Ro

There’s still a lot I’d like to say about this story, but I think the story itself speaks for itself, and it’s impossible to explain everything in writing. I wish I were as good as the author herself. It’s only by experiencing a story like this for yourself that you can truly appreciate its true value. In short, what I’m trying to say is... WATCH AND READ EIGHTY-SIX!!!!!

Ah man. Seriously, where do I even begin? I’ve watched enough mecha anime by now, not a huge list, but enough. Stories where kids in giant machines fight just to see the next sunrise because adults already made the mistakes, and now the young ones have to step up, bleed, and die for them. Those stories ruin me every time. They exist to leave a mark... If you still have a heart and any empathy left, they force you to feel how cheap human life can become, especially the lives of the younger generation who end up as the real casualties of wars they never started. The true of war are kids. That’s exactly why Eighty-Six hit me the way it did. It doesn’t sugarcoat a damn thing. It doesn’t paint one side as purely good and the other as cartoon evil. It just holds up a mirror. Those kids... The Eighty Six, are treated as disposable Processors. No names that matter. No futures. Just serial numbers and coffins that never come home. Once you strip someone of their identity and tell yourself they don’t count as people, it becomes easy to use them as assets. And that’s the horror the story refuses to look away from. Racism, systematic abandonment, propaganda that lets an entire nation sleep at night while children die in the mud, it’s all there, ugly and unflinching. There were moments I got so pissed off I had to pause. Not because the story was being cruel for shock value, but because the message is that sharp. I felt that the author, Asato, didn’t write this just to hurt the audience. She wrote it to wake them up, this is what happens when a war is allowed to grind on, when a country decides some lives are acceptable losses because those lives look different. How many fragile lives get spent every single day so the people with the right hair and skin can keep pretending they’re still the good guys? Who actually wins when people who share the same color of blood are throwing each other into the fire? That’s the question Eighty Six keeps asking. And that’s why it became important to me. It’s not just another tragedy designed to break your heart. It’s a story that looks you in the eye and asks whether you’re still willing to look away... One of the things I loved most about Eighty Six is how it forces you to witness the horrors of war through the eyes of children who were thrown into it with no one left to protect them but themselves. You watch their friends die one after another, teenagers with dreams, ambitions, and the fragile hope that if the war ever ends, someone with a heart might appear and help them live the ordinary lives they were denied. Then the story reminds you that they were never meant to survive in the first place. They are the Eighty Six... the Republic’s expendable outcasts, stripped of citizenship and humanity so San Magnolia can keep claiming it fights a clean, bloodless war with unmanned weapons. If any of them lived long enough to come home, they would have every reason to turn against the country that abandoned them to die. Why wouldn’t they? Seeing those harsh realities from their perspective makes it painfully clear how some of them lose all faith in humanity because this is how they were treated. The scars run so deep they may never fade, they will carry them for the rest of their lives. Eighty Six presents that truth with devastating honesty. It is not a happy story, because nothing about war is happy. People die. Even though it hurts to sit with this story all at once, I think you have to. That’s the only way to understand the horror it is trying to show.