🔥 :D

DING DING you are the winner of my blue submarine no 6 rant!!

For context: blue sub no 6 is a 4 part OVA from the nineties about a post apocalyptic world that was intentionally flooded by an evil scientist, leaving the vast majority of humanity dead and the rest living the best they can on the water. It kind of sucks? I am now obsessed with it. No one will know what the fuck I’m talking about.

Because there is only this OVA and an untranslated manga from 1967 that I can’t track down, another 5 part manga from the 90s that i dont think was translated either, and two untranslated video games, I am forced to scrounge the bottom of the barrel from fucking reddit for any sort of discussion. The following is my response to those overwhelmingly negative reactions.

All of the characters get criticized as shallow, which to some degree I can agree with because it is a short series (about 2 hours) with a lot of characters, but I think a lot of it is just a blatant refusal to engage with them in any meaningful way. Hayami isn’t a jaded asshole just bc his friend died, he’s a jaded asshole bc his trigger happy impulses directly led to his friend’s death! Because he’s actually a super sensitive and compassionate man as shown in the series even when he doesn’t want to be!! He’s an addict who has to self medicate to ease the pain because he cares SO MUCH. And a lot of blue sub’s characterization and world building is subtle, not a lot is really told to you. It has these beautiful moments of silence that just show you character and worldbuilding, which people hate bc I guess it confuses them? Did they pay attention?? And yes a lot of the other characters dont really get a lot of depth, but they still feel like real people in the little moments you get with them. It feels like a fleshed out world with real dynamics and real people that you were just dropped in the middle of, which many won’t like, but I think its better than spoonfeeding you every bit of information.

People also shit on the ending, which I get it is actually not an ending. It’s a very open ended end with really no conclusion. I think that fits with the uncertainty of humanity going forward in this world. There’s also a lot of criticism of the villain, who unfortunately is the the weakest part of the show when he should be the strongest, but I think a lot of this is bc of the above reasons. He’s an ecofascist who thinks that there were too many people on earth so he sped up global warming and flooded the majority of the world. Idk, maybe that hits closer to home now than it did in the 90s, but real communities are threatened by the sea and there are very real perpetrators of climate violence. His motivation is weak and kind of non existent- which is a fault of the story, but also like. what actual reason is there to justify something like this other than he was a rich powerful guy who could? Again, maybe it’s just because I’m looking at it in a very modern lens and reading too much into it (I surely am), but there’s a reason it doesn’t really bother me.

I’m gonna stop here before I explode. I dont think i can in good conscience really recommend it to anyone? but if someone does watch please tell me please