YMMV / 86 EIGHTY-SIX

• Alternate Character Interpretation: General Jerome Karlstahl is ripe for this, as the man hardly ever speaks his personal opinion on matters except for a few select occasions, and much of his dialogue consists of matter-of-fact statements describing the situation as it is. Most notably, the story never gives a clear answer on what exactly his feelings on the Eighty-Six are. While he never expresses any racist sentiments towards them, he is also completely dispassionate and seemingly unmoved by their plight. One could argue he either has just as low of an opinion of them as he does his fellow Alba San Magnolians, or that he may be secretly sympathetic towards them but that his position requires him to follow the letter of the law to the slightest jot and tittle and not allow any personal emotion to get in the way.
• Americans Hate Tingle: While she's more of a Base-Breaking Character in Japan, you will find few people that like Frederica in the western fanbase. She's seen as incredibly annoying and oftentimes petulant, not to mention that fans find the very concept of a child who can act like an adult (and play therapist to the main character to boot) to be too outlandish for a serious work like 86.
• Applicability: 86 may be a war story, but the nature of the Legion as an apolitical and supposedly time-limited force of destruction means that it also serves as an effective allegory for how countries handle (or fail to handle) natural disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes, and pandemics, and how they prey upon and worsen existing social inequalities. The fact that the first two seasons of its anime aired under the context of the COVID-19 Pandemic hammers it home further.
• Awesome Music: Seriously, the soundtrack of the anime, composed by Hiroyuki Sawano are all absolute bangers, such as THE ANSWER,RE:g1-ON. The tracks by the other composer, Kohta Yamamoto, are quite good in their own right. Laco sings the second ending theme, "Hands Up to the Sky" where it conveys the feeling of struggling through the pain - of war, of being acknowledged - while still retaining hope for the future.
• Base-Breaking Character: Lena is a very polarizing character for many, especially in the beginning of the story. Her naivety and unconscious racial bias, as well as the touch of self-righteousness in her demeanor, can be off-putting, especially to anime-only viewers. Her lack of screentime in the second major story arc further hurt for those who didn't stick around long enough to see her return. For light novel readers, another controversial thing about her comes in Volume 8 when she becomes panicked after Shin's Love Confession to her and ends up giving him very wishy-washy mixed messages on exactly where their relationship stands, causing enough readers to get fed up with her indecisiveness and wonder why in the world it takes Shin almost dying again to finally make up her mind to want to be with him. Volumes 9 and 11 help her regain some of her previous standing with the fandom, but then dips again in Volume 12 since she gets Put on a Bus and is absent for almost that entire volume except for the prologue and epilogue..
• Broken Base:
  • A long argument continues among fans regarding Volume 1's second epilogue "Reboot" on whether people new to the novels should skip reading it or not. This is because "Reboot" takes place after a two year timeskip that shows that all 5 members of Spearhead Squadron eventually return to San Magnolia under the banner of the Federation of Giad and meet with Lena in person for the first time. Readers in favor of skipping it say it should be read after the ending of Volume 3 because it takes away a lot of the tension in Volumes 2 and 3, while the other side thinks the spoiler aspect of it is way overblown and encourages people to just read it as normal. Even Asato Asato herself weighed in on the issue by telling anime watchers who wish to avoid spoilers to not read past Page 321 (of the Japanese release, obviously) unless they were really curious to see what happens next.
  • The first volume of the story is also a point of contention. For those who loved it, the heavy oppressive atmosphere of the first arc is never replicated again, which let down some who found that to be the draw of the series. This is because the story was originally written to be a self-contained narrative for the Dengeki Bunko novel contest, and thus the first arc's atmosphere had to be unique for the series. On the other hand, there are those who find said first volume to be the weakest story arc of the series due to finding the actions of both the San Magnolian government and the Eighty Six to be extremely unbelievable, and feel the story gets a lot better once it's out of the Republic due to ditching the World War II allegory. All that aside, another common point of complaint for the series as a whole after the first volume is that there aren't any more deaths of any named characters who get major screentime, which has led some readers to get annoyed at what they perceive as Plot Armor for the main cast, after the body count was heavily front-loaded to begin with.
  • Pretty much the entirety of Volume 8 is hotly contested among readers. Among the biggest complaints are Lena's behavior (as detailed in Base-Breaking Character above) of leaving poor Shin hanging in relationship limbo for a month especially after Volume 7 showed she was ready to woman up and commit herself to him, the very existence of the Leviathans feeling out of place, and the extremely unrealistic tactics and composition of the Regicide Fleet Countries' navy showing that Asato Asato's grasp of naval combat is quite lacking, to put it mildly. In addition to that, the actual ground operation on the Mirage Spire itself is very confusingly written and hard to follow (particularly since there are no illustrations or diagrams of the Spire in the book).
