A lot of shows try to be more than one
thing. It makes sense, letting them find appeal on some tracks even
if others fall through. And all too often, reaching for more than
was necessary causes the work to fail on all marks. Similarly, you
sometimes get shows that aren’t smart, but want you to think they
are, resulting in a pretentious mess that didn’t need to be one and
could have worked if it embraced a simple core. These are pretty
common results.
Arpeggio of Blue Steel is exactly the
opposite of that. It’s a show that reaches for a couple of things,
but achieves them all as well as it was going to. And it’s a show
that has a very intelligent core, but while not exactly being ashamed
of its intelligence largely doesn’t draw attention to it, being
humble rather than pretentious. It’s not a masterpiece by any means,
but it’s worth some deeper investigation.
The basic story of Arpeggio is this:
Some time ago, a mysterious force known as the Fleet of Fog appeared
with ultra-high technology and forms based on WWII Warships – and
before you ask, no, we never get an answer as to why any of this –
and seized control of the oceans. Humanity’s naval forces were
defeated in a catastrophic battle, and mankind is now more or less
landlocked and suffering bitterly because of it. There is, however,
hope on the horizon: Japan has developed the Vibration Warhead, a
weapon capable of defeating Fog forces. However, Japan lacks the
industrial capacity to mass-produce Vibration Warheads in their
current blockaded state, and so the prototype needs to be taken
across the Pacific to the Americans, who should be able make enough
of them to really ruin the Fog’s day.
Of course, by the very nature of the
problem the Vibration Warhead is intended to solve, this is easier
said than done. Enter our main characters. The first is Chihaya
Gunzou: a young man of decent cleverness and character thrust into
the perfect position to act as a blockade-running privateer thanks to
our other primary lead. Iona, aka I-401, is a Fog Submarine who
defected from her fleet for unknown reasons but a simple purpose:
accept Chihaya Gunzo as her captain and serve him faithfully. And
before you ask, no, we never get an answer as to why. I-401, being a
Fog ship herself, is capable of taking on the Fog on their own terms,
and is thus the only hope for getting the Vibration Warhead to
America.
Iona – and many of the of the other
Fog ships we see throughout the show – manifests what’s called a
“mental model”: a humanoid form with unique cognition and the
ability to interact as humans do, rather than simply existing as an
automated nanomachine ghost ship. Quite naturally, they’re all cute
girls. And before you ask… we actually do get answers for this
one. Good answers, even thought-provoking answers that do a lot of
the work of taking Arpeggio of Blue Steel above and beyond the state
of a formulaic harrowing road trip. This is the material I want most
to go into detail on.
Mostly because… there isn’t a lot of
point going into depth on the surface level of the Vibration Warhead
plot. Gunzo needs to get from point A to point B and has to fight a
series of increasingly threatening enemies in order to do so. The
battles are well-designed and thought out carefully, but the story of
the trip is really basic stuff. We do get a couple twists thrown in,
but those tie in with the better psychological and science fiction
stuff as well, so I might as well address them there. That’s not to
say the main plot is bad, it’s just super-standard and not what makes
the show interesting.
The interesting part is what it does
with the characters and the concept of what it means to be human.
Let’s start with the answers I said we’d get earlier. First of all,
the Fog takes female (feminine?) forms because human cultures (and
I’m aware not all of them, but this is the excuse given in the show)
refer to ships as ‘she’. Which underlies the answer of why they form
Mental Models at all: the Fog is attempting to learn from humans by
this imitation. And you may ask yourself, “Didn’t the Fog kick
humanity’s ass?”. Yes they did, but they did it because they had
an overwhelming technological advantage. Human tactics were,
apparently, far better than the brute force solutions (in both the
battlefield and computing senses) that the Fog employed. Not enough
to win years in the past, but enough that the battle would be
one-sided in the opposite direction if the Fog’s edge in weaponry
were to decay. The Fog recognized this before it became reality in
the form of the Vibration Warhead, and some high-level Fog ships
adopted the extremely human-like Mental Models in order to comprehend
(and gain the benefits of) human thought.
