Having incredibly escaped with their lives, Shin and the rest of the Spearhead Squadron find themselves in the Federal Republic of Giad, a country that sprung from the ashes of the mighty Giadian Empire that unleashed the Legion menace across the land. For the first time in their lives these teens know peace, far back from the front lines, but trauma doesn’t fade so easily, and soon they find themselves returning to the fight and against the Legion’s mightiest weapon yet.
The first volume ended rather bombastically: the Legion have overtaken the Republic of San Magnolia and the only reason the nation still stands in any form is the result of Lena managing to rally some of the 86, thanks to her preparations for this day, and managing to hold out until some of the other nations arrive to help and culminating in the first time she meets Shun face to face. I liked the image of Lena we had in that epilogue, someone in a true underdog fight (unlike the 86 members of the cast she doesn’t have any kind of mech to fight in) and was curious how things would go in San Magnolia after they had arguably lost their most valuable fighter in the form of Shin.
Sadly, that is not the story we get here. The end of volume 3 connects us back to volume 1’s epilogue but other than that the story is solely focused on the members of the Spearhead Squadron who have managed to make it to Giad and continue to fight against the Legion. By which I mean, at least 70% of these two volumes is “being Shin is suffering” and frankly it’s rather tedious without another an additional point of view, like Lena’s, to balance the nihilism out.
In my professional life, I found it a bit amusing that I was reading a “gritty, horrors of war” story at the same time I was transcribing letters written to and from World War II soldiers during the height of American involvement in the war and how utterly unlike these real-life experiences 86 actually was. For starters, there’s an old saying along the lines of “war is boredom 24/7 and 30 minutes of sheer terror” and I think creator Asato Asato has that idea reversed in 86. Any moment of calm, of which there aren’t many, feels like it exists solely to further highlight how grim the fight against the Legion is; Shin even experiences the death of someone close to him in volume 2 and his reaction feels very emotionally “unearned.” It’s not until much later in this two-parter that a flashback with this character is shoehorned in to actually give meaning to this relationship and context to why this particular death seems to have Shin shaken up.
While you could make an argument about how fiction isn’t so much an attempt at mimicking reality but rather an attempt to selectively improvise off of it, the lack of even the clichéd “final light-hearted moment before things get really dark” felt like a misstep to me. There is no boredom in Shin’s life, or any of the myriad things I’ve come across in real letters: no booze-filled furloughs across Sydney, no unflattering artwork shared between friends, no accidents with flamethrowers, and certainly no liaisons at all since that would involve having Shin actually interact with non-plot important characters. Being in Giad does force a few new characters into the mix but the one who gets the most time, the team’s “mascot” Frederica, felt like a bizarre inclusion and she could have been replaced with a non-sentient object for at least half of her scenes without affecting the story at all which is a bad sign. She is important for Plot Reasons but the ham-fisted explanations for why this pre-teen thinks and acts like an adult made it feel like Asato was a little lost while writing this two-parter.
Speaking of characters, I was a bit puzzled by some of Shirabii’s color illustrations at the beginning of each volume; it’s explicitly stated that Lena has a red streak in her hair (as a symbol for having “killed” the Spearhead squadron, a bit emo but perfectly acceptable for a teenager under this much strain) but it never appears in any of the artwork. Also, in volume 3 one of the two page, color spreads depicts Frederica at the climax of the volume but the scene seems to play out differently and less dramatically in the illustration. I don’t know if the story changed after the illustration was started or what but both of these things were differences I noticed immediately and it baffled me.
On a less visual note, while my suspension of disbelief was already being stretched thin by 86‘s claim to be a “serious, gritty war story” it was almost entirely broken with the reveal that Shin doesn’t just have special esper powers, he has special powers because he’s the result of a forbidden union between the two greatest soldiers Giad ever had and at that point I concluded that another moniker, like “war porn” is more apt for the series.
I have heard from some fans of the series that they did not like volumes 2 and 3 as much as they liked the other volumes and that volume 4 was an uptick in the series (I don’t know if Lena rejoins the story as an additional point of view but I hope so since again, Shin as the sole protagonist is just too nihilist). However, as I think it’s clear, I won’t be coming back for volume 4; I imagine I’ll hear more about the series in the future (The manga version of the series has been licensed in the US and there is the future anime adaption) but I would rather hear about this series secondhand and spend more of my time reading other series that I find more enjoyable.