In the past few years of anime streaming, we have had escalating forms of “Streaming Jail”. First, there was Netflix Jail, where a show would sit on TV in Japan but was licensed for streaming in English on Netflix, so you had to wait until the show was done. Then there was Disney+ Jail, where the show was licensed on Disney+ internationally, and you had to wait and see if it went on that service in your region. Now, with Your Forma, we have Smart-device Specific Jail, where a series is only licensed for streaming to a service that’s locked to a specific company’s smart devices. Good news for me – I have a Samsung smartphone and tablet. Bad news for Your Forma – it can’t make it to viewers who don’t.
Your Forma is, basically, a mix of Ghost In The Shell: Stand-Alone Complex and Issac Asimov’s robot mysteries. Human society has androids with varying degrees of sentience who are programmed with We-Have-The-Three-Laws-Of-Robotics-At-Home, combined with neural implants for humans that, in addition to smartphone functionality without the clunkiness also allows law enforcement to (with a warrant) allows you to dive into your memories with the assistance of an android if you are unable to give testimony. One of the Cyber-Investigators who works in these cases is Echika Hieda, who is partners with the Android Harold Lucraft. Together, they fight crime.
It’s all a very well-realized mystery series. The world is well thought out, the characters are well written, and they have some great chemistry. The technology works well within the story and helps make for some interesting commentary on what we want AI to be, and what it would mean if it got there. It also has some commentary on how some of our concerns about the pervasiveness of technology play when the computers you’re complaining about, people spend too much time with, can emote and have feelings, arguably handling that aspect of the concept better than M3gan.
There are two problems with this. The first is with the show itself – it skips the first novel. It’s not an impossible hurdle to overcome, particularly if the second novel is also good (I started the Stephanie Plum novels on Two For The Dough). However, it does add a bit of unnecessary narrative heavy lifting when you’re dealing with an SF story.
The second, as mentioned in the opening, is through the distribution of the series. I have a Samsung smartphone and tablet. I was able to watch this legally. If you have any other model of Android phone, never mind an iOS device, you’re SOL for legal options. That sucks. This is a show that, were I still doing my fanzines as outreach to potential Hugo Awards voters, I’d be hyping to high heaven. This is the series that fans of the Elijah Bailey mysteries have been looking for for years. But unless your smart devices are made by a specific manufacturer, you can’t watch it.
So, I’m going to recommend you watch Your Forma in whatever way is available to you at the time you are reading this, and will leave you to figure out for yourself what that would entail.
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