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Forum - View topicHome Is the Battlefield for the Young 86
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Stretch2424
 Posts: 166 |
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I found 86 to be an exciting show with likable characters--but a confusing and disjointed plot. 86ers are treated like crap in San Magnolia--yet they are the most effective fighters in the Republic's military? They did not seem to have been brainwashed to me. Even in the Giad Federacy Shin and his comrades are seen as some sort of threat to the nation and some want to get them killed? There are only five of them, for God's sake. Even after they almost single-handedly repulse a major Legion offensive they are treated with contempt? They ought to be heroes. The Legion consists of mecha which each have the salvaged brain of a dead enemy soldier? That was my impression, since it was never made clear. The Federacy builds a monument to strangers who have gotten killed in another war, far away, even as a desperate war of their own rages? The Legion has a secret weapon, 'Morpho', but they didn't bother to employ it until their big offensive was defeated by the 86ers? The list goes on and on, but in general the plot of this show does not make a whole lot of sense, in my opinion.
Yet I keep watching it. |
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T.Silver
Posts: 163 |
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It makes sense if you look beyond the surface level.^
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giganeva#932714
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- I don't suppose the 86ers would be more capable at combat since they're the ones originally forced to fight yeah? You have mines and artillery keeping them out, with barebones support for the patrols. It wasn't them being brainwashed either, it's the now-citizens who largely bought the government's propaganda (and also some of them being moral not-so-nice-people). - Some think they should be heroes, some look at them with envy and jealousy. Sadly can't expect everyone to agree the same way. A proud citizen who wants to defend the country faring worse than someone who just knows fighting and probably doesn't care about the same thing. - Legion mecha - already began establishing in a more verbal form starting in episode 5 of part 1 - Monument for remembering the fallen - if you followed the conversation it is a gesture for the 86ers indeed, but it is also something that is concurrently done for the Federacy's soldiers as well so I'm not getting your point - Morpho deployment - I can agree to the point if it wasn't focused on shin's group specifically, but it was indeed being deployed during the offensive. If you looked at where Frederica tried to look into Kiriya's thoughts, you see the Republic's burning flag and the gran mur basically being breached. Why they focused on the Republic first is pretty optimal as well, if you've been paying attention to the legion's development. Also, there was a suggestion of a lure tactic involved post-battle which resulted in mass caualties (People stationing at FOBs, multiple FOBs being destroyed after the offensive was over) |
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Stretch2424
Posts: 166 |
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Are soldiers who are forced to fight typically the best kind? Do draftees routinely outperform volunteers? No.
Wouldn't it make more sense if the Giad government propaganda called attention to this amazing victory and hailed these five incredible fighters as a new source of hope in the ongoing war with the Legion and urged every Giad soldier to emulate them? I was mystified why such an important point as this--the enemy are not human beings but robots driven by zombie brains--wasn't even hinted at until episode five. Why 86ers fight so valiantly for a repressive government could have been explained if this had been revealed. They do it because as bad as San Magnolia is, the Legion is even worse. But the opportunity was missed. Why does Giad make a 'gesture for the 86ers' when countless native-born soldiers have no doubt been killed in this war, and up to that point no 86er had directly contributed to their own war effort? And why build a monument while the fighting still rages? It makes far more sense to spend the time and money on winning the war. I guess I am expecting this show to comply with military history. |
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T.Silver
Posts: 163 |
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Oh it does the points are just flying over your head.
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Stretch2424
Posts: 166 |
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Points work better when they make sense.
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T.Silver
Posts: 163 |
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Exactly and they do here, you're just missing or ignoring all the subtext and depth and are just looking at it from a surface level like I mentioned a few comments ago.
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Stretch2424
Posts: 166 |
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Please explain to me this 'subtext' and 'depth' you speak of. What messages am I missing? I would think such an explanation would be quite easy if I am missing obvious things, so please don't tell me that it would be hopeless to even try. All I see here is a genuinely exciting but sloppily written series, which frustrates me since this story has obvious potential. Somehow, 86 does not remind me of All Quiet On The Western Front.
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T.Silver
Posts: 163 |
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I mean the show gives you the answers to most of your points of contention, so I don't have to spell it out for ya. It just seems to me you just don't want to accept them. It's easy to say they should do this and they should do that from a watchers perspective, but obviously they are seeing things differently than us the viewers do and most of the decisions made aligned well within what humankind has done irl. And obviously it's not 1:1 with the book in question, but it's clearly inspired by and just takes its own spin on the themes and concepts like the article described.
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18210 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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I have read and academically studied All Quiet on the Western Front (as well as thoroughly studying WWI), but it never occurred to me to equate the position of Western Front's protagonist with that of the 86s. It makes so much sense, though, that I have to think the original writer was probably familiar with that novel.
