Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Metallic Rouge
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Jafwasw
Posts: 13 |
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Liking this one on the whole the lead two characters are interesting and there are hints that there are hidden depths to both of them.
Re the argument at the start of ep3: am I the only one who thought that Naomi deliberately started a fight to assist with the current investigation? What I think is telling is that even she reflects afterwards that she went too far, that and giving away all of Rouge's chocolate while she was asleep just felt too calculated to be random thoughtlessness. For some reason (presumably to assist the current investigation) she felt she needed some distance between them. Also in the first episode it is strongly hinted that up until that mission Rouge had only worked with Naomi through intermediaries such as her robot birds so they may not have known each other that long face to face. As for retro vibes at this point I'm getting pretty strong Armitage vibes off this series, not the same but there are similarities. |
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AverageAnimeFan
 Posts: 20 |
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I feel like the robophobia/racism parallel is a common trope in science fiction though. |
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Vanadise
 Posts: 499 |
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These statements aren't mutually exclusive! |
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Arale Kurashiki
Posts: 754 |
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I mean, there is legitimate stuff you can do with robot discrimination; Armitage was mentioned, and I feel like that and Bubblegum Crisis portray robot girls as the most vulnerable people at the bottom of society, in ways that feel extremely real. It's an allegory that works because it's focused on the specific emotions of marginalization.
OTOH, the Detroit: Become Human method of just making it real world slavery seems to almost always gesture at issues and experiences that are well-beyond what the work actually wants to depict, and so this disconnect happens, which is the pattern Metallic Rouge follows as well. |
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Hal14
 Posts: 671 Location: Heart of africa |
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Does anyone else feel like Rouge reacted more in this episode to Viola's death than in the episode where she actually killed Viola? I'm specifically referring to the scene early in episode 3 where Naomi trades viola's core and the focus shifts to Rouge's face. Like Jones said, if we had more episodes before this maybe there would have been one where Rouge reminisced about the events of ep 1. But like this, the rxn just doesn't feel earned to me
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Greed1914
 Posts: 4441 |
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Glad to see I'm not alone in the impression that this feels like an early 2000s anime. Not just in what is happening on screen, but the first episode basically being, "Here is a lot of visually interesting stuff happening, we hope you'll stick around to find out why it is happening" feels like an approach that was more common then.
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Gnarth
Posts: 175 |
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The main conflict so far is just so generic and trite, and despite all its artificial "mysteriousness", the show is as subtle as a car crash. Like, did we really need a scene where three Nazi-looking armed soldiers dehumanize someone just for our heroine to kick one in the ass? That's already eye-rolling, but if you then realize that this person is actually not a human, the whole allegory gets even worse. There is no philosophical weight here, just a mindless retracing of century old sci-fi tropes.
Just think about it: if you can program a robot so that it can't harm you, then you can also program it so that it's never going to seek freedom. If you want your robots to be tools, you program them accordingly, except if you do that, they truly are less than human so you can't have messages about racism. But if that's what you want to talk about, leave AI out of it, and if it's AI you want to explore, actually explore that instead of something entirely unrelated. |
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Dnautics
Posts: 80 |
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Yea the story itself is very generic. I want to like it because it looks good but might up end up being a flop for me. I don't usually drop things, so I'm going to ride this one out. This is an anime original right? It really feels like one. |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11380 |
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Has it been established that the Neans are robots? I mean everyone in universe seems to view them as such or the equivalent, but that might not be a reliable narrative. If they're entirely technological constructs it seems odd that they'd require a drug (that also works on humans) to keep from going off the rails, since they're already operating under Asimov's laws. It feels more likely that they're enhanced humans with cyborg parts and brain implants, and then the question would be where did the "base" humans come from? Grown in tanks, kidnapped from poor populations, whatever. If this has been ruled out by scenes not viewed from character povs, then never mind (my memory is on a par with goldfish, so that could be the case.  ). If not, then maybe that sort of scenario is what they're working toward. Or not. I could be giving them too much credit. 
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InfiniteNothingness
 Posts: 108 |
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Independent of the informational drip feed of this show's world that I do also like, which helps me vibe along like a gently rattling puzzle box, this is one of the more leisurely feeling shows I'm watching this season. OP is a convenient encapsulation of how I feel about that too, with some action sequences in both feeling closer to a... slow dance of emotional beats, than fights to the death. Just as well for a number of other scenes, personally. Which I dislike and like! But how much of either I really have no clue, haha, despite more-or-less enjoying the ride in terms of entertainment without issue.
And yeah, the actual class politics are pretty by-the-numbers and forgettable so far.
Not just you. It did feel too weirdly crass and directly personal for someone that's otherwise been pretty happy in her presence (despite everything else about this episode and the Nean suffering), to just be something she actually felt. Then there was how she talked to Rouge before the reveal. I quite enjoy our main leads and the idea of them having a complicated, if workable and working business relationship, that has only recently actually started working more personally, is pretty fun. A nice ambiguous and awkward middle ground between freshly cooperating and being longtime partners.
You got it, befitting a 25th anniversary release. |
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Thesarum
Posts: 411 |
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It's certainly heavily implied... but at the same time, they bleed when shot/injured, and we've never seen internal components - wires etc- as far as I can remember. The the dead ones decayed into skulls, not metal chassis. So they seem to be primarily organic, even if they are artificial. Though it's also implied, I guess, that they don't age, since Juval was a lot older than his appearance. So in summary... I don't know? I think it's reasonable to assume what we've been told so far is a long way from the whole truth, if it's even true at all. |
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KaidoYuji8Shinji
Posts: 118 Location: Manchester, NH |
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I still like the slow burn of the show, but I am getting a little bored. Things aren’t the same as in the early 2000s.
I think the show may be better binged… |
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Snowcat
Posts: 190 |
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I also like the 90s, early 2000s vibes from this show.
The main cast, Rouge and Naomi, lack characterization at the moment, but they can become more interesting when we get their motivations explained. On the SF aspect, the show is already a trainwreck so I don't expect any interesting allegory about social justice or whatever. The Neans are considered robots aka tools but, as the same times have feelings ? It doesn't make any sense. Same for the Neans wanting to die but subject to 3rd law of Asimov, they cannot even formulated this idea if they are under Asimov law, it's stupid. Neans dying with nobody caring: except for the chock value in the exposition, that doesn't make any sense either. The theory of the reviewer (Neans being enslaved/brainwashed) is interesting but, if it's the case, that can make the story worse. So, I'm really interested in seeing where the story is going (nice aspect of originals) but I keep my expectations for a great SF/cyberpunk story very low. |
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Jose Cruz
 Posts: 1775 Location: South America |
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This show is really up my alley. Anime as an adult entertainment medium emerged in the 1980s with sciences fiction titles like Nausicaa and Akira and even today the few anime titles that are not set in school are often science fiction. I wouldn't say this show feels like a show from 20 years ago, it feels like science fiction anime which has preserved the same overall feel since the 1980s.
In regards to the Neans, they appear to be primarily like the replicators of Blade Runner: organic androids. Neans are artificially constructed humanoid made of mostly organic parts. In Blade Runner the replicators were 100% organic but Neans appear to be mostly organic but also have substantial electronic parts as well: we might say they are replicator cyborgs. |
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Beltane70
 Posts: 3894 |
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They also feel kind of like the humanoid Cylons from the Battlestar Galactica reboot to me. |
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