電脳こいる！ / タカイチ

Every year around Christmas, most anime bloggers get on their full gear to finish up unfinished shows and do massive amounts of blogging. One of the reason that we take so much time blogging during Christmas is the 12 Days of Christmas, where we makes 12 posts to anything anime related for the past year. Another reason is secret santa, arranged by Reverse Thieves, where we a list of three series to pick from and writes a review by December 24-25. For this year, I chose Dennou Coil.

Back when I first got my secret santa list, it gave me Dennou Coil, Michiko to Hatchin and Planets. From the three, I dropped Michiko to Hatchin first because it just didn’t seem all that interesting compared to the other two. I also dropped Planets because it was older, and hence I assumed that it was harder to find. So I ended up watching Dennou Coil, which talks about a bunch of kid all wearing augmented reality glasses. O man, having technology as a center piece of plot, this is good. And then apparently all of them are ‘hackers’ to an extent, o joy, I’m going to have a road trip with this trying to explain the glasses and the whole system behind it.

Dennou Coil takes place in Daikoku City, at a time where the technology behind augmented reality had became advanced enough that the society had fully accepted it and people have started using augmented reality (with the terminal in the form of a glasses) in their day to day lives. The anime follows Yuko Okonogi (nicknamed Yasako), who recently moved to Daikoku City, Yuko Amasawa (nicknames Isako), a mysterious transfer student, Ken’ichi Harakawa (nicknamed Haraken), a quiet individual researching on the a certain irregularity within the augmented reality called ‘illegals’, their classmates, most of who knows few hacking skills to use within the augmented reality, and Yuko’s grandmother, a supplier of such hacks. With those characters, Dennou Coils follows tale of Yasako, Harakawa and co.’s journey to understand more about ‘illegals’ and provides the reason of why Isako acted against the other main characters at start.

The augmented reality system is not bug free or fully secure, and like most programs, they had to undergo updates from time to time. Yet, most likely because of the sheer size and the high usage, it is hard for the system to update all at the same time, and hence there would be parts of the augmented reality with outdated version. And sometime those outdated data are separated with real world that it was supposed to map to as new data get mapped to it, and hence earning the name of obsolete space. (We call those outdated data like memory leak, since there isn’t a real world equivalent to point to that data), giving world to a virtual world of its own. That with the virtual beings called ‘illegals’ (usually represented as a black shadow) are two of the irregular things seen in the augmented reality.

For the young hackers, they depend on a currency called metabugs, which are usually found in obsolete space, which they need it to trade for hacks to use from Yasako’s grandmother or from the internet. The reason that metabugs are traded is because most hacks are based on the metabugs themselves (inherited?), where the metabugs themselves are nothing more than just bugs within the augmented reality system. There is a rumored type of metabug, called kirabug, that is super rare, and have several urban legends related to it, and those things are what Isako was searching for from the start. And the earlier parts of the story centered around the people trying to collect metabugs.

As the story progresses, we see the reason why Isako was collecting the kirabugs and was being a jerk to everyone, and we also discover more about Haraken’s past and his driving force behind his research into the illegals, which ultimately caused him to act out of his character and initialized the final (best) part of the story, connecting the seemingly distinct action and intension of the three main characters.

As I have said, I think that the last part of the show was the best, since I was able to see how everything that was introduced before connecting to a single coherent story (as the earlier parts was more along the lines of event-of-the-week), and prompted me to go “IT ALL NOW MAKE SENSE!!” And with the storyline more coherent, I was able to more appreciate the character relationship that the main characters had with each other. And it ended being a fairly good tale of seeing how everything was so much more related than they would have thought.

While having different situation and intent, I think the closest anime that I can associate Dennou Coil to is .hack//Sign. For both anime, there is the similar situation of where the virtual have trespassed into the reality, causing harm to the characters physically (in .hack, people started to go unconscious after being attacked by a certain monster, while with Dennou Coil, there are also cases where people consciousness is separated from the physical body). Yet, one is used more as a defense mechanism to escape from the abusive reality (.hack//Sign) and one is used to signify the desire to keep what is gone already and not getting over it (Dennou Coil). Dennou Coil was effective in using this imagery in showing how the main character did not want to face reality and grow up, but sought for the outdated virtual world (obsolete space) instead.

Throughout the series, there were quite a bit of plot twists, stuff which seemingly came out of the blue, but well, helped make the show more interesting to watch. Just like how we had the massive twist in episode 3 of Madoka, which turned the whole anime from a positive tone to a negative one and made it all the more interesting to watch, the 2 plot twists that happened, while not as massive as Madoka, one ended up fleshing out a character more and one solidified the relationship of the two girls. And heck, it was good.

だいすき！ / パンダヤギ

Aside from the human character, I really liked Yasako’s virtual dog, Densuke. I liked how realistic the dog was despite it being virtual. I also liked the loyalty that the dog had to his master, of how the dog helped and guided Kyoko back from the obsolete space and protected and guided Yasako from dangers more than once. So much that by episode 23-25, I was sharing the same feeling that Yasako had (denial, having faint hope, and finally being forced with the reality) for Densuke when the dog finally fallen to the aggressive illegals. I was almost screaming when Yasako found that that she mistook someone else dog’s barks as Densuke’s bark. But man, it was so so good when Yasako (and the audience) got to see Densuke once again (and that the dog was able to humbly serve his master by guiding her out of danger one last time). And with the final revelation, it solidified the importance of Densuke to the physical world (ie the dog’s support to Yasako) despite the dog being only contained within the virtual world. And therefore it shows how the dog itself might not be ‘real’ in that you can’t touch it, but the memories that people had with the dog and the intentions that the creators had when creating Densuke was real, in that it supports and propels people’s direction,  solving the problem of “what is ‘real’”, which was tossed during the latter parts of the series and is of utmost importance to us anime watchers.

And as for my complaints, I wasn’t that fond of the first half, where the plot followed less of Yasako, Isako and Haraken, but more on people like Fumia and Daichi. Not that it was bad, but those characters came across as stereotypical to me. Fumia just came across as a normal school girl who just got into hacking because to defend herself and to overpower Daichi, and Daichi was just a stereotypical guy who was just too shy to show his feeling. Their normality showed as they stopped to be even half important as the anime entered into the second half. Therefore, any effort to try to develop them was, well, not important. Even aside from those two, there were episodes where the sole intent seemed to show that there were different kinds of illegals, which sadly also became not crucial to the plot, and ended up feeling like a filler episode. Ya, it is interesting to see everyone, including the girls, to have a beard, but if anything, that created more questions that never got answered than provided hints to what is to come.

So in short, I liked the second half of the show, where the involved character were more developed, the character relationships were ironed out, and lots of points were connected together, with effective imagery to show the characters willing to give up what was lost already and to grow up and just to experience life with their friends. While the first half was rather blend and was, on average, less interesting to watch.