A lot of shows try to be more than one thing. It makes sense, letting them find appeal on some tracks even if others fall through. And all too often, reaching for more than was necessary causes the work to fail on all marks. Similarly, you sometimes get shows that aren’t smart, but want you to think they are, resulting in a pretentious mess that didn’t need to be one and could have worked if it embraced a simple core. These are pretty common results.

Arpeggio of Blue Steel is exactly the opposite of that. It’s a show that reaches for a couple of things, but achieves them all as well as it was going to. And it’s a show that has a very intelligent core, but while not exactly being ashamed of its intelligence largely doesn’t draw attention to it, being humble rather than pretentious. It’s not a masterpiece by any means, but it’s worth some deeper investigation.

The basic story of Arpeggio is this: Some time ago, a mysterious force known as the Fleet of Fog appeared with ultra-high technology and forms based on WWII Warships – and before you ask, no, we never get an answer as to why any of this – and seized control of the oceans. Humanity’s naval forces were defeated in a catastrophic battle, and mankind is now more or less landlocked and suffering bitterly because of it. There is, however, hope on the horizon: Japan has developed the Vibration Warhead, a weapon capable of defeating Fog forces. However, Japan lacks the industrial capacity to mass-produce Vibration Warheads in their current blockaded state, and so the prototype needs to be taken across the Pacific to the Americans, who should be able make enough of them to really ruin the Fog’s day.

Of course, by the very nature of the problem the Vibration Warhead is intended to solve, this is easier said than done. Enter our main characters. The first is Chihaya Gunzou: a young man of decent cleverness and character thrust into the perfect position to act as a blockade-running privateer thanks to our other primary lead. Iona, aka I-401, is a Fog Submarine who defected from her fleet for unknown reasons but a simple purpose: accept Chihaya Gunzo as her captain and serve him faithfully. And before you ask, no, we never get an answer as to why. I-401, being a Fog ship herself, is capable of taking on the Fog on their own terms, and is thus the only hope for getting the Vibration Warhead to America.

Iona – and many of the of the other Fog ships we see throughout the show – manifests what’s called a “mental model”: a humanoid form with unique cognition and the ability to interact as humans do, rather than simply existing as an automated nanomachine ghost ship. Quite naturally, they’re all cute girls. And before you ask… we actually do get answers for this one. Good answers, even thought-provoking answers that do a lot of the work of taking Arpeggio of Blue Steel above and beyond the state of a formulaic harrowing road trip. This is the material I want most to go into detail on.

Mostly because… there isn’t a lot of point going into depth on the surface level of the Vibration Warhead plot. Gunzo needs to get from point A to point B and has to fight a series of increasingly threatening enemies in order to do so. The battles are well-designed and thought out carefully, but the story of the trip is really basic stuff. We do get a couple twists thrown in, but those tie in with the better psychological and science fiction stuff as well, so I might as well address them there. That’s not to say the main plot is bad, it’s just super-standard and not what makes the show interesting.

The interesting part is what it does with the characters and the concept of what it means to be human. Let’s start with the answers I said we’d get earlier. First of all, the Fog takes female (feminine?) forms because human cultures (and I’m aware not all of them, but this is the excuse given in the show) refer to ships as ‘she’. Which underlies the answer of why they form Mental Models at all: the Fog is attempting to learn from humans by this imitation. And you may ask yourself, “Didn’t the Fog kick humanity’s ass?”. Yes they did, but they did it because they had an overwhelming technological advantage. Human tactics were, apparently, far better than the brute force solutions (in both the battlefield and computing senses) that the Fog employed. Not enough to win years in the past, but enough that the battle would be one-sided in the opposite direction if the Fog’s edge in weaponry were to decay. The Fog recognized this before it became reality in the form of the Vibration Warhead, and some high-level Fog ships adopted the extremely human-like Mental Models in order to comprehend (and gain the benefits of) human thought.

