Reviews

Mar 26, 2014
Summary: atmospheric quasi-hard SF dystopia; good production values plus a mostly-sensible & fairly unique plot make for a memorable experience.

I liked _SSY_ from the start: you are pitched into an apparently utopian futuristic-Japanese-Scandinavian rural farming village (shades of _Higurashi_!) along with young protagonist Saki & her friends, but immediately you start to suspect that a horrible truth is lurking, that this is a Brave New World designed to produce... what? What's the horrible reality? Why are her parents so worried? Children are disappearing, to what end? Casually introduced is a species of intelligent slave-rats (by what right?) Clues are regularly foreshadowed, daring the view to try to predict, not always successfully.

Our main characters walk a knife edge between ignorance and incurring the ultimate sanction by prying too much, hiding from the adults even as they are unsure they have anything to fear, and in keeping with the paranoia, the atmospherics & stellar soundtrack are tuned by the director to veer from idyllic to horror within instants, until finally the truth is broken in a big data dump. The system of the world is unveiled: they are walking weapons of mass destruction which destroyed ancient civilization, and the entire system is geared toward suppressing any homicidal tendencies through brainwashing, genetic manipulation, and ruthless murder of any children who might become the slightest threat. The future plot seems clear: this is something of a "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"-situation, and being an anime, I can easily predict what will happen next - the kind-hearted heroine will lead a rebellion against the odious (if well-intentioned) regime, topple it, and install some fairer less-filicidal system. Surprised in the data dump, they luck out when the watchdog is killed and get involved in the slave-rat politics, further demonstrating the cruelty and manipulation of their society. From then on, shit gets real: politics outside the barrier is just as brutal as life inside the barrier under the scrutiny of murderous teachers - ambushes, poison arrows, armies, deception, enslaving baby rat-slaves, nothing is off limits. After wading through a sea of blood, they think they've escaped.

But nope! The adults were onto them all along, and the obvious is completely subverted. They return to normal life (albeit with some hilarious swings, like the episode where all of a sudden everyone is gay), and one of the protagonists suffers the long-forecast breakdown, taking out a whole village with him. Things look a bit different and the system starts to look better: what's the alternative?

In post-dystopian societies, there's two major kinds of plot: rebellion, and attack. The latter focuses on a society that has failed to keep growing or developing, that has chosen stasis and passivity. But this is a dangerous choice, as the world may keep changing: "He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator." (Consider Sowell's "tragic vision" vs "utopian vision" in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Conflict_of_Visions or Scott's "survive" vs "thrive" http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/ ; apocalypses and dystopias embody morality plays from the tragic/survive paradigm where people forget the crawling chaos that underlies everyday life, where they forget that civilization was forged in blood and that fundamentally _homo homini lupus est_.)

Instead, we start to see worrying signs of progress among the rat-slaves: concrete? Brainwashing of their formerly dominant queens? Representative democracy? Yet the villages themselves seem to lack any of these: construction is fragile wood and they don't even know who rules them (the committees work in secrecy). And they are actively decaying: there are repeated mentions of electricity rationing and limits, the education of children seems to ignore any real science and technology, military considerations begin and end with psychic powers, villagers are conditioned to be fearful of the world, new mutations/animals/monsters keep springing up outside the barrier (and predictably so due to Cantus leakage) with little note taken of them inside, they have no military to speak of and indeed all their efforts are effectively bent towards crippling any ability to self-police (the world-building seems seriously flawed, since who would choose to make *every* human unable to kill another human when the whole point was to stop Fiends who apparently have no problem shaking off their conditioning‽), the arrogant eschewing any use of fortification despite the value of them against slave-rats & other mutants & the utility of fortified shelter for even psychers (safe place to attack from), and the population is apparently on the decline given the failure to repopulate the village Shun destroyed. Society had grown complacent, self-satisfied, indolent, and weak by shutting itself off from the world. The message is even less subtle in the first episode of _Attack on Titan_ where characters refer to the king ordering people not to go beyond the walls, and where salvation seems to lie in stealing the power of the outsiders who break through the walls - can there be any doubt that this is in part a criticism of Japan's years closed off from the world under the _sakoku_ policy? (At least, if it isn't, it's a bit eery how well _AoT_ works as a metaphor, and it's difficult to explain the inclusion of a character based on Akiyama Yoshifuru otherwise.)

The stage is set for disaster. And disaster there is: a multipronged attack by subterfuge, indirect sabotage, poison, the use of new mutants and rediscovered technologies, and use of the blatant fatal flaw in the system, another human without inhibitions, a Fiend, whose origin makes a complete mockery of an earlier plot event the viewer took as a victory for the protagonists, undermining it and leaving a bitter taste.

After this point the plot starts getting weaker. They pursue a Macguffin to defeat the Fiend, some mushy-headedness undermines it, the plot & director hint heavily at their assistant planning to betray them (which would have been a great twist: the whole Macguffin was planned by the villain to obtain an anti-psycher weapon and cement his victory) but ultimately decides against it, a clever loophole is found, they win, and the status quo is restored after most (but not all) of the slave-rats have been genocided. The protagonists then discover the slave-rats were engineered by their ancestors into slaves who could be casually slaughtered, and decide to... do nothing. We close with some further sentimentality about improving society. Somehow. What? When Satoru plays with Tainted Kittens (whose purpose we recall clearly) and Saki spares some slave-rats, it's hard not to wonder what exactly we're supposed to take away here; her apparent act of mercy for Squealer is offset by the nostalgia and suspicion she's doing it for her own sake. I found myself wondering if this was intended to be a _1984_ sort of twist, showing how the protagonists have become completely and totally coopted by the system.

The story strives to be hard SF, with good explanations for everything (even offering a little speculation on what runs psychic powers, since clearly the user is spending nowhere near enough energy to accomplish the feats), and is so good I cannot resist taking it seriously and noticing flaws rather than simply suspending belief and turning off my brain. And the plot does has a number of issues: some Chekhov's guns are simply dropped without further comment: the leader who has lived for centuries never teaches Saki her secrets, indeed, that is never mentioned afterwards; the protagonists apparently had *another* member in their group who they've lost memories of, but this is also dropped without any additional memory; how exactly Maria and Mamoru could've had a child in the time before they are killed by the rat-slaves is not explained. Other problems include: the final gambit is mindbendingly risky (what if the Fiend had simply burned Kiroumaru alive *like almost every other victim*?), the overall structure of society makes only partial sense and is fragile to even one Fiend yet apparently everyone is holding an Idiot Ball and focuses purely on prevention and never on dealing with the inevitable Fiend; there are no reforms after the attacks exposed multiple flaws in their security; the ambivalence on Squealer (the most interesting of characters in the entire series) seems as much a product of poor writing as intended thought-provoking moral ambiguity; parts of the claimed world-building are not carried through (so, the scientists based things on bonobo troops and free love... which is why everyone is *monogamous*‽ where are the orgies and one-night stands, where are the polyamorous assortments of lovers?) or are implausible (brain surgery does not work that way, even in slave-rats-human-hybrids).
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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