Discussion topic for the “Tircis and Aminte” light novel & drama CD of planetarian. Feel free to refer to the entirety of the original planetarian and this story without spoiler tags, but please tag references to any other content with [spoiler], providing adequate context in parenthesis.
What would you rate this story?
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WHY!? Why, Suzumoto, must you be so cruel?
I’m not really sure what to say about this thing. The atmosphere is as wonderful as the other parts of planetarian. I always have and always will love how Suzumoto manages to create an atmosphere that’s sad yet hopeful. Going along with that, we have Suzuki Keiko’s acting that is out of this world.
I guess I can talk about how awesome this line is: “‘Happiness’, ‘Ultimate’, ‘Consciousness’, ‘Chaos’, ‘Nihility’, ‘Inquiry’, ‘Soul’, ‘Thought’, ‘Love’, ‘Separation’…”
All of these relate to the story. Happiness relates to Tircis’s feeling towards Aminte and how excitable he is as a child. Everything from Consciousness to Thought relate to the search for knowledge and how it leads to Tircis abandoning the task he was originally given. Love and Separation is like the most subtle piece of foreshadowing ever.
I’m not really confident in my abilities to talk about Tircis’s speech about God, but I hope someone else can do a better job because it’s probably very cool.
Oh right, I have one note to make as a translator. Whenever Tircis says “everything” like in the beginning of 02, he says みんな(minna) which is more commonly used to refer to animate objects. So even though he talks about nature in general, what he says has a more compassionate feeling to it. Tircis has a lot of stuff like that; he has a very pure and kind view of the world around him.
I do have one complaint about T&A and that is how the twist leads to the first half 07 being just a huge info dumb. Other than that, it just makes me cry like a baby every time, and I have to go over these many times.
A random thought occurred to me recently. I can totally see this story working as a sort of interwoven side story with planetarian. The parallels that can be drawn to the Illusionary World scenes from CLANNAD are very strong.
Hello I finished this story but i am not sure if I understood everything and since I cant find any other discussion post anywhere I would like to ask you questions. Were the Words knowledge the gathered ? Was their task to protect the Words(knowledge, informations )? Did they have a normal bodies but at the end they only send their memory cards? At the end how did they know the words Yumemi was saying all the time, does that mean that when humans escaped the Earth someone had the Yumemi memory card and Tircis get hand on it?
I am sorry if I am annoying but I love the Planetarian story and cant stop thinking about it since i dont understand few things. Any information or theory you have will help. Thank you
Good question. In fact, the translation almost didn’t happen because I couldn’t answer that question. It’s simply not specified how Yumemi’s data got to the Moon. All your questions are up to interpretation. My guess is that the twins are AI without corporeal bodies. We know they were tasked with preserving a large database, but how any of this makes sense from a technological stand point is up to your imagination.
Thank you very much for answering. I felt so empty after reading it and needed to discuss it with someone. Thank you once again. Gonna fill the emptiness with Rewrite.
Umm hello! I too wanted to talk about the story, I resently learned about planetarian and it had such a big impact on me! I really like it and think it is really beutifull. I began looking for more of planetarian and found these drama. It is as beutifull as the original story.
I like how they manage to make such a inocent and human like characters althou they are not hummans, the part when Tircis says that god maked humans to his resemblanse and how humans make them to their resemblanse is really intresting and makes me wonder, if we were able to make a IA that could feel, think and learn would they become our succesors in the universe? Our legacy? Its a really intesting thought. If that ever happens I hope that we live together as a sole specie. Mankind is a really violend species too so I hope that if they ever are able to exist they become even better than us in that aspect.
I also have a question, in the end did Aminte came along with Tircis? I want them both to be together so that they don’t feel alone.
She’s with him “as a Word;” it’s just speaking metaphorically. The twins are ultimately separated in the ends, but Tircis still carries his memories and love for Aminte with him.
That is really cute but at the same time a little lonely. Saying goodbye is one of the hardest things in life. I only hope that they get to see each other again 
Thank you!
So this is probably the only good opportunity to say this. There’s these two tidbits about planetarian that don’t really fit in anywhere.
First about the planetarian light novel, before the story starts there’s a quote from a poem. The poem is by Kitahara Hakushuu and is called 月から見た地球(The Earth as Seen from the Moon). The poem kinda describes what the Earth would look like traveling across the sky, though it’s only the last stanza that’s quoted.