This is actually a clever idea. It establishes a strong identity for the Fog as AI entities even if they are capable of adapting, gives us a reason why our lead (explicitly an expert tactician) can triumph over Fog ships in defiance of extremely unfavorable odds, and it underscores the main conflict of the show. The main conflict, really, isn’t getting the Vibration Warhead to America, but rather the Fog’s struggle between what it means to be like humans and what it means to simply be human, grappling with their concepts of purpose and identity.

All the Fog characters that take human form are, ultimately, ‘infected’ by humanity in lesser or greater degrees. In seeking to capture the human ability to improvise, they also gain the baggage of human emotions, losing the machine rationality that had previously governed their actions through the enigmatic “Admiralty Code” that the Fog allegedly adheres to.

For the most part, each of the Fog ships we see seems to take a different journey. Some are similar beyond the details, while others represent largely different branches in their approach.

Iona is the most basic. She starts the show already “converted” in essence, though she does have some work to do getting used to feeling and thinking like a human. Her arc is one of quiet discovery, as she learns what it means to ‘want’ and to have more of a ‘self’ than the mechanical baseline of the Fog are implied to have. She starts the show expressing few desires other than to serve her purpose (in that way being similar to the orthodox Fog), but ultimately becomes something of a guide for the other Fog ships to understand what they’re going through.

Takao, on the other hand, is probably my favorite of the lot, because she has the best studied journey from “Soldier of the Fog” to “Person” alongside being in many ways the perfect execution of the Tsundere. Takao (like most of the Fog ships) starts the show as an enemy; she’s the first Fog Mental Model that Iona and her crew fight against in the show’s running time. In the final moment of battle, Gunzo chooses to spare Takao’s life, and that catalyzes her defection from the Fog. The thing is, it’s not a fast process. She becomes fascinated with Gunzo, and the idea of ‘having a captain’ (the difference that allowed a ‘lowly’ submarine like I-401 defeat a Heavy Cruiser like Takao). The more she dwells on her fascination, seeking out human culture to understand what her desires mean, the more her interests transform. What starts as the basic Mental Model drive to self-improve by gaining human tactical superiority morphs in a desire for another. As Takao embraces more and more of her humanity, whether she realizes it or not, how you can define her interest shifts. By the midpoint of the show her desire is clearly personal – she does not want to “gain human-like tactical ability” or even simply “have a captain”, she wants Gunzo. Her desire takes on tones and terms of affection, possibly even of lust. There’s a brilliantly funny moment where we cut to her hugging a home-made body pillow of Gunzo, but it’s more poignant when you think about it in the wider context, because it shows how far beyond what should be her parameters Takao has gone.

After she joins forces with Gunzo, helping escort him and I-401 past a Fog blockade and onward to America, she becomes more in-tune with her desires, until you really can finally describe what she feels as “love” – something that even more than personal desire or lust should be anathema to the orthodox Fog. Towards the end of the show, Takao has to sacrifice her corporeal existence to save Iona and Gunzo (though her core survives, so her sacrifice needn’t and as of the denoument clearly wasn’t permanent). And you might think that’s not anything particularly special: the baseline as Fog, the ships without Mental Models like the countless Nagara copies we see throughout the show, are war machines and must necessarily be willing to ‘die’ for their mission, especially when they have no sense of tactics. Takao’s sacrifice is different, however, because it has nothing to do with her mission, not any mission she could have. Takao gives of herself because she wants what’s best for Gunzo in defiance of any mission objectives or even at the cost of her other interests. She acts out of a pure, human love and that’s not something the Fog were really prepared for.

