青(あお)の6号(ごう)(Blue Submarine Num. 6) is an anime about a blue submarine. I mean, it’s in the title. The blue submarine exists in an alternate Earth that has been flooded and, now that it’s flooded, it’s being fought over by humans and fish people. Our main character and soldier stationed on the Ao6, Hayami, is a pacifist for no good reason.
Ao6 is related to LASTEXILE as many staff who worked on this returned to work on that.
Between this and that, Ao6 is interesting to watch, though it’s not that great.

It’s very difficult to understand what they were going for with this. I’m assuming that what they were trying to say is that ‘both sides are gray/equally bad’…but they missed the fact that the situation they created doesn’t really…allow for that?
Let’s look at Zorndyke and his forces:

1. Zorndyke is responsible for destroying the world.
2. Zorndyke’s forces are rarely, if ever, not portrayed as unapologetically evil.

Zordyke himself is a really strange guy…I mean, he’s like if Einstein got jaded one day and decided to cause a nuclear apocalypse.
Though let’s elaborate on point 2: the main force that hunts the Blue Submarine throughout the series is filled with people who are hyper-violent and their leader is, probably, a rapist. At the very least, he commits sekuhara.
There is the fact that Zorndyke gave all of his ‘creations’ free will and essentially gave them the option of not doing what he tells them to all the time…but then you consider that Zorndyke built a weapon of mass destruction, which he camouflaged as his one weakness. Humans, seeing his one weakness, would bomb it into oblivion which, in fact, would activate it…causing the actual end of the world. He even smiles like a supervillain when he explains this. How are we, the audience, supposed to take him as anything except evil?^A)
This whole framing has a domino effect on the rest of the series…specifically with the main character: Hayami. Hayami is a pacifist who doesn’t want to fight Zorndyke…but considering the actual context…it really isn’t surprising that nobody seems to like him. He is essentially the one Jew who is siding with Hitler in the Second World War…after learning about the Holocaust.
All that said…the animation is interesting and I’m pretty sure some of the issues here stem from the fact the OVA is too short. If they had more time, they might have fixed the framing or made Zorndyke less (or more) evil…or…who knows. It’s very obviously unfinished.
Maybe the Dreamcast game will be good.

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