This is actually a clever idea. It
establishes a strong identity for the Fog as AI entities even if they
are capable of adapting, gives us a reason why our lead (explicitly
an expert tactician) can triumph over Fog ships in defiance of
extremely unfavorable odds, and it underscores the main conflict of
the show. The main conflict, really, isn’t getting the Vibration
Warhead to America, but rather the Fog’s struggle between what it
means to be like humans and what it means to simply be human,
grappling with their concepts of purpose and identity.
All the Fog characters that take human
form are, ultimately, ‘infected’ by humanity in lesser or greater
degrees. In seeking to capture the human ability to improvise, they
also gain the baggage of human emotions, losing the machine
rationality that had previously governed their actions through the
enigmatic “Admiralty Code” that the Fog allegedly adheres to.
For the most part, each of the Fog
ships we see seems to take a different journey. Some are similar
beyond the details, while others represent largely different branches
in their approach.
Iona is the most basic. She starts the
show already “converted” in essence, though she does have some
work to do getting used to feeling and thinking like a human. Her
arc is one of quiet discovery, as she learns what it means to ‘want’
and to have more of a ‘self’ than the mechanical baseline of the Fog
are implied to have. She starts the show expressing few desires
other than to serve her purpose (in that way being similar to the
orthodox Fog), but ultimately becomes something of a guide for the
other Fog ships to understand what they’re going through.
Takao, on the other hand, is probably
my favorite of the lot, because she has the best studied journey from
“Soldier of the Fog” to “Person” alongside being in many ways
the perfect execution of the Tsundere. Takao (like most of the Fog
ships) starts the show as an enemy; she’s the first Fog Mental Model
that Iona and her crew fight against in the show’s running time. In
the final moment of battle, Gunzo chooses to spare Takao’s life, and
that catalyzes her defection from the Fog. The thing is, it’s not a
fast process. She becomes fascinated with Gunzo, and the idea of
‘having a captain’ (the difference that allowed a ‘lowly’ submarine
like I-401 defeat a Heavy Cruiser like Takao). The more she dwells
on her fascination, seeking out human culture to understand what her
desires mean, the more her interests transform. What starts as the
basic Mental Model drive to self-improve by gaining human tactical
superiority morphs in a desire for another. As Takao embraces more
and more of her humanity, whether she realizes it or not, how you can
define her interest shifts. By the midpoint of the show her desire
is clearly personal – she does not want to “gain human-like
tactical ability” or even simply “have a captain”, she wants
Gunzo. Her desire takes on tones and terms of affection, possibly
even of lust. There’s a brilliantly funny moment where we cut to her
hugging a home-made body pillow of Gunzo, but it’s more poignant when
you think about it in the wider context, because it shows how far
beyond what should be her parameters Takao has gone.
After she joins forces with Gunzo,
helping escort him and I-401 past a Fog blockade and onward to
America, she becomes more in-tune with her desires, until you really
can finally describe what she feels as “love” – something that
even more than personal desire or lust should be anathema to the
orthodox Fog. Towards the end of the show, Takao has to sacrifice
her corporeal existence to save Iona and Gunzo (though her core
survives, so her sacrifice needn’t and as of the denoument clearly
wasn’t permanent). And you might think that’s not anything
particularly special: the baseline as Fog, the ships without Mental
Models like the countless Nagara copies we see throughout the show,
are war machines and must necessarily be willing to ‘die’ for their
mission, especially when they have no sense of tactics. Takao’s
sacrifice is different, however, because it has nothing to do with
her mission, not any mission she could have. Takao gives of herself
because she wants what’s best for Gunzo in defiance of any mission
objectives or even at the cost of her other interests. She acts out
of a pure, human love and that’s not something the Fog were really
prepared for.
I called Takao the perfect Tsundere and
this is why – the essence of the Tsundere is that she is prickly
(running hot; Tsun) on the outside while being sweet and affectionate
(dere) on the inside. Now, you can have Tsundere characters who
don’t really have arcs, but there is a conflict and motion implied in
the very setup. That is, a Tsundere lashes out at her love interest
because she can’t be honest with her feelings. There are many
reasons for this, like pride or circumstance, but ultimately the best
path for a Tsundere is to gain the self-knowledge and understanding
of her own feelings that she clearly starts out lacking, the dearth
of which drives her paradoxical behavior. As such, for a Tsundere to
undergo character development, she normally should follow a journey
of self discovery, at the end of which she may keep a sharp tongue or
a hot temper, but with a new understanding of what her feelings mean.
