Reviews – Page 24 – Diabolical Plots

BOOK REVIEW: Star Wars: Aftermath by Chuck Wendig

written by David Steffen

(note: I’m behind on posting my own reviews, I read this book and wrote this review a while ago, so references to the “The Force Awakens” movie being recent, etc are a symptom of that)

Aftermath is a Star Wars franchise tie-in novel written by Chuck Wendig and published in September 2015 by Del Rey. Since Disney decided to declare all of the pre-2014 novelizations as a separate timeline from The Force Awakens movie in 2015, Aftermath is one of the few novels in the official movie canon.

Aftermath picks up shortly after the original movie trilogy. The second Death Star has been destroyed. Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine are dead. The Empire is shaken and leaderless, but not gone (keep in mind that this book was published before The Force Awakens hit theaters, so we hadn’t yet met Kylo Ren and the First Order yet). The Rebel Alliance has become the New Republic, trying to restore as much order as possible in the wake of the conflict with the Empire.

The New Republic is seeking out the remnants of the Empire to keep them from regrouping. New Republic pilot Wedge Antilles, visiting planets on the outer fringe to seek out Imperial remnants, discovers exactly what he’s looking for on Akiva–a group of Star Destroyers gathered around a fringe planet–but he’s taken captive before he can broadcast a message to the New Republic. Broadcast frequencies have been jammed and the Imperials are closely monitoring traffic to ensure secrecy.

Former rebel fighter Norra Wexley returns home to Akiva after the war to reunite with the son that she left behind, not realizing that she is stepping into this secretive Imperial summit. Norra, her son, a bounty hunter, and an Imperial defector work together to find a way to fight back against this remnant of the Empire to interrupt it before it can gather its strength again.

I haven’t read a Star Wars novel since I was a teen, and I was happy to sink into the universe in print again, with the excitement of The Force Awakens movie still fresh in mind. I did read the book after seeing the movie, but I don’t think it made much difference in my appreciation for either one since Aftermath has very little character overlap with the movie.

It had some good action, fun sense of wonder tech stuff, space battles, fun banter, a few familiar characters, all what I would expect from a Star Wars book.

One thing that I thought was interesting about this book before I even read it was the angry reaction it spurred from a subset of fans who were upset at the acknowledgment of homosexuality in the Star Wars universe (and very excited reactions from a different subset of fans who were excited about the representation). I heard about it for months before I got around to reading the book and I was interested to see exactly what the portrayal of homosexuality was. The presence was so minor I’m not sure I would have even given it more than a passing thought, honestly, if it hadn’t been for the big to-do made about it ahead of time. I thought it was cool to see representation, no matter how minor, and I hope to see more.

All in all, I’d recommend it, and I’m looking forward to reading Chuck Wendig’s next Star Wars book installment. If you’ve seen The Force Awakens and you’re looking for a little something new in the new Star Wars universe (as opposed to the dozens of books that have been released over the past 40 years that have new been retconned out of the official universe) then you should give it a try.

Anime Review: ReLIFE

relife

Despite taking place mostly in a high school, ReLIFE seems to be designed to appeal to people in their twenties and thirties, following the misadventures of twenty-seven year old Arata Kaizaki.

Arata got out of grad school a little later than most, got his first job, and then quit after three months. Being twenty-seven and jack to show for work experience, he found himself completely unhireable by any white collar company. To make ends meet he ends up taking a part-time job at a convenience store which doesn’t pay enough to cover rent, and to make matters worse, his mom intents to cut off her support and have him move home.

His situation, being college educated and still struggling to obtain a full time job, is something easily relatable for anyone who’s been in a tough job market.

Fortunately for Arata, the ReLife company steps in and makes him a deal. They’re working on an experimental program to rehabilitate people who’ve fallen out of the job market, and they need test subjects. In exchange for being a program participant, Arata will be paid a full year’s worth of living expenses, and if the program is successful, he will also be given job opportunities.

Though initially skeptical, Arata ends up taking the program medication after a night’s drinking, and wakes up to find himself de-aged to seventeen. Initially he does not take this well, but considering his other options, he agrees to sign up.

The program sends him back to high school as a third year student (a senior in the US) where he will have to study and relearn what he’s lost. And it’s not simply the course material, which he’s completely forgotten like any other adult who’s been out of high school for ten years.

As we follow Arata’s adjustment to being a student in school, we see the difference in how he behaved as an adult, at the bottom of his company’s social hierarchy, and how he behaves as a student, where he feels free to say whatever is on his mind.

Watching Arata is the biggest joy in the series and the biggest source of comedy. At first it’s because he’s been out of school (and an adult) so long that he screws up things like forgetting to bring a pencil to class, bringing cigarettes to class, and worrying about outdated restrictions like whether it’s okay to bring cell phones to class.

