Tag: dystopia

Anime I’ve Watched

TiberiusLeave a comment

Equally a lot and not enough

Getting back to the end of year wrap up of content, I’ve definitely watched more anime this year in between my regular duties in the Army. A lot of what I’ve been watching this year has been stuff I’ve written about on this blog yonks ago, but also some new stuff that can (and probably should get) their own posts, but this being a speedrun like before I shipped out to Fort Lost in the Woods for training is gonna be a brief overview of some stuff I got a look at this year, but didn’t necessarily finish. I may add more to the watch times of these respectively and give them the reviews that they deserve, but I’m probably gonna do what I normally do and play it by ear. Here’s the anime lineup:

  1. Texhnolyze
  2. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
  3. Clevatess
  4. Frieren
  5. Neon Genesis Evangelion

With a bonus. If you were to ask me if it was anime, it falls under “Yesn’t.” It’s based off a manga and has an anime adaptation that is currently four seasons in, but it’s doing something different.

Normally, this doesn’t always work even with a Japanese cast, but the short version of my upcoming opinion is, “Yes, please.”

Now to the list, starting off with:

Story time: in the first half of advanced individual training to be a 25H commo troop, we had a student leadership, selected by the drill sergeants based on the presentation that the trainees gave during a Soldier of the Month board. For those who don’t know, these boards are a series of questions given to the soldier (or servicemember since every branch does this) to test their knowledge and proficiency on a given subject. They mainly boil down to memorization. The student leads we had at the time seem to have convinced the cadre to use Discord of all platforms to mass communicate important information. But the logic behind it is solid. Wish I were a fly on the wall to see how it unfolded.

I’ve long since left the Discord server, but I recall one of the chats had an anime recommendation chat and one of them had a link to a series called Texhnolyze. I saved it thinking I would get to it immediately and only recently did I start watching it. With a name like that (certainly a tough one to pronounce out loud since X and H don’t normally meet in English), coupled wit the fact that the YouTube channel associated with it is still up, it belongs to the shortlist of things I can search up and still find on YT intact, but with some series falling victim to this Death Note of a blog when I bring them up, sometimes it’s a matter of time or whether bad luck notifies the YT copyright system and takes it down. Thankfully, Taiho Shichauzo is still up, so I still have access to my buddy cop fun times.

Calling Texhnolyze unique is only gently rubbing the surface, never mind a scratch. The description Google gives me reminds me of the Blade Runner: Black Lotus anime produced by Crunchyroll and distributed for weekly airing on Toonami in late 2021.

And now that I think about it, it makes me think of a bunch of other sci-fi, cyberpunk anime we’ve been getting over the years

There isn’t much to glean from just the first two episodes, but from what I recall, the society within features the protagonist, Ichise, a downtrodden prize fighter past his prime, losing his limbs and getting rebuilt $60 million man style. The setting is an underground city known as Lux, a crumbling city-state under which three main factions vie for power over what remains. Something, something, undesirable soldiers fighting for least desirable piece of real estate, only it’s not a base in the middle of a box canyon no one cares about.

I promise I’m not trying to be harsh here

Running from April 17 to September 25, 2003 for 22 episodes, I don’t wanna critique it based on originality considering a lot of my favorite things aren’t the most original or necessarily universally loved things in the world, but more with what came before, concurrently and after. Ghost in the Shell for instance debuted its manga in 1989 and has become a franchise ever since, with a 1995 movie (and 2008 redo with touchups); Neon Genesis Evangelion debuted in 1994 and has also spawned a franchise, spearheaded by Hideaki Anno who still leads the project to this day; and I had already mentioned Cyberpunk in this blog, so I’ll beat that horse when I have more to say.

On its own merits, Texhnolyze seems to have a few things going for it, but merely falling into obscure reference, cult classic status. As a result, it’s up my alley. Let’s describe it a little: a future dystopia where humans have cybernetic enhancements to answer for physical shortfalls, battling between wide corruption and complicated power struggles. That’s vague enough to describe Texhnolyze and 2018’s Megalo Box, which interestingly looks like it was animated in 1997 and due to a bevy of legal hoops and hurdles wasn’t able to air until over 20 years later.

