Dream with Our Eyes Open

In modern-day Italy, a shadowy but seemingly benevolent organization takes in young girls whose futures are hopeless: Henrietta, the only surviving member of a family that was slaughtered; Rico, who was born without limbs and whose parents were increasingly unable to care for her; Triela, a child of mixed race from Tunisia who had been kidnapped and spoiler and squick/trigger warning used as a victim in a snuff film; and so on.

In truth, the Agency for Social Welfare (excellent choice of name: so bland and boring, no?) "treats" these girls by surgically altering them and brainwashing them to forget their former lives, turning them into near-unstoppable assassins that the agency calls cyborgs. This process also shortens their overall lifespan considerably, although because the program is still pretty much experimental, good data on the life of a cyborg is not really available.

Each girl is paired with an adult male "handler." Given that this is manga, this set-up could have been skeevy as hell, but although the sexual element is not totally ignored (Triela, who seems to be around 13, is definitely grappling with romantic feelings toward her handler), it's mostly a very minor element in the relationships. The pairings are called "fratellos" – that is, basically, a set of siblings.

There's an ongoing plot involving a terrorist group, which provides opportunities for the agency to use the girls' powers (although they are also involved in some very cold-hearted murders for general political expediency). We are shown the terrorists' interactions with each other, during which they discuss their political philosophies, so that they are not just faceless targets. Personalities and relationships, in fact, are the focus of the series: the girls' relationships not only with their handlers, but with each other. We get lots of scenes of their training and their down time in their dorm, when they talk about life in general as well as what they have been doing.

Despite a persistent feeling that this is all going to end in tears, I'm fascinated by this series and am enjoying it. The attitude of the trainers toward their doomed charges makes me think a bit of CLAMP's Clover, while the brainwashing and training of the girls recalls similar scenes in the childhoods of the azi (programmed clones) Catlin II and Florian II in C.J. Cherryh's Cyteen, who are destined for security work.

The artwork is more utilitarian than striking, but it gets the work done. It's very detailed and provides a lot of gun porn: wikis detailing what weapons each girls uses can be found easily online. There's a certain amount of male gaze – this is a shounen series – but it's not quite voyeuristic. We see girls changing their clothes, stretching (in spandex exercise gear), and in hospital gowns for procedures, but the treatment of these scenes mostly seemed to me more expository than exploitative. (And I was surprised to find that this was not a seinen series. The relationships between the girls and their handlers seems like prime moe.)