But later, the fact Arata is twenty-seven makes a difference when it comes to friendships and his interactions with the other students. Because Arata is actually older, he pushes and encourages the teens around him to be more honest about their feelings and to step out of their comfort zones because he’s well aware that high school isn’t going to last forever.

The refreshing thing is that because he’s considered such a goof-up by his classmates (he’s forever in make-up test hell due to his grades) the exchange between him and his classmates feels equivalent. Arata may have more life experience, but he’s far from an older brother or mentor figure, and many times when he’s talking to them, he comes to realize how he may have failed in those very circumstances himself.

Arata is not the only adult character masquerading as a teenager in the story (he has ReLife support staff watching him too), and it’s interesting seeing the differences between how the adult characters pretending to be teenagers differ from the actual teenagers. None of the adults flat out behave as adults, but they’re much more inclined to act based what they think is the best action, where the teenagers tend to hesitate.

Unfortunately, the manga is still running and is only a handful of volumes in, so the ReLIFE anime doesn’t have anything close to an ending. The finish episode wraps up with a revelation about one of the characters and settles into a new normal as the credits roll.

It’s not particularly satisfying since this ends Arata’s story four months into his year as a high school student, but if one doesn’t mind the lack of an ending, it’s a fun watch.

Number of Episodes: 13

Pluses: painfully relatable for its target audience, adult perspective on high school hang-ups, Arata being a fish out of water

Minuses: whenever the show deviates from Arata and his immediate circle of friends, no ending, Arata’s ongoing incompetence at tests gets old after a while

ReLIFE is currently streaming at Crunchyroll and is available subtitled.

laurietom
Laurie Tom is a fantasy and science fiction writer based in southern California. Since she was a kid she has considered books, video games, and anime in roughly equal portions to be her primary source of entertainment. Laurie is a previous grand prize winner of Writers of the Future and since then her work has been published in Galaxy’s Edge, Strange Horizons, and the Year’s Best YA Speculative Fiction.

GAME REVIEW: Hacknet

written by David Steffen

hacknet >I need your help

>I have everything you’ll need

>I will teach you how to use it

>In exchange, I want you to find me

> My name is Bit

> And if you’re reading this

> I’m already dead.

This message, received out of the blue, marks the inciting action for the (mostly)-console-based white-hat hacking game Hacknet, published on Steam in August 2015 by Team Fractal Alligator.

The entire game interface takes place on a combination text console that’s made somewhat easier by the graphical interface. The text commands are Linux-based, so if you are familiar with Linux console commands then you’ve got a headstart on navigating the game world, but you do not have to be a computer expert to be able to pick up the game.

The automated message from Bit sets you on a mission to find out what happened to Bit. This is a rather roundabout mission, as it starts with you learning the console commands, working on simple hack missions, building the trust of hacking organizations, and gaining wider access and more powerful hacking tools.

The game gives the impression that it is written with real security principles in mind, and has some interesting points to make about bad security practices–i.e. choosing insecure passwords, reusing passwords, etc. But it’s certainly not a real-life hacking tutorial by any means. Most of the hacking procedures involve running executable programs that you have acquired either from the automated sending programs Bit left behind or from other sources–one program to break an FTP port, one program to break a web port, etc.

The game has some story, all centered around the central premise of hacking, as well as a fair amount of unrelated missions that you work through just to gain credibility with the hacking community. Since the player character has no backstory there is no story reveal there, you are who you are.

The game was generally pretty fun, though occasionally got a little repetitive. There were some particularly interesting missions, including one where you are forced to operate without the graphical interface, using the console only.

What really failed for the game is that there is a major unresolved bug that left me stuck in what would be an unwinnable state if not for walkthroughs. There are several stages of the game where you have to work on a list of missions given by hacker organizations to increase your credibility to a point where the next story mission can occur. These lists do not specify what order you must do the missions in the list, and when you pass the credibility threshold then the next story mission occurs immediately. Once that story mission starts, you can’t take any of the missions from the previous list, and you can’t cancel this mission to go back. So the issue happened when the story mission assumes you have a hacking utility program that you gained by doing one of the missions on the list. BUT THE GAME DOES NOT ENFORCE THAT YOU COMPLETE THE LISTED MISSION BEFORE THE STORY MISSION. So you end up on a long goose chase of a mission and have to hack into a computer, but you don’t have the right utility program to finish the job. It’s set up in such a way that it’s not super obvious that you are high and dry but I guessed that the programmers screwed up and found a walkthrough to confirm and to find a way around it. Without the walkthrough I would’ve had to restart the game and try not to repeat the mistake–with the walkthrough I could go to a particular IP address (which is only normally available as part of that mission) and could hack into it to get the hacking utility function.