For Takao, this arc is essentially baked in to her very character.
It is exaggerated, and important, and deserves even more focus than
usual. Takao starts out not ‘in touch’ with her feelings because
they are very literally new to her, in a more profound way than a
teen experiencing her first crush. She embarks on that journey of
self-discovery willingly, and while her path isn’t necessarily easy,
she does follow it. She engages in most of the Tsundere tropes, but
they’re beautifully justified because they feed into and are fed by
the “machine or human?” dilemma that the Fog ships all
experience. Everything about her is built to execute the Tsundere
arc in a way that’s made more logical by its setting and that its
setting makes more relevant. I’m not saying she’s the best written
Tsundere ever (she’s not), I’m saying she is 100% good Tsundere
material and it manages to be 100% integrated into every other major
theme of the show that she touches. Perhaps “perfect” was the
wrong word – you could say instead that she’s the Platonic Ideal of
the Developed Tsundere, and that might be a little closer.
All the same, she’s fun to watch.
Hyuuga, Kirishima, and Haruna are
perhaps not as well-explored as the other Fog ships, so I’ll cover
them briefly. Hyuuga is also consumed by something like ‘love’
(though her form is more twisted and cartoonish than Takao’s), in her
case a worshipful attitude towards but Iona. Kirishima and Haruna
both begin their defection out of a sense of loyalty (something that
doesn’t seem foreign to the Fog), and while there’s some good play
with the fact that Kirishima is trapped in the body of a teddy bear,
it’s mostly played for laughs. Their arc seems to be roughly
following Iona’s, but with an extra element of choice. Iona was
guided to follow Gunzo, it’s her overriding purpose in the beginning
the same way that the Admiralty Code is for the orthodox Fog. By
contrast, Haruna and Kirishima protect the character Makie (herself
an interesting study who I will be getting to in good time) of their
own free will. Whatever the emotion that motivates them, their
ability to select their own paths is what puts them at odds with the
Fog, which would normally be bound to strict rules of behavior by the
Admiralty Code.
Iona’s sisters, I-400 and I-402 are
another story. Their arc is short, since they get one focal episode
and not too terribly much screen time outside of it, but also fairly
important. The submarine sisters begin their existence as the
‘model’ we have for the most orthodox of the orthodox Fog; while
Kongou and to a lesser extent Maya are our starting faces for the
faction, the fact that they’re ‘off’ in their own ways is evident to
the audience before it’s made explicit. The sisters, though, with
their flat affects and eerie similarity to one another in both
appearance (shared with Iona) and manner is the picture of what you’d
‘expect’ out of the Fog as machines predicated on hard-coded logic.
However, in their final battle with Iona they challenge her not just
by shooting torpedos like every Fog foe so far has done, but by
addressing her on a human level, and undermining her belief in
herself and her actions. In their dying moments, their unique
characters are revealed, but the fact that they could come at Iona in
the mental realm the way they did says a lot.
What also says a lot about the
submarines is Maya. The heavy cruiser Maya is presented at the start
of the show as another Mental Model, and the right-hand ship of main
antagonist Kongou. However, it’s revealed very late on that the Fog
ship Maya does not, in fact, have a Mental Model. The Maya we’d been
seeing throughout the show was nothing more than a simulation being
run by I-400 and I-402 as a covert way of keeping eyes on Kongou;
once the rug is pulled, ‘Maya’ can’t even pass a basic Turing Test.
You could argue that the show may not
have been clever enough to think through this next bit of
speculation, but I choose to give it the benefit of the doubt:
creators tend to put something of themselves into their creations.
Maya’s script (or the code that generated it) had to be created by
the submarines, which means Maya would have to be something within
their experience and comprehension. You would expect, working
backwards from the truth rather than having it as a twist, that Maya
would therefore share a lot of their traits. The traits we see the
submarines exhibit until the end are, again, that flat affect and
stilted robotic manner. The traits that Maya exhibits are anything
but. Maya is quirky, upbeat, and emotive. She seems to display
curiosity and while her advice might be tailored to keep Kongou ‘on
the right path’ her nature is somewhere between skew to the ideals of
the Fog and downright contrary to it. It helps her purpose, because
Kongou comes to consider Maya a friend (even if she wouldn’t use such
a human term for the majority of the show’s run), but where did her
creators get it? We know the Fog aren’t used to emotions (corrupted
Mental Models being an emerging problem) and we know the Fog have
trouble innovating on their own (hence their lack of tactics), so
I-400 and I-402 must have been advanced enough in their emotional
intelligence to create Maya’s personality from themselves.
