This episode really grabbed me by surprise. Not only was it exceptionally good and well produced, but also just about everything that happened here was against what you’d expect or came out of left field. This episode built up a ton of questions, it showed the cast in a completely different light, on top of being absolutely gorgeous to watch.
This episode took two completely unrelated characters: Nezumi and Safu, and had them experience the same hallucination at the same time. Erm, why? On top of that, against expectations the bees turn out to be active during the winter, and they seem to be related to these hallucinations in which they could talk. Again: how the hell is that happening? On top of that, Shion’s mom’s friend is suddenly afraid of mice, Then Shion suddenly comes and catches Nezumi unguarded, and then Safu is coming back, of all things. How the hell are the creators going to weave all of that together? And will the show still be running when we get to that point?
On top of that… that dance scene. Holy crap, that was well animated. The characters really came alive and the visual direction was utterly gorgeous. This episode on top of that had poetry and theatre as well, making it artistic in many different ways. It was a bit strange to see Nezumi in women’s clothing, but it does make sense: traditionally in Shakespearean plays, the female parts were all played by men as well.
Also, shock! This episode actually included a kiss that wasn’t overly romanticized.
Rating: *** (Awesome)
ah man… it´s a compeling story, i want more… where is the story heading to?!!! I just can´t wait the next episode…
The boys name is actually Sion, a small detail i know, not sure why everyone keeps adding a H.
I respect you even more as a reviewer now. A lot of people (especially straight guys) would have run screaming from this show by now because of the romantic overtones, but you continue to see this anime for the great story it has to tell about two great characters, regardless of whether it’s a love story or not. I really appreciate you for that, but then again I respected you in this way since your review of Aoi Hana and Wandering Son. 🙂
OMG! This episode was great. It was everything I’m looking for in an anime. I like the love undertones between the main characters without them being too powerful and full of awkward blushing! The mystery is also very intriguing. I want the next episode XD
I’m really enjoying No 6, wonderfuly animated, great storytelling, great characters… but the TIMING is worrying me, is it really ending at 11, 12 episodes?
also, call me a homophobe as you wish… but since ep. 1 I’ve been uncomfortable with the “tension” between Sion and Nezumi, specially in this episode, with the dancing, blushing, cross-dressing… when you put it all togheter it gets pretty tiring, and makes it tough to “show/recommend to others”
@Kaza
Ehh, I think it depends on who you hang out with/recommend. All I said was that there was a new show out with gay main characters, but it’s sci-fi dystopian world, not romance, and my friends were on it like hot cakes. Though I’d say take a leap of faith and recommend it anyways. I’ve managed to to make a lot of my friends less/un-homophobic by showing them manga like Tokyo Babylon and Petshop of Horrors where strong characters and plot is far more important than who sleeps with who.
ANYWAYS, this episode was amazing. The animation, the music, the plot – I am so, so curious about where the wasps plot is heading, especially with Safu fainting in front of a stained glass with wasps on it.
Next episode. Can’t wait.
@balamunka Actually, I think because it’s a Japanese name, there should be Japanese sounds? There’s not really a “si” sound in Japanese, but there is a “shi”.
@Kittychick
“but you continue to see this anime for the great story it has to tell about two great characters”
I am afraid I have to disagree with you. Disregarding the clear BL tones.(And the issue that it assumes that every male character is interested in homosexuality. Even the bloody guys that ambushed the two start asking for “payment”)
This story is nothing remarkable. It’s been done better before and I don’t see anything that makes this stand out.
As for the characters Sion has no discernible personality. All we know is that he cares a lot about other people and is completely ignorant of the world outside of No.6. Nezumi is your basic “Experienced veteran with a mysterious dark past” with a hairstyle stolen from Sasuke in Naruto. His mysterious dark past also isn’t very mysterious. It’s obvious that he was a lab rat for human experimentation. Hence the reason why he is called Nezumi.(Rat)
I am not saying it’s a bad show. It’s decent. Certainly not great.
@balamunka, “Sion” is just the romanization. In japanese language, there is no “si” syllable, only “shi”.
@AidanAK47
“This story is nothing remarkable. It’s been done better before and I don’t see anything that makes this stand out.”