That bug should’ve been found by the programming team, and should’ve been corrected by now. It should be a simple matter to correct–just don’t launch that story mission until the correct prerequisite mission is complete. Any competent tester would’ve found that dependency on their first try considering I wasn’t seeking bugs, I was just playing. This is embarrassing for the company and it makes me wary of getting other games from the company, even though I enjoyed playing this one overall.

Visuals
Almost nonexistent. The game allows different skins to be applied mid-game, but it’s mostly just color schemes and rearrangement of text information windows.

Audio
I don’t entirely know, I played it mostly without audio and didn’t experience a detriment from it.

Challenge
I think the game should be possible for someone with no programming or console experience, but I think it’s easier if you have some experience with that. The biggest challenge is trying to recognize when you’ve reached that unwinnable state and it’s time to find a walkthrough

Story
The story was okay. Nothing that I’d call exceptional, but it served the purpose of giving an excuse to do a bunch of hacking missions. The biggest sticking point is why Bit would, instead of reaching out to a friend, would send messages to a complete stranger who is completely unexperienced at hacking.

Session Time
Nice and short, just the way I like it. You can save and quit at almost any time.

Playability
Takes some learning to get all the console commands, and the few times that you have to use them at urgent speed might be very challenging for some. But I thought the game did a reasonable enough job teaching the navigation.

Replayability
If you don’t look up the walkthrough you’ll probably HAVE to replay to finish the game. And, completionists will probably have to replay multiple times because it doesn’t let you finish all the missions on a list before the story hijacks the mission list and then you can’t go back–the completionist in me found that kind of annoying as well.

Originality
I haven’t played another game based around hacking, nor working entirely through console commands (well, apart from old text-based adventures I suppose, but I mean where the console is actually an in-game console rather than just being the interface to a different kind of game).

Playtime
About 7 hours to finish according to Steam? That includes a fair amount of time trying to work around the game-halting bug..

Overall
Fun game, novel setup and interface, based around real Linux commands. The massive game-halting bug keeps me from really recommending it to anyone, unfortunately, and such lax game testing as that bug implies makes me wary of buying more games from this company again. $10 on Steam.

Anime Review: Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope’s Peak Academy – Despair

danganronpa 3 despair

Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope’s Peak Academy assumes familiarity with both with the original Danganronpa and Danganronpa 2 video games (the latter of which was never animated).

Because of this, this review will also assume familiarity with the franchise. Watching either Danganronpa 3 arc will be very difficult for the uninitiated, even if they’ve seen the first Danganronpa anime, and the Despair Arc in particular puts a large amount of focus on the cast of Danganronpa 2.

Despair Arc begins sometime in the middle of Class 77’s first year at Hope’s Peak Academy. This means that they have yet to meet Junko Enoshima (who will be in Class 78) and we get a chance to see them in their pre-corrupted personalities.

This arc unfortunately starts slow and the early episodes consist mostly of shenanigans that could only happen in such a wacky school for the supremely talented. If anything, Despair feels oddly constrained by events that have to happen to maintain continuity with the games’ backstories and to plug in gaps with Future Arc.

Though the initial focus is on Class 77 and the first episode makes it look like Despair is their story, the various classmates aren’t treated equally, and most of them don’t get much in the way of character development. Occasionally they disappear from an episode almost entirely. One of the most devastating events of their high school life that isn’t directly tied to the main plot (the Twilight Murder Syndrome story) is built up in a single episode following the POV of a character who wasn’t even involved, and then wrapped up off camera.

My two biggest issues with the Despair Arc are the lack of a cohesive story and the pacing, which likely stems from trying to fulfill too many functions.

Despair is not just the story of Class 77’s fall from grace. It’s also the story of the corruption of Hope’s Peak Academy and the Izuru Kamikura Project. And it’s the story of Junko Enoshima’s preparation for the most despair-inducing tragedy the world has ever seen. Though they all eventually get tied together because of Junko’s meddling there is no central cast to root for.

We’re essentially following the POVs of five groups of people (Class 77, Junko and Mukuro, Izuru/Hajime, Munakata and friends, and Principal Kirigiri’s group) for a total of 24 recurring characters who don’t always have much to do with each other. That’s a tall order for a 12 episode series that is also trying to fill in backstory for the Future Arc.

The second half of Despair ends up in a terrible hurry to get everything to happen and it’s unfortunate that in most cases, it falls on its face and the corruption of the Danganronpa 2 cast, which should have been the highlight of the prequel, ends up being the biggest letdown.

Junko certainly has some wicked moments that showcase just how devious she is, but she doesn’t quite reach the horrid peaks she had been built up to be in the game, the kind who can convince hundreds of people to kill themselves through sheer force of personality.

