Shion has a seemingly perfect life, but something’s off. Although No.6, the city Shion resides in, appears to have everything a person could possibly want, it doesn’t quite come across as bliss.
Supposedly, a great war from long ago destroyed much of the planet’s inhabitable areas. The handful of the remaining civilizations signed a treaty, resulting in six distinct city-states; the anime takes place in No.6, a.k.a. Chronos. At least, this is the history Shion’s been taught. Who knows how much of it is true and how much is simply propaganda?
The anime opens with a bunch of faceless goons chasing and shooting at a disheveled looking boy through what appears to be an extensive sewage system, a scenario reminiscent of The Fugitive. We then cut to a classroom in session where we meet Shion as he looks out the window and daydreams. In his imagination, he is high in the sky when he suddenly dissolves into leaves; the strong wind carries the leaves away.
In contrast, Shion’s friend, Safu, is giving a lecture on the the brain. She is demystifying the soul, equating it to the electronic impulses between the billions of nerve cells in the human skull. In becoming leaves in his fantasy, Shion does the opposite: he returns to nature.
Afterward, as Shion and Safu are on their way home, Shion comments that Safu should have majored in martial arts instead of neuroscience; she had picked a fight during class. This seemingly innocent jab between friends appears unimportant at first glance, but isn’t it strange that twelve year olds like them are already picking and choosing fields to focus on?
Scanners throughout the city keep tabs on the residents as they come and go.
As the two continue on their way, they pass through scanners and checkpoints throughout the city. These could be benign, but they could also be a sign of something ominous — like big brother checking up on little brother.
The rainstorm excites Shion.
Safu has invited Shion over to her grandmother’s home because today happens to be Shion’s birthday. Shion looks up at the stormy clouds with glee, confessing to Safu that the wild weather is the best present he could ask for. She looks at him somewhat befuddled by the comment. This, again, adds another layer to the idea that No.6 isn’t all it’s cracked up to be; most people gripe at the idea of rainy weather.
The only thing Safu’s grandmother seems to do is knit.
Still, what really clicked for me was when Safu’s grandmother said something strange after Shion thanked her for the sweater he had received as a birthday present:
“I can’t really do anything but this. … I don’t know what I should be doing. Here in No.6’s Chronos, we can live without a care in the world. Aside from gardening and knitting, I don’t know what to do tomorrow or the day after.”
She’s smiling the entire time she says these lines, but she doesn’t seem to be describing a pleasant existence. Remember how in The Matrix, the Architect tells Neo that they tried to construct a perfect simulation of reality for mankind, but humans didn’t want perfection? That’s the vibe I get from No.6. The inhabitants of No.6 are prisoners — content prisoners, but prisoners nonetheless. They are trapped by the comforts in their lives because it feels unnatural or, as I suggested in the title of this post, artificial.
Anime characters always blush when they are kissed, but Shion doesn’t.
Take a look at Shion’s bizarre reaction to Safu’s kiss on his cheek. He doesn’t even blush. He just wonders why she would do something that his mother already does. Safu’s reaction to this is also peculiar:
“No! My kiss was the physical symbolism of the manifestation of reproductive desire–“
Maybe Safu’s just a brainy child; after all, she’s studying neuroscience at the age of twelve. But again, like her lecture on the brain, Safu demystifies something wonderful — this time, a kiss. No.6 is certainly a pristine world, but it also appears to be sterile.
Shion in the rain.
When Shion finally returns home, the storm has arrived. He opens the windows to his room and steps out onto the balcony. He then grabs the railings and screams at the top of his lungs into the raging night sky. This moment is almost carnal or a cry for help, but it definitely mirrors the fantasy Shion had at the start of the anime. Following this crucial moment is when a variable, unaccounted by No.6 and its rules, is introduced into Shion’s life.
The boy we saw at the start of the anime has found his way into Shion’s home. He threatens Shion’s life, but Shion helps the young boy with his injuries, finds him something to wear and also brings him food to eat. More importantly, they appear to share the only genuine human connection in the entire episode:
There’s more feeling here than the kiss earlier in the anime.
Shion learns that the boy’s name is Nezumi, i.e. rat. Nezumi continually tests Shion throughout the night; he finds it strange that Shion is unafraid of him. In the end, he laughs and decides that Shion is simply an airhead. When Shion wakes up the following morning, Nezumi is gone.
