Summer Wars/Fridge

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Fridge Brilliance

  • Left with only two accounts, Love Machine still has control of the satellite. One of the two accounts he holds is Kenji's, but the other may be his original account, created by the military to load him to OZ in the first place.
    • Or the account of the civil administrator who controls the satellite. I think the implication is that Kenji's was his original account - Love Machine is an AI, not an avatar.
  • Both occasions of Spanner in the Works and the subsequent triumphant victory could easily fit into the theme of family. Once or twice they're going to screw you over, but in the end they'll stand with you and you will be unstoppable.
  • It may seem strange that at the climax of the movie Love Machine chooses to drop the satellite on a rural country estate owned by a single family instead of following through on its original plan to hit a nuclear reactor somewhere in Japan....but think of it this way. If you're a virus whose mission is to collect accounts, cause general chaos, and play games and the only consistent threat you've seen from the outside world involves a math genius breaking through your encryptions, a gamer whose avatar beats the snot out of you, a school girl whose gambling ability costs you to lose millions of the accounts you've gained, and various others who pooled their resources to mitigate the fallout from the trouble you caused and very nearly lock you inside a trap of their own design...and all of these people happen to belong to the same family? Who would you view as the most important target to annihilate?
  • Your opponent has millions of accounts. You have 20. You need to gain control of as many of your opponent's accounts as possible as efficiently as possible. How do you do it?. Gambling. Use the winnings from your last hand to raise the stakes on the next one.
  • A mix of Fridge Brilliance Harsher in Hindsight is take a look at both cover images [1] [dead link] and [2]. Is someone missing? Sakae isn't there... in either of the images. Though there someone else there, it's Wabisuke. Now, who arrived in Shota's car, the one you see in the former picture, and this image is a clunked up version of how chaotic each of the family members minds were- see Shota holding onto the ice, or how Katsuhiko's holding his son, and many others. Then in the latter image, they're all together to fight Love Machine- see how orderly it looks, and looking like how a 'warrior' family would look when heading off against their foes (i.e. their expressions) with Natsuki holding on the family symbol in front. You can actually pinpoint the moments that these two were representing.
  • Shortly after Love Machine starts to wreak havoc in Oz, Takashi tells Kenji that there's a rumor going around Oz that the culprit is an AI called Love Machine released from an American university that hijacks accounts and treats its attacks like a game. The question is, who would actually know all that, right down to the AI's name and how it thinks? Wabisuke would. The scene right before this has Wabisuke checking his cell phone and reading the very same email from the Pentagon that he shows Sakae later, the one telling him that the test run was successful and that they'll buy Love Machine. Apparently Wabisuke responded by starting the online rumor we hear about in the next scene. Was he just gloating a bit, since his creation was so successful and he'd made a fortune? Or did he feel guilty and was trying to help out by anonymously tipping Oz off about what it's up against? Knowing Wabisuke, probably a little bit of both.
  • At first, it seems to be a remarkable coincidence that the rogue AI that steals Kenji's avatar in its initial attack on Oz was written by the black sheep of the family he's staying with. Of course, since Kenji became involved in the entire mess by responding to an e-mail via cell-phone, Love Machine almost certainly knew Kenji's physical location, was likely able to correlate it with the location of Wabisuke's home, and probably picked that particular avatar just to screw with its creator.

Fridge Logic

  • We're talking about upsetting or destroying ONE reactor. ONE. That's Chernobyl, not Doomsday.
    • True, the stakes aren't quite as high as the end of the world. But that's probably not the point. The point is that a lot of people could die because of it anyway. Just because the entire world isn't at stake doesn't mean the danger is any less real. It is still a lot of people. It is a more realistic danger, and still a very real threat.