Planetes and the Great Man’s Shadow

Planetes’ second volume describes the allure of conquering space in familiar terms, as it sets the stage for protagonist Hachimaki’s attempts to join the first manned voyage to Jupiter. Its synopsis opens with “in the history of space travel, many great men have forged the way into great frontiers, and many great men have died so that others may continue further into the great reaches of space.” It goes on to describe Hachimaki’s dream of traveling to Jupiter and joining this hallowed pantheon, but its frame of reference for history and society is already set by those first few words. Though Planetes is about many things, in its second volume, it could perhaps most clearly be described as a story about the mythology of the Great Man.

Our history books tend to be quite fond of Great Men, those larger-than-life figures who seem to single-handedly set the course of human society. Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Einstein and Shakespeare, Edison and Mao. As human beings, we are naturally inclined to sort the world around us into coherent narratives, and thus history is defined by villains and protagonists who shake the world order through their spirit and vision. Whether defined as an intrepid explorer piercing the veil of ignorance, or a Randian superman embodying all that is best about productivity and personal excellence, these Great Men cast a long shadow over the rest of us, while also inspiring hope that anyone could rise to achieve similar greatness. Without men like this, the argument goes, we’d still be leaving in caves, cowering at lightning and fearful of fire. It takes bold and decisive actions, and the Great Men capable of pursuing such actions, in order to carry our species into greatness as well.

This volume opens with the introduction of Planetes’ own Great Man, the accomplished Werner Locksmith. Locksmith is an engineer, and a brilliant one – his designs lead to the creation of the Tandem Miller Engine, and the powerful Von Braun ship that carries it. Locksmith’s engineering genius is matched by his personal drive; he considers himself an incorrigible lover of space, and dreams of using his engine to fuel the first manned flight to Jupiter. Locksmith’s designs and leadership embody mankind’s capacity for striving, and his actions could single-handedly push human development into a new age of scientific development and abundant natural resources. He is history’s beloved scholar-king, the man strong and wise enough to make the choices the rest of us could not.

He is also an utterly unrepentant monster. Our introduction to Locksmith comes in the form of a phone call, as he urges one of his associates to test their second engine to the limits of its capabilities. He is well aware of the engine’s theoretical capacity, but needs to actually stress-test its limits before embarking on his flight to Jupiter. In response to some safety-related response by his subordinate, Locksmith distractedly assures the caller that “if it incinerates, I’ll take full responsibility.” He has other matters to handle – whether that engine fails or succeeds, the great dream must live on.

Locksmith’s experiment goes wrong in the worst possible way, as the engine detonates in an explosion visible even from lunar orbit. The entire moon base is destroyed, and hundreds of scientists and engineers are killed. Trillions of dollars are lost, and the moon’s orbit is flooded with debris, thousands of shards of deadly wreckage all spinning in tandem. Locksmith’s ambition and perspective inspired him to take a great and terrible risk, and the consequence of that gamble is human tragedy on an epic scale. So how does Locksmith “take responsibility” for this crime against humanity?

He holds a press conference and says that he’s very sorry, that he’ll try to do better next time, and that he promises the lunar explosion resulted in a great deal of useful data.

Locksmith’s callousness embodies the true nature of Great Men, and Planetes’ fundamental critique of this entire view of history. Moreso than his leadership capabilities or engineering acumen, Locksmith is first and most centrally defined by his unquestioned willingness to commit evil on literally any scale in pursuit of his goals. To accomplish what Hachimaki’s father describes as “Tsiolkovsky’s Lie” – the recasting of your own personal dream as the dream of all mankind, an endeavor synonymous with human greatness. In the face of a goal as admirable as that, how can you possibly condemn him for some minor collateral damage?

Locksmith’s actions might seem uniquely callous, but his choice embodies the truest nature of a Great Man. His pledge to “take responsibility” is just a series of necessary but meaningless words – they’re something he must say to make small-minded people get out of his way. To a Great Man, the suffering of ordinary people is meaningless; it’s essentially just statistical noise, a certainty that cannot sway them from the course towards glory. Great Men see empathy as weakness, and a focus on human costs as a failure of perspective, a small-minded preoccupation with ultimately irrelevant concerns. When challenged on the validity of their quest, their thoughts may resemble what Hachimaki at one point screams at the starry-eyed recruit Tanabe: “what a convenient excuse for getting nothing accomplished.” Great Men sail above such mundane concerns, considering themselves answerable only to history and its Great Men-adoring scribes.