I, of course, don’t agree with Nezumi. Shion, by all accounts, appears to be a bright, young kid. I think Shion sees in Nezumi the same thing he sees in the raging storm above them: freedom. In No.6, everything’s structured. Another point to consider: in becoming a pile of leaves, Shion becomes disorganized, i.e. entropy. A rainstorm is also entropy. Nezumi, in his wild nature — the way he swept across the field of windmills — is entropy. These things are all in direct defiance of No.6, a world full of order — a world where young children decide their course of study at the tender age of 12.
More importantly, there’s a difference between Shion and Nezumi, a difference Nezumi alludes to: Shion is elite and Nezumi is not. This idea also hints at another common binary: male and female. We haven’t met a single adult male in the anime. Most of the episode’s runtime takes place in the home. Coincidence? The friendship between Shion and Nezumi could be something that bucks the trend — something that defies the binaries of the world they live in. After all, an elite is befriending a non-elite.
Or are they defying some other possibility? Well, all we can do now is wait and see how the story unfolds.
Now this is interesting… This show is getting such mixed reviews, and to have you come out so in favor of something like this is a rare treat.
I’ll be checking it out soon. Excellent post. :)
Gosh, seems awfully early to call this anime already. All it has really done is set the stage. Is it the bromance that bothers everyone? I bet it’s the bromance.
Definitely the bromance.
Bromance. 100% bromance.
Ugh, why can’t those gays do things where I can’t see them?
*watches YuriYuri*
I was pleasantly surprised by No. 6. Many themes swirling around in what I hope will end up a decent dystopian offering to complement the rest of the season. It’s one of three that I’m pretty sure will end up good.
I dunno how it’ll end up, but it still strikes me as strange how little discussion this show is generating. There are plenty of other anime with slow starts and people don’t generally balk at them, but they have no problem leveling this same criticism at No.6.
I was really impressed by the first episode. It touches on a lot of themes, but most importantly it actually wants you to know that it does. I’m kind of appalled that the general reaction to Nezumi and Shion holding hands is immediately ‘gay!’ when in fact the world of No.6 is a cold world of order and for the first time, Shion experiences something ‘warm’ and wholly abstract– with someone his age nonetheless.
Geez, anime community. Girls can grope each other’s breasts and everyone is ‘oh fanservice, you so silly’ two boys hold hands and become concerned with each other and it’s ‘gay and fujoushi pandering’. OH BOY.
Obviously, girl on girl is just innocent and cute. Guy on guy? Dirty and sleazy!
You’ve convinced me to actually watch something this season, I hadn’t heard of this but now I’m very interested. As described first episode seems very “Darker than Black”-style BONES: the actual storyline is nothing remarkable, but the way the story is told is enough to transform it into something far more than the sum of its parts. Thanks for taking the time to screen all these series.
I’m flattered but you really didn’t have plans to watch an anime this season? No way~ We had some good exchanges on Ano Hana so hopefully No.6 or some other show this season holds up for similar results.
Yeah, I really wasn’t, at least not from the beginning. I’ve seen a lot of anime but wouldn’t call myself an “anime fan” as such. My next few months will be a bit busier than the past few month have been, nothing jumped out at me when I took a quick look at this season’s schedule, but I’ll be sure to check this one out.
Excellent post. I’m impressed you didn’t go for the “haha, they are gay” thing everyone else was going for, but instead carefully analyzed the dystopian structures of No. 6 and how the main character fits in as an individual.
Ugh, but they’re so gay — nothing else matters!
I’ve seen this story before: 15 years later Shion will discover that after that night Nezumi went off and made a fortune in Australia, and in his will left it all to Shion.
But more seriously: the first episode did indeed turn out to seeming *very* “Darker than Black”-style BONES (in terms of narrative “tricks”, see below), which at least for me is a very good thing. Hopefully the quality holds up and the story fits into the remaining episodes (seems ep1 is mere prelude to the real story).
The most prominent “trick” used in Darker than Black is to setup the setting and the storyline so that most of the things that happen have one or more levels of additional symbolic/metaphoric significance, but subject to two additional constraints: (1) the events with extra significance have to “make sense”/”seem natural” in the story’s context at the time they are presented to the viewer (with no overhanging sense of “there’s obviously more going on here but I don’t know what”) and (2) the information necessary to interpret an event’s significance is almost always presented after the event itself has been presented.
The end result is a story that makes sense as you watch it — and, superficially, may not seem to have much going on beyond the visible action –but has layers of internal nuance and symbolism that may only become apparent on a rewatch; fortunately for us, however, this “prelude” episode’s story is self-contained enough we can already see some of this at work.