This series is said to pay homage to Ashita no Joe and Hajime no Ippo, but I suspect the animation team had at least one Texhnolyze fan onboard

The 22 episodes are still up for viewing as of this writing and I had saved the playlist in 2024 so I know where to go without having to close a pop-up ad every three seconds and so do you.

Channel: Parham

If the channel disappears, you know what I’m gonna say. And since I mentioned Ghost in the Shell earlier:

  • Major Kusanagi looks different from the 1995 movie here

This might be a bit harsher than I intend it to, given I’ve seen the movie at least three times and have had to retreat to Google-sama to get an understanding of what the hell it’s about. But in general, a cybernetic officer in a futuristic Tokyo is tasked with apprehending an entity who goes by the name of the Puppet Master, an advanced AI with the power to Worm and Trojan Horse itself into nearly any vulnerable computerized device to include humans with mechanical enhancements and this description alone may not do it justice.

The manga debuted in 1989, the movie in ’95, and Stand Alone Complex in 2002. It does raise a lot of biting, complicated questions over AI and technology’s advancement over time, though with my limited viewing of the series (four episodes on Tubi before Toonami snatched it back up after many years pimping it out to streaming services), while it scratches the itch I didn’t know I needed scratched, like Texhnolyze before it I’m only just getting started, but unlike Texhnolyze, it’s had decades to cook and it isn’t as straightforward as most other series of its caliber. The mangaka Masamune Shirow may not have realized what he’d unleash when he first put pen to manga panel, but with what it’s become ever since the movie, anyone getting into the franchise has a hell of a lot homework to do.

I’m going to be light on spoilers as I have a more in-depth review scheduled to be drafted and published in February, so until then I have more of it to watch. Take this as a light recommendation until then. Also, the content of this series and Serial Experiments Lain may reinforce Trunks’ biases against androids.

Channel: ImmaVegeta

Better get the boy an iPhone for Christmas

  • Fantasy world but the monster and the protagonist become an impromptu family

An interesting one that Crunchyroll was promoting at the time by letting you binge it in one sitting. I loathe binge-watching and forever hold the practice over Netflix’s shoulders, but I think for 2026, I’ll have to loosen that up a little. The series starts off with the protagonist’s party setting out to destroy a beast known as Clevatess, not knowing how royally f[clashing]ked they are until they all drop dead. Clevatess, the monster happens across a baby of noble birth that belonged to a royal family under threat from a rival kingdom and adopts the baby while also reviving one of the heroes to forever live as a zombie of sorts, but using many of the same principles that affected Bucciarati in the second half of Vento Aureo, sans the slow deterioration and lack of pain receptors.

If you’re curious what would drive a bloodthirsty beast to take on the role of a step-parent to an orphaned infant, well, the situation is equally a bet from the baby’s mother, and a test of humanity. Clevatess isn’t the only beast in the world; others like him are also out and about. The zombie female MC was among a group of 13 heroes sent to dispose of Clevatess and the rest, but ultimately struggled at the first hurdle. Following their demise, Clevatess was approached by the mortally wounded mother of the royal baby who had requested he spare humanity starting with the infant. If Clevatess could successfully raise the infant then humanity would be spared, but if not, then mass extinction imminent.

Some may draw unfavorable comparisons to Overlord, and I dispute that so heavily because the comparison is false. Yes, Clevatess and Momonga/Ainz adventure and aid with strict conditions, but Ainz is basically fantasy RPG Genghis Khan. Clevatess is a dark being hellbent on destruction. Even if the source material shows Clevatess leaning Overlord-like down the line, I’m not so certain I wanna give it the copycat flag just yet. Not for nothing, it flips a few tropes on their head where the bad guy becomes the caretaker, though I wonder just how old that trope is. These days, you can find it if you search hard enough, but looking for older examples is a struggle.

The manga debuted online in Japan on the LINE platform in the summer of 2020, so the anime was the only way I ever knew about it. Having said that though, for what it has going for it, it needs more episodes because 12 isn’t enough to give it the leg room it needs.

