86 is pretty tiring. It wants you to FEEL so much while hammering you in the face with the most boring, unsubtle versions of its themes.
It's literally one of those stories where everyone from one faction is a scumbag aside from the designated good one, and the oppressed people are clearly stand ins for the Japanese (even though almost all of them aren't even Asian), so it has this sense of being manufactured to appeal to social justice types in the west and super hard right Japanese people while not being interesting in its own right.
Also doesn't help that the female lead spends a lot of the episode being super moe or crying, and that the male protagonist is literally a knock off of a knock off of Mikazuki Augus (namely, Hiroto Kuga from Gundam Build Divers Re:Rise - they look almost identical aside from their outfits).
86 - HOOO BOY, this is trying too hard in every way. Not quite Full Metal Panic levels of tonal mismatch between the stuff with the female lead and male lead, but it's enough to make you realize how it has a lot of stuff pointlessly dialed up to 11 in a cheap attempt to elicit emotions.
*There's a really bad dip in the animation quality around the middle of the second episode and the OP straight up reuses scenes from the first episode for the first 15 seconds. I dunno if they're saving money for later in the season or what, but it worries me quite a bit.
Yeah, 86 has a problem where it just doesn't do enough to establish the side characters, so their deaths are utterly meaningless.
Like, Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans also had a ton of disposable background people, but they also had secondary and tertiary recurring characters who got the spotlight every so often so you'd remember them. In 86, the only ones I remember are Theo - sketch man, Anju - the one next to Shin when he did his gun haxx, and Kurena - the designated failed alternative love interest, and two of the three are only because I've been hanging out in /m/ threads for this show.
Kinda surprised that 86 is only getting 12 episodes, so I guess A1 Pictures is either A) Trying to save money by making a short initial season to make a lot of the mecha assets, then do more seasons in more seasons, or B) they weren't sure this would be a successful show (not surprising, given how weak the narrative has been so far), so they decided to only give it a short season.
Well no, it's a "we took this web novel, didn't bother to do any revisions so it's not as hackneyed, and tossed it on the published book market while making the author shit out tons more books" problem.
Like, if they'd bothered to do a proper revision of the novel before publication, they could've scrapped a few of the very repetitive "Lena begs for shit and gets denied" scenes and put that word count towards developing the people who died or giving Annette* some more stuff. Maybe give the 86 more banter amongst themselves to make them more distinctive.
Then again, maybe it's just the anime leaning into the weaknesses of the source novel and adding some of its own, because apparently Lena's mom is still alive, and you don't get that impression at all in the show. I could've done with a few less scenes of Lena being Captain Slow on the Uptake Naive Idealist (again, because they're repetitive) and more scenes developing the 86 or even establishing what the fuck the average San Magnolia citizen knows.
*I really felt her story had more gravitas when I didn't know the kid she yelled slurs at was literally Shin. That's some fanfic tier shit.
After thinking about it, I think the only reason why Shin was Annette's childhood friend exists is to explain how the Para RAID can pick up the voices of the dead... which is still convenient as fuck, but at least it has a purpose.
The audience already knew that. We knew that the moment that she was literally the only one bothering to try. That's why a lot of her scenes are a waste of time, because if you have a brain, you'll realize that literally every criticism of her by the 86 is correct. She ain't going to accomplish shit unless A) she pulls off a coup and takes over her own damn country, or B) all the politicians and military guys above her in the chain of command get killed by the Legion and she takes over the country.
Sure, in universe, making it take time for her to realize how fucked things are is fine. But as a writer/director, you should be aware that sometimes repetition of a point lessens its impact/annoys the audience. It's things like this that make the show feel super hollow and pointless.
I don't need to be sold on her position. I can see it in literally every damn scene she's in. Maybe this worked in the book, but this is anime. We can see these and hear these people, and it'd be nice to give a shit about them... or their situation in general. Like, I give less of a shit about this attempted genocide than I do the poverty of Mars in Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans, and they only spent like, an episode and a half at the beginning of the show to establish how bad it was.