• Catharsis Factor:
  • Admittedly minor example, but for those who had a chip on their shoulder against Annette due to her constant racist remarks towards 86 and her attempts to have Lena do the same, how she let her Childhood Friend get deported, or how she cruelly cut ties with Lena when she asked for her help to save Spearhead Squadron, seeing Lena, in her first display of Manipulative Bitchiness, ruthlessly Blackmail her for her help with the chance to help said Childhood Friend, Shin, and causing a massive Oh, Crap! for Annette can be cathartically terrifying.
  • After seeing the horrific crimes committed by San Magnolia it's easy not to feel bad for them when the Legion finally breaks through the Grand Mur. What results is an utter Curb-Stomp Battle of the unprepared Republic military, with the nation only being saved from complete annihilation by the very people they'd derided as subhuman. The icing on the cake is seeing their crimes against humanity exposed to whole world when the Federacy relief force arrives.
• Common Knowledge: A lot of reviewers and first time mecha watchers seemed to focus on the racism storyline as something original in anime. Thing is, it's not as simple as those would want you to believe - the racism storyline is only a small part of the wider Crapsack World setting (San Magnolia rapidly falls Out of Focus after volume 1 and the first course of the anime), and 86 definitely isn't the first Mecha Show to deal with similar heavy topics (those have been a Real Robot Genre staple for pretty much the entire existence of real robot mecha as a means of storytelling).
• Evil Is Cool: This is a mecha show, and the iron rule of mecha shows is that the bad guys get most of the best toys. Mechanical designer I-IV delivers handily with the Legion mechs - sleek, stylish, and as awe-inspiring in their power as they are terrifying.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception:
  • Anime-only viewers who think the series takes place on Earth due to the opening theme blatantly featuring a map of Earth, with Tunisia highlighted on it, and further think the series is simply an Alternate History or set in the far future. The truth is, the image of Earth is completely random and unrelated to the plot as 86 takes place in a Constructed World with completely different geography from our real world.
  • Calling Episodes 12-23 "Season 2" is becoming an extremely sore sticking point for fans, who have to keep explaining that it's just Part 2 of the same season.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Lena and Shin are often referred to as "Discord/Skype gf"^*girlfriend and "Discord bf"^*boyfriend respectively especially in earlier parts of the story, due to the fact that the two's behavior begins to draw a lot of similarities to real-life Long Distance Relationships.
  • The random Female Republic Officer who was with Lena at the start of the 2nd cour was immediately nicknamed "Bob Cut Girl" by fans.
• Friendly Fandoms: With Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon. As of 2023, ACVI is the most recent and widely available action Mecha Game that allows players to build and play a high mobility quadruped mech, while the in-game image editor lets players create their own custom decals and emblems. This has led to fans recreating decals used by the Spearhead Squadron, such as Shin's Undertaker decal.
  • Armored Core VI's story trailer also drew a lot of comparisons to the bleak tone and feeling of 86 as Walter's "Hounds" are sent on what looks like a suicide mission.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The political events and plotlines of the light novels have revealed a few frightening parallels with the events of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022:
  • The devastated streets of San Magnolia's capital are harder to look at when compared to the real world destruction in Ukraine that occurred during the anime's hiatus.
  • The Republic's refusal to allow the Eighty Six to recover their dead in order to hide the true costs of the war is a practice that has become a disturbing reality in the real life Russo-Ukrainian War. Ukraine reportedly has thousands of Russian bodies sitting in morgues that Russia has refused to repatriate. This is likely part of an effort by the Russian government to hide the true extent of Russian losses from the public and avoid paying compensation to the families of the deceased.
  • Much like San Magnolia, Russia has also been accused of using ethnic minorities from poorer parts of the Russian Federation as little more than cannon fodder. This has been seen by some observers as an indirect form of genocide, aimed at getting rid of troublesome ethnic groups who might demand greater rights and autonomy in the future. They have also been recruiting prisoners with promises of freedom, much like how the Republic promised to restore the Eighty Six's citizenship in return for military service. These convicts have reportedly been thrown into the worst fighting as disposable cannon fodder, leading to speculation that Russia likely doesn't intend to hold up their end of the bargain either.
