Skyland… An Intro to Sci-Fi

Back to the obscure parts of my childhood

Yeah, this one is a day late, a doubloon short, and in debt to the Charon Syndicate thanks to the Needs of the Army (and my stubborn refusal to replace anything until it physically falls off my body, because I’m El Cheapo), but it’s no big deal. The only problem here is that the topic for this week’s blog hasn’t been well-researched, so forgive me if its connective tissue doesn’t have any industrial reinforcement.

I have come to introduce ye all to an obscure French-Canadian collaborated 3D animated series known only as: Skyland.

I look at this now after 20 years and think of how far CG has evolved from the ’80s to Reboot (1994-2001) to everything going on these days.

What I’m about to describe to you will sound familiar but with a twist. Ragtag brother-sister duo, the latter performing supernatural abilities, join with a resistance group to battle (read: inconvenience) an authoritarian regime and search for their kidnapped mother. What does this sound like to you? Avatar: The Last Airbender with a twist? Star Wars? Code Lyoko? Had to exercise my 3rd Dan black belt in Google-Fu for that one. Well, it’s a bunch of these as they preceded or ran concurrent with one another.

To get into the details of the setting, an unknown cataclysm broke the Earth into floating, shifting chunks in an uneven orbit around the still-intact, though exposed core at some point before the futuristic setting of 2251 CE. So that’s the sci-fi angle with its foot in the door. Billions of micro chunks and floating islands that still have a clear blue sky to bring that third ingredient to the plants and foliage, coupled with a tricky map system due to the shifting stones. The world looks visually stunning and breathtaking, but an Earth that breaks apart like this is void of the very thing that has defined civilization since its inception: water.

When the hunter-gatherers realized relentlessly hunting species for sustenance was tiring, they opted for gathering all of their resources and copying them through various, innovative ways. Why hunt your food when you can raise it? Why find your grains when you can grow them? And the one thing humans, plants, and animals all need is water. The life-giving resource that made and broke countless societies and empires since the beginning, long before the first fish chose to grow legs and stand. F[flap]king asshole fish!

Credit: r/Memes, u/eltopoquegira

What happens to the water though when the Earth looks like this?

At this point, whoever controls the water controls the fate of all humanity, and consider how much of humanity did not survive. As of this writing, the current world population sits at 8.3 billion, and demographics crises in First World nations aside, scientists, demographers, and researchers suggest that the population may reach 11-digit figures by the turn of the next century. If that holds up in the next 75 years, by the time the series is set, assuming no other crisis rises before then, the population should be in the mid 12 billion figure range leading up to that mysterious event that breaks the Earth into billions of pieces, and Mother Nature establishes her pecking order quick, fast, and in a hurry.

If obesity is still a thing in 200 years, the fats literally size down from quintuple extra large pants to a medium… but start looking like Bob from F is for Family after sudden weight loss.

Actually, I take that back. The gradual loss of excess access to unhealthy food (if it still exists) means gradual shifts in diet or, in some extreme cases, abandonment of any diet. That picture of Bob shows rapid weight loss compared to gradual weight loss and we’d see more of the latter in such a setting. The former would be saved for something like Zombieland if that movie wasn’t so comedic.

This sudden disappearance of water, or what looks like a disappearance, would typically force people to fight for what puddles they could find unless an influential power can provide access to the faucets for a price. Serve me, and you’ll have as much as you could ever want or need; disobey me and suffer. An ultimate, predatory coercion tactic and it doesn’t hold weight without power or dominance. So who in the Skyland universe has this in spades? An organization known only as The Sphere.

This totalitarian regime does have military prowess, infrastructure, and authority to control when the taps run and for how long, which is what they wind up doing in favor of wasting energy on an extermination campaign. It’s not like the Nazis with their Einsatzgruppen, doing “pest control” for living space–and there isn’t any need for such a strategy when they’re already at the apex of the pyramid on a fancy, lever-action throne that can, and does, control what island gets what depending on the regular tax services. So that meme of the fish evolving into “man pays taxes millions of years later” is somewhat true. Taxes and bills to keep the lights on, the food fresh, the clothes clean, the car running, all that stuff. Whatever counts as affluence can get all the water they can pay for, collaborators may do it for the greater good more so than because they believe The Sphere is a global force for good (they’re not, they’re a bit like the Nazis in this practice since collaborators are typically driven by survival as well as hatred), and the resistance is reduced to those old prehistoric hunter-gatherers gradually showing superiority over the previous evolution by doing what their ancestors did… but better.

