Tircis and Aminte was kinda frustrating to me. I’ve read this thing like 5 times and nothing really jumps out as an obvious theme. Sure it concludes the story of planetarian but I feel like I don’t understand these themes. Added to that, when I try to map the themes onto other Christian themes like I have with the other planetarian stories, they never actually make sense, or they just become heretical. I probably have to just refrain from using that same framework for this drama cd in particular.
So there are a bunch of things that I found interesting and while I can draw some conclusions, I’m open to other people’s interpretations. First, there’s a ton of phrases that just get repeated in this story. The first one is when Aminte first presents the idea of a ship. Tircis asks when the ship will be ready to which Aminte always says, “I’m sure it will be soon.” This same response appears again twice in chapter 3. Now perhaps this is merely indicating Tircis’ impatience and childish urge to go outside, but I always noticed this because Suzuki Keiko always says it in the same way and I’m thinking hey I’m learning Japanese!
Another thought pattern is at the beginning of chapter 3. “There used to be birds, but not anymore. There used to be trees, but not anymore. There used to be wind, but not anymore.” Again I picked up on this because of the way these lines are voiced. And actually if you think about this a few more times, even if the world has frozen over it does not really make sense that there would not be wind so I guess looking really deeply its a very early hint that they world on which they now live really isn’t earth and is artificially made to not have wind. But I don’t know physics very well so I don’t know if the absence of wind is even a possibility.
A third pattern is how Tircis is described at liking Aminte more and more in chapters 2 and 4 until chapter 6 when it says she became dear to him. I suppose this could simply be an indication of the development of their relationship from his point of view but as was mentioned before, it sounds really weird considering they’re supposed to be twins and you know, incest vibes are NG.
Other than the repeated patterns I also have lines of thought relating to chapter 6 but I can’t come to a definitive conclusion here. This chapter by far has the most religious talking points but they don’t at all seem to correlate with a Christian worldview which is how I’ve been analyzing all of the other stories. The thing is, when Tircis and Aminte talk about God and about humans as the image of God, the first descriptions they give are absolutely right. Then right after Tircis says, “everyone in the world is like that. Everyone is God, and everyone was created by God,” which is a completely heterodox statement that I can’t work with.
Some more less relevant repeated patterns are the “millionth time, billionth time, trillionth time” rhetoric and “a ___ (town or class or whatever) just for the two of them.”
There is however one other thing that I can link to a Christian theme but it’s kind of a long shot. It’s also my best interpretation of the meanings of the names Tircis and Aminte. Tircis and Aminte are characters used in two different pastoral poems. Pastorals are supposed to be stories about shepherds and if I remember correctly, Tircis and Aminte are the names of the shepherds in their respective stories. Other than the people who take care of sheep, there’s also another usage of the word and this is, of course, in the Christian context. The Latin form of shepherd is pastor so in a sense Tircis and Aminte can be seen as pastors or care takers, but not of people, but of the words. Tircis says in chapter 6 that their duty was to preserve the words and so they did.
