Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
chiasaur11
Oct 22, 2012



In the future, warfare as we know it has become obsolete.

For nine years, the Republic of San Magnolia has been in a desperate struggle with the Giadian Empire, but in all that time, not a single person has died. War is fought with drones, with the human element left safe in command bunkers far from the front. The citizens of the 85 districts live in relative safety and comfort, waiting for the day the Empire's advance will grind to a halt from material starvation, free of the hatred and fear that war would normally inspire.

At least... that's the official story.



Based on the popular light novel series by Asato Asato, 86 is a 2021 anime by A-1 pictures with a soundtrack by Hiroyuki Sawano, and they seem to be going pretty all out for it, spending a whole cour on just the first book in the series, promoting it through multiple channels, and launching a line of Plamo to coincide with the show's run. Anyone's guess if it'll keep going well, but right now it's looking like a solid show even by the standards of a very packed season.

But what's it about?

Well, it's about a girl.


Major Vladilena "Lena" Milizé. A talented young officer from a noble family, her talent and connections may be the only way she can get away with her eccentricities... like treating the 86 as people. At the start of the show, she's been assigned to command Spearhead Squad, an elite frontline unit with a bad habit of killing its assigned commanding officers.


And it's about a guy.



Shinei "Undertaker" Nouzen, the ace pilot of Spearhead, it's said he hears the voices of the dead. A crack shot and a daring fighter, he's one of the key components to his squad's survival, and a nightmare for his repair crew, pushing his machines past their limits.

And it's about a lot of other people caught in the gears of a war that tries to hide its bloodshed behind friendly euphemisms, a nation that dehumanizes huge portions of its population to protect the comfort of the rest, and a world that may have even darker secrets than the unmarked graves of countless child soldiers.

So, you know. A fun time for the whole family.

Eighty Six is currently airing on Crunchyroll for an eleven episode first cour, with dubs in English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and German announced.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

booksnake
May 4, 2009

we who are crowned with the crest of wisdom
From the promo artwork, I assumed this would be light novel trash that I would probably nonetheless enjoy, but this

quote:

soundtrack by Hiroyuki Sawano

means I can't not watch it

Ethiser
Dec 31, 2011

Just watched the second episode and I think I really like this show so far. It kind of scratches that Votoms itch of everyone using the same junky robot with the main character being a super skilled ace. Something tells me that the six year limit on the out of control AI swarm isn't the truth of the matter.

wdarkk
Oct 26, 2007

Friends: Protected
World: Saved
Crablettes: Eaten
The plastic models mentioned in the OP seem to be impossible to google thanks to Toyoda and the F-86.

kirtar
Sep 11, 2011

Strum in a harmonizing quartet
I want to cause a revolution

What can I do? My savage
nature is beyond wild
What I got from the end of the episode 2: Service guarantees citizenship*

*terms and conditions may apply

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

"According to Wikipedia" there is a black hole that emits zionist hawking radiation where my brain should have been

I really should just shut the fuck up and stop posting forever
College Slice
I see episode two confirms the truth we all know in our hearts, that good girls like bad boys. The show is really giving me Gundam Wing vibes.

Overlord K
Jun 14, 2009
Watching how insanely uncomfortable everyone in the unit got as soon as she made contact in episode 2 and interrupted them all really painted a picture quite clearly.

Also pretty funny how Undertaker likes to read since it helps him zone out whenever the handlers are talking to him.

chiasaur11
Oct 22, 2012



wdarkk posted:

The plastic models mentioned in the OP seem to be impossible to google thanks to Toyoda and the F-86.

Yeah, should have considered that, I suppose.

So, here's a link.

Tabletops
Jan 27, 2014

anime
Do the helot people have kill switches or something I’m not sure why they don’t just you know slaughter the nazis

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

"According to Wikipedia" there is a black hole that emits zionist hawking radiation where my brain should have been

I really should just shut the fuck up and stop posting forever
College Slice

Tabletops posted:

Do the helot people have kill switches or something I’m not sure why they don’t just you know slaughter the nazis

Presumably the legion of drones that will in turn slaughter them have something to do with it.