If Planetes has a villain, it might well be Werner Locksmith. While Hachimaki finds comfort and purpose in the dream of achieving like Locksmith, Planetes as a whole is far more concerned with the debris and suffering he leaves in his wake. His violent introduction points to the show’s understanding that in spite of all our fawning cultural rhetoric regarding the sacrifices necessary for achieving greatness, the gumption and inspiring work ethic of Doers and Makers, it is far more often the ordinary, uninvolved people who end up paying the price for these men’s greed and ambition.

If catastrophe strikes, Locksmith won’t be the one suffering – it’ll be the low-level workers who had no say in his choice to disregard safety concerns, a choice he likely saw as no choice at all, just the assumed cost of being a Great Man. He might apologize on live television, and perhaps even be sanctioned by his company, but he’ll still be rich and powerful and utterly uninhibited in his ability to shape the world. Great Men are never caught in the catastrophic whirlpool of their activities, the human cost of a martial empire or industrial revolution or corporate coup. And given both their distance from the consequences of these actions and continued willingness to pursue them, what these men undoubtedly see as a clarity of perspective and ambitious long view could also be neatly described as sociopathy. What defines a Great Man might not be the scale of their ambition, but simply their unquestioned willingness to commit evil on a scale that us near-sighted mortals could never imagine.

Hachimaki yearns to achieve the greatness and seeming permanence of a Great Man. Planetes’ first volume saw him directly staring into the imposing, soul-rending void that is space, when an accident at work left him briefly stranded in the dark. Staring down that darkness almost broke him – in the face of such infinite oblivion, he felt so shaken by space’s inhumanity and his own powerlessness that he almost retreated back to earth. But witnessing the Von Braun engine lit a fire under Hachi, telling him that while space may not care about us, humanity still has a need for hard-working Great Men to carry us into the future. Hachi has chosen to find meaning by excelling, by rising above the crowd and making a true mark on history. His dreamed-of spaceship is an icon not just of financial freedom, but of personal meaning – “I was here, and it wasn’t a waste.”

Hachi’s fears are understandable. All of Planetes’ conflicts are pitched against the backdrop of that endless void, that featureless expanse passively assuring us that all our struggles are meaningless, and all our dreams will amount to nothing. The universe is just too large for any ordinary person to feel like a significant part of it. Massive, imposing panels of celestial darkness appear throughout this volume, embodying the hopelessness that Makoto Yukimura sees as the most fundamental quality of space itself. If it’s all meaningless, if we’re all ultimately alone, what hope or meaning can we believe in? Given that, is it any wonder that Hachi clings to the ideal of a gallant, solitary explorer, a Great Man capable of piercing the darkness and truly being remembered. In a darkness this complete, perhaps only a Great Man can hope to carry a flame.

This fear of insignificance prompts Hachimaki to embrace the mythology of the Great Man. As he trains for one of the fiercely contested crew positions on Locksmith’s grand adventure, he consistently frames his struggle through a positive, personal interpretation of Great Man rhetoric. Hachi isn’t trying to take advantage of others, merely prove his own competency. He views ascending to Greatness as synonymous with growing up and becoming a real man, as opposed to simply drifting through life in a complacent daze. Reframing concern for human suffering as a lack of perspective is a classic Great Man rhetorical feint, and Hachi is the perfect target for such entreaties – lost in a world that terrifies him and desperate for any sort of meaning, Hachi believes they understand something he does not, and clings to their rhetoric like a life raft in the celestial storm.

Planetes’ understanding of and sympathy towards Hachimaki’s viewpoint is expansive and admirable. Whenever his associates attempt to impress upon him the human cost of Great Man enterprises, he scoffs and says something deliberately insensitive; but that’s not a reflection of any fundamental cruelty, it’s merely his naturally confrontational personality pushing back against a framework that has nothing to do with his feelings. Hachimaki isn’t intentionally embracing the theoretical amorality of his choices; he genuinely believes in the dream of personal striving, and is fighting a fight that makes sense to him. From Hachimaki’s perspective, this isn’t about human striving versus human suffering; this is a personal battle focused on his own dreams and limitations.

What Hachimaki is fighting against isn’t the pleas of those affected by Locksmith’s actions – instead, he is pushing back against his own fears, working to surpass his limitations in a world that ultimately doesn’t care whether any of us succeed or fail. For Hachi, the greatest fear is submitting to complacency, and a future with no bright light in the distance. He sees giving up on his dream not as a reflection of compassionate perspective, but a sign of personal weakness and a surrender to despair. The voice of insecurity in Hachimaki’s head doesn’t speak to the human cost of Great Man endeavors – it instead embodies the embracing of weakness he sees as the only alternative to greatness, urging him to quit striving and head back to earth and let a nice woman take care of him.