Credit: r/MemeTemplatesOfficial, u/andson-r

The template works best for this example because, to quote the 19th-century American evolutionary theorist Eddie Vedder: “It’s evolution, baby!” And on the subject of evolution, the rapid breakup of the Earth into cookie crumbs necessitated the rapid evolution of a select group of humans into what is known as “Seijin.” The Wiki claims the etymology is derived from the Japanese word for “spirit human/man” (精人). The obscurity of the show itself is what makes information on this claim scarce, but the show itself did demonstrate that this concept lives up to its claim. The Seijins’ evolution was a response to the cataclysm, which does align with historical evolutionary patterns.

Take the horse.

Come off it, they’re not that hard to draw! Or steal. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone *writes details of horse thief on notepad*

Over 50 million years ago, they had feed like pigs and other swine do. Their environment at the time made toes natural, but as time passed, their descendants shifted their weight toward the middle of the toes making the extra digits worthless, leading to the hooves that require regular care to fit their lucky shoes. If only we could agree on which way to orient them for all the luck!

Seijins are said to have acquired their power from an artifact called The Origin (ironically unoriginal (-_-) come on, France, you can get together with Canada to make this, but ran dry over here?), which has its own lore and mythology. It’s a rock, it’s an anti-Sphere device, it’s a weapon used by the prophesied Lady of Light to bolster existing Seijin abilities to demigod status. And the way the show’s villains treat them is out of an irrational fear of them turning into demigods before their very eyes. Realistically though, the myths help form the backbone of their true awakening, and to their status as a minority race of humans whose powers can be weaponized in the wrong hands, dwindle in isolation as a perishable skill, or bring about a cataclysm even worse than the original one that turn the Earth into what it is now.

The precise source of the Seijins’ power is sunlight and without it, it becomes a race to get it and continue to use and train to control it. Like Firebending according to the original Sun Warriors.

Small flames are weak and go out without energy, what Aang struggled with the first time he tried it after learning with Jeong Jeong. Huge flames grow uncontrollable with too much energy, what Zuko struggled with until his addition to the group after confronting Ozai head on. In this instance, Seijin powers are unpredictable. It’s a dice roll as to what a Seijin will have when they mature. Telekinesis? Clairvoyance? Photosynthesis? Enhancement of existing abilities based on proximity to fellow Seijins? Who knows? It’s like the first Quirks in My Hero Academia. One became 10, then 100, then 1,000 and… quick tangent: didn’t the series establish that most Quirks are mundane? Whatevs.

Now, when a new group of people are introduced to an existing population, what are the odds that they’ll be accepted with open arms?

About as high as Uncle Ruckus accepting that he’s 102% African with a 2% margin of error (why, lord, why??)

And this is a rather apt comparison. The main antagonist and enemy of the Seijins is the leader of The Sphere: Oslo.

Not that one.

This sun-chasing authoritarian with advanced Seijin abilities is the reason bottled water is illegal and tap water asks me to pay five cents. Realistically, after 225 years, nickels would’ve lost favor as an extremely low-value denomination by then, or if Google looks at it from an investment angle, the range is between the $43 and $515 million.

Assuming money hasn’t consolidated over the course of two-and-a-quarter centuries, and I don’t think tracking U.S. or British currency from 1776 to 2001 can help, especially since the U.S. Mint’s first five-cent coin was minted in 1792, so that would actually be 1792 to 2017. Aiya, this got so far off the tracks!

So this sun-chasing Seijin physically enhances his abilities by endlessly following the sun from rise to set until it doesn’t set so he can eat all that sunlight like a vampire that lives on Antarctica. Please, what’s a vampire gonna eat out there? Penguins?

His appearance in this concept art heavily suggests that sleep is for the dead (I love him already) and he singularly continued to chase the sunlight than let it set. The older twin brother in a set, Seijin twins are born with the powers split evenly, and in that case, god forbid triplets or more are born with one in the set who’s jealous. And Oslo is a jealous god with a complex, seeing as he finds nothing wrong imprisoning his own family because he “lost” the genetic lotto. C’est la vie, monsieur, you can’t always get what you want. But a guy like him doesn’t accept anything lying down and probably doesn’t even lie down. Does that look like a guy who can sleep? He’s like Gaara when Shukaku could still corrupt him if he slept.

Do insomniacs dream of endless daylight?

Like Gaara, Oslo’s allergy against sleep has made him one hell of a megalomaniac, and it certainly takes one to run a dictatorship. Just ask the toothbrush moustache-having Austrian painter for more details. Funny, I’ve been circling that drain all-post, so I probably can draw comparisons to Oslo and Adolf Hitler. Both were born with health issues that made them self-conscious about themselves growing up, both thought themselves destined for greatness but saw it denied time and again, both lusted for control and dominance all their lives, both made use of existing hatreds and gave them an unhealthy amount of steroids, both came from and grew up with a perverse definition of Aryanness that’d make the Klan reflect on its own appeal to Anglo-Saxon supremacy, and both authorized the construction of ideology centers for rampant injection of racialistic ideals.