OnimaruXLR
Sep 15, 2007
Lurklurklurklurklurk
this is probably a known-known in the source material, but I think it'd be more interesting if the country that the drones originate from is in fact still intact and have just washed their hands of the unstoppable killer robot army they've created instead

I dunno I guess I just think that creating a army of killer robots is less reprehensible than forcing people who've been denied their humanity to fight wars. The former is probably more stupid but the latter is more disgusting.

also, I'd bet good money on the action reports that Commander lady asked for being the first clue that the drones are not, in fact, going to just all magically shut down in two years (which is a frankly delightful illustration of the kind of dumb assed wishful thinking that seems to effect policy makers)

cock hero flux
Apr 17, 2011



Tabletops posted:

Do the helot people have kill switches or something I’m not sure why they don’t just you know slaughter the nazis

given the fact that their machines transmit and receive data from command it would make sense that the machines would have remote killswitches, at which point any rebellion necessarily becomes them trying to simultaneously assault the fuhrerbunker and fend off a horde of killer robots with nothing but handguns

which could still theoretically be worth it just out of spite to take the silver nazis down with them except that they've all been fed the almost certainly bullshit line that the war has a set time limit that's almost up and that as soon as the killbots reach their preset kill limit everything will go back to normal and the dystopian nightmare state which declared them to be non-human and sent them to die will welcome them back with open arms, happy to put this little bit of unpleasantness behind them. which they probably don't really believe, but the hope that maybe, if they can survive a couple more years, the war will end and the nazis will leave them alone is enough to prevent them from going for the definite suicide of a spite-based uprising.

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

"According to Wikipedia" there is a black hole that emits zionist hawking radiation where my brain should have been

I really should just shut the fuck up and stop posting forever
College Slice
I'm not sure if they're really Nazi's when its more analogous to the penal battalions the USSR used. For the race based ideology just look to Juche.

cock hero flux
Apr 17, 2011



Raenir Salazar posted:

I'm not sure if they're really Nazi's when its more analogous to the penal battalions the USSR used. For the race based ideology just look to Juche.


they're a military dominated state which rounded up everyone who didn't belong to the majority race and put them in camps, declared that they weren't human, and is now getting them all killed via forced conscription

these guys are absolutely nazis. like, by the strictest definition of the term.

Wark Say
Feb 22, 2013

by Fluffdaddy
First thing I thought about when seeing this anime title
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHYKnMR7mgw

Will be sure to check it out!

galagazombie
Oct 31, 2011

A silly little mouse!
Have we seen a world map or anything showing the two relevant countries? The OP shows a map of Europe that zooms in on what might be the Republic which implies the real world/future but are there other countries watching this or is it a 1984 style Superstates thing. If it's the real world/future then where did the Alba come from? I'm getting a feeling it's some kinda Gattica thing where the unnaturally colored and inhumanly homogenous Alba are the product of genetic engineering and the 86'ers are what's left of "natural" humanity.

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





Just saw the first two eps and I'm liking it so far. Future/Space Nazis gotta go, though. And probably will, since if they're right about the AI rebellion thing then there's not much hope that the supposedly destroyed Empire didn't also automate their factories and resource chain....robot miners take raw ore to robot refineries which put out worked metal for the robot factories to pump out new killbots. About the only thing that could save the Republic is the fact that the AI might not be able to innovate and create new models of itself and they could maybe get ahead of the AI by building better and newer Juggernauts to fight with...but the stupid fuckers aren't even doing that much, and are just sending out their conscripts in second rate crap!

I'm guessing they're totally hosed when the AI hits the six year limit and doesn't just fall over on schedule.

Tabletops
Jan 27, 2014

anime
I hate that they make some of the nazis out to be normal characters like please don’t try to make me like the nazis

Phobophilia
Apr 26, 2008

by Hand Knit
You can be an absolutely insane racialized slave state, and still not be an OG Nazi. Because being a Nazi isn't just about being a racist piece of poo poo, but an insane warmonger who has to forge your peoples in the fires of constant warfare against all your neighbors. Your people need to be blooded constantly to demonstrate your masculine energies. The show lays it out explicitly, the Alban citizens are completely effette and incapable of actually persecuting a war against anyone.


The analogy is a far more racialized version of a liberal democracy that hides all warfare behind the veneer of cleanliness, like the modern west with its drones and jets and tanks.

kirtar
Sep 11, 2011

Strum in a harmonizing quartet
I want to cause a revolution

What can I do? My savage
nature is beyond wild

Phobophilia posted:

The show lays it out explicitly, the Alban citizens are completely effette and incapable of actually persecuting a war against anyone.