I suspect that Future Arc was scripted first and the reason for the odd pacing in Despair was to make sure that when something meaningful happened in Future there was a corresponding episode in Despair to expound upon it. Three of the Danganronpa 3 exclusive characters show up in just one episode of Despair and never return again, making their appearance a narrative anomaly. That episode was unsurprisingly sandwiched between two Future episodes that dealt with the conflict between the three.

Other parts of the series such as the student council killing game felt oddly done. We knew it needed to happen because it was mentioned in Danganronpa 2, but it didn’t feel like it happened naturally (though once underway it is incredibly gut-twisting and violent in a way that Danganronpa rarely is, because for once the brutality isn’t stylized).

Unlike the Future Arc I don’t think it’s possible to watch Despair as a stand alone. As a prequel it relies heavily on the audience being familiar with the cast, and Danganronpa 3 original characters sometimes pop in and out without much context. While Future viewers can appreciate them, they’re given little to no introduction for someone only watching Despair.

Even as a companion piece though, I find Despair difficult to recommend due to retcons and what may have been impossible to fulfill expectations. It has its moments, and the backstory for the Future Arc characters helps, but it doesn’t come together or offer nearly enough cohesion to be its own entity.

It’s worth mentioning that Funimation’s streaming service orders the Despair episodes as 1-11 and Future as 13-24. This is how they chronologically occur within the story. However, their airing order alternates starting with Future (so they aired 13, 1, 14, 2, 15, 3, etc). If viewed in airing order, the two arcs compliment each other with a plot thread raised in one storyline being immediately handled in another.

Episode 12 by the Funimation count is the Hope Arc, which closes off both the Future and Despair arcs and should only be watched after the end of Future. As far as Despair is concerned it’s more of an epilogue, since the story proper ends at 11.

Number of Episodes: 11 (12 if if Hope included)

Pluses: one more chance to spend time with old friends, Izuru’s motivation in Danganronpa 2 fleshed out

Minuses: more of a series of events than a plot, corruption of Class 77 handled poorly, divided focus between too many POVs

Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope’s Peak Academy is currently streaming at Funimation and is available both subtitled and dubbed. Funimation has licensed this for eventual retail distribution in the US.

MOVIE REVIEW: Arrival

written by David Steffen

Arrival is a science fiction first contact movie released in November 2016, which is based on the short story “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang. The movie stars Amy Adams, with Forest Whitaker and Jeremy Renner.

The movie begins shortly after 12 gigantic alien aircraft suddenly appear over various places around the globe, including one in the United States in an isolated spot in Montana. Linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams), struggling with memories of a lost daughter, is recruited by Army Colonel Weber (Whitaker) to find out why the aliens have come and what they want. Louise leads the team alongside Ian Donnelly, a theoretical physicist aiming to use science as the medium of communication. It’s a race against time, because the other 11 eleven alien vessels are communicating with the governments and militaries of other countries. Do they mean us harm? Are they willing to share their technology? Will they share weapons? What if they share weapons with all those they are in contact with? What if they share weapons with only some of them? What if the aliens support one country against another. The Army has set up protocols for the meetings, about what exact topics may be spoken of, and exactly how the aliens can be approached, but Louise is willing to take big risks to try to make a breakthrough happen. Meanwhile, as Louise becomes more and more fatigued from overworking, she struggles with memories of the loss of her daughter, coming to mind at odd moments.

This movie was very good and had me captivated throughout. The casting was great, and Amy Adams in particular did a solid job. The scenes in the aliens were the highlight of the movie for me, as one is watching their every movement and the team’s translations for signs of their intent, and the different concepts of the alien language were very interesting. I appreciated that the trailers for the movie were very low-key–they didn’t give me a particular feeling about whether the aliens were hostile or not, so I honestly had no idea whatsoever what to expect. For a movie like that, that’s what I really want, is to just find out as it happens with no advertising preconceptions.

I quite liked the special effects in the movie. They are not the most flashy, but I thought they did well to add to the aura of mystery around the aliens–these days I find flashy special effects rather boring, because they’re a dime a dozen, it’s nice to see some other effect wrought from them.

The only minor quibble that I had is that it uses the Sapir-Worf Hypothesis of linguistics to justify some parts of the movie, and by what I understand (as someone who is not a linguist) the hypothesis has been largely discredited based on lack of data support. But, it feels plausible to me, and works to me as a storytelling element, even if I was picking at that edge a little bit.

I haven’t read the short story that it’s based on, but I’ve heard that the movie did it justice reasonably well, and that it is one of Ted Chiang’s best. Saying that it’s “one of Ted Chiang’s best” is no minor feat–he is not prolific, but every story of his that I’ve read has been incredibly well done. You can read it as part of his collection Story of Your Life and Other Stories. I definitely need to read that.

I highly recommend the movie.