The fear of a life without meaning that drives Hachi is conveyed in stark, brutal terms throughout this volume, from his angry retaliations against Tanabe to his struggle to save a dying companion on the lunar sea. But ultimately, the fear that drives Hachi to embrace Great Man philosophy as a road to meaning can’t suppress the fact that Hachi is, fundamentally, not a Great Man. Though he reveres Locksmith’s drive and dreams of making his own mark on history, Hachi ultimately has too much compassion to live for greatness’ sake.

Anti-Jupiter mission ecoterrorist Hakim describes it as a certain look in their eyes. Those men who truly would sacrifice anything for their goals cannot avoid keeping that truth from their face – it’s the look that inspired Hachi’s father to actually believe in Locksmith’s dream, and it’s the look Hakim understands as the colonizer’s stare. Hakim knows Hachi is not a Great Man because he sees it in his eyes; and when Hachi briefly does reach the point of being willing to kill for glory, Tanabe pulls him back from the brink. To be a Great Man is to stare into your victim’s face as you pull the trigger, and then get on with whatever you were doing before you were so rudely distracted. We are likely all capable of assuming the cruelty of a Great Man, but at least for Hachimaki, Tanabe’s voice in his head always pulls him back.

Hachi’s anxiety regarding his place in the universe, and the philosophy he’s embraced as a salve for that pain, comes to a head during that death march across the lunar sea. In the course of his endless series of Jupiter mission qualification challenges, Hachi and his equally Greatness-minded companion Leo are tasked with completing a lunar circuit, only to have their ship brought down by lingering debris from Locksmith’s terrible experiment. Trapped with a friend who will likely die as a direct result of Locksmith’s amorality, his “taking responsibility” revealed for the vacuous nonstatement it is, Hachi clings to his Great Man dreams as one final source of strength. If the Great Man dream is real, then it doesn’t matter that Locksmith’s selfishness destroyed their craft, dooming them both to meaningless deaths in the wake of his glory. Great Men don’t become random statistics in the wreckage of other Great Men’s journeys – Great Men rise above, and recount such adventures with a laugh and a winking smile. But for all his struggles and all his pride, Hachimaki is still alone, still at the mercy of an uncaring universe, and still concerned for the fate of his fellow man.

When the end arrives, Hachimaki’s thoughts are not “please save me” or “I can’t die before achieving the dream” – instead, he is ashamed to realize he cares the most about making sure his companion is safe. Seeing the Von Braun as his escape from a life without meaning, Hachi sought to become the kind of man who steers history, who holds the rudder and guides humanity towards a brighter future. But the Von Braun cannot heal Hachi’s fundamental emptiness, and idealizing the dreams of starry-eyed sociopaths will never make a compassionate person happy. Alone with a dying friend on the vast and heartless lunar sea, Hachi has no more room for artifice – he must admit that he truly cares, and that his claims to be above compassion are simply a ward against that endless dark.

As if in answer to that confession, Tanabe herself appears, carrying light and hope down to Locksmith’s “acceptable losses.” Angry and ashamed, Hachi cries out with the realization that birthed his Great Man fanaticism – “we live alone and die alone! That’s us!” But he can’t help but ask, in the face of this strength so entirely unlike the brutality he seeks, what force drives this girl to save him. With tears in his eyes and a dying friend on his back, Hachi shudders as he asks “why are you so good to me?”

From their lofty vantage point, Great Men are only truly capable of seeing other Great Men. Hachi wanted to believe he was one of them, but ultimately, he’s one of us – the millions of tiny people who may not fully appreciate the big picture as envisioned and sculpted by Great Men, but who are perfectly capable of seeing each other, the minnows swimming in their wake. The millions and billions of fellow human beings with hopes and dreams of their own, and every right to a world that empowers them, instead of simply using them as fuel for history-shaping endeavors. These people are not real to the Great Men of the world, but they are absolutely real to Hachi.

Tanabe knows this, and can only smile in response to Hachi’s question. Stranded a hundred thousand miles from our native home, alone in a darkness too total for human habitation, Hachi’s empathy compels him to make the choice Locksmith never could – the choice that embodies what is truly great about humankind. Stranded between the shimmering dream and a wounded friend, he raises his companion towards his trusted coworkers, the specks of human debris that are nothing to Locksmith, but everything to Hachi. “Please save him,” Hachi asks. “Please bring him home.”

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