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Can it really be we don't have an eighty-six thread?

Man, something that consistently impresses me with the 86 anime is how all the CG sequences look fucking amazing. It's one of two anime to genuinely blow me away with CG action. That climb up the Morpho was amazing.
 
Darthtabby said:
As someone who has been spoiled a bit on future developments, my one significant complaint with the episode itself is
that they implied the deaths of Shin and his remaining comrades again when I know they have to survive because of their appearances in later stories.

Would it be asking too much to have two separate threads for this series given how far ahead the novels are vs the TV adaptation? (Though I guess even a separate thread for the novels might need spoiler tags if anyone's reading the Japanese market releases.)
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It's up to you really. Starting new threads is free, even if only three people ever post in it.

Have to agree with you on the cop out. We all know they aren't dead, they probably aren't even hurt with long lasting consequences. The only dramatic impact I really got from them splitting up over the story is that they're still willing to abandon their friends to die if the mission demands it. That's a fairly harsh thing to have hanging over the relationship but, for all their issues, their friendship doesn't seem to be complicated by that in the slightest. So, yeah. It felt unnecessary but if it's what happened in the novels what else can you do?
 
So the final two episodes are scheduled to air on the 13th and 19th of this month. I've been rewatching the previous ones in preparation and it seems to me that some of the second cour episodes have been improved a little. It could be that I'm picking up some things that I missed or forgot, but it seems to me that there are changes to the music and a few new or improved visuals.

Also I'm not sure how representative they are of the fandom as a whole, but Eighty-Six won six categories at the 8th Anime Trending Awards: Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Boy, Best Sci-fi/Mecha, Best Soundtrack, Best Ending Song, and Best New Anime (for which it got a special illustration). It also placed third in the Best Girl category and second in the Anime of the Year category.
 
Darthtabby said:
So the final two episodes are scheduled to air on the 13th and 19th of this month.
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I'd guessed they would be airing the remaining two episodes soon, after getting a recap episode on Crunchyroll recently, but its nice to have firm dates.

So, did production fall apart a bit in the end, to cause these delays? Scheduling issues? Not quite sure what happened, honestly...
 
@Mizu My understanding is that the delays earlier in the second cour ate up some of the timeslots that had been booked for Eighty-Six and it had to step aside because Sono no Bisque Doll had that timeslot next.
 
Oh boy, watching those last two episodes after having binged the series again in preparation? It was super cathartic.

How watching Lena & Shin these two episodes felt having read ahead:




It's on lads! Boy has meet girl and now the real party gets started!
 
Whatever my misgivings I mentioned earlier with how certain parts of the show's premise strain my suspension of disbelief (and I still haven't done that rewatch to better explain myself on them T_T ), the director has done some legit incredible work with this whole series. A series title-drop left to hands reaching towards each other was such a great fucking choice, and it's honestly pretty small potatoes among the artistic flexes they gave us,.
 
BiopunkOtrera said:
I mean, it's allegorical in as much as you wouldn't generally want to treat the people fighting for you like dirt, because they'd run away, or lose moral, or let a Legion attack in and then ride it into your city. But beyond the premise of fighting, I think it's pretty well realized. What exactly do you find nonsensical?
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So! r/anime just finished a rewatch series on this show, and so that was excuse enough for me to finally sit down and do that second time through with the dub I mentioned. Short answer is that the show absolutely, 100% holds up. Incredible work by everyone involved.

But, participating in the rewatch let me sort out my feelings on the racism topic, and what keeps me from agreeing with calling it "one of the best studies of racism" is that while the storytelling is absurdly good (the director, Toshimasa Ishii in particular, is a mad genius), the worldbuilding has some serious holes that brings it down whenever the racism themes need to lean on it. You hit on kind of the foundational issue in your quote there: IRL societies that used slave soldiers mostly had those soldiers actually command a certain level of status and respect (jannissaries, gladiators, etc) even if they didn't have their freedom, and IRL societies that have practiced the sort of racial oppression we see in the show (Nazi germany, the Transatlantic Slave Trade) go very far out of their way to not arm the out group for exactly the reasons you say. What 86's author has set up is a weird worst-of-all-worlds mishmash that hurts the believability of the whole premise.

And then you get in to specific issues like 'no you can't use the mortars because they're set up in the middle of a mine field and we'd have to thus risk Alban casualties for the 86's sake' which is just kind of pants-on-head on its face even if you acknowledge that the Republic has foresees using them on a rebellion by the 86 as more likely than using them on the Legion because they'd still be risking their mortar crews for no reason. A place as dysfunctional as the Republic frankly shouldn't have survived nine years of the Legion, and we wouldn't have had a story and so the author really shouldn't have written it to be that way.

And just like in that example with the mortars, despite all the phenomenal direction by Ishii and the great characters written by the LN author, the nature of the story itself brings attention directly to the weakest parts of its own premise. And like, 'weakest' isn't even really bad objectively, just that when everything else is an A+, having the worldbuilding be a C+ sticks out even when that's a perfectly passable score in the abstract.
 
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Japanese Military Sci Fi always struggled with the "thankless slave fodder/levy" trope as seen with works like Gundam IBO for example since there are few authors with history in the military and focused more showing how immoral the military is. To the armies employing such soldiers in such works, they are not worry about armed slaves rebelling but rather not falling back when ordered to, hoping to at least die fighting rather than spend another day living under all stick and no carrot situation since you can put down an uprising of poorly trained but armed slaves and they don't have people sympathetic to their plight who would want nothing to do with them unless they want to get punished for aiding them
 
Gladiators weren't slave soldiers. They were entertainers XD.

In any case, the 86s were only slave soldiers for a handful of years during an extreme intensity conflict. They didn't really have the time and space to enact a bloody slave revolt. The legion isn't something you can just defect to.
 
Aye, and given the Republic were of the belief that the Legion would shut down and cease at a set date, their counter to the rather high likelihood of an uprising once the Legion was gone was to try to expend as large a portion of the 86'ers as possible before then - the ideal outcome for the Republic would be to launch a final all out offensive with all the remaining militarized 86'ers on the "last days" of the Legion, then send the survivors out on deep recon once the legion shut down.

... basically going all in on the assumption that the enemy will behave as planned.
 
Yeah the Republic is probably the only reason the Legion is still likely to be a threat after their expiration date. Sending most of your population and materiel into a meat grinder against the local borg equivalent is just about the worst strategy
 
Mechs doing CQC is always a good in my book.

Plus, fieldtrips in a traveling mecha train with teenage drama and angst in the post apocalypse! Yay!
 
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