And I don't really understand the point..I guess? Like it's about a group of kids who are part of an oppressed caste of people forced to go to war and fight on behalf of the decadent republic that they are not citizens of. They have a "handler" who sympathizes with them but does nothing but cry. Ostensibly the show seems to be about finding happiness despite your lot in life but I find that really unsatisfactory for a few reasons.
First the world they've established is extreme. The child soldiers are slaves being sent to die as part of a genocide. Second the republic is pretty much demilitarized except for officers who are in charge of the "86ers" who do the fighting. Third the show is about an elite unit and their politically well connected handler. The republic is losing the war that they are sending the 86ers to die in.
To me this seems like a good setup for a show about a revolution, but instead it's a show about accepting that you can't change anything so just try to be happy despite it. I feel like you could get that message across more effectively without making the world so evil. And besides it's not really that interesting of a message. What is the point of making the viewer angry at the world if the characters do nothing? Why do we care about these characters?
I never understood the hype about this show. I watched it purely for Sawano soundtrack, and while Mizuki - Avid was an amazing ED, the show isn't even worth watching for Sawano.
How did not a single person think "hmm maybe we shouldn't be feeding new brains to the Skynet eating brains to expand"? Even in the most fascist regime, at least military leadership tries to know its enemy. It's just a full cour of watching mechanical zombies being fed free new bodies because racism?
That premise is so idiotic I couldn't take it seriously at all. We're supposed to feel sad for the main characters when they die, but there's no build up, just "okay please become zombie food now" and then they die.
In the end, when the main characters manage to flee the country, the story becomes somewhat more interesting. In season 2 we see the geopolitics between the countries, the world map of how far the mecha-zombies have gotten, and how the fascist regime collapses. But it doesn't make up for how shit season 1 was.
You know what, I actually found that part to be believable. Look at western leadership today when it comes to Ukraine and Yemen in particular. Nobody is taking a sober step back to say "maybe we should try something else". I think something similar applies to a lot of our foreign policy. Our leaders do not wish to engage in the material world. So to me this was actually a good parallel with where we're at. In the show the military leadership does appear to know the truth but they are deferential to political leadership that is ignoring it.
This is different, because there is no existential threat to the west and they know it. In the show, the survival of the human race in its entirety is at stake. In the real world, there aren't any self-replicating robot zombies of destruction expanding from those on the frontline dying.
The moment any NATO intel shows there is a real counter-threat it will be taken seriously. Hell, even if there isn't, it's used as an excuse to respond more harshly to something that doesn't even exist.
It's very "off brand IBO" at an initial glance. Too bad that it couldn't even live up to that. I don't even remember the spider robots being too interesting either.