This would be fine in a purely fictional setting, but Irina goes out of its way to use real historical figures where only 1 letter in their name is changed and directly reference real historical tragedies like the Nedelin Disaster of 1960. Elfen Lied is also kind of guilty of this admittedly. Remember Monster Musume and how it tried to have this shoehorned anti-racism message? Only the MC is nice to the monster girls, while everyone else is ridiculously horrible to them. The answer is simply to tell a monster girl story. Why would you shit on some of the greatest heroes in history? This is not only stupid, but incredibly tasteless and insulting to the first cosmonauts who risked their lives for human progress. They want to use Irina as a guinea pig and make her the first person in space, then kill her and send an ethnic Russian into space. Every Soviet character besides “nice male MC harem lead” is an evil bastard. That would be like in our world if all the Soviet Union’s top scientists in 1960 believed that Jews have horns and that’s why they wear yarmulkes.ĭespite showing the space race from the Soviet POV, this anime is Red Dawn levels of anti-Soviet.
Myths that any semi-educated person would have stopped believing centuries ago in a world where vampires are real. In the world of Irina, the leading Soviet officials and most of their scientists still believe medieval era myths about the vampires for some reason. We’re told that vampires are just a harmless minority early on, but the same researcher who tells us this still hates vampires for no reason and is completely ok with killing them in medical experiments. This is seriously the route the anime goes in! They basically just made the vampires a stand-in for Jews. After that, the vampires lived in isolated communities and over hundreds of years many racial myths and negative stereotypes were created about them. During the Bubonic Plague, vampires were falsely blamed for poisoning wells and were hunted down in pogroms. They’re just a hated and oppressed ethnic minority who happen to have fangs and sleep in coffins for no reason. Instead, we learn that vampires don’t have any magical powers. She has fangs and must sleep in a coffin, so you would think the portrayal of vampires will be somewhat traditional. When we first meet the vampire girl Irina, she is being used as a test subject by the Soviets.
However, Irina wants to preach a message about racism and does so in the most tone deaf, incompetent way possible. What do vampires have to do with space exploration? Absolutely nothing.
Isn’t that literally just the plot of Royal Space Force? Gainax already did that shit in 1987 during the Cold War. This isn't very good.īrought to you from the director of Cutey Honey Universe and a first-time writer, this is an alternate history version of the space race told through the perspective of the Soviet Union. I went in having absolutely no idea what to expect, but I was still somehow disappointed by this one. Just the title lets you know this is going to be a weird one. Through their time together, Irina and Lev begin to develop a mutual love for outer space, bringing them closer together. Lev Leps, a former top candidate to become the first human cosmonaut, is designated to accompany Irina and act as her guide. However, Zirnitra's government has a potential solution: to experiment on vampires, whose biological similarity to humans is too significant to ignore.ĭespite being forcibly taken from her home in the mountains, vampire Irina Luminesk shows no resistance and is even willing to train as a test subject. Since then, the space race between the confederacy and its competitor, the United Kingdom of Arnack, has intensified the two countries hope to one day send humans to the cosmos above.Īs a dog's biology is inherently different from a human's anatomy, there is no way to perfectly identify the risks involving space travel and its effects on an individual's body without actually sending someone for observation.
On November 23, 1957, the whole world witnessed the Federal Republic of Zirnitra's monumental achievement of sending the first live animal-a dog-to outer space.