STARS AND SPEAKING/SPACE AS A LIBERATING CONTEXT

ALEXANDRE HAÏOUN-PERDRIX - Writer, 3rd Year, Philosophy

He be praised and praised for the centuries to come, the one who shall invent a means for stars to brightly burn in the most urban skies.

Stars and the aether often play a contextual role as a literal immediate space wherein the action can take place; it is however a pretty fairly widespread use to make them not exactly the place, but part of it – its firmament, its scenery. And in this case, this very scenery has more than simply an aesthetic interest. Starry nights are doubly defined: they require that two kinds of conditions be met. Spatially, the environment must be such that the eye, almost wherever it chooses to fall, does so on the sky and its uncountable lights – or at least its deep, navy blue, possibly mixed with dusty purple if the action is set in a city. Temporally, night is unavoidable: there must be no sun, or not enough for the moon and its shining cortège to be obscured. The characters involved by the action happen thus to be outside, and at a time when human beings are expected to sleep: the first effect, and perhaps the most researched one, of starry night is subsequently more or less artificial isolation. Two characters – sometimes, though rarely, more – are thereby in such a position that it is ideal for them to discuss. This is especially true when they happen to be on a journey at this moment, thanks to the scenario, and thereafter alone in huge spaces – if not with sleeping companions whose role will at most be to, precisely, break the situation by waking up and asking the others what they were doing or saying. Before it happens (if it does so), the starry night has created for those speakers a “most-outer-space”, perhaps more outer even than the interstellar one, always filled with massive and numerous spaceships. They are finely isolated (or at least so they think, and so is the spectator expected to think with them), meaning they can freely and frankly interact. Series like Fate Grand Order: Absolute Demonic Front Babylonia intensely use this technique – and rightly, for it is most easily inserted in their own context, and is extremely effective when it comes to building and defining, not that many characters, but rather relationships between them.

This “elsewhereness” of others might be the consequence of two things: either they do sleep, or they do something that explains why they do not sleep. In the latter case, the starry night is even more obvious when it comes to its “breaking role”: it is the physical outside, when night itself takes back its rights, by opposition to inner spaces where human activities keep going on, despite the sun being gone for a long time already. The starry night is also, in this situation, a decompression chamber: herein (or rather hereout), the ongoing activity absolutely ceases, it is at most a far rumour and an indistinct light coming through the window of the balcony. For, even though the most usual setting is that of the journey and the waggon or the caravan, it is not that rare that it be for instance a ball from which one character then another, or both at the same time, take a break on this very balcony, as it may happen in How Raeliana ended up at the Duke’s Mansion or the original Gundam series. In both cases, the balcony and its starry ceiling absolutely isolate characters from the ball (until they come back to it or are joined by some others). Conventions cease to rule every word and gesture, or loosens for a moment their hold. This goes a step further when it helps the characters leave behind them even their own rules for a decisive moment and crucial talks, which the somehow cosy and relaxing atmosphere which stars, obscurity and solitude bring with them enables. This is especially true for Kaguya-sama: Love is war – the first kiss that never ends, where night also provides a neutral space, where no character, not only dominates, but also needs to dominate. Sun-ruled day is a time to shine and perform in this very world: night, on its side, offers a way out of it, through dreams or through discussions friendly discussions.