I can’t believe I didn’t do this sooner… This will probably be the first of many of my posts on planetarian topics. Ever since I listened to the podcast many years ago I’ve always wanted to explore more of the Christian themes of planetarian because the story itself was a big reason why I came back to faith in the first place. Looking back at all the posts here, I am reminded that there was already a ton of analysis regarding the Christian themes here but I know that there is so much more to explore so I will be doing so in probably all my posts for this series. So here is part one out of who even knows anyways. It’s always possible that I edit these posts upon doing more research but feel free to ask questions and stuff.
The first topic I want to address is the style of the ending. Some of this stuff has already been discussed before, but I want to put my spin on it because I think Suzumoto is a genius writer whether he intended this stuff or not. So people have talked about how the ending is different from what you would expect from a Key work, especially if you put aside Hoshi no Hito for now. This ending is probably intentional to emphasize how the Junker has changed, even if the catalyst for that change is no longer alive. But I want to relate this to the Bible because I’ve been reading a lot of that lately.
So you may or may not be familiar with the fact that there are four books of the Bible that tell the story of Jesus Christ. These are the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. For the most part, they tell the same story but from different perspectives and for different audiences. All of them talk about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. That’s cool and all but one of them in particular, I believe, is similar to how the ending of Planetarian is written. Previous analysis above has established essentially that Yumemi parallels Jesus. At the end of Planetarian though, Yumemi doesn’t come back after death, so are we missing out on the resurrection aspect? Is Suzumoto’s interpretation of the gospel just fricken wrong? Actually this is probably just a question I’ve thought about but I’ve concluded that no, its not. Interestingly, the gospel of Mark is the only gospel doesn’t explicitly say that anyone has seen the resurrected Jesus. Instead, the last chapter, chapter 16 depicts two of his followers discovering an empty tomb with an angel telling them that Jesus is risen. In most versions of the Bible starting from verse 9, there’s a little note that says, “Some of the earliest manuscripts do not include verse 9 to 20.” Verses 9 to 20 which supposedly are not in the earliest manuscripts detail the resurrection stories present in the other gospels, specifically about Jesus’ appearance to his disciples. So basically at the end of Mark, you get this kind of cut off point where you don’t have confirmation about the biggest question of all time because that’s for you to decide. If you believe that Jesus has indeed risen, then the logical answer is to follow him as he truly conquered death. If you adamantly believe that the resurrection is not true, then Christianity as a whole has no value in your life at all. If you’re unsure, then you can read the rest of the Bible.
As this question relates to Planetarian, we too are left with a similar question of whether or not Yumemi lives or dies. It’s not so much whether she physically lives or dies, but rather if she lives in our hearts. The junker’s answer in this case is of course, yes. At the end, he carefully removes her memory card, placing it in his waterproof container which stores his most precious treasure, and puts it in a place that physically is the closest to his heart that he can put it.
