No.6 – 03



So, the obvious question when you start watching No.6 is: who are these people? Even in the second episode, there is this strange brown-haired guy who looks nothing like the guy on the promo material, although it also provided a big hint about what would suddenly cause this change in hair pigmentation. This episode indeed shows what caused it, and I really have to praise the creators for delivering one heck of an intense scene.

The second half of the episode pushed the story forward again, and put a huge emphasis on morals: letting the killer bees hatch will probably lead to the downfall of No.6 if they’re allowed to spread without being noticed during Winter. This will mean the end of a dystopian society, yet also it will lead to the deaths of countless of innocent people who are merely living their lives without knowing anything about the world. the big question right now is what has Nezumi so convinced that those sacrifices should be made?

I like how this series has a very strong concept of foreshadowing: it doesn’t necessarily have huge cliff-hangers, but instead it ends every episode with the promise of new major revelations. The first episode promised a ton of change and intrigue, the second episode promised the change in hair colour, and now this episode is promising that next week, we’ll learn about the truth of No6. After all, there’s no way that Nezumi is going to wait with that.

Also, regarding the soundtrack: it was the soundtrack that I was looking forward to the most after Dororon Enma-Kun (both show share the same composer), and it has definitely delivered. I especially like the kinds of bombastic soundtracks, and this one is both that and subtle and varied.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

12 thoughts on “No.6 – 03

  1. Totally agree with you on the soundtrack; I especially love the opening theme (Spell by Lama). Been looking for both the Japanese lyrics and translations for it online. Hopefully I can find them soon.

    As for the story, I really like how they are pacing it so far; they managed to fit one book into the three episodes so far. Not sure they can fit the whole story into 11 episodes, but they are making a good effort.

    *SPOILER*I am also okay with the fact that they pretty much stripped 95% of the (VERY MINOR) romantic chemistry between the characters in the anime compared to the novels to appease more conservative viewers. They left in juuuust enough to make fangirls like me happy, and also to convey how profoundly their meeting affects their lives and the development of the story overall. To that I say well done Bonz!*/SPOILER*

  2. Man I love the ‘killer bees’ in cr subs ;P

    nicholas cages would be proud.

    The light BL for some reason reminds me of naruto >.>”

    Maybe because Nezumi’s VA sounds really similar to Sasuke…

  3. Man I love the ‘killer bees’ in cr subs ;P

    nicholas cages would be proud.

    The light BL for some reason reminds me of naruto >.>”

    Maybe because Nezumi’s VA sounds really similar to Sasuke…

  4. The sitting is like a crossover between Brave New World and 1984… which is really, really awesome. Definitely one of my favourite settings in anime. Can anyone recommend me any anime with dystopian settings like this?

  5. Huh. That it might be too derivative of the big titles in dystopian fiction crossed my mind, but I didn’t really expect an actual Shakespeare drop. I was thinking more of them going to live on a reservation or something. Somewhat amusing in retrospect.

    You won’t lose hair pigmentation in grown hair except by external means. So I guess you can say that they explain the discrepancy between the promotional materials and the character we’re introduced to, but it makes about as much sense as the spontaneous rapid senescence in response to the maturation of the wasp–that is, not much. The process is also horribly wasteful with one egg per host in a species with as slow a sexual maturation rate as humans. There are numerous parasitoid wasps, but their hosts are considerably smaller than humans. It does not bode well for the survivability of this organism.

    That sort of leads me to the question of how they emerged in the first place. I was thrown a little by Nezumi’s lack of knowledge of the wasps. I had thought that maybe they were part of the city’s evil underbelly. I thought that maybe the city’s whole point was to host these parasitoids. Specifically it had come to mind that perhaps humans had engineered wasps capable of human mind-control, but it fell apart after some conflict and the remaining humans found themselves co-opted by the wasps for their life cycle. The whole city-state would then have emerged from a collective consciousness of social wasps. However, if Nezumi knows the city’s dark secret and it has nothing to do with these wasps, then just how exactly did they come to exist? This is a pretty delicate life cycle that they have, and I’m not aware of any species closely related to humans that are hosts to wasps for them to jump from.

    This series is somewhat interesting, and I definitely don’t have any confidence that I know where it’s going at this point, but I still have this nagging suspicion that it’ll have an entirely counterproductive ecological premise and some rationalism-has-stolen-the-spirit-of-humanity stuff. Note that the city is setup as being the source of ruin for the environment they fled to and that the walls of his home are adorned with sheet music and shelves of literature, apparently lost to the technocratic people of No. 6.

  6. thanks to your review i started watching this, would’ve missed a great series otherwise cos of the bad rating in the website where i usually watch stuff. wonder what caused the very poor rating.. could it be the BL stuff?

  7. The series was pretty awesome and I adore Shion and Nezumi, they made the series really. It was so good my friend decided to make an RP around it for the fun of it (its the url)

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