My girlfriend just finished showing me all 24 episodes of the Japanese/French Jetix series Oban Star Racers, which you can find in their entirety on youtube right now, incidentally. I never hear anything about this series, even though it’s positively fantastic. There are so many unique, lovable characters and cool designs, every one of which is important at some point, and while its universe is dominated, like most in entertainment, by humanoid aliens, there are a fair number of non-humanoids characterized just as lovingly in rare ways.

In fact, all the most inhuman aliens in the show are either heroic or at least sympathetic.

This includes MUIR:

Muir is a giant, screaming arthropod reminiscent of a huge pseudoscorpion or dust mite, with many extendable, writhing tentacles. Its “vehicle” in the interplanetary racing competition is a huge floating organism is controls from inside, parasitically.

I wish we saw even more of Muir, but its few scenes are some of the most touching in a generally touching series.

BIG FAT SPOILER:

Just when it seems like they cast a big bug as a mindless, destructive villain like every other series ever, we learn that his mate was killed by (humanoid, elf-like) alien poachers for her valuable tentacles. He keeps her body preserved in his host/ship, and races believing he will be able to bring her back to life if he wins the mysterious prize, rumored to be a single unlimited wish.

He shares these memories with the series heroine, who hopes to bring her mother back the same way.

WAY BIGGER SPOILER:

I MEAN IT

MAYBE YOU SHOULD WATCH THE SERIES IT’S ONLY TWO SEASONS COME ON DO IT

BUT OKAY WHATEVER:

They both find out that the prize can’t resurrect the dead. Muir withdraws from the race and goes home, presumably to finally lay his mate’s corpse to rest.