Why do we like dystopias so much?
When you get down to it, despite a reputation for being high-flying and forward-looking, science fiction more often indulges in – and often seems to be consumed by – not hope for the future or wonder at the possibilities of scientific advancement, but rather fear. Fear of the future, fear of technology, fear of the unknown, the works. For every inventive gadget or futuristic concept mankind dreams up there’s almost sure to be a scifi story about why this is a terrible idea and going to kill and/or enslave everybody. It often seems as though the genre of the future would rather flee into the past, delivering lesson after lesson about how anything that changes the status quo is bad, to the point where real people view emerging technology with extra heaps of fear and suspicion specifically because every time it crops up in fiction it’s somehow evil.
There are exceptions, of course. Famously, the original Star Trek takes place in a post-scarcity society, Gene Roddenberry’s vision of a future where technology has improved our lives and humans want, in an essential sense, for nothing, allowing us to explore the stars in relative peace and out of a diplomatic and scientific spirit rather than being driven by the desire for conquest or the need for a broader base of natural resources. But while the Federation is legendarily idyllic, even the Original Series was mostly not concerned with its internal affairs, as the star ship Enterprise made its way from one screwed-up dystopia to another on its five-year mission to actually look at what the universe had to offer. And of course later interpretations have offered even less in the way of sunshine and roses for that setting. Planetary Romance and Space Opera are somewhat resilient against the grasping claw of the dystopic, but they don’t care very much about the “science” in “science fiction”, often instead being more of a space fantasy brand of Speculative Fiction.
I do have a theory regarding this, and it’s actually pretty simple. Science fiction depicts dystopias because, when you get down to it, almost every compelling fictional world, from every genre that has actual drama, is worse than the one we live in, and even in very normal settings the lives of the characters we watch are rarely actually the lives we’d want to live. This is because stories are driven by conflict. We don’t want to be angry or afraid in our daily lives all the time, at least most of us don’t, but stories about harrowing times are much more interesting than stories where everything is going kind of okay for the people we follow. Conflict is interesting, and interesting is desirable in fiction, but not in life. A story set in a true scientific utopia, one where society has managed its growing pains and advanced technology primarily does good for individual lives, would not have much of a story to tell unless, like classic Trek, we were to venture outside the bubble of that society in order to find something interesting.
Long story short, fictional universes – not just scifi ones – are cool places to visit, but not places we should want to live. And that’s what makes fiction compelling.
All the same, when it is applied specifically to scifi, it does get frustrating from time to time. Part of the drive towards the genre is the essence of wonder, and when everything wonderful inevitably backfires or everything that could be wonderful without fail is turned to horror, it becomes exhausting. If you are not, yourself, someone who is typically afraid of the future and human progress, seeing fiction about the future and human progress constantly screech that you should be afraid wears you down, especially when it seems like there should be an easy out or two.
Some stories handle this dynamic better than others. The Gene of AI had a fairly balanced take on its universe. One element I praise it for is that while it certainly looks at the ugly side of its society, it feels like it has a more down-to-earth view on how society would evolve. There would be hitches and glitches and not everything would be nice, but as a whole the world would kind of stumble forward. Psycho-Pass, by contrast, absolutely comes off as a dystopia, but at the same point it makes it clear why people would want to live in this technically dystopian society, why it survives, and on a deep level why this probably shouldn’t be salvageable despite that. It asks questions, rather than just screaming the answer.
Now, this digression has gone on quite long enough, so I suppose I should introduce the material of the week. Say hello to Love and Lies. The premise is that in the near future, humanity has devised a system known as the “Red Strings of Science” that can find a perfect romantic match for a person. And because this is fiction and the government has never heard of “incentives”, “subsidies” or “consent” this results in young people being forcibly matched with punishment awaiting any who disobey, rather than simply being an extremely desirable opt-in sort of system.
Thus we begin our story in a world where this has been going on for forty years. We follow a boy, Yukari Nejima, who is helplessly in love with his classmate, Misaki Takasaki. On the eve of his 16th birthday (when he could receive a marriage notification), he decides to confess to her, and it turns out their feelings are mutual. Very mutual.
The resulting make-out session is interrupted by the stroke of midnight, and Yukari getting his notification. The text at first names Misaki as his partner, but in a moment it glitches out, and government goons arrive to hand-deliver the printed version. Except, the notice that they deliver has an entirely different name on it, pairing Yukari with one Lilina (or Ririna, depending on your preferred romanization) Sanada. This breaks poor Misaki’s heart, but there is no delay in Yukari deciding that he loves who he loves.
