Anime Post: Land of the Lustrous
A fantasy anime that takes place on a far future Earth, long after humanity has gone extinct.
Plot
Two eternally opposing races have made the planet their home or their battlefield. The Gems, a humanoid race made of precious stones of varying properties, have always been in a defensive war against the Lunarians, an unsettling and seemingly celestial race that routinely attempts to abduct Gems.
The story follows Phos (short for Phosphophyllite), a Gem that is eager to be useful in combat against the marauding Lunarians. Instead, because she’s a weak low hardness gem, she's assigned the apparently lowly duty of putting together an encyclopedia of their world, its animal life, and the activities of the Gems. While gathering information, she encounters Cinnabar, a Gem who's abilities make her a danger for others to be around and so must live isolated from the others. Seeing her rather lonely state and her sense of burden, Phos vows to discover a way for Cinnabar to control her powers one day. This leads Phos on a journey to actually becoming strong enough to take on Lunarians, while making discoveries about the world she inhabits and learning more about her fellow Gems, but losing parts of herself along the way.
Theme
Overall, Land of the Lustrous is basically a Coming-of-Age story, or at least more generally about change. In your average story of dawning maturity there usually features a trade-off along the way to embracing adulthood, whether its looked forward to or not, or whether its pleasing or not. So, there is usually a defining incident that imposes a realization, or a highlights a decision to be made, on the unavoidable need to "Take responsibility", to "man up", to “accept reality”, or to "sacrifice", with the knowledge that life won't really be the same afterwards, for better or worse. And Land of the Lustrous puts more emphasis on the need to “sacrifice”, taking the viewer and Phos through a maturity process of the painful but necessary variety.
The process of Phos becoming an adult of sorts is marked by traumas, her being quiet literally cut and shaped as the story goes on. The viewer is first introduced to a rather cheery and sassy personality, that slowly gets lost, replaced, and forgotten, often along with her Gem limbs. Phos arises from these traumas and awful incidents as a wiser, more sober, and stronger personality, but less capable of experiencing the same happiness the once used to when she was more naive. Some might be led to feeling bad that Phos isn't as she was before, until they realize that — perhaps aside from the trauma — this always happens, and is bound to happen to a developing character. She wanted to be able to fight the lunarians like the others. But she had to change, painfully, in order to be able to do it.
TL;DR: A living Gem person wants to be stronger and better person. But it turns out that she can't really keep being herself as she was. Also, literally Your changing body and you. Theres also some Buddhist inspiration to the show that I'd rather not bother with.
And to think, achieving her dreams only cost her… An Arm and a Leg!
PS: It has the special distinction of being one of the first few anime to be done in very obvious CGI yet turn out beautifully.