  • Elves don’t change like humans do

It kicked off in 2023 and had been memed all over the internet even to this day. The most prominent memes being, Ubel being a morally ambiguous mage with… lickable armpits… (ಠ_ಠ), Fern and Stark f[explosion!]k so much that Frieren could leave and come back to greet a litter of their children, and Frieren herself is a god-tier racist, on par with LowTierGod.

Demons beware

Admittedly the memes are far as hell in the animanga and I’m only a couple of episodes in. Aside from these three jokes, the plot is an after story. It’s a DnD campaign that wrapped and the heroes are getting used to peace after the evil entity had been defeated once and for all. Frieren the mage, Himmel the hero, Heiter, and others among the party all go on their separate ways while remaining friends. The one thing that gets to Frieren herself is her elven lifespan compared to that of humans. 50 years pass and Himmel is a frail old man while Frieren, due to her elven species, hasn’t aged a day.

This doesn’t bear on Frieren’s shoulders until Himmel passes away from old age and the elven mage regrets not having gotten to connect with him better. Over the course of the series, the characters, even in their new chapters in their lives, remember Himmel the hero by what he did and how he lived. Each person who remembers him has a lot to say and all of them are positive and uplifting. Of course, the heroes, having known him personally, have more personally ridiculous and intimate stories with him. This goes on throughout the series and Netflix currently has it in its line up so give it a watch if you don’t feel like pirating it. I’d talk more about what I’d observe, but in this instance, I think it’s better when you watch it for yourself.

  • Don’t make me ask twice! !GET IN THE ROBOT, SHINJI!

A staple in the mecha/gundam genre, NGE very much alludes to Christian mythos with the angels harkening to their biblically accurate appearances. There’s a lot to say about Evangelion, it’s movies, and the Rebuild sequel movie series, but this is another one I have slated for a 2026 review.

The main crux of the series is not “Wow, cool robot,” like most of its contemporaries. It’s a combination of peace of mind through acceptance of oneself and clever critique of the military use of children for dangerous experiments. Also the theme of personal loss in juxtaposition with self-acceptance. Roughly every character is fundamentally broken and the fact that much of the cast consists of 14-year-old mech suit pilots, Anno is a weird guy, alright, if this is the proof in the pudding.

What has people continuously talking about it for 30 years strong is the memes, of which there are many. You can have some of your favorites (my personal ones involving Asuka in some capacity), but the one thing to note is that unlike a lot of fandoms, I think the Eva fandom I’ve seen is one of the few to actually read its source material and understand it without issue. This puts it above some of the other series to air concurrently and down the line where the bombastic, earth-position-influencing combat is the sole or central focus of a series. It technically disguises itself as an allegory for depression through Christian mythology, but Hideaki Anno won’t admit that.

Like Frieren, it’s also on Netflix and so is the movie, End of Evanglion. I so far am wrapping up the anime, but I haven’t touched the movie yet. And speaking of movies:

  • Even more Ainu cooking, but for real

So Satoru Noda began writing the manga in 2014 and the anime adaptation followed four years later. After that came this live action movie in 2024 and a continuation in a second season … Hmmm… The live action version of Golden Kamuy does well to capture the humorous elements of the manga while staying true to the practical elements. It isn’t 1:1 for obvious reasons but this was completely unexpected. A surprise to be sure but a welcome one. I had talked about Golden Kamuy before, so a run down of the salient points are everyone knows of the legend of the Ainu gold, the map to the treasure is tattooed on a group of eccentric Abashiri prisoners, and death is the only thing stopping everyone from using the gold for their own purposes. A race to near-infinite wealth of sorts…

Yeah, I went there.

I only give it high marks because I love the series so much, so as much as I recommend the movie and live-action series, consider that this part of the blog is a bit more subjective than normal since I consider myself part of the target audience for something like this.

Robot Girl War Mobile Game

TiberiusLeave a comment

A Brief Fling with Girls Frontline

At this point in time, I’ve got to propose a chicken and egg question about the origin of cute girls in dystopian fiction in East Asia. Whatever the case, there’s enough in the world to inspire such a setting for a mobile game. The one I’m referring to being Girls’ Frontline

Developed by MICA Team in 2016 in mainland China before spreading its wings overseas, Girls’ Frontline (Chinese name: 少女前线) is set in a distant future where the widespread integration of androids is commonplace in numerous walks of life from services to retail to even the military, more so than what we currently have in the world’s most developed militaries, so those drones have a human-looking face for once.

