Fractale is a science fiction show that takes place in a future Earth dominated by Augmented Reality technology. It’s a dive into a multi-layered blend of digital and physical realities where our young heroes attempt to work out for themselves what’s real to them and what’s worth saving.
At the risk of starting where I usually end, I’ll summarize some of my feelings. Fractale is a show that almost works. It stands on the cusp of greatness in a lot of ways, but it can never quite measure up to its awesome ambitions. It aspires to be grand and fantastical, combining visionary science fiction with the deeply mythic feeling of the hero’s journey through a strange world. It attempts to be both intensely human and operatic, both philosophical and visceral… but in its pursuit of being all things to all people, it’s a show that can come apart at the seams and doesn’t reach any of its goals, much less all of them.
Because of the mythic side of the show, the basic story is very simple: a boy named Clain lives an ordinary life somewhere in this screwed-up earth. He meets a catalyst (in his case, a girl called Phryne) who catapults him out of his comfort zone, and subsequently ends up traveling the world, interacting with many different peoples and many ways of life, presumably growing as a person so he can, ultimately, have a decisive role in a struggle that will decide the future of the world.
Of course, this means that an actual summary, one that does a half-decent job of retelling the story for those who haven’t watched the show, would have to go through a labyrinthine series of abductions, abandonments, meetings, partings, and bizarre encounters, most of which are in the show for their own sake and intrinsic value more than for what they do for the larger and more overarching plot. It would be like trying to summarize The Odyssey or the voyages of Sinbad; there’s a minor compulsion to go into great detail about all the stops along the way.
However, this is first and foremost a review, not a deep-dive essay, so I’ll do my best to keep it plot-relevant.
So, we start with Clain. He lives in a world where humans regularly interact with digital existences projected and managed by the Fractale System, an ancient Augmented Reality system that’s able to largely cover the world.
His world feels a lot like the “Post-apocalyptic Pastoral” model I talked about somewhat when reviewing 86. In this case, it’s not so much a matter of true absence, so much as a sense of things… winding down. Clain lives in a fairly small town, and a good deal of the ‘lively’ stuff around town is a matter of Doppels – robot-like digital beings that exist via Fractale and may or may not be controlled by humans elsewhere – rather than actual humans. While Fractale itself presents as, more or less, ultra-tech, it’s also mythologized, with its keepers functioning as a theocracy and the rest of the setting looks and feels very period, in a way that evokes Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky more than anything else.
And if you know Castle in the Sky, you know there’s a mysterious waif who appears, pursued by some military-type people. In this case, that would be Phryne, who I mentioned earlier. Clain saves her from some pursuers who really do evoke some of the extras in Castle in the Sky, and they talk, explore his town, and become friends. Subsequently, she vanishes, leaving behind a pendant. Fortunately for the plot, Clain likes to tinker with technical-looking things (like the Pendant) and brings forth its contents, a “young Phryne” Doppel called Nessa.
This properly gets Clain caught up in the clash between the Fractale-church, which currently controls humanity, and Gekkostate’s lamer and more morally dubious cousins, the airship-based rebel group known as Lost Millennium.
Lost Millennium is a group of sort of future Luddites, who believe that the Fractale system is harmful to human dignity and want to destroy it, while maintaining their life largely free of its influence with a kind of quaint period town vibe, even more than where Clain lived.
Lost Millennium turns out to be pretty ruthless, though, when they ambush a church group, indiscriminately shooting priests and civilians alike (not that the priests care much who gets caught when they return fire), with the seeming objective of either grabbing Phryne or, if that can’t be done, outright killing her because she’s important to the church. She’s rescued/abducted more than anything else, and ends up back at the hidden village. Said village quickly falls under attack from a high priestess and a particularly slimy priest who wants Phryne and Nessa. Ultimately, Lost Millennium is able to get away on their airship with Nessa and Phryne aboard.
Now’s as good a time as any to talk about some of the schizophrenic elements in this show. Most of Fractale’s tone is rather upbeat. There’s a slight hint of melancholy, but it’s the sort where the sad elements are very abstract while the happy parts are very near, as best evoked by a beautiful pastoral setting with too few real people in it for comfort. Most of the Lost Millennium goons are almost pure comedic relief, and they come off as a really fun band of eccentrics, like the pirates in Castle in the Sky even more than the Gekkostate.
And then they kill innocents and also get killed in horrible ways. And then they forget that all happened to just be back to comedy. Lost Millennium conducting a rather brutal terrorist raid, in which they take losses, is followed up by beating around the bush with Nessa and Phryne, and why the two don’t seem to get along. The attempted raid to recapture the girls is followed up with an entire episode of Clain being the butt of everyone’s joke and general chew toy shipboard (much like the first arc where Renton is with the Gekkostate, compressed to one episode). The tone and the content don’t really match up.
