shinryaku! ika musume (squid girl)

When the main character in Squid Girl shows up, she talks a lot about how she's going to invade the human world and take over. The reason she gives for this is that humans are polluting the oceans and generally make a bit of a mess of the world.

The BBC recently ran a series called Human Planet. Interestingly, the idea of this was something along the lines of treating humanity as if it were the subject of a Nature Documentary. The episodes were divided up into the various habitats of the world (so, deserts, oceans, the frozen north, etc) and it showed some example so the strategies people use to survive.

I found the series to be a weird mixture of both fascinating stuff and appalling stuff. It was like for every clever idea or thing we've come up with, there was an example of us raping the natural environment - often, the two were one and the same. One of the things it tried to emphasise was that for most of the environments, the people were broadly in balance with the surroundings.

So, where they killed a whale every bit of that whale would be used and they'd only take a handful every year - sufficiently low numbers not to have an impact. This was only not true when it got around to modern, city-based living and things like mono-agriculture that are needed to support it.

Overall, I actually found the result a little depressing. It kinda backed up the notion that we're like a plague upon the planet.

I raise this because I think it may well have coloured my feelings about Squid Girl, which I watched at around the same time.

See, my problem was having turned up and given the feeling that it would at least involve some sort of environmental message, instead it was simply a daft comedy. Not that there's anything wrong with it being a daft comedy - it did raise quite a few smiles from me, after all - it's just it would have been nice if it had slipped in a few little environmental things as well.

I mean, okay, she spends quite a bit of her time picking up trash on the beach, but that's about the extent of it. Indeed, the overall theme of the show is more about how she becomes good friends with the humans she meets and how she almost abandons her squid-ness to become human.

In other words the sub-text was almost the exact opposite of what I was expecting - it was about how great humanity is.

Not that I was expecting it to come down badly on us, but tackling a few "issues" wouldn't have gone amiss. Even if it had avoided stuff like global warming, it could easily have gotten pollution in there. Heck, it could even just have been more head on about the rubbish on the beach.