Anime Review: Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope’s Peak Academy – Future

written by Laurie Tom

danganronpa 3 future

Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope’s Peak Academy assumes familiarity with both with the original Danganronpa and Danganronpa 2 video games (the latter of which was never animated). For the Future Arc this also includes the interquel game Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls.

Because of this, this review will also assume familiarity with the franchise. Watching either Danganronpa 3 arc will be very difficult for the uninitiated, even if they’ve seen the first Danganronpa anime. The animation team knows their target audience and Danganronpa 3 – Future Arc is a murder filled send-off to a much loved cast of characters, as well as wrapping up the Hope’s Peak storyline.

Future Arc follows Makoto Naegi, the protagonist of the first Danganronpa, who has returned to the Future Foundation to face the music for his actions at the end of Danganronpa 2. Though the focus is on Makoto, and a lesser degree Kyoko Kirigiri and Aoi Asahina, rest assured that all six survivors of the original killing game put on an appearance.

Before the various division heads of the Future Foundation can decide on any punishment against Makoto, their secret headquarters is attacked by a missile-toting helicopter, which causes enough destruction to effectively seal them inside. If that wasn’t enough, their computer systems are hacked, preventing communication with the outside world, and the group of them are gassed unconscious. When they wake, a digital Monokuma appears on the monitor of their meeting room, revealing that he’s trapped them in a new killing game.

The biggest mystery is the identity of the new mastermind since the ones who began the first and second killing games should no longer be (directly) involved, though their legacies may well live on.

The previous two Danganronpa installments relied on individuals being willing to kill a stranger to achieve freedom, even if it meant leaving everyone else to die, but this killing game features a group of people trying to put the world back together after the greatest tragedy that has ever struck humanity. They’re supposed to be the world’s greatest hope, and they all know each other.

So the twist this time is that one of them is a traitor. Each of the fifteen people trapped inside is outfitted with a bracelet that serves a number of purposes. It tells them what their forbidden action is, and then will give them a lethal injection if they do it. More importantly, every two hours the bracelets will knock them unconscious with an anesthetic, with the exception of the traitor, who will then have free rein to kill someone.

Each cycle of unconsciousness will result in someone dying, unless the killer him/herself is killed first.

It’s like being trapped in a lethal version of the party game Werewolf or Mafia.

The mastermind clearly wants everyone at each other’s throats and encourages rampant paranoia. Killing the right person early will save more lives, but killing the wrong person raises the body count and brings horror and despair to the remaining individuals.

Danganronpa has always had a heavy hand in pitting the concepts of Hope and Despair against each other, and the symbolism in having the best hope for the world’s future falling into despair as they murder each other would be interesting if that hadn’t been the reason for the first killing game in Hope’s Peak Academy.

Fortunately, the cast makes up for it. I was concerned that there are sixteen participants listed, and we have just 12 episodes to the Future Arc, but as before, all the characters are distinctively designed and after a couple episodes it’s not hard to tell people apart or remember who they are due to their outsized personalities.

After the first two games the production team thought it would be too much to have another round of Hope’s Peak Academy students killing each other (and by then, inventing another excuse to use the class trial system might be pushing it) so they decided to tie off the storyline with an anime, and I think that was the right decision.

Future Arc follows some of the same narrative beats as the first game, but gets to do a lot of things a game can’t, such as offering multiple points of view. Things can happen simultaneously and stories can unfold without Makoto being in the thick of everything (though he is still very much in the crosshairs of far too many people), which results in earlier than expected reveals of critical information. It’s not enough to tip the reveal of the new mastermind too soon, but the pacing definitely picked up since there’s less of a need to set the stage or for a protagonist to get used to the new normal.

If there’s any fault in the Future Arc it’s that once the mastermind’s hand is revealed it’s a little hard to swallow, and those accustomed to poking out plot holes will likely find several that don’t quite add up.

While the identity and purpose of the mastermind is a nice Danganronpa style twist, the ending relies too much on information that’s been withheld to feel satisfactory, and worse, it removes agency from Makoto in favor of giving the audience some fanservice. Considering how much the poor guy has gone through both from the first game and now the concluding anime series, it feels like the final moment should have been his, and it wasn’t.

As a conclusion to the series, it’s definitely an ending with no leftover plot threads. As a killing game it’s a lot of fun to watch along and try to figure out the traitor. But as a story it can’t pull itself together in the end, and that’s unfortunate since there’s a lot of fun along the way.

It is mostly possible to watch the Future Arc without watching the Despair Arc, and that may have been intentional since fans are more likely to want to see the conclusion of the series than a prequel, but watching Despair does offer more backstory for the new characters, giving the audience additional time to get to know them that the killing game does not offer.