いや、すでに知っていたのだ。地球人が
早くも神を求めていたのを、
また創っていたのを。
[This is the modern version with actually readable hiragana]
This is probably blasphemy to anyone who cares for this guy’s writings, but is says something like: No, for I already knew. How quickly the earthlings would seek God, create God. The blog I found on it said that part was about like how people will seek logic in nature and attribute it to the divine. In planetarian humans do create robots which often act as divine symbols, so the last line takes a different meaning here. The light novel is described as “Four little stories about stars, words, God, and robots” after all.
For my second trick I’ll present you the secret planetarian side story! Okay, it’s not actually that exciting but quite the pain in the arse.
Disclaimer: All this information is from Wikipedia and heresay. I can in no way guarantee how much is real.
When Hoshi no Hito ran in cinemas, there was a pamphlet with this micro story called 舟守の塔(The Boatmen’s Tower). It’s supposed to make a more clear connection between Hoshi no Hito and Tircis and Aminte. So in the original, the three kids get Yumemi’s memory card and say they wanna go to the Moon; that was the whole connection before. Apparently, over many generations of planetarians, this changes into this idea that all of humanities writings should be sent to the stars. So humanity is beyond saving, but the final planetarians, a brother and a sister, make it to the city on the Moon. They input all the writings they’ve gathered including Yumemi’s data into the super computers, then they die fantasizing about starting a family (Weren’t they siblings?).
I wish I could see this story for myself. I asked Pepe about it in the past, but he didn’t seem to have it.
I guess one big question looming for me… Who built this digital garden on the moon? By all means the technology to build it, and the means to leave the Earth should be lost to mankind.
Well, maybe one possibility is that the base was built before the apocalypse, and the startellers beamed everything up to the moon through satellite. Could be a nier automata type scenario, with AI on the moon which gradually evolved more complex with time
Junker talks about a city on the Moon in Hoshi no Hito. That’s one of the triggers for why the kids wanna go there, I think.
Yes, that would be the lunar city of Mare Nectaris. In the visual novel it was gone into in more detail, but the anime left out the role it had in the war that ended everything, probably because it would have been detrimental to its pacing to suddenly toss it in.
Past this point is a lot of speculation based on evidence we get throughout the whole of Planetarian media, so take what I’m about to say with a grain of salt.
Now, I don’t know for certain, but I’m reasonably sure that Mare Nectaris was only properly depicted in Yumemi’s projection in said anime, and that wasn’t even an official description, just the Junker imagining it, so we don’t know for certain if that was how it looked by the time the apocalypse happened. The way it looked, I would almost imagine that it had to have been when it first became habitable by more than the crew meant to keep it functioning, so it’s wholly possible it might have grown more since then to the point where the incident that was supposed to have gone down and then been hushed up by the government in the visual novel could have been as big a point of crisis as it was, since a world with a lot of problems or on the brink would probably need a hefty shock for it to stick in the memory of scavengers like the Junker, younger ones who don’t have as much of a memory of the world that was. Thus, the strike on Mare Nectaris had to have been massive enough to shock that way.
Now then, we look to Mare Nectaris’ role, or at least, its role as implied in-universe. Logically, the first city offworld would be something like a port city, meant to handle shipments more than anything else so future lunar development becomes easier. This does mean, as you suggested, data centers to handle the rigors of space traffic, automated loading and fabrication systems that would have been worthless after the Mare Nectaris incident as nobody was around to man them or give them relevant instructions for the war to come, and the means to construct or at least prepare a ship for the end of the story. Mare Nectaris, as implied by its role and position if not directly shown, would have to be the perfect spot to launch this ship because it’s pre-apocalypse, reasonably developed, relatively untouched by the total war that cut it off from Earth for good, and meant to handle such a challenge.
That, and I guess it’s also an example of Chekhov’s Gun - why the hell would you introduce a new lunar city at what’s like the last minute narratively?
I get some vibes here about the Voyager probe and the “Golden Record” - this being a much more technologically advanced and sophisticated version. In this case, less about first contact and more of a “humans were here” - a kind of Galactic in memorium.
I have been wondering why “Tircis and Aminte” The only reference that I can find is a tragi-comic pastorale by an Italian poet called Torquato Tasso ( aka Le Tasse in french). Tircis and Amante are a shepherd and shepherdess but otherwise that story has no apparent relationships. It’s a pretty obscure reference…
And now I find that Tasso’s major work was La Gerusalemme liberata / Jerusalem Delivered…
That was what was meant to be flying in the credits of the movie version of Hoshi no Hito, right? This ship?
Tircis and Aminte was…a weird one. I have no idea if I liked it, and I doubt I understood it.