  • On the Ukrainian side, the invasion exposed a very ugly undercurrent of severe racism within Ukrainian society, a country that had previously seemed like it had no major problem with such an issue, which is an even stronger parallel with San Magnolia due to being the victim of an invasion. Many reports of mistreatment and discrimination by Ukrainian authorities towards immigrants from Africa and Asia came out in the wake of the Russian attack (such as denying them spaces on evacuation trains to prioritize white Ukrainians), and these have played a not-insignificant factor as to why Ukraine has had difficulty gathering support from African and Asian countries.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The Phönix is basically one big Terminator Impersonator, with many of its abilities seemingly inspired by the T-1000 and the T-X from Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. However, one of the abilities it reveals it can do in Volume 6, splitting off a less-capable copy of itself is right out of the Rev-9's playbook, which is incredibly funny considering the volume was published a month before even the first trailer for Terminator: Dark Fate was released.
  • When the first trailers for the anime were released, viewers who weren't familiar with the series made constant jokes that Lena must be Esdeath's daughter. Come Episode 9, and one dark shot of Lena makes her look nigh-identical to Esdeath herself!
• Hype Backlash: The show wasn't received that kindly by veteran mecha fans, as some of the media covering it were again going for the "it's not mecha because it deals with character drama" excuse (something already seen with Neon Genesis Evangelion, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and Code Geass). Said excuse is often considered a cowardly cop-out to keep perpetuating the myth that mecha as a genre never was good, except for whatever ends up popular as a flavor of the month anime on MAL/Reddit/whereever.
• Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: Many fans consider San Magnolia to be worse than the Legion ever was, since while the Legion want to exterminate humanity, they only do so because they're programmed to. San Magnolia, on the other hand, voluntarily discriminates against and oppresses its non-Alba population by forcing them to fight the Legion as disposable troops. Their country getting wiped off the map doesn't make the situation better as then they start complaining the 86 and Federacy didn't do enough to protect them.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Especially among American viewers, frequent comparisons between Shin and The Undertaker were abound thanks to Shin's callsign. This got even funnier when it is revealed Shin's overriding goal is to fight his brother Rei to the death, leading to further comparisons between Undertaker and Kane.
    "GOOD GAWD ALMIGHTY! AS GOD IS MY WITNESS, HE HAS BROKEN THAT LÖWE IN HALF!"
  • FUCKING GLORY TO THE SPEARHEAD SQUADRON ^explanationThe iconic phrase on Kujo's blackboard counting down the days to their end of service also serves as the rallying cry for the fandom
  • Lena the NTR protagonist ^explanationThe infamous scene of Lena emotionally coercing Annette into helping Spearhead Squadron, including her Slasher Smile has led to jokes about her making sure the childhood friend still does not win
  • Hachi-roku where?◊^explanationPeople who only hear the title and come to check it out thinking this series has something to do with Initial D
  • 99mm handgun^explanationA hilarious typo in Yen Press's release of Volume 2 which says Shin's handgun is chambered in 99mm when it obviously should be 9mm, leading to further jokes about how insanely strong Shin must be. For reference, 99mm would be the size of an artillery cannon or a tank's main gun
  • Shovel sharpening intensifies^explanationBorne from a scene in Volume 8 when Shin makes a mock threat to kill Vika using a shovel thanks to him making Lena wear the Cicada suit, an insanely skintight suit that practically exposes every part of her. It has become a meme associated with anything or anyone pushing lewd, or even highly suggestive, fanart of Lena
• Misaimed Fandom: Volume 11. This story arc sees the final destruction of San Magnolia as Giad pulls all its forces out of the country and arranges for a civilian evacuation of the approximately 1 million Alba still in the country. However, the logistical challenges and messy state of the evacuation mean a lot of the Alba aren't able to get out in time, and the Legion who were former San Magnolian Eighty-Six out for vengeance brutally gun down and burn tens of thousands of San Magnolian Alba left behind at the train stations. While the Eighty-Six don't really shed any tears for their deaths, the slaughter is still exceedingly disturbing to witness (especially with the Legion using high-caliber machine guns that are mulching their targets and heavy flamethrowers to torch them alive) and they do their best to push it out of their minds and stay focused on the mission. This is contrasted with much of the reader base for the series, many of whom were positively rejoicing in seeing such an event occur in all their intimate detail.
• Narm: The anime original classroom scene in Episode 2 when Lena delivers a scathing rant toward the audience about the truth of the Juggernaut mechs being piloted by the Eighty-Six and San Magnolia's brutal treatment of them. While this was all told to the reader through the omniscient narrative in the light novel (which can be argued to have its own problems with presentation), the scene can come off as feeling like a borderline self-insert power fantasy moment one would expect to find in a low-brow Young Adult novel.
