I have recently been watching Scrapped Princess with Jessa over dinner (that’s when I get in most of my TV watching these days – an hour a day, two to three times a week, over dinner).  It’s one we’ve both seen before, and one I remember fondly from my days in the Anime Club back at Mesa State College.  This time around, there were a couple of things I looked more closely for as I watched, but the most interesting was watching out for the various anachronisms from the setting and plot of the series.

In terms of anachronisms, there were actually fewer than I thought.  The first thing that I wanted to point out is the conceit of the world of Scrapped Princess as a digital simulation.  This is mostly visual through the magic system (which is so ordered it looks digital) and the occasional fractal landscapes.  Jessa and I also joked that Pacifica has “root access” to the world.  After this last viewing, I’ve instead come to believe that the reason for magic is instead one of two possibilities.  First, it’s possible that magic, in the classical fantasy sense, exists in this world.  This explanation works if you accept that magic and technology can co-exist, and it’s simply a conceit of the magic system that it looks digital.  I find this to be the simpler of the two explanations, and doesn’t require anything we haven’t seen outside the anime.  The second possibility is that magic, as the denizens of the world know it, are rote commands that a greater technology obeys to cause effects in the environment (maybe something left over from the war).  In this way, the technology has more the conceit of magic (rather than magic having a digital conceit) and more tightly explains the magical effects in the context of technology, but requires a technology we are never shown in the anime.

The other anachronisms are much more physical.  I think one of the first reoccurring anachronisms are the poisonous bugs that the Silencer attempts to use to assassinate Pacifica.  Here, the bugs are clearly tech (not fully organic organisms – they spark when they die, the have LED screens, etc), but the mechanism he uses to control them has a magical conceit.  The magical conceit of clearly technological constructs follows to the other major anachronisms: the peacemakers, the dragoons, the Skid, and the Gigas.

These two things, I think, are what make the series magi-tech so interesting: the magic has a very digital/technological conceit and the technology has something of a magical conceit.  Between the two, it makes the world seem very consistent and a lot deeper than first blush.