Concerning other questions/points brought up in this thread. . . • That the Legion are autonomous drones was first brought up in the news announcement near the beginning of episode 1. That they had overthrown their controllers and were operating independently was brought up during the lecture scene in episode 2. • No, not all of the Legion have salvaged brains; just the special ones called Black Sheep. (Shepherds are the ones with intact brains.) This is explained by Shin in the first half. However, as Shin also points out, that number is growing. • Though never outright stated, the Morpho is implied to be a new weapon. It was first test-fired during episode 8 or 9 (whenever the 86s had their last round of losses before their final mission), came up again in episode 11, and absolutely used on all surviving countries during the large-scale offensive. • The 86s were never really fighting "for" the Republic; they just had no choice about it. The Republic baited them with the possibility of regaining citizenship, and they had their own people to defend even if they didn't care about defending the Alba. But some also did acknowledge that not all the Alba were rotten, and for others fighting was a point of pride. All of this was explained in bits and pieces throughout the first half, with the heaviest explanation load coming in episode 8. • The motivations behind the memorial are not explicitly stated but can be inferred. The revolution which threw off the imperial government was an idealism-driven one, and Ernst has made it clear that, for better or worse, the country's going to stick to that idealism. Acknowledging what happened to the 86s is part of that, and from a more cynical viewpoint, such a memorial would play well with a public already riled up about how the 86s were treated in the Republic. Hence doing it this soon could easily be construed as a PR ploy if nothing else. • That idealism is also why the 86s and their battle successes are not being glorified by the Federacy. Saying, "hey, the way these teens were treated is awful" but then turning around and also crowing about the feats they achieved sends a very mixed message. The remarkable thing about this series is that the writing is actually quite tight. It has fewer logical holes than most and (as this article shows) grounds itself more heavily in history and sociology than may be obvious at first. |
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Stretch2424
Posts: 166 |
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If Shin and the others weren't fighting for San Magnolia, who were they fighting for? Or are they only fighting against the Legion? Why give despised members of a lower caste cutting-edge weaponry and allow them to become experts with it? Didn't it occur to anybody within the Alba that Spearhead might mutiny some day? (and for that matter, didn't that possibility ever occur to the members of Spearhead themselves?) Their loyalty is almost inexplicable.
If this memorial has been built for political purposes, why locate it out in the middle of nowhere (at the site where the San Magnolia mecha were finally knocked out, I assume)? There were no visitors at the site when Shin and his comrades were taken there. Wouldn't it make far more sense to locate it in the capital city of the Federacy? The names inscribed on it were those of persons killed somewhere else. Another thing which confused me was that in the high level briefing Morpho seemed to be a railway mounted artillery piece (probably based on a WWII German railway gun). But the giant weapon Shin and Spearhead veterans take on after landing behind enemy lines was something completely different--a C-shaped device that generates some massive electro-whatever pulse. Definitely not a gun of any sort. That wasn't the real Morpho, was it? You would think that the Giad staff had shared their drawing of Morpho with the team being sent to destroy it, wouldn't you? yet they initially seemed to mistake it for Morpho. I can't help feeling that the author just wants Shin and the others to be poor, oppressed, mistreated folks no matter where they are and no matter whether they have done anything to even remotely justify it. 'Feel sorry for them, viewer, but don't think too much'. Even after they have pulled off a miraculous upset of the big Legion offensive, they get little or no thanks--because that would be inconvenient for the author's plans. It seems to me that it wouldn't have been all that difficult to explain the premise of this show better and tweak things so that they made much better sense. And It's hard to feel moved when to a large extent the plot doesn't make a whole lot of sense. |
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Stretch2424
Posts: 166 |
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I have only watched the series up to episode 20 so far.