From the beginning it was clear to me that the ship Tircis wanted to go on would end up being a spaceship. As for the twins, the two of them being completely alone made me think of an Adam and Eve type situation where they would have to learn everything there is about the world and repopulate it themselves. Icky, especially with Tircis’s comments on how he was liking Aminte more. I had a weird feeling of her being the antagonist for some reason. However, the Adam and Eve situation clearly couldn’t be the case because somehow they were able to live in the school and have no problems eating and surviving in there, so maybe someone was watching over them waiting for them to be ready. And then when the reveal happened, I was just like…WTF? Admittedly I did like the idea of the twins soaking up all the knowledge they could from old books in an empty world.
This is what was implied to have happened in the story I think. Humanity struggled on but eventually died out on Earth. Before that, they uploaded all of their data, books and archives to the base on the moon that got attacked right before the war started. They then created the two AI to learn everything they could from an innocent perspective unrelated to humanity. Finally, the twins were separately sent into the stars in hopes of finding an alien civilization to share the knowledge and works of humanity with. The data itself stayed on the base in the moon while the twins who could survive the journey in the ship went themselves.
That’s what happened right? Correct me if I’m wrong. Perhaps humanity really hadn’t died out and just was trying to reach out to the stars because of the influence of those three children. The empty city in the beginning of the CD makes me think of humanity being gone. If humanity really wanted their legacy to survive somewhere among the stars, they could have made frozen embryos to send with the twins along with the knowledge of their society and how to survive. That’s just a wild theory though and the technology on Earth wouldn’t have been able to create something like that or determine where to send the embryos and the twins. Or would it?
This was just weird as fuck honestly.
Tircis and Aminte is simultaneously one of the most out of place side stories in the world of planetarian, but also one of the most fitting when you start looking at all of the things presented. I was at first quite surprised by the tone of the story – it’s very different to the rest of the side stories. In my opinion, if you removed the ending, it would be difficult to identify this story as something that takes place in the world of planetarian, but I do believe that this story should exist despite that.
One thing that I want to discuss is how the characters of Tircis and Aminte are presented. Firstly, we see everything from the perspective of Tircis, so naturally this means that we have a better understanding of Tircis as a character. Tircis is presented as being curious – trying to understand what’s around him and why he exists. Throughout the drama, he asks the majority of the questions, some are simple, some are quite complex and philosophical. Meanwhile, Aminte is presented as someone who has all the answers. At the start, Aminte points out all of Tircis mistakes and Tircis states that he believes that Aminte has all the answers. However, as mentioned later on within the drama, when Tircis asks a question to Aminte, she asks what he thinks instead of giving her perspective. So despite the fact that Aminte is presented as a character that has all the answers, she never gives the answer, she lets Tircis try to figure out the answer for himself. To me, this presents one of the key concepts of Tircis and Aminte – self-realisation. As mentioned before, Tircis asks a lot of questions, many of which do not have definite answers, such as ‘Who created us?’, so Aminte asking what Tircis thinks presents the idea that one should believe in what they believe in, without being affected by others. Aminte doesn’t try to present her point of view because Tircis would most likely take her answer as the definite answer. Aminte wants Tircis to realise his own beliefs by his own will, even if those beliefs are wrong. An example of this is that when seeing the frozen Earth for the first time, Tircis believes that it’s the moon. He asks Aminte if it is in fact the moon and she throws the question back at him, only for him to reply that it is the room, in which Aminte then says that it is the moon. Now if Aminte is this all knowing character, she obviously knows that it is not in fact the moon but the frozen earth instead, but she doesn’t correct Tircis on his conclusion. Now one could argue that Aminte doesn’t actually know whether what they saw was the Earth or the Moon, and he knowing more than Tircis is just part of a persona she’s presenting. Given how at the beginning of the drama she is presented as having a wider variety of words than Tircis despite them being around the same age and how Aminte was able to build a ship for Tircis, I personally interpret Aminte as knowing more than she lets on. This is also emphasised by her having to think a lot before answering any questions – she’s trying to present things in her most ideal way to get Tircis to grow.
