Log Horizon (original title: ログ・ホライズン; Japan 2013–15) (review)

Based on a light novel series (originally published serially online) by Touno Mamare, Log Horizon follows more than a decade of sf entertainment focusing on players who have found their life-or-death struggles in online games to have real-life consequences. This premise has its roots in cyberpunk tales dating back at least to Tron (Lisberger US 1982) and its sequel, Tron: Legacy (Kosinski US 2010). The advent of massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) in the 1990s has generated a veritable subgenre dedicated to this trope in Japanese animation. .hack//SIGN (Mashimo Japan 2002) was one of the first television anime to popularise the MMORPG setting for this particular premise. Based on a light novel series by Reki Kawahara, Sword Art Online (Itō Japan 2012; original title ソードアート・オンライン), along with its television film (Itō Japan 2013) and sequel (Itō Japan 2014), is probably the most immediately recognisable anime featuring this premise in recent memory. With its second season being released on disc this summer in the US by Sentai Filmworks, and distributed online by Crunchyroll and Hulu, Log Horizon sets itself apart by emphasising the utopian aspects of the gaming community and the ways in which that community could yoke its strengths to the political project of world transformation.

Swimming upstream against a steady diet of shows emphasising eternal friendship or power trip fantasies for lonely youths, Log Horizon includes anime fantasy standbys: if you need your griffin fix, epic battles with giant monsters and moe girls vying for the affection of the romantically clueless protagonist, you got it. After the mysterious event the players call The Apocalypse traps them all in the universe of Elder Tale (the MMORPG designed to be a fantastical, one-half scale version of Earth), they find that living in a gameworld is radically different than playing in a gameworld. (There is from the start, however, a lingering mystery about whether the world in which the characters find themselves trapped is or is like the game. As the series progresses, the latter seems to be more the case.) Players, called Adventurers in the game, can still access heads-up displays listing their skills, attributes and items, but they quickly learn that they can fight more effectively simply by attempting to do the action physically, rather than mediating it. Similarly, all food is tasteless mush when it is prepared via digital menu, but if – and only if – players with the requisite cooking skill level take the time to prepare ingredients by hand, it will taste like the real thing. It is this latter discovery that propels a Copernican revolution. With many driven either to despair or barbarism after the Apocalypse, biting into a juicy, home-cooked cheeseburger is enough to give the orphaned Adventurers a renewed sense of hope. With this reminder of home, the players begin turning the world into which they have been thrown into heimat.

At the centre of this transformation is Shiroe (Takuma Terashima), Log Horizon's primary protagonist. With each step Shiroe takes toward utopian revolution, he roots himself further to a place in the world. His own evolution from loner to leader is intertwined with the expanding scope of his community. It is Shiroe's insight that Akihabara (his home city, named after the district in Tokyo that serves as a mecca for the Japanese geek community) must have functioning institutions in order to thrive. While Shiroe does undertake quests over the course of the series, they are never for the mere purpose of acquiring rare items or prestige. For the sake of cementing good diplomatic relations with the neighbouring kingdom, he helps a princess plead for Adventurer help in quelling a goblin invasion. To prevent the Akihabara landowners from drowning in debt – or greedy Adventurers from turning into what Lenin might have called kulaks – he raids a dungeon for the express purpose of returning ownership of the land to the Japan 'server' itself. Shiroe's schemes are Machiavellian in the classic sense: all for the sake of protecting...