I called Takao the perfect Tsundere and this is why – the essence of the Tsundere is that she is prickly (running hot; Tsun) on the outside while being sweet and affectionate (dere) on the inside. Now, you can have Tsundere characters who don’t really have arcs, but there is a conflict and motion implied in the very setup. That is, a Tsundere lashes out at her love interest because she can’t be honest with her feelings. There are many reasons for this, like pride or circumstance, but ultimately the best path for a Tsundere is to gain the self-knowledge and understanding of her own feelings that she clearly starts out lacking, the dearth of which drives her paradoxical behavior. As such, for a Tsundere to undergo character development, she normally should follow a journey of self discovery, at the end of which she may keep a sharp tongue or a hot temper, but with a new understanding of what her feelings mean. For Takao, this arc is essentially baked in to her very character. It is exaggerated, and important, and deserves even more focus than usual. Takao starts out not ‘in touch’ with her feelings because they are very literally new to her, in a more profound way than a teen experiencing her first crush. She embarks on that journey of self-discovery willingly, and while her path isn’t necessarily easy, she does follow it. She engages in most of the Tsundere tropes, but they’re beautifully justified because they feed into and are fed by the “machine or human?” dilemma that the Fog ships all experience. Everything about her is built to execute the Tsundere arc in a way that’s made more logical by its setting and that its setting makes more relevant. I’m not saying she’s the best written Tsundere ever (she’s not), I’m saying she is 100% good Tsundere material and it manages to be 100% integrated into every other major theme of the show that she touches. Perhaps “perfect” was the wrong word – you could say instead that she’s the Platonic Ideal of the Developed Tsundere, and that might be a little closer.

All the same, she’s fun to watch.

Hyuuga, Kirishima, and Haruna are perhaps not as well-explored as the other Fog ships, so I’ll cover them briefly. Hyuuga is also consumed by something like ‘love’ (though her form is more twisted and cartoonish than Takao’s), in her case a worshipful attitude towards but Iona. Kirishima and Haruna both begin their defection out of a sense of loyalty (something that doesn’t seem foreign to the Fog), and while there’s some good play with the fact that Kirishima is trapped in the body of a teddy bear, it’s mostly played for laughs. Their arc seems to be roughly following Iona’s, but with an extra element of choice. Iona was guided to follow Gunzo, it’s her overriding purpose in the beginning the same way that the Admiralty Code is for the orthodox Fog. By contrast, Haruna and Kirishima protect the character Makie (herself an interesting study who I will be getting to in good time) of their own free will. Whatever the emotion that motivates them, their ability to select their own paths is what puts them at odds with the Fog, which would normally be bound to strict rules of behavior by the Admiralty Code.

Iona’s sisters, I-400 and I-402 are another story. Their arc is short, since they get one focal episode and not too terribly much screen time outside of it, but also fairly important. The submarine sisters begin their existence as the ‘model’ we have for the most orthodox of the orthodox Fog; while Kongou and to a lesser extent Maya are our starting faces for the faction, the fact that they’re ‘off’ in their own ways is evident to the audience before it’s made explicit. The sisters, though, with their flat affects and eerie similarity to one another in both appearance (shared with Iona) and manner is the picture of what you’d ‘expect’ out of the Fog as machines predicated on hard-coded logic. However, in their final battle with Iona they challenge her not just by shooting torpedos like every Fog foe so far has done, but by addressing her on a human level, and undermining her belief in herself and her actions. In their dying moments, their unique characters are revealed, but the fact that they could come at Iona in the mental realm the way they did says a lot.

What also says a lot about the submarines is Maya. The heavy cruiser Maya is presented at the start of the show as another Mental Model, and the right-hand ship of main antagonist Kongou. However, it’s revealed very late on that the Fog ship Maya does not, in fact, have a Mental Model. The Maya we’d been seeing throughout the show was nothing more than a simulation being run by I-400 and I-402 as a covert way of keeping eyes on Kongou; once the rug is pulled, ‘Maya’ can’t even pass a basic Turing Test.

You could argue that the show may not have been clever enough to think through this next bit of speculation, but I choose to give it the benefit of the doubt: creators tend to put something of themselves into their creations. Maya’s script (or the code that generated it) had to be created by the submarines, which means Maya would have to be something within their experience and comprehension. You would expect, working backwards from the truth rather than having it as a twist, that Maya would therefore share a lot of their traits. The traits we see the submarines exhibit until the end are, again, that flat affect and stilted robotic manner. The traits that Maya exhibits are anything but. Maya is quirky, upbeat, and emotive. She seems to display curiosity and while her advice might be tailored to keep Kongou ‘on the right path’ her nature is somewhere between skew to the ideals of the Fog and downright contrary to it. It helps her purpose, because Kongou comes to consider Maya a friend (even if she wouldn’t use such a human term for the majority of the show’s run), but where did her creators get it? We know the Fog aren’t used to emotions (corrupted Mental Models being an emerging problem) and we know the Fog have trouble innovating on their own (hence their lack of tactics), so I-400 and I-402 must have been advanced enough in their emotional intelligence to create Maya’s personality from themselves.