The thematic thing going on is to very deliberately draw parallels between the events with Nezumi and some sort of rat-in-a-maze laboratory experiment. It’s too early to guess at the significance of that parallel — we don’t know about .
The sequence of presentation runs like:
– (1) unknown man evading pursuers in mazelike sewers (and finding a false, barred-over exit)
– (2) middle of presentation on neuroscience espousing boilerplate materialist/reductionist take on soul
– (3) in passing presentation mentions supporting evidence drawn from a “rat experiment”
– (4) in passing presentation mentions the rat being motivated by fear and survival instinct
– (5) a bunch of unrelated stuff happens
– (6) guy from (1) shows up, reveals his name is Nezumi (“rat”)
– (7) visuals demonstrating the no 6 city diagram resembles a classic “labyrinth” (with some extra lines)
– (8) Nezumi is chipped and tracked by No. 6
– (9) Nezumi hints that he may’ve been deliberately taken out of prison and released inside No. 6
…which, en toto, is enough to make it extremely likely that whatever’s going on with Nezumi is analogous to setting a rat loose in a maze as some sort of experiment (either literal or metaphorical). If the same information had been presented in a different order it would’ve been cloyingly obvious — eg., think about how it would’ve gone down if it’d started by establishing that the guy’s name is rat, was set loose and monitored, and then cutting to Safu’s lecture about the rat experiment, then later cut to Nezumi running through the sewers — but in this order it’s at least a little less obvious.
All of this may be painfully belaboring something that’s extremely obvious, but since you didn’t mention it I can’t be sure. In any case this is indeed a promising first episode. Good job BONES, hopefully won’t crash and burn due to the short length.
No, your analysis is fascinating and I hadn’t read anything similar to it anywhere else. Yes, it would have been “cloyingly obvious” to make the episode anymore transparent, but I wonder if the alternative would have improved the anime in the eyes of others.
I’m going to go on a bit of tangent here, since I feel as we’ve adequately unpacked the first episode. The first of two general complaints about the anime is that it lacks action, which I disagree with. Still, I can’t help but think people tend to overpraise stories where the thinly-disguised metaphors practically leap out at the viewer. Feeling emboldened, they conflate their ability to “get it” with quality.
(The other general complaint is the ridiculous fear of potential BL.)
I can understand the lack of action complaint, though it’s not something that bothers me much. I’d be mainly concerned that “slow start” together with “BL” implies problems of commercial viability, which is bad if you’d like to see more productions like this one.
In terms of BL: I’m worried it’s going to prove insufficiently gay. Specifically: I’m not sure what I’ll think about this series if, in the end, the BL overtones — or explicit gayness, if it’s incoming — are only in there as some kind of symbolism for Shion’s rejection of No. 6’s shallow orderliness. Too soon to know if that’s what’ll happen, but if it is how things turn out at a certain cynical level it’d risk being “not gay enough (to use its gayness in a legitimately interesting way)” while also being “too gay (to sell well or even get high ratings)”. Oh well, no point worrying about spilt milk before it’s been spilt.
In terms of quality-versus-perception-of-quality: yeah, basically agreed. For a given target audience if your goal is to maximize their perceived quality of your work, one of the parameters you can try to tune is the subtlety of any symbolism/easter eggs/etc. you want to include: subtle enough it’s not painfully obvious but not so subtle your audience completely misses it.
Excellent breakdown of the show. Your description of the contrast between the sterile world and Shion’s attachment to Nezumi was great. The major question that the raises for me, and particularly in light of the ED and all the promotional material is: Just how far in the time line will this show go. They are both grown up in the ED and Sion looks like…he’s been through something. So I’m eager to see if this will be one of those few shows that takes place over a course of many years.
I think the first episode was just a prologue of sorts judging by the second episode. It’d be a cool concept but hard to keep the viewers attuned, I think.
I’m not a big anime fan, but I really fell in love with this show. The storyline is interesting and refreshing, I like the characters as well. I’ve read some of the novel, and it has BL tones but never crosses the line into forbidden love. They kiss twice but it’s not BL love, it’s a farewell and oath kiss. So the novel is not BL after all, and if they toned it down for the anime and manga, it’s even less BL.
Ah, that’s good to know. I have no access to the books nor any means of reading them anyhow.
i read the manga and watched the anime.it definently has BL tones and its under mild shounen ai.check all websites its not forbidden love but its love.shion says how his attracted to nezumi