Episode 12 by the Funimation count is the Hope Arc, which closes off both the Future and Despair storylines and should only be watched after the end of Future. In fact it is the conclusion of the Future Arc and is not skippable.

Number of Episodes: 12 (13 if Hope included)

Pluses: interesting cast of characters, new killing game to puzzle through, fanservice when it’s done right

Minuses: fanservice when it gets in the way of the story, unsatisfactory red herring takes up part of the early plot, mastermind’s plan and real goal is needlessly complicated

Anime Review: 91 Days

written by Laurie Tom

91 days

91 Days is an anime love letter to mafia films. Set in the 1930s when Prohibition is in full effect, its cast is filled with gangsters and bootleggers, led by a protagonist on a single-minded quest for revenge. The haunting opening credits perfectly encapsulate the violent world that Avilio has chosen to inhabit, while showing the psychological toll his charade is costing him.

When I first started the series, I was a little concerned about how much I would like Avilio, born Angelo Lagusa. His father belonged to the Vanetti mob family and was killed along with the rest of his immediate family during a change of power. As a child, Angelo escaped the slaughter and then disappeared for seven years from everyone he knew, only to return at the start of the show because he receives a mysterious letter giving him the names of the men who murdered his family.

Now going by Avilio Bruno, he begins integrating himself into the Vanetti family so he can kill the men responsible.

Avilio is a laconic character and nigh undeterred, but he’s not without personality, and part of the reason I love the opening credits is because they allow the audience to see the inner conflict that must be happening before we can actually see it play out on screen. The title card for 91 Days even forms the space between the 9 and 1 with a silhouette of Avilio holding a gun behind his back. His revenge relies on keeping up his masquerade, that he’s a trusted friend and ally, while plotting the deaths of those he’s befriending.

But the masquerade is hard, and requires Avilio to be every bit as ruthless as the men he’s trying to bring down. Though Avilio doesn’t say much, and we aren’t privy to his inner thoughts, we can guess well enough that he doesn’t want to get to know his targets as people, and yet he has no choice but to do so if he’s to get close enough to the don himself.

He does this mostly through Nero, the son of the current don. After a quick dust up throws the two together, Avilio finds the opening he needs to become one of Nero’s most trusted subordinates. The two have a great chemistry together. Nero is boisterous and wears his heart on his sleeve, and Avilio is sulky and prone to doing rather than speaking. The biggest problem between them is that Nero is one of the men responsible for killing Avilio’s family.

In mafia media fashion, the gangsters are not all about shooting up other people, and have lives where they are also devoted family members, loyal friends, and religious even when they can’t stop sinning. The more Avilio sees during his time with Nero, the more the audience wonders if he’ll be willing to pull the trigger, knowing that he’ll destroy lives like they destroyed his own.

And yet, he stains his hands so early it becomes impossible for him to back out without consequences. It’s clear that Avilio is willing to accept some level of collateral damage if it gets him where he needs to be, and he lies and betrays as easily as breathing. Avilio never gets to the point of being completely unsympathetic, but many times the audience feels like Corteo, his friend and only confidante, watching Avilio slide deeper and deeper into a pit from which he might never return.

Though there are parts of the series that feel like they don’t belong in a period mafia show (the character Fango and the bounty hunter after Nero in the early episodes), every time 91 Days drops into a small town grocery store, or I look at how the characters dress, the detail grounds me in the setting again.

The biggest flaw in the series is probably its ending. After a pitch perfect lead-up to the finale, the final episode feels drawn out and ends ambiguously, which is disappointing for those who prefer something more concrete.

It’s thematically fitting, considering Avilio’s journey, but the result is an unsatisfying bump at the end of what has otherwise been an excellent series.

I would still recommend 91 Days though because it’s a fantastic mafia revenge story and it’s pleasantly self-contained since it’s not based on any other media. Avilio is a crafty protagonist who I never get tired of watching, and I like that we very rarely get inside his head. His actions speak in place of his words, and it’s a testament to the animation that we can feel for a protagonist who says so little.

Number of Episodes: 12

Pluses: perfectly captures the dissonance between a mafioso’s private and public life, Avilio is an extremely canny and interesting protagonist to watch, great sense of tension

Minuses: sometimes Avilio’s plans only work because other characters are too stupid, Corteo sometimes fades out of the story like the writers forgot him, ambiguous ending

91 Days is currently streaming at Crunchyroll and is available subtitled. Crunchyroll has licensed this for eventual retail distribution in the US.

TV Review: True Blood Season 7

written by David Steffen

True Blood was an HBO horror/mystery/romance series based on the Sookie Stackhouse series of novels by Charlaine Harris.

The series as a whole follows Sookie Stackhouse starting shortly after the major world event of vampires “coming out of the coffin”. Where, after a Japanese company perfects the production of synthetic blood branded Tru Blood, vampires reveal themselves to be real and begin to integrate with mainstream society. Sookie has always had mind-reading abilities which has made it difficult to keep a human relationship, so she is immediately drawn to the vampires which she can’t mindread.