All the same, he’s got to meet the new girl. Sanada proves prickly, kind of sheltered… and in love with love. That is, Yukari ends up spilling the beans about his forbidden romance, and she’s utterly taken by it, including wanting to see where things might go. This ends up with Sanada meeting Misaki and learning her true feelings (how she’s also hopelessly in love with Yukari).
This is extra impactful to Sanada because she and Misaki hit it off right away, becoming friends pretty quickly… while Sanada herself had never had a friend before (at least not a female friend – she was prepared to count Yukari after he was kind to her), and is in fact hated by her classmates (According to the press copy for the show they call her “Snooty Sanada”, but in-show they use a pun on her name that means “Tapeworm”, referencing her sickly past as well as how much they presumably dislike her, while sounding way meaner).
Thus, Sanada becomes the biggest advocate for Misaki x Yukari, being far more interested in witnessing their romance than in having anything to do with Yukari for herself. She pretty much does all the legwork of pushing them to go ahead and carry on an illicit affair.
Of course, it’s not that simple. These characters are fully enmeshed in their culture, and don’t give up their hangups lightly. So even though we get quite a few more intimate moments between Yukari and Misaki, it’s not as though they’re anything but an “it’s complicated”.
More hitches introduce themselves along the way. One is Yukari’s friend Yuusuke Nisaka. His problem is that he’s secretly into Yukari, but Yukari thinks he’s got feelings for Misaki instead (due to him catching on to what’s going on with our main trio, and choosing to confront anybody but Yukari about it). Another, though significantly later introduced, is Shuu Igarashi, a friend of Misaki. I’ll get to her when her relevance comes out.
Anyway, while Yukari and Misaki continue to not be super close except when circumstances find them alone, Nisaka needles at Sanada, mentioning things like all the social penalties that would await Yukari and ruin his future if he were to break off the engagement, as well as the fact that Sanada herself would (by default) be left out in the cold. This might feed in to Sanada’s stake becoming more complicated as she starts to have steamy dreams of Yukari not with Misaki, but with herself.
This comes to a head rather quickly, when Yukari and Sanada are called in (along with quite a few other young couples) for a special course from the ministry. Sex ed, of course, with some high expectations for the pairs working out practical aspects and rumors of penalties for those who don’t get it on. Shuu is there as well, but she seems to be part of the ministry staff. There’s also a guy on staff (with white hair, just like her) who seems to know what’s up with Yukari and teases him about being monitored when that’s really not the case. Thus, Yukari is at first horrified, and unsure of what to do is put in this bind where, for Sanada’s sake if not his own, he feels like they need to bang.
… You know, while I started this review with a much bigger digression than usual, I feel another one coming on. Maybe it’s because I don’t really like thinking too much about Love and Lies (I’ll get to that in my usual wrapup), but this particular moment did remind me of something. While I’ll be connecting it to the show, I’ll also put in a header along the way, so if you just want the plot summary, skip to the big text.
So, some of you may remember, if you were here for my Yurei Deco review that I mentioned offhand a pen and paper RPG called Misspent Youth. Okay, probably nobody remembers that, because I didn’t go into detail about it just then except to say that a an actual play of said game would probably be more interesting than Yurei Deco.
Here, though, and specifically with this “Sex Ed” setup, I was once again reminded of Misspent Youth. I’m not an RPG reviewer or anything like that, but for the same of this argument I do want to highlight how Misspent Youth works and especially what that means for how this scene works.
So, Misspent Youth is a game that attempts to mimic Young Adult Dystopian fiction, pitting the Youthful Offenders (players) against a tyrannical Authority (run by the GM) in a struggle for the fate of their setting. It’s not saying much to say that Love and Lies could have its premise adapted to Misspent Youth, since Misspent Youth has a pretty broad selection of stories that it can model (basically anything where “The Man” is your bad guy could be adapted), but what made me snap back was one particular element.
Misspent Youth is, broadly, a member of a larger family of dice-lite storytelling RPGs that put more focus on narrative than on tactics. Many of these games resolve conflict in very simple ways, often a single die roll or other substitute like rock-paper-scissors to have some element of randomness or drama so you’re playing make-believe with enough structure to convince yourself it’s okay to be a kid again.
However, Misspent Youth decided, I would say to its credit, to spice up the conflicts a little, letting them have a sense of push and pull by basically forcing the players and GM to play craps against each other, narrating actions with every roll. The (relevant) fun part is that, should the players lose, the last player to make the fateful roll has an opportunity to turn things around. To do so, though, they have to “Sell Out”, becoming permanently more corrupted in a way that will eventually bring an end to the campaign (or Series as Misspent Youth calls it, taking inspiration from the structure of episodic media).
