaiing

1. to enroll or obtain (a sailor) for the crew of a ship by unscrupulous means, as by force or the use of liquor or drugs.

By the end of that first episode, Marika is shanghaied into being a (Bodacious Space) pirate by the Bentenmaru’s crew, and the fact that has no previous experience provides the crew able opportunity to explain the pirate’s trade for the benefit of both Marika and the viewer. It is an infodump, but it at least as a clear narrative justification and the explanations that are being given are immediately relevant to the matter at hand.

And then, in the story arc where the crew catches a contagious space-virus, Marika goes on to shanghai her friends to being her replacement crew.

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Circling back to the dinner theatre thing, the most common thing (bodacious) space pirates do is launch staged attacks on luxury cruise ships for the entertainment of the wealthy passengers who get to vicariously experience the excitement of a pirate attack without any of the downsides of actually being attacked by pirates.

Now, that being said, while there isn’t that much genuine piracy, all things considered, Marika and her crew do take on real jobs. There’s a several-episodes long arc in the first half of the series that involves the Bentenmaru helping a princess track down a ghost ship connected to her planet.

Eventually, the action and the stakes do ramp up, though Bodacious Space Pirates is a fairly light-hearted and comedic series for the majority of its run. Even with the stakes at the highest, Bodacious Space Pirates never really stops being a rollicking Space Opera yarn.

While there isn’t a complete lack of spaceships shooting at each other with big lasers, most of the combat actually boils down to electronic warfare, with the crews of opposing ships trying to infiltrate and compromise the other ship’s computer systems, in part to facilitate shooting them with big lasers. Much like in real-life ship-to-ship combat, the trick is less “attack until it runs out of hitpoints” and more “get them into position to actually hit them.” It’s refreshingly grounded given the prominence of Star Wars-esque — and in turn World War II-esque — point-blank dogfighting.

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Unfortunately, the series does not seem to be available to stream anywhere legitimately as of this writing.

It was available on Sentai Filmworks’ HIDIVE service, and that’s where I watched it (I also own the Blu-ray), but it disappeared a while ago.

It looks like you can buy it digitally via Amazon Prime in the US, though.

And although it’s not available on Crunchyroll in North America, the Crunchyroll YouTube channel does have the catchy opening theme posted:

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