So forgive me if I don’t get particularly invested when we meet a different Lost Millennium leader, who practically radiates “smug jerk” to the audience but seems more friendly to out young leads, and it turns out he’s kind of a slaving despot who will lure people with basic needs and then forcibly conscript them, with no mercy for those who fail to bend the knee. Neither side lands well, first because it’s blindingly obvious that’s where they’re going with the jerk, and because nothing adds up to give us a really solid feeling.
That’s not to say you can’t have happy moments in darker works or dark moments in largely positive works – in fact, it’s quite important to do so – but it takes some degree of skill, in order to establish a cohesive whole that has a solid theme and tone your audience can follow along with. When you create a story, you need understand where and when your audience will want to laugh, to cry, or to cheer and either play into it or manage your transitions carefully in order to get everybody on board for what you want. If you want a slightly melancholy future that looks at this degraded society and its mythologized technology with adult eyes, that’s fine. Leave out the little sister of the Lost Millennium punk and her two goons that make Team Rocket look like consummate professionals. If you want to have a lighthearted adventure like Castle in the Sky, that’s fine too, but then you probably don’t want your band of colorful loons gunning down civilians. If you want a brutal story about life and death in a broken world, that’s also fine, but you need to acknowledge it, really wallow in it, and show how the darkness hits people, changes them, even scars them, rather than just shooing it out for jokes about somebody’s loincloth.
Or, if you’re going to have all these incongruous elements, you need to get a smooth flow between them, so that the audience follows along for the whole big deal. A lot of this is down to pacing. Most of the works that are most comparable to Fractale’s ambition, like mythic arcs or, in anime, Eureka Seven, are sprawling affairs. They have lots of time to acknowledge their dark sides, recover, and dive again if necessary. Fractale is only eleven episodes. Five hours is a good deal of screen time in an objective sense but the way Fractale is told it means that something had to suffer, in this case the connective tissue that should have held its disparate parts together.
We get this in the characters too. Phryne is a fun, tough girl… except when she’s not. I’m reasonably certain that the authors wanted her to be extremely complex, with many layers of her own issues hiding what her core actually might be, but she doesn’t have the screen time to express much more than a nonsensical tsundere routine. I do, honestly, believe that her mood swings could have worked if we had enough effort put into understanding her inner world, but we just don’t have the time. Nessa is a fun, cute young (digital) girl… except when she’s not. She can’t ever quite decide if she wants to be a cool little sister or a seriously annoying brat. I think it’s for the same reason as Phryne’s problems, that the writers had something in mind for her that would support all her different behaviors, but that we didn’t get to see enough of it in time for the audience to really follow her, thanks to abrupt transitions in tone and emotion.
This actually means that Clain (the generic nice guy) and the antagonists (who at least keep to their one brand of antagonism each) come off as better characters than the two girls that the show is technically more about exploring, and that’s deeply unfortunate. There is so much weight given to Phryne and Nessa that the show can at times come off as a character study when it’s not trying to be a travelogue, but they’re actually poorly studied characters. Clain is an extremely generic low-agency younger male lead, who has kindness and little else to his name. That sort of thing works in heavily mythic stories, or if the character has a lot of time and opportunity to grow. Here, it’s not as mythic as it thinks it is and he doesn’t have the time, but there is still at least a baseline to his execution
In any case, after a few funny incidents, a few melancholy incidents, and the one grim and violent incident with the even worse Lost Millennium leader, Clain and friends end up crash-landing a scout craft and making their way into a Fractale city, where the avatars of people from all over gather. It’s about what you’d expect out of the sinful big city, full of light and noise and people who care only about themselves in one form or another. The group ends up sold out and caught by the church, in part because Clain is injured and Phryne trades herself for theoretically getting him care.
The lot end up taken in, and Lost Millennium (which was already tracking them for rescue) is coming behind, but not before we learn some of the “truth.” Phryne, it seems, is a clone. She’s different from her copies, though, in that she was allowed to reach her teens, while most other Phryne clones (including one that helps Clain out while he’s a prisoner of the lab) outlive their usefulness when they’re more similar to Nessa. Apparently she/they is/are the key to the Fractale system, being clones of a girl who was, in some manner that’s not totally clear, involved and critical in the system’s inception, and that a proper copy is necessary for some asinine reason to reboot and save the Fractale system.