True Blood Season 6 ended with a world-changing event, the release of the bio-engineered Hepatitis V virus. Based on a mutation of the Hep-D virus, which only weakens a vampire for a time, Hep V is a much more contagious and much more deadly strain. Humans who contract the virus show no symptoms, but any vampire that drinks their blood will also catch the virus which causes extreme weakening and eventually the true death. It was originally spread using tainted Tru Blood so not only are vampires in danger from the virus, they also have lost their synthetic food source.

The season starts 6 months after the end of the last season. Sam Merlotte has become mayor, and Hep-V infected vampires are roaming the countryside in packs. The human and vampire residents of Bon Temps make a pact to try to get through this difficult time in the hopes of finding a Hep-V cure and untainted Tru Blood production begins again–healthy vampires will protect humans from the ever-hungry Hep-V infected vampires, and the humans will in turn provide their own blood as a food source for the vampires. This situation, predictably, comes with a lot of tension built into it as many humans and vampires are not satisfied with the arrangement. A band of H-vamps crashes a human-vampire gathering in Bon Temps as the season begins, and drags away some humans for food.

Meanwhile, Eric Northman has been run off and hasn’t been seen again since the events of last season, and his progeny Pam is looking for him.

This being the final season of True Blood, the show does not pull any punches. Major characters die, and not always when you’re anticipating or in a way you might guess. There’s no telling who might survive and who won’t. The stakes are high as the rampaging H-Vamps are killing humans en masse just to survive, and any of the main vampires in the show could become infected and with no cure available that’s a death sentence. So much happens in just 10 episodes, and generally I thought they did well giving satisfying conclusions to the characters that felt internally consistent with their history. I’m not going to lie–I did cry in the final episode, and I’m not much of a crier.

Anime Review: Orange

written by Laurie Tom

orange

Orange is a romance/high school drama with a speculative twist. Sixteen-year-old Naho Takamiya discovers a letter from herself from ten years into that future that tells her to watch for a new transfer student, Kakeru Naruse, who will become one of her friends. Though happiness has not eluded future Naho, she has many regrets over things that she wishes her younger self had done differently.

As predicted, Kakeru joins her class that same day, and he’s quickly absorbed into Naho’s circle of friends (both male and female). Though she knows from her letter that Kakeru will not live to see the end of the school year, teenage Naho can’t help falling in love with him.

Orange at its best can be an emotional watch, not because we know that Kakeru does not exist ten years from now, but because his death didn’t have to happen, and we get a front row seat to all the missed moments that future Naho hopes to change to make a better future.

The bulk of the series takes place during Naho’s high school years, but there are periodic flash forwards that show future Naho and her high school friends ten years later, and the events that lead up to why she decides to send the letter.

Each episode the story weaves in what is currently happening to teenage Naho with adult Naho’s regrets and advice, and the combination works extremely well even when events begin to diverge. We know that teenage Naho keeps a diary, so it is not out of the question that the highly detailed letter from her future self is possible (getting events down to the day) because she was probably cross-referencing her diary when she sent it.

Interestingly, knowledge of the future doesn’t mean that Naho has an easy ability to change the past. Though teenage Naho changes small things early on, such as getting the nerve to participate as a pinch hitter for her friends’ softball team, she is still herself, with all the insecurities that come with being an introverted high school girl. Even with the prodding of her future self, she can’t always break free of her innate personality, and it’s clear that she’s trying the best she can.

Having been a painfully shy teenage girl, I completely understand that, and we see the younger Naho make mistakes that would be easily solvable by someone with a more aggressive personality, but that’s not her. Future Naho can tell her younger self to do things all she wants, but everything is easier in hindsight.

As for Kakeru, whose life and death is what sets this whole thing in motion, he’s his own character and not an idealized love interest. His story is woven, bit by bit into each episode, and not in a necessarily getting to know a person sort of way. A fair bit of the information comes from the future and those who’ve gathered to celebrate his birthday ten years after his passing. (I have to wonder if this is a Japanese thing, because this is not the first anime I’ve seen where friends gather for the birthday of a lost friend.)

Kakeru isn’t perfect and like Naho, feels a lot like a person we could have been or could have known in high school. He integrates well with Naho and her friends, and makes dumb mistakes like dating a girl he’s not really into just because she has a cute face. Among his more blockhead moments is being surprised that Naho would stop calling him in the morning to wake him up after he gets a girlfriend.

But Kakeru remains highly sympathetic, as the series readily shows us that people make mistakes, even when they have the best of intentions, and Kakeru is carrying a difficult weight that we don’t discover until well into the series.