Honestly, the only emotions this show has generated in me as a response to its content is irritation at the amount of screentime we get of Lena being a slacktivist, indifference to most of everything else, massive irritation at how the Alba are generally strawman racists who are also too dumb to live, and some feels at the post-credits scene in this last episode. That's really bad for a story that's focusing on the subject matter it does... the story should be making me feel bad when the 86 die and make me feel glad/relieved when they manage to get through another engagement, but it doesn't do any of that.
Also, I shouldn't be offended that the bad guys are being bad at being bad guys. I should be offended at what they're doing. Again, Gundam IBO did this great with Gjallarhorn's Arianrhod fleet, and 86 just drops the ball hard on that. Like, holy shit, if you're going to give Kurena the flashback of her spotting Shin mercy killing someone, give her the flashback of her parents getting gunned down by Alba guards. That's super important.
I hear the LNs pivot away from the race plot once we get past volume 1, so maybe the second season will get into more interesting stuff and let the characters develop.
86: Holy shit, did we just see a SFW netorare scene? Masterful execution of how vicious and selfish high school girls can be. I especially appreciated the fact that Lena just leaned on an already broken person and broke her some more to accomplish her ends /s.
Also, if the mortars were just hooked up to an automated control system, instead of, you know, an actual manned command and control system with a normal chain of command, then that means she could've saved tons of people if she'd put her energies into hacking in vs bothering to slam herself into the brick wall of her uncle.
Lena's run through the city has zero emotional impact, because they don't establish that Lena has zero friends outside of Annette, which is one of those things they could've covered if they'd cut down on the redundant stuff earlier in the show.
Eighty-Six: if I didn't know this was going to get a second season, this episode would be a definitive, if somewhat meh, end. I thought people talking about the light novel were being metaphorical when they said the 86 were Japanese people, but the anime proved that to be a literal statement, because all the former Imperial text was in Japanese, vs the English the Alba use. This makes the racism thing even more farcical, given the real world and in-universe implications (the IRL WW2 denialism, the fact that the Empire literally caused a robot apocalypse).
Also, because I got exposed to facts about the subsequent books, I thought the episode would end way differently to set up S2, but I guess this epilogue will do that. Also, since I know about some of the next book events and remember the backstory of Para RAID, I'm trying to figure out if Shin got a memory dump from that one Legion or he just recognized the dude's voice, because that's a super plot important detail.
Nice that they included the mechanic's backstory, but man, this show is so heavy on the "tell, don't show" or "don't bother including" when it comes to story that the only thing that got a bit of a reaction from me was Lena reading the notes from Spearhead.
In the Imperial school house, all the text was in Japanese. In Spearhead Division's old base, all the text is English. That's pretty on the nose allegory right there. If they didn't want that allegory to be seen, they would've picked a different language for the text in the Imperial school.
And as for the in-universe thing, it's because the racism displayed by the Alba has been so 1 dimensional that it's unrealistic. So far, the only apparent reason was because they weren't silver haired, whatever eyed people. But now that show has revealed that the Colorata/86 were refugees from the Empire, which caused the disaster by making automated war machines that went out of control, the racism makes sense. It's stupid and misdirected, but the leap from "those fucking Colorata from the Empire dragged their Legion problem to our doorstep" to "put all those fucking Colorata in camps and let them fight the monster they made" makes more sense than "those Colorata look weird" to "put them all in camps and make them fight killer robots."
For a non-anime example, Star Trek basically provided multiple in-universe reasons for people to be racist against Romulans through their on-screen actions, so when they made a story trying to cast the Federation as being unreasonable for not helping the Romulans, the effect wasn't "The Federation betrayed their principles," it was "Wow, they sure went out of their way for those assholes."
Here's a great example of this - in the anime 86, which is a light novel adaptation, the director and screenwriter(s) completely failed to clearly establish one of the major motivations of the main character, Lena. One of her major things is constantly arguing with people about the treatment of an oppressed underclass (the 86) to people who clearly don't give a fuck, including her uncle, who's her superior in the military hierarchy. Now, they establish why she gives a slight fuck about them to begin with, by talking about how her dad was constantly talking about it and showing an 86 saving her life, but they completely botch the other half of it by failing to establish that she's got a one-sided parasocial relationship with them because she has one friend in real life.