In essence, I feel like I-400 and I-402
are the “successful” Mental Models. Even when they finally
reveal their feelings, they’re zealously loyal to the Admiralty Code
in a way even Kongou ultimately isn’t. But in possessing the ability
to create a personality that is convincing and unlike themselves and
use that image to deceive, they display a much more advanced
emotional intelligence than any of the other Fog ships (who are
mostly figuring things out as we go along through the show). Most
Fog ships seem to be pretty bad liars. Haruna and Kirishima can
conceal facts they know need to be concealed and Takao can say one
thing while meaning another (being a Tsundere and all) but they’re
all largely pretty transparent. I-400 and I-402 are masterful liars,
capable of weaving a complex fiction for both short and long term
considerations. They understand what the Fog wanted to understand
out of the human condition; how to use it to fight, both physically
and in the emerging battlefield of information and emotion.
And while they’re loyal and ‘orthodox’,
even they are at least a tiny bit compromised.
The last Fog ship that bears mentioning
is Kongou herself. Kongou, like Takao and Hyuuga, gains an
overriding obsession. Unlike those other two, her key emotion is
hate. Kongou believes in the Fog and that she is what, in effect,
the submarine duo really are: a Mental Model with the ability to
champion the Admiralty Code. As she sees the Fog changing through
interaction with Gunzo (and humanity in general) she comes to blame
him for this turn of events, and pursue him with a wrath that blinds
her to the fact that she is changing too, just in a different way
from the others.
The Submarine duo is not so blind as
Kongou; they use Maya to keep tabs on her, and when she proves too
unstable, they restrain her and go on the hunt against Iona
themselves. We then get into some of the best stuff out of Arpeggio:
the climax.
Throughout the show, the fighting was
fairly good. Arpeggio features a military commander as its main
character, and as is fitting it gives a lot of attention to tactics.
Not every fight is a high-end winner (for sure, the ship battles are
much better than any action that happens to go down while characters
are on foot instead), but they do it pretty well. That said, it
would be pretty easy to try to add drama by just scaling up the
threat. The first major naval battle of the show is against Takao (a
Heavy Cruiser); the next is against Haruna and Kirishima (Fast
battleships, which are larger and theoretically more dangerous as
well as there being two of them). The escape sequence once again
features numerous opponents, and the characters don’t actually defeat
their foes. It’s once again scaled up from what we saw before.
So, when Kongou goes mad, absorbs Maya,
and comes after Gunzo not in the shape of a ship but a flying
battlestation reminiscent of the Death Star, it would have been an
alright climax to just blow up the big metal ball and let that be
that. Arpeggio, however, is not willing to settle for that.
Instead, the climax owns up to the more
interesting side of Arpeggio’s material. There is a battle against
Kongou’s sphere of doom, though the struggle is largely framed as a
struggle to survive, but the real battle is a mental and emotional
contest between Iona and Kongou, with Iona struggling to save Kongou
from self-destruction and insanity.
The fact that the climax is a struggle
to save Kongou (rather than defeat her, though the two causes do
align) and predicated in psychology rather than just tactics, is a
pretty bold move for a show that despite its intelligence hadn’t
really come off as fond of bold moves. It’s an excellent sequence,
depicting a physical battle alongside a battle of wills, with good
action and some creative visual wonder. Despite that, there is a
part of me that feels like it’s a little bit cheap to have Kongou
reach an epiphany about herself that erases her hostility, when that
hostility was a big part of making her a person. But while there
would be something to be said for Kongou going down like Captain
Ahab, I accept her redemption. This is in large part because I-400
and I-402 went down swinging, and how the loss of her sisters hit
Iona. Essentially, the deaths of the submarines would have been
wasted if Kongou fell too, since it was their fate that galvanized
Iona into making an insanely risky play to not see another sapient
being meet the same fate. I have to appreciate that it’s not just
forgotten the episode after they fall that killing Mental Models is a
big deal for Iona
While that’s the rundown of the Fog and
the plot, there is one more character who’s worth mentioning: Makie.