Next thing to consider is how the ‘words’ come into play within the drama. Due to the setting of the drama, Tircis can only learn things through words (whether it be books, or Aminte’s words) and his own thoughts/experiences. I mentioned in my Hoshi No Hito analysis how I believe that the story is representative of passing knowledge and belief from one generation to another, and how it is a continuous process in order to help humanity grow. Well in Tircis and Aminte, that concept still holds to some extent. To me, the words act as more than a way to hold information and communicate it – the words act as a test. A test to see if Tircis can grow and gain independent thoughts and beliefs based on only the information that has been written by humanity and his own mentalities. One thing that stuck out to me is how Aminte reveals that the ship is ready soon after Tircis makes a very profound comment about God, and how the words don’t matter because they are the words. To me, this is representative of Tircis growing to gain enough independent thought on his own to both be able to pass on the words he has learned to other people, but to also create and add to the words. Words are just a way of communication, and each one holds some meaning, so when Tircis says that words don’t matter because they are the words, what he means is that it is the person that defines the meaning of the words, and not the words themselves. The best way I can explain this point is through the use of language. Let’s consider two different languages, and say they have a word with the exact same meaning in every possible regard, but the words of each language are spelt and pronounced completely different. Well to someone who doesn’t understand one of the languages, the words would have no meaning, but if they understood the other language, then the word has meaning. Tircis is aware of this, and that what matters is the ability to communicate ideas to others, and not the words themselves. When you consider that it was the wish of humanity to give their words to someone else in the future, then it follows that since Tircis was sent into space, he is the person who is meant to fulfil that wish, and give the words he has collected and realised to whoever he meets in space.
Finally, I want to talk about how this links in with the world of planetarian, both in terms of plot and themes. Firstly, some basic points. The Earth has frozen over and this story takes place on the moon. The frozen Earth is most likely due to the events shown in Hoshi No Hito where the never ending rain becomes snow, which most likely lead to the earth freezing. Also the concept of the moon being populated was presented in Hoshi Not Hito. Tircis talks about how there is no longer any wind or tree because of war. This is clear references to how war was the cause of the post-apocalyptic world of planetarian. Finally, there’s Yumemi, and how the spaceship is playing her message. If you were to remove Yumemi from these points, there’s not actually that much to suggest that this story is a part of the world of planetarian, but that soon changes when looking more in depth at the story.
Let’s consider Tircis and Aminte. I’m really surprised no-one has mentioned this yet, but it is heavily hinted at throughout the story that Tircis and Aminte are both robots. First of all they’re twins, most likely meaning they’re both the same model. Tircis cannot remember his parents, in which Animte then says that if he cannot remember them how does he know he had them, in which a possible conclusion is that he has none. Aminte is presented as knowing more than what she says, which is most likely because she is aware that she is a robot, but Tircis is not aware that he is a robot (or at least not at the start of the story, which is suggested by things such as Tircis saying he believes he has grown recently, which isn’t possible if he’s a robot - later on he realises it was his purpose to protect the words among other things, suggesting he’s realised that he’s a robot too). Tircis states that humanity was made in Gods image, and that he and Aminte was made in humanities image, once again suggesting that they’re robots. Aminte summons the spaceship at the end without having to physically go to it, which is most likely due to her communicating with it using her program. Tircis states that in the spaceship, he can feel all the words coming together, which might represent his full processing power being used or a data transfer to the spaceship. It’s even stated at the end that there was a robot production centre on the moon, meaning that they were most likely created from there. There’s also the minor point of how Tircis and Aminte are never eating or drinking anything throughout the story, which is possibly due to them not need any food or drink to live. Basically, these characters being robots helps this story fit in with the world of planetarian since robots are prominent throughout all the side stories. The concept of robots fulfilling humanities hope and dreams is something present in the original VN, and this holds for this story since at the end Tircis is sent into space with all the words he has gained, thus allowing him to hopefully fulfil humanities wish of passing on the words to someone else, which is one of the key things that robots are meant to do - help humanity.
With that being said, let’s consider themes. The concept of faith and belief is one of the most prominent themes in the world of planetarian, and Tircis and Aminte is no different in that regard. These themes are presented in several ways. One of the ways is humanities faith that their knowledge will one day be passed on to someone else in the future. There is no way to know whether the spaceship that Tircis is in will ever reach someone, but if humanity didn’t have hope that it would be sent, that ship would have most likely have never been sent into space. Another way is the faith Tircis and Aminte have in each other. Tircis has faith in Aminte’s knowledge, which is emphasised by him asking Aminte asking a lot of questions for validation, and Aminte has faith that Tircis is able to realise everything himself, which is why she usually asks if he believes whether something is the case or not. This also ties into another way faith/belief is presented – Tircis’s belief in what he has realised. Tircis says things like ‘The one who made us was probably God’, which is due to the conclusions he has made because the words he’s been exposed to and this own thought. To me, this comes down to one of the fundamental things that allows for belief – thoughts and experiences. The original novel presents faith and belief as something that is passed down from person to person (more specifically the Junker to Yumemi), but this story shows how faith and belief can be created from very basic principles. This concept of taking basic principles and developing upon them is present throughout the story, such as how Tircis’s arguments become more sophisticated and detailed throughout the story, and how he starts to look at and consider more complicated words as time progresses.