• Narm Charm: The series presentation of racism towards the 86's due to not having the same hair and eye color as Albas and the resulting cruel treatment they receive can appear so overblown and non-sensical that it's almost hard to take seriously. However, this serves to emphasize just how non-sensical racism itself is, and so is ultimately to the benefit of the series and its message.
• Nightmare Fuel: Even beyond the Fantastic Racism premise, the real brunt of it is in the Legion who use Human Resources in copying brainwave patterns from their victim's last moments. The premise is bad enough given it's what Shin feels around the "Black Sheep" units, and the Para-RAID system's mental link makes others feel it too. Once San Magnolia falls to a full-blown Legion invasion, we find out that at least 90% of the population, estimated to be ten million people, were straight up physically harvested for their brains, and the cast find out the hard way just what happens to these victims as well as their leftovers at the factories.
• Spiritual Adaptation: The world, characters and general atmosphere of 86 are incredibly similar to those of Code Geass: Akito the Exiled. The story revolves around a squad made up of discriminated minorities who are meant to die on the battlefield who fight primarily with spider mechs. Their military handler is a Nice Girl from the wealthy nobility who does her best to treat them in a humane and compassionate manner who relies on her Honorary Uncle military general to protect her from political consequences. The main character of the story has a supernatural ability to somehow sense the souls of the dead, which he awakened to after his brother tried to murder him in a church as a child, and he has made it his goal in life to find and kill his brother on the battlefield. The top government and military officials of the racist country that the main characters fight for keep denying they are losing the war, and in both stories, it does eventually collapse. In addition, the Humongous Mecha used in both series have a Brain/Computer Interface network linking the whole squad and their handler together that allows for instantaneous communication yet comes with a risk of emotional bleeding for each user (significantly, there are no other examples of such an interface existing in the rest of the Code Geass franchise): they even have similar names, with the 86 version called "Para-RAID" and the Akito version called the "Brain Raid System (BRS)." While some of the details, such as character motivations, are different enough to warrant Spiritual Antithesis, it's hard to deny that 86, at least in its first volume, feels like some kind of grand Homage or Whole-Plot Reference to Akito the Exiled.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Lena's mother is inconsequential to the story. She only appears at the very beginning eating a tense breakfast with her daughter, and her few lines of dialogue show her to be a very typical San Magnolian racist with the usual mentality of the old nobility regarding her daughter's future (she speaks only in the light novel & the manga adaptation; the anime cuts all her dialogue and leaves her as basically a living prop). Unlike Lena's father and uncle, she doesn't even have a name in the light novel.^note Only the first episode of the anime and the afterword of Volume 1 of the 86 - Eighty-Six: Operation High School spinoff give her name as Margareta It could have been an interesting turn of events to see Lena's domestic home life with tension between her growing closer to Spearhead and especially Shin (since she Resonates with them every evening in her room), versus her mother's prejudiced views. It would have been even more interesting to see how she and her husband Vaclav made their marriage work (or not) due to their radically differing views towards the mistreatment of the Colorata, and how she reacted to his death. Instead, after her initial appearance at the beginning, the only other time she's ever brought up again is in Volume 4 when Lena sadly informs Shin that her mother and uncle both died from the Legion invasion of the Republic, leaving her all alone as the sole surviving member of her family.
  • Volume 11 has a flashback scene that gives some greater context to her. She has lived in constant fear that Lena will die a sudden death just like Vaclav, which is why she was so adamant that Lena quit the military and get married to live a civilian life. Despite her pleas that Lena flee during the large-scale offensive, she is ignored by her daughter who chooses to continue fighting. The last we hear of Margareta Milizé is that she was trying to save a child before getting crushed to death by a Löwe.
• Woolseyism: In the original Japanese text, Lena's famed nickname is "Bloody Regina." This is a little at odds with the claim that it's wordplay based off her name, so the light novels' official English translation altered it to "Bloody Reina," which means the same thing in a different language (Latin to Spanish) but this one actually is a pun, based on how her full first name "Vladilena" would be pronounced in Japanese. The change in the English version was actually acknowledged by Asato Asato herself when she noted that the original "Bloody Regina" title was kept simply because it was aimed at a Japanese-speaking audience who weren't likely to get the joke. For what it's worth, the anime's English dub sticks with "Bloody Regina."