It seems as if every season there’s a LN adaptation or two that’s sold as being different from all the others, and I always give them a chance to win me over. But success seems to happen about once every five years or so. There’s something endemic to the writing of the modern-day light novel that repels me like a magnetic force, and very few of them manage to surprise me in any meaningful sense. I wish this wasn’t the case, with LNs carving out such a large niche of the anime production market. But it is what it is, whether I like it or not.
So it is with 86, this season’s entry. Lofty aggregator scores, heaps of praise from the readership, buzz aplenty. But it did nothing for me, I have to say. It’s not offensive, or racist, or nationalist as far as I can tell – and that alone places it above a good chunk of LN adaptations. It is minsogynst to me, though in a subtler way than these series often are. There are women in positions of importance here, but the narrative treats them differently from the men. Still, on the whole, it’s pretty tame by the usual standard.
Unfortunately I can’t find much else to hang my hat on, not even the initial kind of morbid fascination I had with Mushoku Tensei. The problem here is that the writing is so broad in these series, where every moral distinction is hammered home with black and white insistence and there’s no possible room for the audience to have to try and figure things out. The military leadership is so cartoonishly evil that it’s quite funny, though I don’t think it’s meant to be. It’s immediately clear what’s going on here (people being used as disposable soldiers and treated as non-humans by the state) and sure – it’s bad. But it’s not very interesting when we’re told so specifically how to feel about it.
I’m sure 86 is going to do very well commercially, since the source material is already very popular. It’s been greenlit for two split cours, and the show will no doubt draw even more attention to the novels. I’d much rather see a series like this succeed than some of the really repugnant LNs that are out there cleaning house, as at least it’s relatively dignified and seems to be espousing a somewhat humanistic point of view. But that’s as far as it goes for me. There are going to be plenty of folks talking about 86 so me not being one of them is of no consequence in the larger scheme of things anyway.
Derrick
April 11, 2021 at 8:30 pmIt certainly is puzzling, manga can churn out Tokyo Revengers, Silent Voice and other serious themes but LN market just rarely grow up.
Logically writing should be less time consuming than writing+drawing (GRRM notwithstanding) so we should expect more quantity of writing from LN with similar quality to Manga. Maybe they don’t want to be too serious like Murakami Novel, but there should be a happy medium somewhere.
Litho
April 11, 2021 at 9:16 pmMost LNs are basically written by degenerates for degenerates. Only difference from WNs are the addition of a degenerate editor giving degenerate author more degenerate ideas to make money for the degenerate-pandering publisher.
TL;DR = Most content consumers have no taste, so we may as well profit from it by employing content creators with no taste.
Music industry has been doing it for decades.
Litho
April 11, 2021 at 9:27 pmI feel you on LNs and all, but it would’ve been helpful if you dedicated a short paragraph to explaining what the story is about.
Haraga
April 12, 2021 at 4:06 amI think LN writing is often hard to pin down and define what exactly it is, but when you see an LN adaptation you immediately notice it. Unfortunately, it is just the result of modern LN writers only reading other LNs, while many successful LNs in the past were written by people who likely read other books and consumed a broad array of media in general. Modern LNs are mostly happy to lionize teen and adult otaku mindsets. It’s funny that the most outrageous ones (isekais) are aimed at 30+.
This show is a very good example of a dumb tendency that WORLDBUILDING is more important than the actual story. The episode delivers a lot of information, but it doesn’t make me care about anyone in the story, because the simplistic politics of this world seem more important to the writer than the characters that occupy it.
Regarding misogyny, I think it’d help a lot if the main heroine’s outfit was more appropriate for a military commander.
toroidal
April 12, 2021 at 5:07 amYeah, it’s about as obvious as a brick to the face. Probably a negative if subtlety is your preference. Still, there are shows that can’t even make the Nazi analogs the clear bad guys (AOT), so maybe brickface obviousness is necessary in some respects.
Snowball
April 12, 2021 at 5:20 amI don’t think I want to go through another experience of Gundam: Iron-blooded orphans again, which this show reminds me of.
Guardian Enzo
April 12, 2021 at 6:47 amThat show made much more of an initial impression on me, if I’m honest.
kenjiro
April 13, 2021 at 10:31 amHonestly I didn’t expect this to be LN based because the issues for me seemed more like what anime originals often have. I’m not surprised people are bringing up Iron-Blooded Orphans in comparison. Well since I stuck it out with that, might as well give this one a shot too. That’s a nice pun you have there about 86ing this but I disagree with your haste.
Guardian Enzo
April 13, 2021 at 10:34 amI’ll give it another week, but the bar is high this season. Just too much anime, too little time.
writerRichieK
April 13, 2021 at 8:27 pmI rather you review a series that is comfortable & enjoyable for your viewing. I get that 86 has great storytelling to convey the speculative fiction of an unmanned army that’s actually made up of discriminated minority race, but there have been premise like this made in previous years.
The execution in 86’s premiere episode feels lacking (sorry to say) mean-spirited though it’s meant to make you feel that way, but the way I felt seeing an 86 comrade died at end of episode seems lacking, probably too much exposition dump from conversations of the main heroine with her uncle and best friend. I say the pacing is an okay level. It’s just that I feel like I’m skimming through pages with the working devices & roles/jobs of the main characters. Surprisingly, this episode covers the whole chapter 1 of the LN so all I can say is that it may be worth watching, but for me, it feels depressing. Oddly enough, I’ve seen dark fantasy series that have the same take about racism & ultranationalism, but I don’t remember any of them making me feel gloomy like 86.