In essence, I feel like I-400 and I-402 are the “successful” Mental Models. Even when they finally reveal their feelings, they’re zealously loyal to the Admiralty Code in a way even Kongou ultimately isn’t. But in possessing the ability to create a personality that is convincing and unlike themselves and use that image to deceive, they display a much more advanced emotional intelligence than any of the other Fog ships (who are mostly figuring things out as we go along through the show). Most Fog ships seem to be pretty bad liars. Haruna and Kirishima can conceal facts they know need to be concealed and Takao can say one thing while meaning another (being a Tsundere and all) but they’re all largely pretty transparent. I-400 and I-402 are masterful liars, capable of weaving a complex fiction for both short and long term considerations. They understand what the Fog wanted to understand out of the human condition; how to use it to fight, both physically and in the emerging battlefield of information and emotion.

And while they’re loyal and ‘orthodox’, even they are at least a tiny bit compromised.

The last Fog ship that bears mentioning is Kongou herself. Kongou, like Takao and Hyuuga, gains an overriding obsession. Unlike those other two, her key emotion is hate. Kongou believes in the Fog and that she is what, in effect, the submarine duo really are: a Mental Model with the ability to champion the Admiralty Code. As she sees the Fog changing through interaction with Gunzo (and humanity in general) she comes to blame him for this turn of events, and pursue him with a wrath that blinds her to the fact that she is changing too, just in a different way from the others.

The Submarine duo is not so blind as Kongou; they use Maya to keep tabs on her, and when she proves too unstable, they restrain her and go on the hunt against Iona themselves. We then get into some of the best stuff out of Arpeggio: the climax.

Throughout the show, the fighting was fairly good. Arpeggio features a military commander as its main character, and as is fitting it gives a lot of attention to tactics. Not every fight is a high-end winner (for sure, the ship battles are much better than any action that happens to go down while characters are on foot instead), but they do it pretty well. That said, it would be pretty easy to try to add drama by just scaling up the threat. The first major naval battle of the show is against Takao (a Heavy Cruiser); the next is against Haruna and Kirishima (Fast battleships, which are larger and theoretically more dangerous as well as there being two of them). The escape sequence once again features numerous opponents, and the characters don’t actually defeat their foes. It’s once again scaled up from what we saw before.

So, when Kongou goes mad, absorbs Maya, and comes after Gunzo not in the shape of a ship but a flying battlestation reminiscent of the Death Star, it would have been an alright climax to just blow up the big metal ball and let that be that. Arpeggio, however, is not willing to settle for that.

Instead, the climax owns up to the more interesting side of Arpeggio’s material. There is a battle against Kongou’s sphere of doom, though the struggle is largely framed as a struggle to survive, but the real battle is a mental and emotional contest between Iona and Kongou, with Iona struggling to save Kongou from self-destruction and insanity.

The fact that the climax is a struggle to save Kongou (rather than defeat her, though the two causes do align) and predicated in psychology rather than just tactics, is a pretty bold move for a show that despite its intelligence hadn’t really come off as fond of bold moves. It’s an excellent sequence, depicting a physical battle alongside a battle of wills, with good action and some creative visual wonder. Despite that, there is a part of me that feels like it’s a little bit cheap to have Kongou reach an epiphany about herself that erases her hostility, when that hostility was a big part of making her a person. But while there would be something to be said for Kongou going down like Captain Ahab, I accept her redemption. This is in large part because I-400 and I-402 went down swinging, and how the loss of her sisters hit Iona. Essentially, the deaths of the submarines would have been wasted if Kongou fell too, since it was their fate that galvanized Iona into making an insanely risky play to not see another sapient being meet the same fate. I have to appreciate that it’s not just forgotten the episode after they fall that killing Mental Models is a big deal for Iona

While that’s the rundown of the Fog and the plot, there is one more character who’s worth mentioning: Makie. Makie is a little girl we meet about halfway through the show, and escorting her becomes something of a subplot. She befriends Haruna and Kirishima, doing a lot about bringing them into the human fold. She also happens to be the inventor of the Vibration Warhead – a weird feather in the cap of someone who doesn’t look to be out of grade school. She also happens to not quite be human.