As is appropriate for Nazi France.

Not Keyser Soze
Mar 7, 2007

Endless Celestial Sex
lol "It's not always Nazis, sometimes it's LIBS"

Between an Aryan-adjacent ethnostate, a soviet-style penal legion and a morally deceptive drone warfare program it's clearly meant to be pastiche of dystopian war themes. There are even Districts.

Lena is a 2010 YA novel protagonist. We just need one additional male love interest to complete the formula.

Ethiser
Dec 31, 2011

Not Keyser Soze posted:

Lena is a 2010 YA novel protagonist. We just need one additional male love interest to complete the formula.

We need a pretty boy Android from the AI swarm who acts goofy because he doesn’t understand humans.

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

"According to Wikipedia" there is a black hole that emits zionist hawking radiation where my brain should have been

I really should just shut the fuck up and stop posting forever
College Slice

Ethiser posted:

We need a pretty boy Android from the AI swarm who acts goofy because he doesn’t understand humans.

Isn't this literally Undertaker? Or did you mean the other AI swarm :D

chiasaur11
Oct 22, 2012



Raenir Salazar posted:

Isn't this literally Undertaker? Or did you mean the other AI swarm :D

Undertaker totally understands humans.

Actually, that's an interesting thing about him in the downtime scenes this episode. While he's clearly from the same house and line as Heero, Setsuna, Sousuke, and Mikazuki, he's much more... normal than any of them.

He's a bit standoffish, but he's bantering like a regular guy. He tries to fake being illiterate to duck out of writing reports, gives a "Seriously?" look when one of his squadmates accidentally rats on him, and when his turn comes up in the shooting match when he just wants to read his book, he pulls his pistol and no-difficulty's things to get back to it in a very "I know exactly what I'm doing" way.

Sindai
Jan 24, 2007
i want to achieve immortality through not dying
Which is why I'm interested in seeing how exactly he drove the previous handlers crazy.

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

"According to Wikipedia" there is a black hole that emits zionist hawking radiation where my brain should have been

I really should just shut the fuck up and stop posting forever
College Slice

Sindai posted:

Which is why I'm interested in seeing how exactly he drove the previous handlers crazy.

Yeah that's what I'm dying to know how because the battles the MC was handling for at the start seemed much worse and PTSD inducing then what she's currently dealing with with Undertaker and I'm very confused because he seems polite and professional enough.

cock hero flux
Apr 17, 2011



Raenir Salazar posted:

Yeah that's what I'm dying to know how because the battles the MC was handling for at the start seemed much worse and PTSD inducing then what she's currently dealing with with Undertaker and I'm very confused because he seems polite and professional enough.

based on the reaction of his previous handler during the very first scene it seems like he's figured out a way to send a little bit more than just audio through the neural uplink, which would track with the explanation that the science lady gives about how they could theoretically sync up a lot more than just hearing but don't because it can give you brain damage

Not Keyser Soze
Mar 7, 2007

Endless Celestial Sex
They comment briefly that he runs his mech especially rough which could just be a set up to point out that the 86’s are under supplied or could have something to do with what Handlers experience if they try jack into his senses.

an actual dog
Nov 18, 2014

Sindai posted:

Which is why I'm interested in seeing how exactly he drove the previous handlers crazy.

It might literally just be because he talks back and is right, which fucks with the handlers' superiority complex. Pretty sure some version of the same is gonna happen to Lena in some capacity, cause she clearly has one too.

Patrat
Feb 14, 2012

Though I did very much appreciate how they demonstrated that she absolutely knows her poo poo. She underestimated them, but going from the information she had access to she was very much giving them the best possible orders/advise and doing her job in a competent manner.

Plus the whole openly ranting at recruits in training about how hosed up everything is. She 100% knows how evil her society is and she is not holding back whilst exploiting her disgusting privilege to let her get away with it. That is not typical shonen protagonist idiocy, she is principled, brave and smart about it and I really like that in a main character.

chiasaur11
Oct 22, 2012



Patrat posted:

Though I did very much appreciate how they demonstrated that she absolutely knows her poo poo. She underestimated them, but going from the information she had access to she was very much giving them the best possible orders/advise and doing her job in a competent manner.