You might be like, "How do you know that?" and the answer is "I checked out the wiki," because the show straight up omits Lena's mom, any sort of conservation about Lena not having friends outside of the one girl she knows, and any sign that she's lonely/miserable. It also employs a writing and editing style that implies that anything that isn't shown is unimportant. This leads to Lena's entire storyline falling flat, as she behaves like a stereotypical slacktivist, offending everyone around her, and generally not understanding why no one wants to help until people verbally beat the reason into her, which makes one of the 86's criticism of her entirely accurate. However, what we were probably intended to feel is tragedy as she tries and fails to save the people she thinks of as friends.
The show also does this with the 86, by having people talk about major events/people who affected their lives, but refusing to use flashbacks to show them and really make it clear how major these things were in their lives.
Like, the people with the most clearly defined characterization are a dead guy's AI upload, the robotic equivalent to a dog, and Lena's one friend, and that's because the non-humans got long flashbacks that showed them interacting with people and explaining their thoughts, and the girl just straight up unloaded her self-loathing at Lena for going full slacktivist at her.
Boy, 86 S2 is... more of the same. Like, the only person who's interesting is Ernst, because he's such a tryhard goofball, but everybody else is just as flat as they were last season.
What I don't get is the fact that the Giad people haven't been briefed about the whole "Legion use people's brains" thing, because there's that one dude who's super pissed about Shin doing his usual routine of headshots, and it's pretty clear that everyone in the know is not against that. So that means the grunts don't know about that, which is a bit... weird. It'd be one thing if there was a scene where the brass talk about revealing that fact and decide against it for morale reasons, but they just don't bring it up.
The Giad military had months to debrief the surviving 86 and they were involved in the development of a new mech. At some point, this should've been mentioned, unless they're deliberately hiding that for... no reason?
Like, they hid that from the Magnolians so Shin could get away with mindfucking particularly shitty handlers. They really don't have any reason to hide that here.
I got that part. It's kind of hard not to, even if the older dude basically recited Ernst's lines on the topic verbatim.
I guess the better way of phrasing my issue is that it seems like the only people who know shit about the 86 are the brass, and everyone else seems to know they exist, but not much else. For some reason, it feels like the show is treating the 86 like Spartans from Halo, but these are people whose arrival got propagandized to shit. Like, there should be insane rumors about how much shit they've seen, what they've done, and how crazy they are (which admittedly Shin is), not this weird "nobody knows shit all about them" stuff.
I heard the second season would be better, and to be fair, not having Lena ineffectually flail at a military command structure that doesn't give a shit/has given up is already a massive improvement.
I love how the fucking screenwriters and director of 86 decided that a battalion's worth of non-86 run Reginleifs was not worth establishing before this episode.
I'd have to check, but I don't think there was any vehicle support along the part of the Giad defense line we saw.
I mean, they had real time tracking of the events at that front line, and really, all they needed was a 500m or so no-go zone from out the outer edge of the trenches to limit friendly fire. They could've been softening up the Legion way before they actually got in position as depicted in the anime, and even if they didn't start the artillery until the Legion opened fire, they could've disrupted the enemy advance.
Blade Runner: Black Lotus would probably be better as a set of 90 minute TV movies, with some of the long, quiet scenes and flashbacks omitted to tighten up the pacing and making the experience of watching it less boring and repetitive.
The anime/light novels series 86 is a pretty weak take on racism, and a lot of the anime adaptation's decisions to omit things are usually to the detriment of the characters and the audience's understanding of the narrative. As a result, it's pretty hard to give a shit about the characters, because the show doesn't do a good job of establishing their motivations and backstories, which are pretty important when you've got a dual lead show with a heavy relationship focus.
I hear 86 season 2 got two episodes pushed back into next year due to production delays, and... you know what? If I didn't know there were more novels, ending on episode 10, where it looks like every named character from season 1 is dead, would be fine.
Like, the entire story for the past episode or two has been going "this is a suicide mission," so it's not like it's a subversion of expectations if it ended that way. And also, them surviving would just prove they have plot shields out the ass.
