The Doctor is In! - Dr. Stone

This month at the AJnet Anime Club, the doctor is in! Dr. Stone, that is!

There’s just so much anime to watch, and so little time to watch it.

Sometime back in 2022, my buddy tried to sell me on an anime about humans being turned to stone, and a really smart highschooler managing to get free and beginning to rebuild society.

That anime was Dr. Stone.

We watched the first episode, and I made a mental note to go check the series out later. Like all my mental notes about TV shows and movies, this one got shoved to the back of the mental filing cabinet and forgotten about for a few years. There wasn’t any real reason that I put Dr. Stone off. One of my favorite manga, Sun-Ken Rock, was done by Boichi about ten years before he began work on Dr. Stone, so I was genuinely interested in checking the series out.

I really shouldn’t have slept on this series, it’s pretty fucking good.

The premise of Dr. Stone is simple. A sudden flash of green light turns every human (and sparrow) on Earth into stone statues. Thousands of years pass, most traces of society crumble, and nature gradually reclaims the world.

One day, teenage science prodigy Senku Ishigami is able to break free from his stone prison. He immediately gets to work, building himself a house, tools, and a makeshift lab. Eventually, Senku discovers that the petrification can be undone with nitric acid, which he finds in a nearby cave (bat guano contains nitric acid). He unpetrifies his strong friend, Taiju, to help with manual labor. The two then free the even stronger Tsukasa, a teenaged fighter nicknamed “The Strongest Primate Highschooler”. Senku and Taiju want to rebuild modern society, but Tsukasa is against the idea, believing that modern society has corrupted humanity and that humans are better off living a simplistic lifestyle. Tsukasa begins smashing statues of adults, effectively killing the people trapped inside them. The two conflicting ideologies set the stage for the first two seasons, with Senku racing to scientifically advance his group as far as possible to take on Tsukasa’s group of strong and capable fighters.

I’m not going to break down every little piece of this series, since we’d be here all day. There’s so much going on, and the story moves pretty fast. Thanks to Senku’s insane intelligence and MacGuyver-esque ability to build insane inventions out of nothing, most serious problems feel like minor inconveniences and usually get resolved within a few episodes, only to be replaced by yet another problem that gets resolved by Senku’s quick thinking and ingenuity.

Senku is almost always the smartest man in the room, and almost always has some kind of primitive version of modern technology in the back of his mind, ready to be called upon and constructed to save the day. There’s definitely a lot of ass-pulling going on, but it’s done in an entertaining way, and I didn’t find it to detract from the story. If anything, it made me want to keep watching to see what crazy shit Senku was going to come up with next, and just how he planned to actually go through with it.

Obviously the show isn’t 100% scientifically sound, and a real chemist or engineer would find hundreds of flaws in the stuff Senku and his team are doing. But Senku’s ass-pulls are presented and explained in ways that sound believable and have at least some basis in reality. For example, Senku builds a “smartphone” (which is really just a wired walkie talkie). This sounds ridiculous, but the process is presented to us in a “roadmap”:

Now obviously making a wired walkie talkie takes a bit more work than this, especially in a world that’s regressed back to the Stone Age. But nothing on that flow chart is so absurd that it requires a massive suspension of disbelief to enjoy, and unless you already know all the real science behind everything you’re not going to be sitting there groaning and calling out any gaping flaws. Most of Senku’s larger inventions are explained through these “roadmaps”, with the development process being broken down bit by bit and simplified for the audience.

While the show doesn’t shy away from breaking the fourth wall and explaining things directly to us viewers (via “Mecha-Senku”), most of the explanatory dialogue is presented by Senku to the population of villagers, who descended from six astronauts that were on the International Space Station when the rest of the world was turned to stone. These villagers have lived a simplistic hunter-gatherer lifestyle for a few thousand years with no knowledge of our modern world. Then Senku arrives on the scene and blows their minds with his science. At first he’s branded a sorcerer, but the primitive screwheads come around and begin to embrace that marvelous sense of ingenuity that made us the dominant species. Some, such as Chrome, even grow to become very capable scientists who can hold their own without Senku (albeit in a limited fashion).

A lot of people give Boichi shit because he supposedly “objectifies women”. This was every single weenie on Reddit’s complaint about Sun-Ken Rock (and probably why we’ll never get that anime adaptation). These are probably the same people complaining about things like Spider-Woman’s ass or any female being drawn with big tits. I won’t argue that he doesn’t get a little carried away with the sexual stuff in Sun-Ken Rock, but some of you really need to grow up and stop being so sensitive. Women in comics and cartoons are allowed to be attractive, and I feel like half the time it’s uggos and effeminate wimpy dudes complaining about this shit.

Anyway, there’s not really any of that in Dr. Stone. Yes, there’s that classic Boichi touch that’s visible in some of the women (particularly Ruri), and the show dips its toe into ecchi a couple of times, but it’s nothing like Sun-Ken Rock, and most casual viewers probably won’t even notice it.

If you haven’t watched Dr. Stone yet, definitely don’t sleep on this series like I did. I give it an 8/10, there’s just so much here that I think anyone could enjoy this anime.

Angry_Jerk

Adam “The Angry Jerk” Baker is the CEO of The AJnet Organization and Editor-in-Chief of AJnet Magazine. A grizzled internet veteran of over 20 years, he writes about politics, culture, and whatever else manages to annoy him that day.

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