Iris on Rainy Days Review

Humans are of blood and flesh, they are fragile and emotional. Robots are of steel and electronics, they are tough and emotionless. This is the element which seperates the boundary between humans and robots.

What if both concepts of humans and robots are jumbled up? Iris on Rainy Days depicts how even robots, possess human-like emotions and how humans, even though weak, can be downright evil and cruel.

The light novel stars Iris Rain Umbrella, the main heroine of the story. She is a proud robotic maid of the Umbrella family, and serves Wendy, a robot researcher who Iris adores from head to toe.

I love the brilliance and ambience of the world of Oval Town. Although the light novel is about robots, it isn’t particularly sci-fi. Oval Town is an ordinary town like any other. Robots are pretty much treated as hardwares shops, one can sell body parts in the store, be it original or second-hand. There is a system created by the Robots Management Department in regards to the robot’s ownership, and it is a very interesting system. When the the system initiated upon Iris due to a certain incident, this is when the story really begins, where Iris got scrapped and was brought to do forced labour on the junkyard.

If a robot has emotions and a will, then what would happen if they are aware of their altered body parts. Imagine for an instance, you’re residing in a human-like body then one day, you woke up, to find that you’re suddenly in a completely new body, an old junkie robotic steel body. How would you feel? Not just Iris, but most of the other robots face daily crisis like these day by day. The humans forgot that the robots they themselves created had understoond what are emotions, and are still treating them as if they were mere machines; disembling, modifying, grinding them. It is saddening to see the robots being treated as mere “slaves”.

During the latter part of the series, Iris befriended other robots in the junkyard, and like her, was suffering. The humans treated them as nothing more but “replacements”, when they need them, they give them all the love they had but when they don’t need them, they are thrown away like second-hand tools. The concept of robots and their owners are another brilliant execution of the novel. Each the robots has their own special circumstances but it all comes down to one thing; the humans treating them with inferiority.

Iris however, is different in the way that she was loved by her guardian to the very end. However, it perhaps is because she knew love that she had to suffer the regret and sadness more then anyone else. It was heart-wrenching seeing Iris struggling physically and emotionally throughout the novel.

Iris on Rainy Days depicts the personification of robots. It is a heartwarming, yet painful story of how Iris, a robot who once knew love, suffered through human’s atrocity, and after experiencing the ordeal, learned to look forward and build a better future for her robotic community.

Rating
Story: B+
Character: A
Artwork: B+

Final Score
8/10

Tags: android, body swap, iris on Rainy Days, Iris Rain Umbrella, junkie, junkyard, metals, Professor, Wendy

This entry was posted by Kai.

• June 16, 2012
• Light Novel, Review
• 22 Comments