There’s a great tension there. You can win for the moment, but at what cost? And it plays into the themes of the dystopia by forcing characters to grapple with their morals and convictions, questioning what they’re willing to do in order to achieve their theoretically noble goals. It’s the kind of choice that makes for good emergent storytelling on the tabletop and, when you get down to it, good storytelling in general.
And with where I decided to go on this digression, some of you may already understand why: when an episode of Love and Lies ends with Yukari, clearly panicking, pushing Sanada down on the big bed they’ve been provided and thinking about what he might need to do in order to spare her punishment from the show’s Authority… this is his chance to Sell Out. If he goes through with it, he gets them out of any immediate hazard of having their grades and futures screwed with (illusory though that hazard may be), but does so at the cost of giving up something core to him that he will never get back.
When I review a show, no matter how I find it as a whole, I try to give credits to bits that work and pick apart bits that don’t. In Love and Lies, one of the biggest problems is that Yukari – a boy who starts out the show by defying an ingrained system core to his life – usually doesn’t have the balls to do or initiate much of anything, making him a poor Youthful Offender. Instead, he falls into the mild-mannered, dithering, and easily-flustered milquetoast complainer bracket. For the record, this is the episode 6/7 break, halfway through the show, and frankly nothing much has happened to deliver on the promise of the pitch. He’s a character who, problematically, needs to be pushed. This movement pushes him the way a good evil Authority should… even if it doesn’t last longer than a moment.
WE NOW RETURN YOU TO YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED REVIEW
So, naturally, they don’t go all the way. Yukari tries to fake it and we get some very steamy kissing between him and Sanada, but eventually he notices she’s also distressed and they talk out the issue, including Sanada noting that it would be extremely unethical to spy on them and not something the government would do. Thus, we return to puttering, but now with a rift between Yukari and Sanada… one that Misaki recognizes as Sanada starting to fall in love with Yukari. And, because she’s the one character in this show who comes off as actually interesting, Misaki decides to utilize silence and lies in order to pursue her own greedy desires even as she knows she shouldn’t.
To her credit, she comes out to Yukari fairly quickly with her fears, and we get a good portrayal of her as – to paraphrase what another character calls her later – a girl given over entirely to love. Like, she’s not what we’d normally think of as a Yandere since she’s trying to distance herself and isn’t about to go psychotic and start stabbing people (after all, she likes Sanada) but there’s an element of her portrayal that’s delightfully unwell and intemperate. She’s even called out by Shuu in a flashback as being a stalker, and I’m not sure Shuu’s teasing there is wrong.
After more puttering, we finally bring Shuu into the picture properly as she shows up to claim (contrary to the white-haired bureau guy, who after trolling Yukari has since bonded with him over having been in his position in the past, and looked into the case) that Misaki is Yukari’s true love – a fact that Sanada, of course, happens to overhear, being on campus for Yukari and Misaki’s culture festival.
She does explain later to the two of them that she means something more philosophical, not the notice calculations, but it’s still a shaking experience. We also learn that she is, indeed, a ministry insider due to being a descendant of the inventor of the system. The white-haired bureau guy, who it’s now clear has no relation to Shuu even though it looks like she’s there on “take your daughter to work” day, breaks into the conversation and shames everyone. His shade makes Sanada and Yukari actually have to question how they feel about each other. This would be interesting if Yukari had a spine up until this point and was actually decided on Misaki (or seemingly so) rather than dithering all the way.
Somehow, this has gotten us to episode 11. Episode 11’s first half puts Yukari back in Misaki’s court, which now stings for Sanada… which was basically where they were after Sanada started having erotic dreams, so really what’s happened? The second half is the obligatory hot springs fanservice bit. What, you thought you were going to get away without that? Well, at least it’s a family trip with Sanada and Yukari’s folks, so it gives a chance for their chemistry to keep being chemistry. What conclusion does Sanada come to after all this? The same one she had in the first scene she was introduced in.
This is the biggest issue with Love and Lies: it goes basically nowhere. It has a dystopian premise that, my general beef with the excess of dystopia aside, promises a pretty solid dynamic. It uses that to deliver a very standard – and very static – romance.
If this story really wanted to deliver, you’d want to move Episode 1 a little faster so that you could introduce Sanada and her take on things. You’d then get Yukari and Misaki together, with Sanada helping them hide their affair from snooping parents and government agents as the three of them consider if and how they can actually defy the system. Then you’d pull in Shuu confirming that the calculations say one thing while she believes in another somewhere around episode 4, and let the chemistry get really complicated.