I’m not sure how a sacrificial maiden is supposed to deal with the decaying orbits of ancient satellites, but this sequence gets so awkward and off that this time I don’t want to seriously attempt to figure out what the writers were probably thinking. Because, in the most forced and possibly most jarring of the show’s dark twists, it turns out that the reason Phryne-we-know is different is that the creeper priest figured out that a critical difference between the Nessa-aged clones that weren’t working and the original they needed to replicate was the experience of being raped, which he delivered onto Phryne with evident gusto.
Now, while this is a mess of a “twist”, it does somewhat put Phryne into perspective, suggesting that she’s supposed to be a young woman who was abused, and is consequently living with a very deep trauma. The thing is, like most of the other dark turns, this is forgotten almost as soon as it’s introduced, and the show tries to bury it almost as quickly as we’re out of one very creepy and awkward scene. No. You drop that bomb, show, and the bomb is dropped. You can’t just launch into the final battle for the fate of the world without letting any of your characters come to terms with this reality.
And, at the risk of repeating myself, this makes no sense, or at least no effort is made to communicate how this is supposed to make sense to the viewer. The part about aging up Phryne and having her go through the original’s formative traumas, oddly enough, I kind of get, but it’s not clear why they need the original in the first place or why it would take so long for somebody to get the bright idea that a grade school girl is probably not a valid substitute for someone who must have been a good deal older to be involved in the scientific triumph of creating Fractale.
I’m reminded, somewhat, of Warhammer 40,000. Specifically, one of the themes for the Imperium in Warhammer is that they do not actually know how a good deal of their technology works any more, and have mythologized and made into religious rituals what should have been maintained as scientific knowledge, so that many of the rites that Tech-priests and the like perform do work, but not for the reasons the Tech-priests think they work, as they’re basically doing maintenance under the guise of pleasing the machine spirits, and with a lot more incense and chanting than is strictly necessary (of course, there are also ones that work on “clap your hands if you believe” logic, since 40k doesn’t have to make sense, but we’ll ignore that side of the equation for now).
It feels like that partial loss of knowledge, and especially mystification of knowledge, is what Fractale was aiming for with the church that attends the Fractale System itself. But there are a few factors of how this treatment works in 40k that Fractale doesn’t have. For one, 40k is in a number of ways a parody or farce, and isn’t intended to be entirely taken seriously. For a second part, while the characters do things their way because they don’t know any better, it’s clear to the audience (again, because there are farcical elements) what’s actually getting the job done and what’s there for us to laugh at how future people have regressed to the medieval. For a third part, there are the cases I set aside earlier. Magic is real in 40k so sometimes sacrifices and souls are real things, unrelated to the deep mysteries of changing the batteries in the remote or what have you, so we could better accept something like Phryne.
For all that Fractale tries to have the feel of a mythic or fantasy epic, it is from beginning to end a pure science fiction piece, without any real mystical conceits. Everything is explained through technology, some of it beyond ordinary understanding but all of it grounded in a sort of scientific sense and logic. Except for this one huge thing on which the show actually hinges and of which you are made aware late into the game. They even still try to have their cake and eat it too – we get technobabble “explanations” for why Phryne is needed, but they don’t really explain anything or answer the core question of why any of this is a thing at all, as though if they clear up the lesser issues the big ones will magically go away.
In any case, the resulting conflict at the cloning base leaves it in ruins, from which our young leads are extracted by Lost Millennium. The revelations give Lost Millennium the idea that now is the time to push over the Fractale System once and for all, and thus gather all their forces to storm the church’s central base.
In the battle that follows, Phryne ends up going ahead, Clain chases after her, and they both find their way to the temple’s weird esoteric pinnacle. There, they have (or at least Phryne has) the final say when talking to ancient AI goddess Phryne (it happens), the ability to choose whether Fractale will be rebooted or permanently shut down.
Oddly enough, they go for reboot. This wasn’t wrong, per say, but it did baffle me when I reached this point, because it flies in the face of genre convention. Now it baffles me because it flies in the face of some degree of sense.
You see, for all that Lost Millennium are sometimes awful and absolutely have blood on their hands, the show does lean more heavily on them being “plucky fun rebels” than enemy rebels, as evidenced by the fact that we spend most of the show teamed up with them and get to know a good number of their incidental characters in a positive way. The church, by contrast, is every evil corrupt JRPG church. We don’t really see any adult clergy who are anything but awful. We do see ordinary people who live with Fractale, but most of the time the show seems to be angling for a sense of nostalgia for the physical world, as if to say that the dependency on Fractale is a bad thing, shouldn’t have been allowed to go so far, and humanity would benefit from “waking up”.
