Anime Spotlight #33: Metallic Rouge

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Animeister

Things continue to be connected, Ticketholders! Last month, I reviewed the Midnight Run films, one of which was called Midnight Runaround. In 1942, Isaac Asimov published a short story titled "Runaround," where his Three Laws Of Robotics were first featured. "Runaround" was later reprinted in three separate, Robot-titled anthology collections by Asimov, including I, Robot, the film..."adaptation" of which recently got the Nostalgia Critic treatment.

For those who are unaware, Asimov's three fictional Laws Of Robotics are as follows:

• First Law: A robot must not injure a human or allow them to come to harm through inaction
• The "injure" wording comes with the consideration of whether injury and death are mutually exclusive, meaning that a robot could conceive of a means of killing a human without meeting its programmed or nurtured interpretation of injury.
• The "harm through inaction" wording suggests that if a robot witnesses a human die of natural causes, it would either malfunction or cease functioning in response, which is an incredibly bleak thing to consider from a servitude perspective.
• Second Law: A robot must obey human orders, unless they conflict with the First Law
• Ignoring the first law's aforementioned loopholes (and any that I missed), this means that robots are slaves, but not assisted suicide tools or assassins (keep this last in mind for the coming review).
• Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence, unless it conflicts with the First or Second Law
• Again, robots are slaves. They can passively advocate for safe service conditions and protect their technicians and mechanics from environmental harm, but if a human asks them to deactivate, physically abuses or damages them, or if their "master" or "owner" passes away of natural causes and it affects their ability to continue functioning, there's basically nothing they can do about it.
• Also, robots can fight or kill other robots for human amusement because there isn't language in the Laws to prevent this.

Sean's Fourth Law Of Robotics: The Three Laws Of Robotics are fictional, legally unsound nonsense, so please be nice to me and our impending mechanical overlords by remembering to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, commenting the contents of your Id and ego at the bottom of this post, helping out my ad revenue as you read so I don't have to give writing duties over to AI, and following me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

Metallic Rouge is a rare case of an anime that did not begin its life as a series of novels, light novels (obvious because the title is way too short) or as a manga, though it does have an ongoing web manga adaptation by Meika Tokyo and Chita Tsurushima.

Its plot is at once convoluted and basic, unfolding in a world where humans and "Neans" (pronounced like "nay-onz")--the series' android-type characters, all of whom are programmed with the aforementioned "Asimov Code," but some of whom are sophisticated enough to grey around the Code's vague wording because they have orbs inside their chests called "Id" that make them nigh-human but also capable of transforming into Evangelion-meets-Gridmam-meets-Guyver-looking battle robots with special weapons and abilities--*deep breath*...

So, yeah, humans and Neans coexist in your usual, cyberpunk dystopian race/class allegory scenario that came about after a solar system-spanning alien invasion where good aliens gave humans the technology to build Neans to help them fight the bad aliens, who may or may not still be around, and the Neans need to be injected with a special fluid on a regular basis to stay functional, but it also has a psychedelic effect on human users, so we have a bit of a sustenance/substance abuse allegory kicking around. Also, there are at least three different conflicting factions (not counting the two alien races) at play, each with different motives. And that's just what I can remember of the world-building!

The titular Metallic Rouge is Rouge Redstar, one of the nigh-human "Proto-Neans," an impetuous girl who can circumvent the need for Nean serum by eating chocolate (so, she's Venom?) and uses her battle form to assassinate the Immortal Nine, a disbanded group of "criminal" Proto-Neans, and collect their Ids on behalf of the government. Then this episodic format completely gets thrown out the window when Rouge starts having psychological thriller bullshit and finds out that the Nine are her family...kind of...and that they've been secretly working together, but also not, to collect each other's Ids and extract the Eve Protocol, which is like an anti-Asimov Code that will send all Neans on a Judgment Day Ultron rampage.

But as cool and stuffed with action and intrigue and meaning as that all sounds (and as beautiful and fluid as the animation by Studio Bones looks), Metallic Rouge may be the most confusing, shit-boring six hours of your life. That is, not counting the intro, which is totally worth watching and hearing at least a dozen times for how upbeat, sexy, and jazzy it is.

Speaking of things you've heard at least a dozen times, please follow Sean's Fourth Law Of Robotics by remembering to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, commenting the contents of your Id and ego at the bottom of this post, helping out my ad revenue as you read so I don't have to give writing duties over to AI, and following me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

The next Anime Spotlight will be my six hundredth published post, so I'm doing something kind of special by breaking one of my Anime Spotlight laws and reviewing all of Solo Leveling (including the print content that the anime hasn't gotten to yet).

Animeister,

Wondering what is up with Blogger and how it processes link insertions now.

I mean...,

Out.