In many ways, Tircis and Aminte shows that one can grow from the most basic elements without needing others to impose ideas upon them. It takes the themes from planetarian and reduces them to the most basic of forms, only to develop upon them until those themes have reached the same standard as the original story. With every end, there is a new beginning, and that’s something Tircis and Aminte communicates very well, and thus it holds as a very fitting end to the world of planetarian.
For the sake of completion, I figured that I should discuss the use of music in Tircis and Amante. For those of you that aren’t aware, I did an analysis of every track in the planetarian soundtrack in the Planetarian - General Discussion page, and how each track is used to represent certain themes and concepts throughout the novel. Tircis and Amante only uses a select few pieces of music from the original vn, but because of the nature of this story it is very difficult to discuss their significance of all of the tracks because it’s very different from the rest of the side stories. With that being said though, there are still some significant placements of music.
The general ‘Hoshi Meguri no Uta’ motif: Now in the previous topics, I have argued that this is the theme of each stories ‘Stargazer’, but in Tircis and Amante, there is no clear indication of a Stargazer existing which initially threw me off writing this earlier, but it starts to make more sense when you consider what the characters represent. Tircis and Amante’s meaning in life is to protect the words they have gathered, the words given to them by the previous generations of humanity, the words of the Stargazers. Throughout the story, the character decide that they no longer want to just protect the words, they want to share them, similarly to how the Junker wanted to show the world what Yumemi showed him, and in Hoshi No Hito, the three children wanted to share what the Stargazer showed them. While it may not be as clear as the previous characters, Tircis and Amante are Stargazers, or at least share the mentalities of a Stargazer, and the use of this theme represents this. While one could argue that the music is used just to remind the listener that this is a story in the world of planetarian or something along those lines, I would like to point out how Jerusalem had an entirely original soundtrack that was not used in any of the other stories, so there must be a reason why track from that story, or entirely new tracks weren’t used, and I think Jerusalem’s lack of a Stargazer is the reason.
Winter’s Tale: This piece first plays when Tircis sees the Moon/Earth in the sky along with all the stars in the sky. This is similar to how in Hoshi No Hito, this music first plays when the Stargazer shows the three children the stars. Now I’ve always argued that this piece represents a turning point for characters – it represents a character wanting to become a Stargazer, a character wanting to share knowledge and experiences with others. Now it’s around this part in the story where we see Tircis start to develop more as he starts to ask more complex questions and come to more conclusions such as how some words are wrong.
Gentle Jena: This plays when Tircis gets in the ship and starts to leave the moon. I’ve always argued that this piece is very similar to a hymn both musically and symbolically and its use in Tircis and Amante is no different in that regard. Tircis is about to embark on a journey with the purpose being to pass on the words of humanity to someone else. This is such a hopeful thing – even though the human race is gone, their wish is still being fulfilled. I think is the really significant when considering one of the lines Yumemi says in the vn: “Mankind will be able to solve all of its problems, and will one day reach out to the world of the stars”. Even though humanity didn’t physically make it to the stars (or at least beyond Mars), their words did, so in essence humanity did reach out to the world of the stars, and this makes Yumemi’s belief come true, and that’s what Gentle Jena is about – believing in Yumemi.
Itsukushimi Fukaki/Deep Affection: This is the final song that plays in the side story, and one of the most fitting ones to end on. While some may argue that Hoshi Meguri no Uta is ‘Yumemi’s theme’, I will continuously argue that this piece plays that role instead. In all previous cases of this piece being used, Yumemi gives her ‘Why don’t you come to the planetarium’ speech, and stays the same until the end. It is at this point in the story where it is revealed that the ship containing Tircis also contains Yumemi’s words, and the story concludes with them travelling through the world of stars. I think it’s a beautiful way to tie everything back to Yumemi. We have to remember, none of this would have happened if it wasn’t for Yumemi – the Junker wouldn’t have seen the beauty of the stars, thus Hoshi No Hito wouldn’t have happened and thus this story wouldn’t have happened. While humanity may have died out, because of Yumemi, they didn’t die in vain – they were able to pass their knowledge on to someone else. It really shows how the hope of one individual can really have an impact on the world. Even though Tircis doesn’t know who Yumemi is, she is giving him hope, and will most likely give hope to someone else.
Despite being very different from all the other side stories using this music, Tircis and Amante are very consistent with how the music is used and what it symbolises when compared with the vn and the other side stories. In my opinion, the use of planetarians music is severely underappreciated - it is rare for any series to have music that consistently embodies all of the main themes of the series, and I hope the analysis has helped others appreciate how masterfully planetarians music is used, and enhanced their appreciation of the series.