Maybe Misaki does decide to go the self-denying route she sits in uncomfortably for most of this show. Maybe a formerly convicted Yukari starts to become conflicted as his trysts feel less like wholesome love and more like cheating. Maybe Sanada has to grapple with wanting her hat in the ring but not wanting to backstab the only friend she’s ever had, becoming tormented by how quick she was to throw Yukari to his old flame. Or maybe her feelings never actually develop in that standard way. Maybe Sanada is a crazy voyeur who finds herself disturbingly turned on by her role in the affair. Wouldn’t that be a twist? If the system assigned her Yukari because it knew he’d cheat and that was the only way Sanada would be happy.
Have your characters interact with purpose. Have their meaningful conversations move them, rather than showing us the same thing in a different setting. For Gay Best Friend Nisaka, who chews up a mountain of screen time in the real thing, either actually address what it means to have an incompatible orientation under the Notice system and how he suffers thanks to the dystopia they live in, or drop him. As a third-place and utterly hopeless non-competing competitor for Yukari, he’s not worth the time. Do something or don’t, but don’t do something that’s nothing.
I can’t help but compare Love and Lies unfavorably to True Tears. True Tears had a complex relationship web where A & B want each other but think they can’t have, and then B gets paired off with C who is really good for him in a lot of ways but who isn’t the same kind of romance – not at the start, and not in the end when the starting couple actually get together. But in True Tears, the walls between the characters feel more natural, and the characters grow and evolve really well. The shows aren’t really that similar, though you could probably get some mileage out of comparing the two main girls. Sanada to Noe and Misaki to Hiromi. It’s pretty unfavorable to Sanada since Noe is actually interesting.
I know this is a derivative work. Love and Lies, like a lot of anime, is based on a Manga, and because of that the creators didn’t have total freedom to give it a pace that works better for twelve episodes. But I’m here to judge it on its own, and it doesn’t work. It’s unnecessarily plodding and the characters range from perfectly serviceable or kinda interesting in Misaki down to boring Sanada and annoying Yukari.
Anyway, there is one last episode of Love and Lies.
Sanada pulls out that she’s researched a way to escape the pairing: if they pretend like they hate each other for at least six months, the match can be dissolved, and second matches are not obligatory so provided Misaki does the same thing with any match she gets, the two of them can be free. Sanada is very much in favor of this, since both she and Yukari care more about Misaki than themselves… but she does want to make out a little first. You know, for practice for that second relationship and not because she has actual feelings (which is a lie). Well, whatever gets us another super-steamy kissing scene.
I’ve mentioned this before, but since we’re at the end, I’ll say it explicitly. In past reviews like Super HxEros, I’ve said that it’s quite possible to get very erotic moments even without disrobing anybody. That show was bad at getting spice even without clothes in the way. Love and Lies is absolutely spectacular at delivering kissing scenes with a sexual edge to them. Honestly, if the raw artistry in the passionate, messy, lingering, complex kisses that happen throughout this show was indicative of the overall tone, like it actually lived up the lurid idea of forbidden love with some edge of carnality, Love and Lies would be more interesting. But no, it’s just kind of orphaned.
Misaki, however, doesn’t seem to bite too much (not that we see a whole lot of her), Yukari angsts about hurting the girls he cares about, and we end with a scene as he makes up with them by attending a photo shoot where the two are doing bridal gowns, getting us the “one true threesome” final image
So, I think I’ve made clear my opinion that Love and Lies is a broken show. It takes a concept that, while not particularly unique, is at least a little different, and uses that to deliver a very reprocessed love triangle. It has good art, but the story goes nowhere. The one character who is actually interesting, Misaki, gets the least screen time of the main three, possibly even less than Nisaka, so it’s hard to enjoy her. And Yukari is a pain of a main character. Look, kid, you’re not going to please the missus, the mistress, or the government that wants you to get with making babies if you don’t have any balls.
Love and Lies fails to engage as a dystopian story, fails to have compelling turns as a romance, fails to really go anywhere or threaten anything as a drama, it isn’t really a comedy… it’s not anything worthwhile.
In my mind, this show is the picture of a D. It’s far from unwatchable. When you get down to it, a lot of scenes work and the art is fairly nice, even aside from going all the way with the kiss scenes. But it’s got nothing to really recommend it. I may have compared it to True Tears, but True Tears was actually good. The quality line is much closer to Kiss x Sis, albeit with different strengths and weaknesses. Kiss x Sis does more wrong, but it also just plain does more… which isn’t a good place for Love and Lies to be.
In the end, Love and Lies is style over substance, and best ignored in favor of other fare.