Well I guess we will have to agree to disagree. Unlike many sci-fi series I have watched, this one had an interesting twist with the relationship between the two characters, and in my opinion the characters are not nearly as flat as you described. After his little outburst towards the pimp, Sion showed he can be quite the spitfire if provoked, so he can’t be as bland as you say.
And if you want to look at the BL aspect of No. 6, I can tell you that this show is all the more enjoyable for it’s handling of it, specifically because it doesn’t follow all the cheesy tropes that often plague BL. Having read and watched a fair amount of the genre, I am always pleased when I can enjoy a great action/sci-fi story that can make my little fangirl heart flutter, so it’s a win-win for me.
As with most posters here, I appreciate your comments, and some of your ideas about Nezumi’s background are in alignment with the theories I have, so it’s nice to see great minds can think alike. The world of anime is huge enough to have something for everyone; and while we may not always agree on what’s good or bad, it’s nice that we can come together and respectfully talk about it in places such as this. 🙂
yes,i’m 100% totally agree with your comment about this ep.
what a great mystery, lies in this ep!!
somehow with the mystery at the center, it delivers some kind of melodramatic scenes-yes, the dancing!!!it was so perfect, the background music+the dancing background scene totally amazed me!!
before i thought nezumi was somekind of human android,but watching this ep made me remember nezumi said no 6 city is a gigantic toy before,so i think the whole city fulled with human-like android, including shion!!!while the abandoned city was the real human being. that’s why nezumi said they will become enemy and felt shion is weird. the bee might be the virus damaging the android system.
but, this may b vice versa,ahahaa..
one more thing, the connection between safu n nezume gives me supernatural feeling..don’t u think this give the same feeling like tegami bachi?the power came from the gun actually from ancient insect creature.
well, i glad i didn’t neglect this anime:)
Once upon a time I was a huge homophobe and would absolutely trash an anime like this. However that’s because I grew up with everyone around me openly hating gay people and encouraging me to do the same. The more I realized hatred was not the answer to living a good life the more I opened myself up to material like this.
Fact is, letting something like that get in the way of enjoying good art (if not GREAT art) is ridiculous. It’s a sign of inner hatred. Lot’s of things make us uncomfortable, how does that make a tv series bad? Most of us who watch movies like Hostel or Saw don’t really want to see people suffering in front of us. We watch horror movies, gross out comedy, ultra violence and all kinds of things that don’t necessarily make us feel comfortable. We watch because it’s entertaining or well done even if it makes us feel weird.
So I ask again, what is it about homosexual undertones that is so much worse than someone being slowly tortured to death, murdered or raped on screen? How is it any more of a gross out than having some dog with backed up gigantic testicles releasing into a bunch of pastry then watching unsuspecting victims eat said pastry?
Grow up.
@AidanAK47: I for one agree with everything you’ve said.
especially during a season as great as the one we’re blessed to have right now, it’s painfully obvious to me how mediocre this show has been thus far. I’m a very liberal person and could care less about BL undertones or whatever people are talking about; the character interactions/concepts/themes in No.6 not only have been done many times before, but were in many cases done on such a higher level as to void any worthwhile comparison.
again not to say this is a bad show or anyone loving it has bad taste, it’s just that I believe the praise this show has been getting to be undeserved.
To me, this is the thing. There’s a big difference between being accepting of homosexuality and IDENTIFYING with it. In BL stories, when the protag is this way, the story asks you to identify with him. I write stories, I direct animation films and whenever I make a protag, I WANT my audience to identify with him (or her) because this is how I transmit the emotions that the audience is supposed to feel. Now it IS the director’s job and writer’s job to make this identification process the smoothiest possible. When you ask a straight person to identify (I really mean IDENTIFY, I didnt say “empathize” or “understand”) with someone with a clear different sexual orientation, you take a big risk to get this member of the audience to the point of the suspension of disbelief. And you definitely want to prevent this from happening. It’s up to you to take the risk or not but you should assume that many members of the audience are going to feel uneasy about what you request them to do in order to experience your story the fullest. If you fail at provoking this identification process, the audience starts getting distracted, focus on other things, miss important things. You lose them and you kill the experience.
