From the Bookshelf: 86 [Eighty-Six] 10
May. 13th, 2023 05:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAfter extracting the tenth Eighty-Six novel from my almost depleted pile of that translated series, I was a bit surprised by its cover and the back-cover blurb, surprised to the point of starting to wonder if I just might build a post about it after having read seven volumes of the series while supposing “it’s not good to push yourself to type out and share an opinion about everything.” My interest in the story continues to outweigh any possible objections about “this translated prose is tough to get through”; in the war against artificial intelligence weapons that have run amok and evaded their shutdown timers through ghoulish means, the main characters who survived the first novel have gone from nation to nation in “a world not our own,” pulling off dangerous missions, edging towards the possibility of winning the war, and managing some character development along the way. The tenth volume looked to return to the grimmer circumstances of the original novel and fill in the backstory of one of the most important characters, the ace-of-aces mecha pilot Shin. I did get to thinking about the series looking to do something more with a concept it had left behind early on; I suppose in retrospect there could have been the perpetual question of “when you have to weigh your own ideas against new ideas from the original author...”
The first circumstances that made Shin a variant on that familiar (mecha) anime character, “the utterly competent warrior who starts off showing little emotion,” had been established long ago as taking place before he was thrown onto the battlefield as part of a perhaps overelaborate plan to “make use of a crisis and kill off visible minorities.” As ever, you have to confront the real world through a sort of metaphor and not resort to the easy escape of fussy objection. As for what was only being introduced now, I did notice Shin was strapped into his country’s flimsy scuttling quadruped mecha at a rather early age and proved competent in combat from his first moments rather than needing the help of others starting out. Not all of the characters introduced in this volume are altogether nice, anyway, although everyone on the foldout colour plate at the front of the volume showed up well before it was over. From there it was on to a story about a character who’d passed from the scene just before the events of the first volume began, in-between events that wound up being adapted into an episode of the anime I’d thought “original” before, a revelation about one of the more unusual yet endearing characters that amounts to “having to confront a story getting tied tighter together than you’d been supposing yourself,” and, perhaps most intriguingly, a last story showing one way things could have been otherwise that still managed to link into the actual story. It had a lot of “guess who this description is of,” but also a suggestion that something in the actual story that’s gone from “of course they should get together” to “it’s actually pretty much happened” wasn’t a matter here of “it would have been inevitable no matter what.”
I’ve got just one Eighty-Six volume left to read now; after that, I guess I’m waiting until when the next one is translated. It is possible this volume of short stories amounted to “extending the series with its potential end in sight,” but I continue to hope things will keep turning out the way they’ve been so far.
The first circumstances that made Shin a variant on that familiar (mecha) anime character, “the utterly competent warrior who starts off showing little emotion,” had been established long ago as taking place before he was thrown onto the battlefield as part of a perhaps overelaborate plan to “make use of a crisis and kill off visible minorities.” As ever, you have to confront the real world through a sort of metaphor and not resort to the easy escape of fussy objection. As for what was only being introduced now, I did notice Shin was strapped into his country’s flimsy scuttling quadruped mecha at a rather early age and proved competent in combat from his first moments rather than needing the help of others starting out. Not all of the characters introduced in this volume are altogether nice, anyway, although everyone on the foldout colour plate at the front of the volume showed up well before it was over. From there it was on to a story about a character who’d passed from the scene just before the events of the first volume began, in-between events that wound up being adapted into an episode of the anime I’d thought “original” before, a revelation about one of the more unusual yet endearing characters that amounts to “having to confront a story getting tied tighter together than you’d been supposing yourself,” and, perhaps most intriguingly, a last story showing one way things could have been otherwise that still managed to link into the actual story. It had a lot of “guess who this description is of,” but also a suggestion that something in the actual story that’s gone from “of course they should get together” to “it’s actually pretty much happened” wasn’t a matter here of “it would have been inevitable no matter what.”
I’ve got just one Eighty-Six volume left to read now; after that, I guess I’m waiting until when the next one is translated. It is possible this volume of short stories amounted to “extending the series with its potential end in sight,” but I continue to hope things will keep turning out the way they’ve been so far.