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The Most Popular Series of 2025

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A short documentary on the history of the Empire and the Free Planets Alliance.

Chikao Ôtsuka in Legend of the Galactic Heroes (1988)

And the Show Goes Off the Rails for an Episode

Yess.., The Legend of the Galactic Heroes &quot;History episode&quot;, I think this might be my new favorite LOTGH episode, I enjoyed so much! This episode is a great example of why I love so much History, oh wow...

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Julian's Journey/Humanity's Journey

I LOVE this episode, it might be my new favourite one. I love how it&#39;s framed like a real documentary, whith all the little interviews and archive footage. It makes this world feel so alive and gives it such a rich history. Slowly but surely this series is becoming one of my favourites. This episode also bears a creepy resemblance to real life history, given there has been a great number of dictatorships over the past one hundred years, this episode gave a brief but scarily realistic look into dictatorships, how they seem to do good at first and then absolutely break everything. Love this show!

Guys, I don&#39;t think you quite understand just how fantastic this episode truly is. I just watched a documentary........within an anime. Can you comprehend just how insane of a concept for an episode is? Not to mention they pulled it off so easily? There wasn&#39;t a single second where I was bored. Yoshiki Tanaka is a god for coming up with ridiculously impressive lore and history for the series. This is legit one of the best episodes I&#39;ve ever watched from a TV show, period.

I guess now that we&#39;re 40 episodes in, the creators figured they had earned enough investment in the audience to do a documentary episode explaining the background of their space opera. Given how lolzy and rushed it felt, I&#39;m rather surprised that they did though, they clearly put no greater thought into it, and just seemed to have rushed out the entire background lore of our story as quickly as they would any other episode. I&#39;m honestly rather baffled by it. As we discover, humanity went to the stars, but as space piracy followed, a strong military was required to stop the threat. Then later, as society devolved from future decadence, an admiral from that space navy went into politics and rose to power, declaring himself emperor. But also, I regret to inform you, he was Space Hitler. So he murdered billions of people, and started murderous eugenics programs, and crushed all dissent, and thanks to all this, started an incredibly stable space empire that has lasted just fine until this episode. Despite the cartoon historians in the documentary not agreeing with his choices, it would seem the universe of this TV show rewarded them amply with success, with the culmination being one of the most successful and powerful civilizations in human history. Did I mention that he only made German people space aristocrats? Because he loved German genes. Oh, and that basically in only a few decades, he completely remade their entire society, created the position of emperor for himself out of nothing, and recreated the idea of nobility in general from a non-aristocratic society? Literally nothing organic or even gradual about any of it, he just decided it, and everyone with a space laser gun apparently agreed wholeheartedly. The Alliance too fails to impress with its backstory, apparently none of the people on humanity&#39;s many colonized planets who had a spaceship decided to leave the empire because of the fascism or genocide, it was a group of prisoners on a penal planet who secretly built a spaceship and took off from there, stopping to build a space fleet (???), before traveling far away to settle a new democratic state. This part didn&#39;t wow me, but it did shed a little light on the in-universe lore for why they need &quot;corridors&quot; to travel through space; apparently if you travel outside of a corridor, your spaceship just explodes. So there you go. To state the obvious, this level of &quot;historical worldbuilding&quot; does not meet a graduate, and certainly not post-graduate, level of understanding when it comes to the topics of history or government. It probably is good enough for a cartoon though. I&#39;m just rather surprised that we get less well considered background for this setting, than you would get asking the average 17 year-old D&amp;D DM the backstory for the fantasy world he made up to run his campaigns in. Why not just leave it to our imaginations in that case? I&#39;m also a little concerned about the 1980s Japanese societal mindset that led to a story where a Space Hitler rises to power and succeeds wildly, simply because no Allies are around to stop him. As if, that was basically the only reason the whole plan didn&#39;t work, there&#39;s no internal flaws or instability there with Space Hitler&#39;s plans, those all are fantastic and work wonderfully. It&#39;s just troublesome spoilers who are the only reason any reich doesn&#39;t last a thousand years. I&#39;m not wild about that message for several reasons.

User reviews

Julian's Journey/Humanity's Journey

Legend of the Galactic Heroes

LOTGH "History Episode" - I'm impressed!

I love the documentary style

History in Space

And the Show Goes Off the Rails for an Episode

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