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Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit started out as the first volume in a series of juvenile fantasy novels before being adapted into a 26 episode anime TV series. Set in a fantasy version of Heian Japan, it focuses on Balsa, a mercenary bodyguard and spearsworman, as she is hired by the Second Queen to protect her son Prince Chagum.

Chagum is the younger son of the Mikado, but his body is inhabited by a water spirit, and all the imperial advisors think that Chagum must be killed to protect the kingdom from the ravages of what they think is a water demon. So the Mikado orders him assassinated. Balsa must take Chagum away from the palace and protect him from the assassins, while also figuring out what exactly needs to be done about his water sprit. The series tells a single long story, but it's broken into self-contained mini arcs similarly to Babylon 5.

One of the most interesting things about this series is that it lacks an antagonist. The Mikado orders the death of his son because he thinks it's necessary to save the kingdom. Everyone who in a more pedestrian telling would be on Team Evil, is acting in the best interests of the kingdom and its people, and is deeply regretful that Chagum must die for the good of the many.

The anime's fantasy version of Japan has two peoples, one (the Yogo) modeled on Japanese society and another (the darker skinned Yakue) that seems to have been inspired by Japan's indigenous people, the Ainu. The Mikado and his Yogo advisers are far less knowledgable about the spirit world and the nature of the water spirit than the Yakue Shaman Torogai. This is head and shoulders above the typical treatment of ethnicity and race in typical anime.

After watching far too many anime that were about and seemingly for middle school children, and one-was-more-than-enough anime that seemed to have been made mostly for sexually stunted man-children, it was refreshing to see an anime with absolutely no fanservice whatsoever, in which most of the characters are adults and even the child characters are handled in a grown up and non-annoying manner.

This is by far the best feminist-friendly anime series I have watched to date.

The original series of pulp novels is called "miniskirt space pirates," and the anime was released in English as "Bodacious Space Pirates", so you'd think this was a crappy sexist production full of fan service aimed at appealing to arrested adolescent males. It's absolutely not, which is why I'm using the Japanese title up there in the subject.

This is a fun, lighthearted space opera series focusing on girl power, girls working together to overcome adversity, and girls achieving their dreams (which have nothing whatsoever to do with boys or boyfriends). And it is completely devoid of the T&A fanservice bits that marred "Read or Die." The endemic sexism of the Japanese anime industry had to express itself somehow, though, so this lovely feminist series has a title that is almost guaranteed to drive away some of the people who would most appreciate it.

Backstory: In the distant future, humans have colonized the galaxy. A planet orbiting Tau Ceti called Sea of the Morningstar gets tired of being a colony subject to the homeworld, and they launch a war of independence. Lacking a space fleet, they take a page from the 17th century and issue letters of marque to pirates willing to harass the homeworld's fleet. The war is a success, but some bureaucrat made a minor mistake: the letters of marque have no expiration date. Issued to the captains of the pirate ships, they are passed down from parent to child, and you have pirate dynasties, operating with legal sanction.

100 years after the conclusion of the revolution, dozens of the pirate ships chartered during the revolution are still in business. In addition to taking on odd jobs too irregular or too risky for the taste of regular space merchants, the pirate ships get hired by the insurance companies that underwrite interstellar cruise liners. The pirate crews dress up in traditional pirate costumes, raid space liners with guns and swords drawn, and steal valuables from the high class passengers. This is deemed part of the entertainment provided during the voyage, and the cost of hiring the pirates and replacing the stolen valuables is factored into the first class ticket price.

Just prior to the first episode of the series, the pirate captain of the Bentenmaru, one of the first pirate ships commissioned by Sea of the Morningstar, dies. His partner Ririka seems to have decided that a pirate ship was no place to raise a child, so it comes as quite a surprise to 16 year old Marika Kato to learn that she can, if she wants, become the new captain of an honest to gosh pirate ship.

Marika thought she understood her life: she waitressed at an ice cream parlour, attended a fancy girl's high school, and belonged to the space yacht club at the school. Now she has to deal with a pirate crew that isn't quite sure if she has what it takes to command them, and various government agencies and rival pirate ships that are extremely interested in whether or not she plans to assume the mantle of her father (if she doesn't take over the letter of marque, the Bentenmaru's commission will expire and there will be one less pirate ship in the galaxy). Not to mention keeping up with her schoolwork and getting enough sleep.

Fortunately Marika's mom is awesome, her yacht club is full of resourceful girls who have her back, and the Bentenmaru's crew wants her to succeed because they want to keep their pirating gig.

While Read or Die had a few short story arcs to establish characters and then launched into a high drama, high stakes story that took over a dozen episodes to tell, Mouretsu Space Pirates sticks to shorter 2-4 episode stories throughout. The tone is light, the drama and the stakes are real but less nerve-wrackingly intense. Stories alternate between adventures with the yacht club and adventures with the Bentenmaru's crew (which appears to be half female).

Every so often I see people complaining about how North American SF has become too grimdark, too obsessed with dystopias. Japan is one of the places to go for optimistic SF, and this is one example. There doesn't seem to be any poverty in Marika's universe, and crime seems to have been made so rare that people pay to experience the thrill of being robbed. When it is revealed that the president of the yacht club is a lesbian and one of the Bentenmaru's jobs is to aid her lover, this is accepted by everyone without question (although there's quite a bit of blushing and looking away when the reunited lovers embrace).

I strongly recommend this series (26 episodes, plus a movie that feels like another standalone story from the series with a bigger animation budget) to anyone looking for girl-heavy SF that breaks away from the grimdark tone of so much Anglophone SF these days.