Defeating a more powerful enemy with tricks, is all that Heavy Object is about. Everything else in this light novel is just bait.
The bishoujos on the covers are just bait, there is no romance and very light ecchi. The heroines are not the point. The pilots of the giant weapons that ended the nuclear age, Objects, don’t really matter. These weapons might as well be Kaiju or giant monsters that humans defeat with ingenuity, even if they are man-made Objects. The relationship between the two actual (male) leads, the “battle-field student” Quenser and “noble” “radar operator” Heivia doesn’t matter either. Their ranks in the military doesn’t matter. Quenser’s goal of learning about objects doesn’t matter, nor does Heivia’s goal of ending of his Romeo and Juliet family feud by becoming his noble family’s head by achieving military feats, because in fact they are both just going to be blowing up giant Objects rather than making progress towards those goals.
In fact, when the two of them talk I honestly barely put in any effort to figure out which of the two are speaking lines (There are often no dialogue tags, e.g. ‘he said’, ‘she said’ in light novels). Their relationship is just a superficial buddy-cop duo routine, not a strong-bond forged on the battlefield.
The world-building about a post-nuclear world in which Objects have created a new world-order feels inconsequential because there is no progress through the battles either in the main duo’s role in the military or in progression in the conflict the world factions towards some kind of conclusion.
The way that the objects fight is affected by the ideologies that different factions. True. For example, the Information Alliance use AI to automate part of the piloting of their Objects. However the problem is that the plot feels a bit scattered, a battle here in Antartica, a battle there at Gibraltar, an Object sunk there in the pacific and then blown up here Australia. It feels like all these battles are not changing much, even if they have sunk about ten Objects by now it’s not like there is much indication that one faction is (morally) better than the others or even that one world power has been severely dealt a blow by the actions of the protagonists, even the protagonists are in the war for selfish reasons which I have said aren’t that interesting.
Above all else, there is an anime rom-com tone clinging to the stories at all points, a frivolousness characterised by the inclusion of things like Maids fighting on the battlefield. This isn’t some serious war drama. And yet the Otaku-pandering just doesn’t go far enough for the story to change the rules of the world to a point where it becomes plausible to the viewer because it doesn’t try to be plausible, instead it tries to give flimsy explanation as to why these things exist but doesn’t go crazy enough with their explanation. (For an example that goes beyond this barrier, check out Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere). Nor does it on the other hand give any kind of commentary on otaku culture or do anything clever with it. As I said, it’s just bait to get people like me to read.
And yet I find myself reading volume after volume. Maybe not a single sitting but it’s proven to be a reliable comfort read in between getting boring work done. Surely, it couldn’t be that I was drawn to the Bishoujo illustrations on the covers knowing full-well that the pretty girl illustrations would just be some minor characters while the two main characters are actually two guys who are not even that charismatic?
No, I have finally figured out why. It’s just satisfying to see a giant enemy defeated by human foot-soldiers. The different battlefields feel more like battle-maps in a first-person video-game like the early Call of Duty games. The things which the protagonists casually survive only make sense in action-film logic or even video-game logic. And yet there is always an explanation for as to how they destroy the object.
It’s not like a mystery novel where all the clues are given to you about how to solve the mystery and you need to find the one truth about who Culprit is, because the mystery in each scenario is how can you defeat this Object, and there is more than one way to destroy it whereas there can only be one culprit, you already know the Object going to go boom and Quenser and Heivia will be the ones doing it. It’s more like a Dungeon Master in D&D who will allow you to defeat a monster in more than one way. In fact the author urges the reader to find different ways to defeat the Object (which the protagonists have defeated in that volume) in the Afterword of every novel. Even the lack of coolness of the main characters puts the focus on the solution because if a cool character, like say Lupin III and his gang, destroyed a giant fortress or enemy, then rather the focus would be on how cool they looked while taking down their enemy rather than the way that they took it down, because it wouldn’t feel like a solution we as normal people could come up with.
Finally, I should note that I only just finished volume 8 and this is a 30 volume light novel series.