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zalminar
Posts: 36 |
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The series might not have many logical holes, but it is rather rickety in its construction. There aren't gaps in logic, but rather an accumulation of many moderately implausible / unlikely / unnatural things--things which you can figure out an explanation for, but which together make for an unconvincing narrative. Some examples:
Which leads into the fact that the writing doesn't actually seem to be all that tight. Thematically the show seems to be kind of muddled (at least beyond the surface level of "war is bad"), and the importance of the 86 to the Federacy's war effort emphasizes this. It undercuts the sense that the 86 are returning to the battlefield because they don't know anything else when it turns out that they seem to be uniquely positioned to save humanity by fighting--it's a nontrivial departure from All Quiet on the Western Front to have the protagonists be special and important. It's still tragic that children need to do that fighting, but the show has a hard time dealing with the fact that all of the adult figures opposed to sending children out to fight end up being implicitly wrong. (There's also the fact that unlike the setting of WWI, humanity is actually facing a world-ending threat, which again undercuts the tragedy of the 86's position--their fatalism isn't an unfortunate product of their circumstance but rather a clear-eyed assessment of reality.) Which is to say that I do take the parallels with All Quiet seriously, and think that on some level they are intentional, but I don't think the series accounts for the differences in the setup--it's trying to transpose a narrative of average soldiers in a tragically unnecessary war to a scenario with anime heroes and a struggle for the existence of humanity against a zombie horde. The pacing is also meandering, largely because 86 starts where All Quiet ends--the protagonists are already traumatized by the war, they've already gone through most everything Paul experienced by the time they first appear on the screen. This makes much of the series pretty static (leaving aside Lena's arc in the first season, which the show seems to want to do too). Almost all of the dynamism of the series is concentrated at the very end of the first season and very start of the second, where they face actual changing circumstances. Most everything else is purely description of situations in stasis--yes, we learn about the (static) characters (though at a dreadfully slow pace and with a lot of repetition) but I think a tighter series would be able to interweave those descriptive elements with something else (a narrative with more momentum, a variety of moral quandaries or philosophical musings, etc.). |
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Key
Moderator
Posts: 18210 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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They were fighting for themselves and/or loved ones and/or the few Alba who were decent folk. Again, this was explained in the conversation with Lena towards the end of episode 8.
Lena posed that question herself during the conversation in episode 8. As explained to her in that episode, mostly it's a matter of practicality. Attacking the Alba would involve crossing minefields and a huge wall with interceptor cannons (the Alba weren't stupid), and 86s don't have anywhere else to run off to; remember, no one in the Republic knew any other country still existed. Sure, they could have just stood by and let the Legion rush in - and I believe Raiden even specifically bring that up during that episode 8 conversation - but that would have been tantamount to completely giving up, and as mentioned before, some had at least some people that they wanted to protect. So their loyalty wasn't "inexplicable" because there was no loyalty here to begin with.
Aren't memorials normally put at the site where something happens?
You're probably right about the Morpho's design being based on a railway-mounted WWI artillery. As for the "electro-whatever pulse," that IS the railgun firing. That's how a railgun works: it uses electromagnetic energy to hurtle a projectiles at such phenomenal velocity that its impact is vastly more devastating than with a conventional weapon. These weapons are still in the realm of the theoretical, so the artists are taking some liberties here with the design and its firing sequence. (And there was a gun barrel involved; it just wasn't very obvious.) Also keep in mind that the allied forces never got a good look at the Morpho, so they were mostly relying on Shin's ability to help pinpoint it. However, as was described during the conversation between No Face and Kiriya in episode 19, the Legion pulled a fast one there.
Sorry, but I'm really not sure what the show would have to do to be acceptable to you. Yes, part of the premise is that the 86s were oppressed, but that's not happening for no reason. And yes, they haven't done anything to deserve being oppressed, but isn't that the norm for oppressed people in this world? (Remember, the 86s and their treatment are heavily modeled after the Jews in Germany in the days leading up to and during WWII.) And no, the 86s were definitely appreciated for their efforts, both by commanders and common troops, after the large-scale offensive, but also being a bit unsettled by them under the circumstances would also be perfectly natural since they weren't home-grown soldiers. This is not a series which can just be watched passively, like so many other action anime series out there. It is as thematically and symbolically dense as any auteur work and takes great pains to cover at least most of its bases. (The series does, admittedly, come up short on the explanation for what, exactly, the Para-RAID is, for instance.) But you do have to pay full attention, which is why I never multi-task while watching this one. EDIT: Sorry, zalminar, did not see your post before I finished writing this. I don't have more time right now, so I'll address any points that aren't covered by the response above in a few hours. |
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zalminar
Posts: 36 |
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Well, yes, but the rail part of a railgun means that it uses the electricity to accelerate the projectile along a set of rails (and the projectile needs to be in contact with the rails during this process in order to conduct the electricity between the rails). I wouldn't exactly describe them as theoretical, rather currently impractical--you can build a railgun (and demonstrate the underlying physics in a science class), they just have design problems that prevent their realistic deployment. The problem with the Morpho's design is the giant gap between the barrel and and the rails, where the ostensible rails curve out away from the path of the projectile before narrowing again--the projectile would need to be propelled by some other means from the barrel until it reached the narrower section of rails, and then it would need to be aligned perfectly to make contact with both rails in order to be accelerated. You could imagine designing a railgun like this that might work, but why? It's a very convoluted setup for a marginal rule-of-cool design, when they didn't need to specify it's a railgun and could have let it be a generic piece of (kinetic) sci-fi artillery. (I actually wonder if this is just a case of something being lost in translation, with "railgun" either just being a stand-in for a generic sci-fi gun, or possibly meaning "railway gun" as in a gun that is mounted on rails.) |
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