Or at least, point very CLEARLY and very early that the story is going to that direction. I only speak about the protag because that’s the one character you are supposed to identify with. A BL among the supporting characters is different and has less implications because you dont identify with them, you empathize with them and you understand them which is a very different thinking process.
@Anb: So, you’re saying people can’t/shouldn’t relate to a non-heterosexual protagonist? I’d like to remind you that not everyone in the world is a straight manly man with issues. I, for one, look into the personality of a protagonist, not their gender or sexuality. If that gets to me, it’s enough to care about said protagonist.
Not to mention, me being an asexual woman, it would be really difficult to find a character whose orientation I could relate to.
@Lou : People can relate with a non-heterosexual character without problems as long as it’s about their personality, their struggle, their suffering, their dreams, etc. We can relate because we share a common experience. We’re all on this Earth trying to go thru life so the identification goes smoothly.
But when it’s about sexuality, and in this episode of no6, it’s becoming more and more a love bonding, it may be difficult to embrace the experience of a character that is the opposite of your sexual orientation especially the more it become graphic. Because we’re not speaking about personality or struggling or surviving anymore, we’re talking about emotions, feeling and sexuality. To fully put yourself in the character shoes and experience every single feeling to the fullest, you have to embrace the choice the character does and learn from his mistakes. Which is difficult when it’s about something as intimate as sexual orientation. You start to distance yourself naturally and you lose a part of the experience.
Of course, we can also just watch the story superficially without entering too deep into the character’s persona, without pushing the identification process too far and just care and empathize for them. It’s fine. And I agree with you that in that case, it doesn’t really matter what his sexual orientation is because it’s his life. Not mine.
And maybe that was what the director wanted. But I believe that all the magic of a story comes from a deep identification with the character and his/her choices. I don’t want to just care for him, I want to experience the story thru him.
@Anb:
I don’t get your point. It seems that lots of woman have no problem to identify with a homosexual male (BL is a pretty popular genre loved by women and written by women). Maybe some straight males have a problem with it, but hey, I as a woman, have a problem with identifying with a heterosexual male in a harem anime – what means that regarding your theory?
And putting aside the sexual thing: Death Note is one of the anime/manga I enjoyed the most. Just brilliant storytelling. But I can tell you I never ever could identify with Light.
@Anb: What I find interesting is that you said “when you make a protagonist” and then said him (or her). Now, according to your theory, how are you able to relate to a gender different from yours? How is your audience able to do that? You say that a difference in sexual orientation makes them unable to actually relate to his emotional and romantic struggles…but how exactly is then a woman able to relate to a male protagonist?
That returns us to the dilemma of male and female storytelling and basically throws us back into the first half of the 20th century.
If that is not the case, why would you say is sexuality a different thing than gender? Why is it supposed to be easier for a man to relate to the struggle of a heterosexual woman than to that of a homosexual man?
I’m not saying that it is not experienced like that by many, many people (probably the majority) but I’m questioning why it is like that. It’s implying that a homosexual man is even further removed from being a man than a heterosexual woman…which is just terribly insulting.
hello!!dear all, do you know the title of the piano piece played during the dancing scene?i want to download it!!
@Anb
Your theory is interesting but flawed.
Anb, we are not talking about aliens here. We are talking about homosexuals. You want to know how a straight man can relate to a gay man’s sexuality? It’s simple. Just imagine the other person is a girl. Walla.
@Kittychick
Remember I said “Disregarding the clear BL tones” In other words, without the twist with the relationship between the two characters this story has nothing remarkable. As for that outburst of Sions, it came out of nowhere, didn’t make any sense and probably will be the one and only time Sion will get angry again. Think about it, the one time Sion got angry was when a pimp jokingly said Nezumi would make him more money. Wow, that’s defining.
I stick that with the other lines from this show that I dub “Lines that will create awkward silences if used in real conversation” I will place it right next to “What if I said I have seen you naked?”
Also in case you guys got the wrong end of the stick I am not putting down this show because it has two gay main characters. I don’t care about that. The reason I am putting it down people are over rating it just because it has two gay main characters.
TL;DR comments, TL;DR comments everywhere