aka land of the lustrous, one of the stories of all time!! it was created by Haruko Ichikawa on october 25, 2012, and it recently ended serialization on april 24 this year. there are, i think, 12 volumes in total, and the anime stops around the 30th chapter. i think the series gained a good portion of its recognition throught the 2017 anime. the anime is really beautiful im not surprised. anyway the manga is pretty cool, if you havent read it go for it :) theres buddhist themes, motifs, all of which i havent looked deep into, but it runs throughout. in the manga ichikawa explores more thoroughly what it means to be human
the story takes place on earth, after it gets destroyed by some meteors, leaving only one island, where the gems reside. each gem has a designated job: some go on patrol, others work inside the school. the antagonists (for the first part of the series) are the lunarians who like shiny things, so they come and try to shatter the gems (this is probably the real reason). they pick up their parts and use them for jewelry. if everyone were humans this would be peak. i havent read the manga in so long so forgive me if theres anything wrong. hopefully i did justice to ichikawa
theres kind of a hierarchy based on ones hardness. the mc, phosphophyllite is a hardness of 3.5, because of how airheaded they are the one task thats assigned to them is writing an encyclopedia. this forces them to confront cinnabar. the latter is in charge of night patrol, yet the lunarians only come at day...phos promises to get a better job for both of them. this is where everything goes wrong so i kinda wanted to mention that last bit
it was probably around the summer of 2021, and i found some amvs on youtube. something about how strange the gems were. i believe i saw dia before, they seemed vaguely familiar. the mysteriousness of it all was pretty intriguing. i saw clips of phos out of context, from the beginning of the anime and the end, and i wondered why they looked so different. part of my interest in hnk might be because i was younger and i probably had an easier time getting attached to something. rn i find it hard to do anything new, i havent seen any other anime since i found hnk. ichikawas worldbuilding is fascinating, and i kind of want to take some notes from it. im still waiting for season 2 and its become one of my reasons to live