Maybe I’m not ready for 86 emotionally, but I’m letting myself watch it seasonal, just not with an enthusiastic feeling in watching how everything is gonna turn out.
writerRichieK
April 13, 2021 at 9:03 pmCorrection: (sorry to say) AND mean-spirited that made me feel gloomy throughout this episode. Though…
ojisan
April 14, 2021 at 12:32 amI’m not a big ranobe fan either, but thinking about it objectively, ranobe are like YA novels, they and the shows made from them are targeted at a specific demo and their popularity within this demo is not a sign of the world ending. I’ve never understood why even highly knowledgeable fans insist on treating anime as if it were an genre, not a medium. There has NEVER been a time where most anime were made for older demos, so a fair share of the problem lies with us growing older and becoming more demanding.
That said, I mostly agree with your take on 86. There was no need to depict the controllers as ridiculously decadent to hammer home their callous attitude towards the mecha pilots on the ground. It only managed to create total disbelief in any possibility of a these people leading a successful campaign. And ffs, female uniforms don’t need garters and zettai ryouiki.
writerRichieK
April 14, 2021 at 1:12 pmApparently the LN author is a fan of garter belts that it has been implemented into Lena’s military uniform.
Though the depictions of racism is a bit realistic, when it comes to doing professional work, I couldn’t help but wonder if the higher-ups don’t mind the Handlers being laid-back & getting drunk on the job.
Of course even if the corners are racist, many of them should be pragmatic when it comes to winning this war. What if they lose all soldiers from 86? If they extinct, do they force oblivious civilians of their country to take over the soldier roles? Also, are their researchers incapable to produce a real unmanned drone? I hope these questions are answered in later parts of this ongoing series.
Still do these higher-ups give into their cartoonishly-evil emotions in letting their subordinate Handlers do whatever they want with the Eighty-Sixers? Somehow I had to agree I find this far-fetched unless these higher-ups characters are depicting what a Trump man does.
ArcT
April 23, 2022 at 2:02 pmI was pretty curious if you’d reviewed this series after finishing it myself and stumbled upon this First Impressions review you did.
Honestly, I think 86 was one of the best anime series of 2021/2022 so far by a huge margin. The ending was stunningly done (up there with Full Moon wo Sagashite’s ending that left me sobbing like a bitch), especially with the ED song spot on.
This series was a smorgasbord of deep reflection on the human condition, racism, political hypocrisy, patriotism (and to some extent nationalism), the bonds of brotherhood in combat, as well as the psychology of PTSD in its child soldiers that few series have tackled so masterfully.
I really hope you give it another try now that it is finished, and if so, you blog about your experience because there’s a LOT of subject matter to tackle in this series (and holy shit does it make you sob like a little bitch every few episodes). Few series in the past ten years have hit me as hard as 86 did; I really hope it hits you similarly if you give it a re-watch.
Guardian Enzo
April 23, 2022 at 5:45 pmI watched the first few episodes. I think I’d categorize my reaction as I understood and respected what the series was trying to do, but just didn’t buy into the way it was doing it.
I know it’s quite well-respected, and while it’s hard to imagine ever having the time, I’d be open to revisiting it someday.
ArcT
April 23, 2022 at 8:09 pmI’m glad you’re open to re-watching it again someday 🙂 Yeah, the first few episodes drag a bit and it starts off seemingly very ‘preachy’ in many senses, which drives off people a bit that are starting it. I know that was a complaint early on in the series, but once you hit episode 8/9 it starts to pick up crazy-fast and takes a different tone/turn than the earlier episodes used.
Seeing how the parallels to Nazi Germany unravel (and the true systemic problems that racism engenders in a populace that refuses to admit they are racist to begin with) in this story is very fascinating and it is even more so because of the Ukraine/Russia conflict and how Russia has taken to dehumanizing Ukrainians by calling them Nazis and the like… it’s very relevant.
There’s a lot to sink your teeth into with 86 and I really enjoy your analysis of series and how in-depth you go into your reviews. 86, if you ever get around to it one day, is definitely worthy of your regard and the payoff is so, so worth it (I’m curious to know if you’d also cry from the absolute catharsis that final episode gave its viewers).
That’s what 86 *excels* at: Healing/Catharsis.
Guardian Enzo
April 23, 2022 at 8:48 pmCan I pick it back up at episode 8 or do I need to watch the ones in-between?
ArcT
April 24, 2022 at 6:26 amI would pick it up where you left off because stuff starts happening in there, too, and it helps structure the series better (I think you might be a bit confused about some truths that come to light after episode 8 without the earlier episodes). Even if you pick it up and ‘wing it’ from episode 8 and onward a lot of backstory (from Lena and Shin especially… and the other cast of characters) is essential to understand what will happen later.
I think as you pick it back up and it progresses past episode 8 you’ll find it’s a completely different tone to what the previous episodes were and things start to pan out (the earlier episodes laying the groundwork for this come in mighty handy from then on).
Be prepared as you go to at least tear up, though. It really resonates with veterans for a good reason, after all 🙂
Thanks again for reconsidering! If you give it another go and get past episode 8 I think you’ll start to see where it’s going as an anime and will be pleased with the places it goes and explores. Happy viewing!