Nerding Day: Wish Upon the Pleiades

It’s kind of a weird move for a car company to produce an anime, but it’s an even weirder move for the car company to demand “Sailor Moon but with fucking amazing hats and absolutely no cars.” That weirdly specific fetish is what Subaru requested in 2011 when they teamed up with the anime studio that made Neon Genesis Evangelion to create Wish Upon The Pleiades. That’s right, I’m crawling into Robert Brockway’s magical girl hole this week!

The main character of Wish Upon The Pleiades is named Subaru, and boy, does everyone in this anime say her name as much as possible. I read a review of this series that said it wasn’t too commercial because there weren’t any cars in it, so congratulations to Subaru for sneaking the name of their brand into this show fifty million times without anyone noticing.

Subaru is the Japanese name for the cluster of stars we typically call Pleiades or The Seven Sisters. Subaru’s logo is based on that star cluster, so it’s not that crazy to have a girl with the same name as a car company. It’s sort of like an American kid being named Orion or like how I’m planning to call my child RadioShack Rulz Bugg.

Wish Upon The Pleiades was a fairly popular anime. It started as a four episode web series, which then expanded into a full 12 episode television series in 2015. There’s a rumor a movie is currently in production, and it even has its own anime statue for the title character. You won’t believe what her name is.

I watched the full original web series and the first two of the expanded lore series in order to help me get a sense of what was happening. It did not help. I’ve only seen a few anime, and being so outside of the tropes and normalities of the genre, I usually get to enjoy how much they can surprise me. (Except when the anime is Kennel Tokorozawa, I did not enjoy any of that). It was difficult for me to understand what was going on in Wish Upon The Pleiades because I don’t think the writers were certain what was going on either.

The original series begins with Subaru witnessing a meteor shower alone beside a lake at night. We cut to her walking to school with her telescope and being emo about the stars. She tries to visit the school observatory but instead accidentally unlocks a magical greenhouse of some kind in which she finds a boy named Minato. You’re going to be shocked to learn this, but Subaru has magic powers of some kind.

The boy in the greenhouse kicks Subaru out after seeing a falling star in the sky. She stumbles two doors down and unlocks a second magic door conveniently located in her high school. Hogwarts doesn’t have shit on this place. The second magic door is also full of new friends, but these are members of the school cosplay club, and they each have their very own fucking amazing hat.

I want you to see these hats so badly that I was willing to take a screenshot that didn’t say Subaru. Observe the magnificence of these hats. Some of them are too glorious to exist in our universe. They’re from every era. You’ve got a Napoleon hat, a '60s stewardess hat, a beret, a witch hat, but half of it is spikey for some reason, and a cake stand that looks like a boater fucked Mystery’s big fuzzy hat. The audacity of a car company to add hats to Sailor Moon and call it a new IP would normally bother me, but the hats are so good I’m letting it slide. I would watch a movie called People Who Hate Lydia Bugg, Specifically Explaining Why She Sucks, if the people were wearing this assortment of hats.

Back to the non-hat bullshit. The president of the cosplay club is an alien named The Peliadian, who gets introduced mainly as an excuse for the mandatory anime upskirt shot when Subaru accidentally sits on him. I don’t blame Subaru, the company, for including this shot of Subaru, the teenage girl. I’m sure people would have rioted if they didn’t. If these troubling panties didn't exist, this article would be called The Incel Subaru Boycott of 2014 (And How it Collapsed the Economy).

The Peliadian’s spaceship is broken, and only teenage girls in sickass hats can help him recover the engine fragments so he can put them together and return home. I know what you’re thinking. Yes, the alien is probably just a pervert, and anyone could have helped him.

In order to help the girls capture his engine pieces, he gives them some kind of unspecified magic and also these flying sticks they call “driveshafts” that sound like a very loud gas engine car. These flying sticks are so loud and distracting, but we need to make gas guzzling engines cool for the kids so these things are screeching through space with all of the grace and poise of a monster truck crushing a hundred bagpipes. Sometimes, the girls will try to sing a song about friendship, and it will be completely ruined by these ridiculous engine revving noises in the background as if they’re frantically shifting gears through space.

Subaru’s former best friend Aoi is in the cosplay club, and she insists that Subaru is too stupid and clumsy to join because she seems to think that Subaru abandoned her at some point, but Subaru thought Aoi transferred schools and left her. It seems like maybe the Peliadians messed with their memories for some reason, but now that they’re back together, they’re best friends again. It’s not like the girls are invisible to other people, but people react to them as if some kind of magic is making it normal for them to wear those hats and also fly. I’m not sure which is weirder.

The Peliadian can't communicate directly with anyone but Nanako, the girl in the Napoleon hat, and he seems to need to sit on her head to talk to her. Not at all an evil brain slug preying on teenage girls, probably. In order to hide the Peliadian during school hours, Nanako wears a somehow even more incredible but also way less conspicuous hat, and a matching cloak.

Again, you're never going to believe this, but there's a male antihero who's also trying to collect the Peliadian engine fragments for nefarious, unspecified reasons. He has red hair and eyes, literal horns, and, oh yeah, he's definitely Minato, the boy from the greenhouse in the beginning, but no matter how loud you yell at the TV, Subaru can't tell that it's him for Clark Kent reasons. So, of course, when she meets him during a space battle for an alien engine fragment, she has to take a moment to introduce herself. I mean, she's not rude.

The original short series is unsure why Minato wants the engine fragments beyond the fact that they are powerful. Maybe they have the power to make the engines on the drive shafts quieter, and he really wants to take a nap without five girls in their tauntingly perfect hats zooming over his magic greenhouse.

It turns out the meteor shower in the beginning that Subaru saw was the accident that broke the evil brain slug's ship and gave Minato his engine fragment-stealing powers. Since Subaru experienced the same meteor shower and got powers from the brain slug, she has double powers, which means she can defeat Minato and collect the final ship fragments by hugging him. I'm sure this means nothing, but the answer was a hot girl hugging a nerd all along.

The original series ends with Minato getting sucked back into space after the hug. It feels like they're teeing the show up for a season two, but instead, they started the whole thing over again, with episode one of the full series being an almost shot-for-shot rehash of the original online series with more pauses and a dash of episode two thrown in. The only change they made to the full series was making Aoi obviously attracted to Subaru instead of being mean to her for no reason. The studio got one note from Subaru and it was "More lesbians."

Alright, that's enough magical girl hole for me. I don't know if this anime brought any new customers to Subaru, but I suddenly have the urge to go buy a sturdy but drab midsize sport utility vehicle and fill it to the brim with my most enormous hats. Subaru, everyone!

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