I imagine this was fairly expected given the April Fools’ Day “review” of Gunvarrel, but we’re going to take a look at Robotics;Notes this week. And I know March is over and my arbitrary Mecha theme with it, but while Robotics;Notes is at least tangentially related to mecha I don’t exactly see it as a Mecha show in the same vein as the ones I reviewed. As seen through Gunvarrel, that sort of stuff is still fictional in-universe. Instead, Robotics;Notes functions more as near-future science fiction story that just happens to include some giant robots.
It’s also one of the members of the
“Science Adventure Series”, or “Semicolon Series” based on
the idiosyncratic style of the titles (note, this one is
“Robotics;Notes”, with a semicolon and no space. They are all
like that.), the most famous of which would have to be Steins;Gate.
The main entries, including Robotics;Notes, are adapted from Visual
Novels and feature a shared universe. What’s more, they also share
some general traits when it comes to storytelling. The members of
the Semicolon series start off with a general sense that we’re
feeling strange people in an essentially real world. Some have
darker or lighter baselines than others, but they tend to have a turn
somewhere in there that catapults the story from personal drama to
the world or at least regional scale in terms of what’s at stake.
They tend to be a solid blend of Science Fiction, Mystery, and
occasionally Thriller in terms of their genre, but are seldom short
on funny (or at least fun) moments, thanks to fairly colorful casts.
They overall try to be pretty grounded, and while the science fiction
that they present isn’t exactly hard the presentation is extremely
artful when it comes to convincing the audience that this is
something that could happen. Part of this comes from the tendency of
the series to lift elements of its plot and science fiction
components from the murkier corners of the real world, including
psuedoscience, conspiracy theories, unexplained mysteries, and
scientific wishful thinking about unproven properties of the
universe. The audience is likely to be passing-familiar with some of
the topics, or at least to have heard of them, possibly even in terms
that lend credence to the show’s take.
Read More…Read More…