Plus the whole openly ranting at recruits in training about how hosed up everything is. She 100% knows how evil her society is and she is not holding back whilst exploiting her disgusting privilege to let her get away with it. That is not typical shonen protagonist idiocy, she is principled, brave and smart about it and I really like that in a main character.

I was glad for the beat after the classroom lecture where she went "No worries. My uncle is a general. They can't do poo poo to me." I'd have preferred a little more planning on the topic of not getting punished for openly defying the party line, but there was at least enough that she didn't feel suicidal for acting so obviously.

I also liked her bit with "Wait, wait, wait. He's sending me the same battle reports every day!", because it was her being competent, and she was trying to be understanding... but at the same time, Spearhead still treated her as a pain-in-the-rear end.

Not Keyser Soze
Mar 7, 2007

Endless Celestial Sex
I wonder if perhaps she's also not the only one to have ever raised these concerns because what kind of normal OCS class has a political officer just hanging around to audit the lecture.

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

"According to Wikipedia" there is a black hole that emits zionist hawking radiation where my brain should have been

I really should just shut the fuck up and stop posting forever
College Slice
When she suggested they go to some specific point, I wasn't sure if I caught what happened there. Was that a good or better point but the timing wasn't right for them to do it; or merely a competent order and they due to experience went for the better ambush point?

Not Keyser Soze posted:

I wonder if perhaps she's also not the only one to have ever raised these concerns because what kind of normal OCS class has a political officer just hanging around to audit the lecture.

Technically he was a MP (Military Police), not quite a Commissar.

cock hero flux
Apr 17, 2011



Raenir Salazar posted:

When she suggested they go to some specific point, I wasn't sure if I caught what happened there. Was that a good or better point but the timing wasn't right for them to do it; or merely a competent order and they due to experience went for the better ambush point?
It was the best point they could reach in time if they left at that moment. They had already taken the initiative and scrambled before she contacted them, though, which meant that they had a better position they could make it to.

Oh Snapple!
Dec 27, 2005

Her initial order was made with the assumption that they had not deployed, so it was simply outdated upon reception. The vibe I got from how it was discussed later was that in a vacuum it was a perfectly good order that would have put them in a good position, it's just that their location at the time immediately rendered it moot.

Unrelated, I got a good lol at the sequence of events of Lena talking up Shinei's professionalism, realizing he was filing the same report over and over again (and not blaming him for it because up until now they've gone completely unread), and then Shinei getting busted trying to play the illiteracy card and having to redo his past reports after all.

Oh Snapple! fucked around with this message at 00:58 on Apr 20, 2021

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

"According to Wikipedia" there is a black hole that emits zionist hawking radiation where my brain should have been

I really should just shut the fuck up and stop posting forever
College Slice
It was also pretty cool that they clearly were very used to secretly communicating among each other while talking to the handler.

Preechr
May 19, 2009

Proud member of the Pony-Brony Alliance for Obama as President

Tabletops posted:

Do the helot people have kill switches or something I’m not sure why they don’t just you know slaughter the nazis

This isn’t really a spoiler, but to be safe the republic has three major things they have control of to protect themselves from their slave soldiers. First, there is a massive gently caress-you minefield between the worthless ubermensch and the helots, which they do not have the equipment to clear. Second, the republic has total control over the 86’s logistics and can cut off their supply of ammunition, fuel, and food at any time. Last, the republic has massive batteries of artillery that are theoretically for supportive fire against the Legion but practically for erasing the 86 if they get uppity, particularly if they’re bogged down in the aforementioned minefield.

Larry Parrish
Jul 9, 2012

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
I thought the LN sucked, or maybe it was a fan translation I was reading because all of those are really loving bad, but if the English dub doesn't suck I'll watch it I guess. Personally i thought the entire premise was kind of stupid but whatever.

Bakanogami
Dec 31, 2004


Grimey Drawer
I've read a bit of the LN/manga. The anime's adding quite a few mostly-good scenes and also going much more in media res in comparison, since the original was packed with exposition. Overall I'm hopeful, the side scenes are giving the series a lot of character that it had kinda lacked.

I'm also kind of curious about how far they'll cover. Since the LN was originally done for a competition and then extended into a series afterwards, the pacing is a little awkward.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Sindai
Jan 24, 2007
i want to achieve immortality through not dying
I liked all the women having their guns on target a few frames after hearing a sound.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply