An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Undead Robot Yandere – Unbreakable Machine-Doll Spoiler Review

It’s September, and you know what that means! It’s Back to School time! … er, at least it’s time for going back to school in Anime land (though for the same year) and other media, where schools neither obnoxiously start in August nor have the looming threat of a pandemic modifying their opening plans. In any case, I’ll be looking at some shows with school settings and themes this month. But, it won’t just be any schools: rather, I’d like to take a look at schools for superpowers, fighting, or otherwise protagonist badassery. And while I have a wealth of options, I might as well start with the Walpurgis Academy of Machinart and the show it appears in, Unbreakable Machine-Doll.

Unbreakable Machine-Doll takes place in a quasi-Victorian (I dare say essentially Steampunk) universe where rather than humans using magic directly, they channel powers through automatons that contain spell-circuits granting them both a semblance of life and the ability to invoke supernatural effects. Machinart, the skill by which “Puppeteers” do this, is a blend of magic and science that has seen both military and civilian applications.

Raishin Akabane has traveled far to attend the Walpurgis Academy of Machinart, possibly the most prestigious place of learning on the topic, but he’s not there to study. Instead, he’s enrolled for the chance to hunt down the man who slaughtered his family, particularly his beloved little sister – the number one student of the academy, Magnus. Helping him is his automaton, Yaya, who has a shockingly human appearance, intellect, and personality. Though his partner is the magnum opus of an eccentric genius crafter, Raishin himself has trouble, initially being ranked second-to-last in the whole school thanks to the short amount of time he’s been training. This wouldn’t be a problem if he didn’t need to get into a tournament open to the top hundred students in order to properly face down against his foe. With his poor assessment, the route remaining open to him is to beat someone who’s properly invited in a duel, proving his supremacy.

His first mark for this is Charlotte “Charl” Belew and her automaton, a dragon named Sigmund who has more in common with Yaya than you might expect (both are “Ban Dolls”, puppets that incorporate human parts and are not normally permitted to be made. But Sigmund is very old and Yaya is foreign so it seems that’s pretty much allowed to slide). Their fight is interrupted and Sigmund damaged in the process, which causes Raishin to call it off, unwilling to take a compromised win over what seems to be a decent person. Instead, he ends up with a different offer to get a tournament invite: find and defeat the serial killer known as “Cannibal Candy” who’s been disappearing students and ripping the hearts out of automatons.

What follows is a mix of mystery and action as Raishin and Charl work together to stop Cannibal Candy, only to ultimately discover that the real killer is the Discipline Committee head who put Raishin up to the hunt, hoping to frame Charl and have her killed for his crimes. His automaton (which performs its ‘cannibalism’ since it can use the magics of those it consumes) is destroyed, Charl’s name cleared, and wouldn’t you know it – in defeating both the enigmatic Cannibal Candy and one of the top-ranked students, Raishin has earned himself a ticket to the tournament.

The next arc starts by introducing us to a new girl, Frey, who is trying to assassinate Raishin. Don’t take that too hard, though: her attempts are adorably pathetic, getting herself caught in the “traps” she sets and falling asleep on his bed rather than making with any stabbing. In all honesty, she doesn’t seem like she actually means Raishin any harm, and is going through the motions because she feels somehow obligated. That may have something to do with the sponsor for her and her standoffish brother, Loki (who Raishin also gets to know and form something of a rivalry with), being a shady automaton company called Divine Works. Her Automaton, after all, seems more effective on that score, and attacks Raishin at least once despite Frey ordering it not to.

Raishin gets some help from Yaya’s maker to investigate Divine Works, discovering both there and after that Frey and Loki (particularly Frey) are human experiments, with implanted magic circuits to make them stronger. They do not, however, particularly like their maker/master/parent figure at Divine Works, who seems to be done with Frey and nearly has her killed through her own automaton going berserk.

Despite normally being quite at odds (and, in fact, their relationship remains amusingly vitriolic), Raishin and Loki team up to take on the boss of Divine Works, managing to shatter his automaton with the power of teamwork right before the cavalry arrives to arrest him for human experimentation, bringing the second arc to a close.

The third and final arc of the anime is… a little bit harder. I’ll say this now but watching it there are enough impersonations, look-alikes, illusions, and layers of blackmail that it’s hard to tell who is who and why they’re doing what they’re doing some of the time. The main hooks are that a girl who looks like Charl (revealed to be her younger sister, Henriette) is attempting suicide, only to be saved from the self-destruction she seeks by Raishin and Yaya. Meanwhile, Charl seems to have gone rogue, using Sigmund to attempt an assassination of the school’s headmaster, destroying the clock tower in the process.

Again, to describe what happens in a more straightforward manner, Raishin and Henriette are stuck working together, eventually with some help from Loki, Frey, and even Magnus, to escape being dropped into caverns beneath the school by Charl’s second attack. Meanwhile, we learn that Charl’s blackmailer, with Henriette as the leverage, seems to be doing what they’re going out of some familial revenge for Cannibal Candy, in an intense web of noble family politics that either not enough time or way too much time is spent on. Raishin “kidnaps” Henriette to draw out the conspiracy, and learns that she blames herself for Charl’s situation both now in specific (which is why she was trying to kill herself) and in general (blaming herself for the event that saw Charl’s family lose its prestige and station).

The ruse is successful, and the arc reaches its climax with a series of conflicts involving stopping Charl from going through with assassination and taking on her blackmailer’s automaton, a butler guy who declares himself to be a “Machine-Doll”, a legendary type of Automaton that can act without a puppeteer. Yaya, Raishin, Sigmund, and Charl are able to defeat him but not take him out, and he flees with the blackmailer, who was apparently someone other than the person we thought she was the whole time. Charl is forgiven (her family’s already-frozen assets being tapped to repair the damage she did) and Raishin’s conflict with Magnus, who is actually his elder brother, still looms on the horizon. It seems that all involved have their own secrets and ulterior motives. But for any of that you’ll have to go to to the Light Novel series which is…

… For crying out loud. To paraphrase Loki for a moment, I’m a patient and tolerant person, but there are three things I can’t stand: people who oppose me, people who order me around, and an unfinished storyline with promise based on a source that seems doomed to get no localization.

Now, all of that is the technical plot of Unbreakable Machine-Doll, but you might notice it feels a little light for twelve episodes. That’s because it’s not the whole show. If I had to praise Unbreakable Machine-Doll for one thing, it would be balance. This is, technically, an Ecchi/Harem sort of show. Each arc introduces a new girl (aside from Yaya) and maintains the older ones, who fall roughly into recognizable archetypes (Yandere Yaya, Tsundere Charl, Deredere Frey, and… Henriette is just the little sister I guess) and are shown off fairly often as they compete for the affection of the lead. But like a good, rather than lazy, Harem show, each girl also gets a lot of development.

Yaya does spend a lot of time being a comedic Yandere, and when she is she nails the comedy sweet spot where she’s clearly obsessive to the point of derangement but despite being repeatedly said to pose a threat to Raishin never feels like she’s actually a danger to him or her rivals. But all the same, there are some good scenes with her that serve to develop her character and her desired relationship with her master. As much as she tries to undress him in private (or even not-so-private) I do remember that her conversation with Sigmund about the matter was at least a little compelling. Charlotte is absolutely a Tsundere, who can’t admit her feelings, but she does a lot of heavy plot-lifting in both the first and third arcs and has plentiful issues of her own to contend with that aren’t just mooning over a boy she met fairly recently. Frey, as the Deredere type, spends the most time acting the romantic contender part, but even then she has a persona beyond her archetype and can get a few laughs from her delivery. All in all, the Ecchi and Harem elements are there at a level that’s absolutely an appeal, but they don’t take over the show or drag down the action and drama.

Speaking of the action and drama, that’s usually good too. Each arc at least ends with a big puppeteer fight, and may contain more, and they’re all pretty engaging. Even if you don’t always know what the spells Raishin shouts for do, the movement and choreography is solid, and the show does a great job about putting him and Yaya on the ropes constantly without it feeling either cheap or like a foregone conclusion that they’re going to pull out. On the emotional side, all the rivalries and blackmail running through the show help build strong investment in the outcome of the conflict. You know what people want (most of the time. As I said arc 3 can be a little more sketchy) and why they need to or shouldn’t be allowed to get it. When Raishin fights, it’s not always because it’s his own life or death on the line, but there’s always an important reason.

The characters are also strong other than in their harem roles. Charl and Henriette are compelling in different ways, Frey’s a cutie you don’t want to see come to harm, Loki’s an arrogant catchphrase-spewer who makes a good foil for Raishin… even lesser characters like Sigmund, the various staff of the academy, and Yaya’s maker do leave positive impressions. That’s a lot more than I can say for a lot of other shows that try to blend Harem and Ecchi with Action and Drama – things like Omamori Himari or Strike the Blood, to lesser or greater degrees, where the characters have character take a back seat to the romance. They exist fairly well-blended in Unbreakable Machine-Doll.

There’s also the mystery aspects. Each arc has a complex web of who is manipulating who and why, and two out of three isn’t bad for it landing well. Some of the turns you can easily see coming, while others might be genuinely surprising to some viewers, which puts it in a good place for a show that’s not really a mystery, but has this significant mystery element.

And then there are the speculative fiction elements. Unbreakable Machine-Doll is a punk fantasy with a complicated and different magic system that viewers have to get used to and navigate, but in my opinion at least it handles the magical topics with grace. I couldn’t tell you exactly how a Ban Doll is better, and it seems to vary from Doll to Doll, but I can tell you why they’re better and why other people in the setting don’t like that. I couldn’t lecture on the bond between Puppeteer and Automaton, but I’ve seen enough of it that I feel like I understand how it works or doesn’t work and what the perks and limitations can be. There’s not a lot of clunky exposition, and yet it still gets the ideas across. This also does address more of Yaya’s character. As a Ban Doll who, despite being an automaton, has this mostly human body (Somewhere, as my title for the review suggests, between a cyborg and a form of undead creature like a Frankenstein’s Monster), Yaya is burdened with human-like thoughts and feelings, but at the same time she has a master without whom she’s incomplete. Even if this does give rise to a Yandere personality that’s largely just played for laughs and the occasional bout of fanservice, there’s a decent pathos to what she is that’s touched on and leveraged, but not thrown in our faces.

To an extent, I find I consider Unbreakable Machine-Doll to be something of a hidden gem. For what it is, this “battle school” scenario that’s often a “comfort food” or even “junk food” of anime, it’s remarkably well put together to be compelling and appealing on almost every level. But it is still something of a rough final production. The third arc, as I’ve mentioned, sometimes has some trouble with its storytelling, and when that’s an entire third of the show, it loses some points. Further, there are a number of things that are set up or established, but because this only covers three entries in a sixteen-entry (unless I’m very mistaken) series that was fairly inevitable. It’s not self-contained, and there’s a degree to which I feel like I watched a twelve episode trailer, in how its put together (a problem shared with, say, Gleipnir). On the other hand, there’s still plenty of meat here.

In the end, while Unbreakable Machine-Doll is a great blend, I feel like it doesn’t quite reach for excellence. It still sees itself as comfort food for the anime-watcher, something that gives you a little of everything you like, and even if it does have a high quality bar in that regard, I feel like it earns a B+ with little interest in pushing onward to A. It’s certainly a good show, and one that I hope more people watch to prove that there’s an interest in the property in the West, which it absolutely does deserve, but it’s here to entertain you rather than make you think or feel deeply.


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