The future Naho knows she can’t change her own past, and it’s made clear that Orange subscribes to the multiverse form of time travel, where changes made in the past simply spin off a different timeline. I don’t think her adult self is entirely unhappy in her present either, having started a family with Suwa, one of her other high school friends, but knowing that she could have changed things for the better makes it worth sending the letter even if she will never see the results of her work.

I enjoyed having the older versions of the characters around, as it’s possible to see how they’ve changed over the years. No one is unrecognizable, but they really do feel like older, more mature versions of their high school selves.

It’s also worth addressing potential concerns about Naho’s friend Suwa, who becomes her husband in the future, since he’s a key character in the present. It is tempting to think that Naho would rather have married Kakeru if he had lived, and that’s why she sent the letter, but it’s made clear that she deeply cares for Suwa, as her letter takes pains to ask her younger self to notice what Suwa does for her, and to not take him for granted.

Orange sags a little in its second half. Part of this is because it becomes increasingly obvious that Naho cannot tackle the goal of saving Kakeru by herself, but also because the show starts to worry about just how the letter got back to the past when it was better left unsaid. Though a speculative series by nature, Orange tries too hard to explain how the time travel could have happened at a time when the audience is already invested and doesn’t care.

Despite those stumbles, the show pulls itself together for a tearjerker of an ending that feels satisfying for the efforts of both Nahos. Tissues recommended.

Number of Episodes: 13

Pluses: Realistic depiction of depression, characters that feel like people we were or knew in high school without being stereotypes, how present and future stories are woven together

Minuses: Second half’s plot revelations seem a little contrived, some questionable decision making by characters (though generally forgivable due to their ages), doesn’t really address what life will be like post-ending

Orange is currently streaming at Crunchyroll and is available subtitled. Crunchyroll has licensed this for eventual retail distribution in the US.

BOOK REVIEW: FIX by Ferrett Steinmetz

written by David Steffen

FIX is the third book in the ‘Mancy series by Ferrett Steinmetz. Before I go any further, if you haven’t read the previous two books, FLEX and THE FLUX, I would recommend stopping now and consider reading the earlier books (I reviewed them here and here respectively). There’s been enough backstory and worldbuilding in the first two books that I think starting with the 3rd book might not be the best way to read the series, and it will spoil a bunch of the major plot moments in the first books as well.

The world of the series involves private, individual magic systems based on obsessions. If someone believes something strongly enough, the universe will change to accomodate those beliefs. But there’s a catch–every change to the natural world comes with a rebound of equal magnitude that comes in the form of bad luck, the flux. Small change, maybe your flux will make you stub your toe. Big change, maybe someone you or someone you love will die in a freak accident. Because of the unpredictable and dangerous nature of both the ‘mancy and the flux blowback, ‘mancy is illegal everywhere in the world, enforced by government controlled SMASH teams, using teams of brainwashed hivemind ‘mancers.

At the end of THE FLUX, the bureaucromancer Paul Tsabo and his family started an underground pro-mancy advocacy group. Along with him are his friend who had trained him in ‘mancy, the videogamemancer Valentine DiGriz, his daughter Aliyah who is also a videogamemancer, his wife Imani a former corporate lawyer who handles much of the planning, and Robert Paulson (Valentine’s boyfriend and former Fight-Club-‘mancer).

Because ‘mancy is illegal, they are constantly on the run, holding secret rallies while dodging SMASH raids. Eight years have passed since the last book, and Aliyah is 16 years old and would be in high school if she weren’t a known ‘mancer on the run. As the book starts, Aliyah’s family is trying to carve out a bit of normalcy for her in the world, letting her join a soccer team in a small town in Kentucky. But what starts out as a pleasant if nervous day quickly goes south and they find themselves on the run again.

This book does get quite a bit darker than the previous two. The stakes are higher and the dark moments are darker. It all makes sense as an escalation of the series, since the last book had ended with the group of characters secretly having ‘mancy powers to being actively hunted by SMASH. But the stakes are raised in other ways that I don’t want to get too much into here because there are a lot of surprised in the plot.

As with the previous books, one of the big appeals for me is the videogamemancy–Valentine DiGriz is of an age where she grew up on many of the video games that I grew up on, and in these books she uses them very effectively for magic (most often offensive magic). But Paul’s bureaucromancy has an appeal of its own–subtle and whisper-quiet where Valentine’s is loud and flashy and explosive. And you never know what kind of ‘mancer you’re going to meet next, since each completely defines their own magic system with the only common element being the flux.

I love all three of these books. I cannot recommend them enough. This one is even more epic and heartbreaking and wonderful and amazing than the others. Ferrett is one of the few authors that I’ll just buy anything they write sight unseen without any blurb or recommendation because he’s just that damned good, and this book is no exception.