Just been reminded of this by reading a crossover fanfic:
In the anime/light novel series 86, one of the main characters, Vladilena Mileze, basically triggers this every time she tries flailing impotently at her uncle, the head of an army that's using people of various races as ablative armor against Terminator bug mech swarms. The reason this happens is because she just goes "this is bad, why aren't you doing something about it?!" at characters who clearly know its bad, but are utterly powerless to do anything about it. This is made worse in the anime by the anime director and screenwriters chopping out details like "Lena has literally one friend" and "Lena might be in a para-social relationship with utter strangers", which make this flailing tragic, instead of annoying.
Also in 86, the story tries to make you feel things for the 86, but this fails because almost none of them are given any sort of introduction or fleshing out in the first novel/season, so they just exist. This is made worse by the anime actually trying to make you give slightly more of a shit about some of the redshirts, but whatever stuff they added was so generic that it did nothing whatsoever. It takes until the second season for the people making the show to actually start including stuff that would make you at least get the main character's behavior, and by that point, there's so little emotional investment in the characters that it still falls flat.
To cap things off, the end of episode 10 of season 2 seems to kill off all the major characters, and because of the way the big climactic fight of the season has been established as a suicide mission, the reaction is not "oh no, the characters might be dead!", it's "oh, well, yeah, that makes sense." If you didn't know there were two more episodes of the show or a bunch more light novels, you'd think this was the finale.
86's portrayal of racism in the first volume of the LN/first season of the anime is the least subtle "racism is bad" message I've seen in a while, and the most ineffective, because it's literally strawman conception of a racist society vs generic multiracial group that are totally not Japanese (even though they write in Japanese) that have a white lady as their champion.
Honestly, I would love to understand what people see in 86 that elevates it over other works that have tackled the same themes and done better jobs of it.
Normally, I would chalk this up to most of those people being younger and missing out on those works, but checking the ages of some the people here cuts against that theory.
Like, there's some visually good scenes and a few emotional moments that actually hit, but in general, the show has almost a Halo live action level of inability to make you give a shit about anybody and is nearly on that show's level of disregard for establishing logic and facts about the universe.
Maybe in this thread, but AFAIK, there's no actual data to make a reliable determination of overall sentiment, especially since the show's got that divisive "the fans really love it, the people who don't either don't care or are haters" thing going.
If you're within the 35-25 age bracket, then you grew up in the same period as Star Trek: Deep Space 9, nBSG, Band of Brothers, The Wire, multiple mainline Gundam shows, and shittons of other media content that covers war, racism, psychological trauma, mecha, and just about any theme that shows up in 86. If you saw some or all of those, then you've seen works with better writing and directing than this anime.
The problem I've had with 86 (the anime) has never been with what it's trying to do. It's just that if the goal was to make me feel certain emotions at certain times, it largely failed to do that by failing to make me emotionally invested.
It then compounded the issue by riddling its story with lots of logic holes that absolutely kill the military technothriller aspect of the story.
It's honestly very similar to the Halo TV series where it expects you to feel the emotions it telegraphs you to have, emotions that are not at all built up to, but at least with the decency to give you the broader context of the conflict that the series revolves around. It's like both series are designed to exploit emotionally sensitive people, and if you put any amount of value into critical thinking or having clear cause-effect chains for the events of the story, the whole thing falls apart.
IIRC, it's locked behind Kadokawa's shitty digital platform, and I don't feel like looking to see if the public library has it if it's just another "first person POV transcript with minimal dialogue tagging" deal.
It's also kind of irrelevant, because if anything, most of the problems with the anime are anime specific (like the bit about cutting out Lena's mom) problems regarding the conception and execution of the adaptation. And to be honest, I suspect that a number of the problems I have with the anime are straight up due to the fact that most anime adaptations aren't designed as their own standalone things, but as ads for other media.
I find that to be a stupid way to make adaptations, especially when localizing the anime is almost always cheaper than localizing a book, but Japanese media companies have been consistently dumb at international business for over 30 years, so I am not surprised by this.
Like, I can't fault them for getting the first volume out of the way fast, but I wonder if eschewing the narrative structure they used and perhaps cutting down on the screentime for the redshirts they barely fleshed out, then redistributing the screentime would've been a better choice and could've solved the problems I and others have.
