The Republic of San Magnolia is locked in a seemingly endless war with their neighbor the Giadian Empire, who has sent countless, unmanned drones to harass their borders and covered the sky in anti-communication chaff, locking San Magnolia away from the rest of the world.
But where the Giadians send in their best weapons San Magnolia sends in their unwanted: all people with non, pure-blooded Alba ancestry are rounded up, sent to concentration camps, and lured into piloting San Magnolia’s under-designed defense weapons with a promise of freedom. Nine years have gone by since this war started and neither Lena nor Shin, an Alba officer in the nation’s capital and an “Eighty-Six” on the most dangerous frontlines, have ever met another member of San Magnolia’s military quite like each other and may even come to trust each other in this life or death daily struggle.
I can certainly see why this series has left such an impression on some groups of people in the light novel community on both sides of the Pacific; relatively few war story light novels get brought over in English compared to more general fantasy works and 86, named for the citizens of San Magnolia who have been stripped of everything and sent to an area outside of the county’s eighty-five Republic sectors, almost seems to revel in its decidedly un-fantastical tone. This “grimdark” tone establishes itself immediately and just as quickly will let you know if this is the kind of story you’ll eat up or one that you’ll roll your eyes at. 86 seems to be aiming to drag out the most intense emotions it can out of its readers by putting its (86) characters through terrible situations without pause; sometimes this light novel comes off as biting sarcasm on the nature of hierarchical command in war and other times, but too often, it gets bogged down in what I would metaphorically term “torture porn” where the characters are suffering just because Asato felt like there needed to be more of it.
A huge driving force in 86 are the members of the 86 themselves and the logic behind their abuse at the hands of the pure-blooded Alba elite class. As someone who is a citizen of a country that has done a similarly horrifying thing, I found that the progression of events leading up to this story-establishing event, or rather the lack of them, to be a completely immersion-breaking situation for me. Before the federally-ordered detainment of Japanese-Americans in 1942, there was the school segregation crisis in San Fransisco of 1906, which helped lead to the informal Gentleman’s Agreement of 1907, which was never ratified but was supplanted anyway by the Immigration Act of 1924 including the Asian Exclusion Act and National Origins Act. This isn’t even all of the laws pertaining specifically to Japanese-American discrimination in this time period, not to mention racism in the general population as well.
My point is: racism, especially big government acts of racism, VERY rarely occurs in a vacuum, and yet it feels like Asato spends so much time trying to convey that oh no, this semi-indirect form of genocide came out of nowhere! This idea, even in fiction, is one I find dangerous since it encourages people to tell themselves that there is nothing ordinary citizens can do to prevent terrible acts of violence, current events contrary, and in the case of 86 it feels like mostly unimaginative writing to boot.
This may actually be a case of unreliable, or really a too-young, narrators: both Lena and Shin were still children when the war and round-ups of 86 started so it’s genuinely possible that they were unaware of other acts of government-sanctioned racism. However that’s an idea I came to on my own, not supported in the text, so I don’t believe that’s what Asato has in mind. I believe that Asato was trying to create a very “realistic” set-up to this war story in order to further tug at the readers heartstrings as the 86 fight and die in a seemingly helpless (and possibly meaningless) war, and yet these half-assed, villainous government officials, who don’t even care that they are knowingly running out of soldiers, know that they have been outgunned since the beginning, and are aware that they will face war crimes from other nations if the war ever ends, set a very different tone indeed. Again, I’m tempted to wonder if these government officials were meant to be written as characters who had lost their minds and are actually engaging in a kind of suicidal behavior, not truly expecting to get out of this war alive, but that would be another interpretation which is literally not supported by anything in the text.
I actually am okay with the fact that the motivations of the Giadian Empire remain mysterious, since I knew the war wouldn’t be over in one book and on some level the reason behind this war doesn’t matter for the story — what matters is that there is inescapable conflict for the characters to be trapped in. That does make me curious about the volumes two and three two-parter, which features at least a partial change in scenery, but it sounds as if the actual fandom for 86 doesn’t like that part of the story as much so we shall see. It’s a story with potential but, by the time a story comes to me in edited, polished, and printed form I expect to find more than “potential” on the page.