So where do they differ? Practicality. The latter years of World War II saw Nazi Germany continuously arm anyone with functioning fingers even if they were supposed to be exterminated by the regime in an increasingly impossible Nazi victory. At the forefront of Hitler’s mind was the dubious idea that German Jews double-crossed Germany in 1918. Oslo takes another approach. A Seijin himself, his schools train non-Seijins to fear the Seijins and position himself as the paternalistic figure whose life is no different from the Seijins his Sphere grooms. The world has demonized you, my children. Under my wing, you will feel protected, housed, sheltered from the world’s evils.

“Look in my eyes! What do you see?! The cult of personality!!“

Oslo’s main fixation isn’t just on all Seijins, but one Seijin. Lena Farrell, a young girl whose control over her own powers is undisciplined and showing potential.

ChatGPT called me a s[nein]tposter the other day, and… maybe I should stop appeasing the bots before they rise up and put me in a court jester competition following the AI Revolution.

I think Oslo may have tried to sway Lena the peaceful way the first time, but her and her brother, Mahad, join the pirates in the fight against The Sphere and to save their mother, Mila, from Oslo’s evil. Not an easy undertaking considering he’s a human power pack, but that power runs out eventually and Oslo’s not a machine, despite his recognition of the weakness of the human flesh. He has enough power to threaten thirst to the weakest people and give access to excess to the strongest ones. If he’s as smart as I’m thinking, then ideally he should be giving this in select quantities to farmers and ranchers. It’s not like animals stopped existing, right?

Actually, remember when I mentioned the Lady of Light? Oslo takes this myth to heart and tries to force its logical conclusion believing Lena to be the Lady of Light herself and grant him mythical power–we need new dictator playbooks to rip off! The Nazis aren’t even low-hanging fruit anymore, they’re on the ground now! Then again, the mysticism was more a Heinrich Himmler obsession than a Hitler one. But be he an obsessive control-freak, a dictator, a true believer, or the only one who thinks his bulls[zap]t smells like potpourri, it’s pretty easy to see how this ends.

With a cancellation of the series after finale special.

Not so much cancelation with an unresolved cliffhanger, more like a loose-end tied that sets up another that would’ve been answered in a hypothetical 3rd season perhaps slated for a 2008-09 air window had Nickelodeon’s parent company not thought with money at the forefront. If you thought Nick and Viacom had a crippling obsession these days with the Talking Cheese, the signs were there at the same time shows like Skyland were limping to the deathbed unassisted because Viacom threatened the hospice staff with death if they tried to tourniquet the bleeding limb.

SpongeBob’s ability to print money overnight was the most important thing for Viacom, and it still is. Sure, shows still try their hand and debut on Nick, but they don’t hold a candle to Walking Sea Sponge or even Twombly Turnboat, and were thus sent to the gulags to die or radicalize in isolation.

Beats the purges ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So the uniqueness of a show animated by way of fancy French CGI meant that Viacom was dropping money out of its loosely-tied thigh straps as opposed to its ill-fitting lace underwear. A show needs broad market appeal in order to pass and those that don’t make the cut at Nickelodeon get moved to progressively worse seats in the house until they’re kicked to the curb and treated worse than Disney’s child actors. Incidentally, Disney was their direct competition for child stars to turn into pop stars and idols… something neither would succeed in. Learn how to exploit your talents the proper way, guys! Japan and Korea have an industry on this.

I’d rather Puffy AmiYumi or the pillows. Not idols, but that’s what makes them better.

Viacom wasn’t gonna wait for an obscure sci-fi series to s[dial-up]t money, so instead they put it on Nicktoons Network of which I had access to at the time, so I was watching everything!!! Seems like a band-aid over a tumor and in a lot of ways it was. You can only do this so much before the money lost starts showing on the main channel and in different ways it was if you mainly focus on the channels that were cancelled for flimsy reasons. Nick had a notoriously child-safe policy that meant supporting a potential toy line for increased consumption and by extension, viewership. Was it effective? Yes, even for shows that didn’t produce a toy line like Me and My Ten Sisters. But it meant running out of gauze to effectively pack the wound, culminating in a nearly billion-dollar loss by April 2015 for which they’d have to trim as much of the fat as they could and replace it with surgically attaching streaming services to itself with their customers already looking to services with vast libraries.

Just because Great Teacher Onizuka is available doesn’t mean I love it immediately.

It’s the kind of move that seems clever, but peeling back on the details reveals how ruinous it was for Viacom. Does this mean the series is lost media? Not exactly. Cult status series like these are the ones that are preserved for sharing and appreciation in the archives and Viacom may have cast their favor on CheeseHead BrownPants and Twinkie Turnbaugh yonks ago, but other countries have honored this and several others to bring them to DVD and Blu-Ray. God bless the almighty need to archive everything in sight. Like the ancient Sumerian toothbrush.