If the Mental Models are the Fog’s attempt to become more like humans and gain our ‘powers’, Makie is humanity doing the same thing back at the fog. She’s an artificial person, grown in a lab and designed for a purpose, and while she’s the experimental unit that lived she’s still something of a buggy beta build: endowed with superhuman intellect (hence her scientific/engineering achievements at such an early age) but stuck with a rigorous course of medication to keep living. In some ways, this isn’t unlike the Mental Models. If the defection of the majority of them is anything to go by, they’ve got some pretty big bugs to overcome… but the core principle is the same.

For me, this means that one of Arpeggio’s big theme, perhaps the biggest one is this: “What counts as a person?” The human characters are torn on Makie – some (like her ‘father’) see her as a real person, but military brass sees her in essentially the same light as they would a supercomputer. More individuals would probably discount the Mental Models, who aren’t even remotely human even if they have human forms. However, over the course of the show, you come to empathize with them as they grow and change, leading up to Kongou’s redemption. The Fog, of course, has a different inside-versus-outside and ethics with a fundamentally alien basis in the ‘Admiralty Code’. Yet even there, they have disagreements. Haruna and Kirishima accept Makie as a person worthy of their care and respect, while on the other side the submarines see Maya as nothing more than a tool, while Kongou saw her as a friend. Or at least as enough of a person to call out to her while taking on the final form that would incorporate her nanomaterials.

When all is said and done, though… Arpeggio of Blue Steel is only an alright show. It’s certainly got a lot of fascinating stuff in it, and it sure as hell isn’t bad. However, it doesn’t exactly go all the way with its ideas. A lot of what I’ve written required reading between the lines, and while it’s great that a show can prompt me to do that, a better production would encourage it, and not just for someone who has a pre-existing interest to go hunting for the discussion. Arpeggio, as I said at the start, doesn’t exactly feel like it’s ashamed of having a lot of intelligence in its setup and skeleton, it doesn’t really want to indulge it either.

For all the genius ideas and thought-provoking turns in Arpeggio, there’s also a lot of bog standard stuff. Most of Hyuuga’s comedy, while a welcome break from doom and gloom, is really cliched, and while Takao may be weirdly great as the ideal model of the Tsundere, there’s a degree to which she’s checking boxes as well. The writers even manage to fit in “must have” elements that they really didn’t have to have, like a beach episode. Most episodes are more concerned with combat tactics (which are, again, done well) or weak cloak-and-dagger maneuvering with the human government we don’t really care about than they are with the inner workings of the Fog and the questions of what it means to be intelligent or human. The last couple episodes are better on that (including the battle with the subs, Takao’s sacrifice, and the final confrontation with Kongou), but there’s a lot of wasted time. Worst (or at least lamest) of all are the human characters. Yeah, Gunzo technically has a crew of his friends along with him but really, I don’t remember any of them by name or attitude. Their visual styles were done alright: I remember Gunzo had Asuka Langley as an engineer, a guy with a cool robot mask, and Lucio from Overwatch on his team, but I am at a total loss for anything those characters contributed at any point. They didn’t have anything to do in the plot, they didn’t help further the themes or ideas of the show, and they didn’t even manage to develop themselves as even mildly interesting. I think red shirts in Star Trek had more personality than these guys.

So, while I do think Arpeggio of Blue Steel is worth attention, and worth a watch… it’s not really worth a HIGH rating. On the whole, it’s a decent B-. There’s some A+ work in there, but its held together by so much bottom-end-of-C work that the whole thing just washes out to average. Still, if you want a show that will reward effort spent thinking about it, even if you sometimes suspect you’re giving it more thought than the creators did, give Arpeggio of Blue Steel a watch.