3XXX: NAKED HUMAN BOMBS

3XXX: NAKED HUMAN BOMBS takes place in an over-the-top dystopian future in which sex has been so thoroughly banned that any amount of seeing or touching another person’s skin is taboo. The age of majority seems to be about 40—we’ve got to protect those 35-year-old minors!—and the useless asterisk censorship that you see people use for “s*x” or “p*rn” has extended to any word that could conceivably be used in a slightly lascivious context, like “m*sculature” and “mo*th”. The sexual repression all of this creates causes people to literally explode as soon as they experience arousal for the first time.

It’s an unsubtle send-up of the bizarre censorship era we’ve ended up in through a combination of poorly-conceived and messily-implemented legislation, corporate algorithmic social media, squeamish payment processors and credit card companies, and “think of the children” advocacy groups. This, of course, disproportionately affects queer people, as our lives are inherently considered unsafe for the children (or the corporations)—worse yet should we actually talk about sex at the level that cishet people do all the time, and anything more than that is just unimaginable. Alongside that, it’s also an explicitly transgender take on the kind of gender-bender anime scenarios beloved of many trans people. The PC, a 40-something police officer tasked with protecting the populace from the evils of sex, transforms instantaneously into a hot young woman—and in this new, strangely more comfortable body, she suddenly finds an interest in being desired and connecting to others sexually that she never thought she’d have.

Taura, as she begins calling herself, is soon enticed to join an underground resistance group, and there she falls for Ollie, a leader of the movement. He is also interested in her, but his own dysphoria and struggles with repression cause difficulties between them. But this isn’t dwelt on much, as the plot moves along at a breakneck pace through political twists and turns, culminating with Taura’s not-really-premeditated assassination of the prime minister.

Where things really get interesting, though, is the epilogue, which takes the form of diary entries by the author. (Exactly how fictionalized these are is unclear, and I make no assumptions one way or another. When I refer to "the author" in the following paragraphs, I mean the persona depicted by the diary entries.) These discuss the author’s original plans for the ending, in which Taura and Ollie manage to overcome their respective hangups enough to share a tender moment that is physically and emotionally intimate. But that doesn’t feel right to the author; it doesn’t ring true. They wonder whether they truly understand intimacy; they’ve never been comfortable enough in their own skin to really open up to another person. Thus, instead, the ending we’ve just read.

And to me, this is 3XXX’s most striking condemnation of the social strictures that it satirizes: that they’ve created a world in which the fantasy of blowing up the prime minister by performing sex acts on live TV feels more achievable, less hollow, than the fantasy of achieving a moment of mostly-comfortable intimacy with another human being.