Makie is a little girl we meet about halfway through the show, and
escorting her becomes something of a subplot. She befriends Haruna
and Kirishima, doing a lot about bringing them into the human fold.
She also happens to be the inventor of the Vibration Warhead – a
weird feather in the cap of someone who doesn’t look to be out of
grade school. She also happens to not quite be human.
If the Mental Models are the Fog’s
attempt to become more like humans and gain our ‘powers’, Makie is
humanity doing the same thing back at the fog. She’s an artificial
person, grown in a lab and designed for a purpose, and while she’s
the experimental unit that lived she’s still something of a buggy
beta build: endowed with superhuman intellect (hence her
scientific/engineering achievements at such an early age) but stuck
with a rigorous course of medication to keep living. In some ways,
this isn’t unlike the Mental Models. If the defection of the
majority of them is anything to go by, they’ve got some pretty big
bugs to overcome… but the core principle is the same.
For me, this means that one of Arpeggio’s big theme, perhaps the biggest one is this: “What counts as a person?” The human characters are torn on Makie – some (like her ‘father’) see her as a real person, but military brass sees her in essentially the same light as they would a supercomputer. More individuals would probably discount the Mental Models, who aren’t even remotely human even if they have human forms. However, over the course of the show, you come to empathize with them as they grow and change, leading up to Kongou’s redemption. The Fog, of course, has a different inside-versus-outside and ethics with a fundamentally alien basis in the ‘Admiralty Code’. Yet even there, they have disagreements. Haruna and Kirishima accept Makie as a person worthy of their care and respect, while on the other side the submarines see Maya as nothing more than a tool, while Kongou saw her as a friend. Or at least as enough of a person to call out to her while taking on the final form that would incorporate her nanomaterials.
When all is said and done, though…
Arpeggio of Blue Steel is only an alright show. It’s certainly got a
lot of fascinating stuff in it, and it sure as hell isn’t bad.
However, it doesn’t exactly go all the way with its ideas. A lot of
what I’ve written required reading between the lines, and while it’s
great that a show can prompt me to do that, a better production would
encourage it, and not just for someone who has a pre-existing
interest to go hunting for the discussion. Arpeggio, as I said at
the start, doesn’t exactly feel like it’s ashamed of having a lot of
intelligence in its setup and skeleton, it doesn’t really want to
indulge it either.
For all the genius ideas and
thought-provoking turns in Arpeggio, there’s also a lot of bog
standard stuff. Most of Hyuuga’s comedy, while a welcome break from
doom and gloom, is really cliched, and while Takao may be weirdly
great as the ideal model of the Tsundere, there’s a degree to which
she’s checking boxes as well. The writers even manage to fit in
“must have” elements that they really didn’t have to have, like a
beach episode. Most episodes are more concerned with combat tactics
(which are, again, done well) or weak cloak-and-dagger maneuvering
with the human government we don’t really care about than they are
with the inner workings of the Fog and the questions of what it means
to be intelligent or human. The last couple episodes are better on
that (including the battle with the subs, Takao’s sacrifice, and the
final confrontation with Kongou), but there’s a lot of wasted time.
Worst (or at least lamest) of all are the human characters. Yeah,
Gunzo technically has a crew of his friends along with him but
really, I don’t remember any of them by name or attitude. Their
visual styles were done alright: I remember Gunzo had Asuka Langley
as an engineer, a guy with a cool robot mask, and Lucio from
Overwatch on his team, but I am at a total loss for anything those
characters contributed at any point. They didn’t have anything to do
in the plot, they didn’t help further the themes or ideas of the
show, and they didn’t even manage to develop themselves as even
mildly interesting. I think red shirts in Star Trek had more
personality than these guys.
So, while I do think Arpeggio of Blue
Steel is worth attention, and worth a watch… it’s not really worth
a HIGH rating. On the whole, it’s a decent B-. There’s some A+ work
in there, but its held together by so much bottom-end-of-C work that
the whole thing just washes out to average. Still, if you want a
show that will reward effort spent thinking about it, even if you
sometimes suspect you’re giving it more thought than the creators
did, give Arpeggio of Blue Steel a watch.