And then they don’t. They say how the Fractale system makes some people happy and let it get rebooted to work perfectly for the next thousand years before it’s destined to fail irreparably. Hope somebody gets a better idea in the meantime despite the stagnation of human culture that the show liked to focus on.
As resolves go, preserving the status quo is one that takes work to sell. You have to get the audience invested in what is present as a good thing, that’s worth defending, in order to make going back rather than forwards a desirable outcome. In Fractale, the system is largely the enemy, so that’s not done at all. There’s also the fact that everyone… just seems to accept it, despite all the strife and bloodshed. I’ve compared this show to Eureka Seven and this ending is like if, after the first in-person confrontation between Holland and Dewey, the Gekkostate was lead by Renton and Eureka to just sort of throw up their hands and let the coral get obliterated. And it worked. That’s the degree to which it seems like abandoning the themes and ideas that were set up in this show.
This ending also comes at the expense of both Nessa (who is part of the rebooting process) and Phryne (who is rendered vegetative). Clain is shown taking care of Phryne in the aftermath, until she finally comes around as Nessa (just go with it, it will be over faster) and I guess that’s supposed to be happily ever after. I guess the idea is that this is a good thing because Phryne freed from her traumas is essentially Nessa, so the new Phryne can go on without having to carry her burdens, but… don’t make me quote Star Trek V. Please, just don’t. The Phryne we knew for most of the show is still basically dead, and that’s that.
At least Phryne got to knife the creeper pedo rapist priest before having to make a mental exit. That was a nice touch.
Fractale was… a mess. It was a mess with often beautiful animation and soaring ambitions, which together make it far more tolerable than a lot of other messes, but it was a mess all the same. In a sense, it’s hard to know quite what to do with a show where the writers clearly put in a ton of effort that didn’t make it to the screen like this. Phryne, the most interesting character in the show, gets painfully little time for her resolve and catharsis. Even the asinine ending where her body is possessed by Nessa or she reverts to a Nessa-state could have been solved if we really delved into what must have been desired for her in concept. I could see her as a character so tragic and torn up by their past that excising said agonizing past would be at least bittersweet, but the vast majority of the show depicts Phryne as, perhaps sour and opinionated, but also her own functional person who is quite capable of living life. It does this because she needs to have agency, and the show doesn’t have a ton of time to wallow in her being tortured and tormented, and because there’s this desire to depict her as “kind of normal” before really digging deeply into her. And this kind of stuff was all over. This is clearly the sort of show where someone in creative has a whole massive tome worth of legendarium and side material and worldbuilding that they used as their bible to determine what would happen on screen, but that we don’t have in order to properly interpret things.
And I think, while I may believe that there were admirable creators putting hard work in on this one, I have to err on the side of grading based not on what I feel could have been or suspect might exist outside the work, but on what we are shown in isolation and what the viewing experience is like. And the viewing experience is, overall, not great. A lot of scenes and even episodes do work, but others fall apart completely The horrified flashbacks I had to Children of the Whales in the third episode when it busted out the bloody mayhem were unfounded, but at the same time there were some constructive issues that might be reminiscent of some of the lesser crimes of Children of the Whales.
In the end, though, their problems are really diametrically opposed. Children of the Whales told us things and used that as an excuse to not show them, and threw away an inventive and colorful fantasy setting by forcing its square peg into the round hole of a very basic fight for survival. Fractale shows us things without enough context to properly process them; it doesn’t tell enough. And it revels in its colorful and inventive world at the expense of the fact that there’s supposed to actually be a plot going on. They both have pacing trouble, but in Fractale the worst of the issues are that many of the turns are too abrupt, while the biggest bad moments in Children of the Whales are ones that decided to drag on and on.
And, when you get down to it… a lot of scenes bomb, a lot of jokes bomb. It doesn’t have the pathos to make you feel most of the time, it doesn’t have the talent to make you laugh, it doesn’t have the pacing to thrill you with action and if it has the ideas to wow you with science fictional wonder it doesn’t get the chance to really show it. It is, in a word, broken.
For all that, I’m going to grade Fractale at a D+. It’s not a show I would recommend watching for any sort of conventional entertainment purposes. Sure, it’s not really terrible, but it’s also not particularly enjoyable nor is it the right kind of bad for “So bad it’s good” ironic enjoyment. It’s a show that desperately wants you to think about it and to feel something, but just can’t manage to be worth the effort. If you watch it, what you see won’t be a failure on all counts and at all times, and now and again it might trick you into thinking you’re entertained, but it ultimately doesn’t deliver enough quality to justify a passing grade.