A devastating global war breaks out (probably even worse than nightmare scenarios of a WWIII) and these androids in the shape of cute girls are repurposed en masse to make up for the military shortfall. They’re designed and programmed in a way to effectively and efficiently handle specific firearms and their classifications, whatever those classifications may be. Outsiders, welcome to the wacky world of North American gun laws (because Canada does weird s[bang!]t with their guns too). For instance an android, called a T-Doll, that’s specifically designed for the M16A2 will only operate the M16A2. Modifications can be made to get them to adopt other rifles of a similar platform, though this requires some amount of recalibration beyond what can be expected for the military use of automatons.

Whatever you’ve conceptualized as an android, it’s a different beast being depicted here. They’re machines to the core, yes, but they’re not exactly soulless or anything. It’s not like there are military formations of androids with Android 16’s personality. That’d make for a boring game.

They’re programmed with their own personalities. Some are charming, others are sweet, a third category is more varied with the typical animanga tropes like -dere types, and the rest you can fill in the blanks of this Mad Lib if you’d like. I wonder if the different depictions of robots in the east and west can be counted as a culture clash. With only a few exceptions, most western stories view robots as a menace compared to East Asia where they fit right in with society. As for the plot, well, it’s got the foundation of the wider lore of the Terminator franchise, in that advanced AI goes rogue and after a catastrophe reduces the human population to near-extinction by the early 2060s.

The offending AI in question is called Sangvis Ferri (SF) and starts terrorizing what’s left of mankind and setting up human-free areas. The unaffected androids are contracted by a private military company called Griffin & Kryuger (G&K) to stop the reign of terror, reduce SF’s numbers and destroy them. So this belongs in the rare category where androids are more complicated than originally presented.

Looking back, both sides can be viewed for the general use of androids for military purposes and it can be seen as a distinction without a difference, which it is on the surface. Digging into the nuance reveals what G&K does differently with their own T-Dolls: saving humanity. Thus morphing from distinction to false dichotomy.

Now, my memories with the game were during the Spring and Summer of 2022 and a bit in 2023 before interest died off. It was during the time when I was trying to join the Army and the recruiter I was directed to at the time kept dragging his heels. Or I wasn’t being proactive — either way, I invite someone to tell me why there’s a two-year wait for Glossary Non-Prior Service types. But I digress.

The best way to describe the gameplay is a hybrid of “deploy unit to achieve task” and “move and reposition unit to impact effectiveness.” The same system I recall being used in Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag where Edward can deploy ships to specific parts of the world to lessen the danger levels and make use of established trading ports, like a real pirate.

The gacha-ness of the games comes from spending points to unlock more T-Dolls which can be upgraded individually or used to upgrade existing dolls. For instance, if I have one who uses a MAC-10 and get another MAC-10 doll, I can keep on building the older one and eventually build the second, newer one. Or I can cannibalize the newer one for parts for the first one. There’s not exactly a wrong way to go about this provided it’s the same type of doll being used for the upgrade. An MP-40 doll doesn’t have parts compatible with a Mosin-Nagant doll and etc.

Sounds like a neat experience, right? Well, remember when I wrote about You’re Under Arrest/Taiho Shichauzo? The Buddy Cop anime series from the mid-1990s and it’s revitalization as a meme? Specifically this one:

Channe: Vinicius Costa

Meme tourism is a hit or miss for me. It can introduce people to a series that may not have the same marketing as something else more popular or it can backfire and drive people away or bring in the wrong types of people. JoJo fans get a bad rap for being obnoxious if you ever scroll down the comments of a song or artist referenced in the series.

The way I found out about Girls’ Frontline was through a different video. Moonshine Animations’ stop-motion toy review of a figure of one of the characters: UMP9.

Channel: MOONSHINE ANIMATIONS

In the video itself, Moonshine contacted a voice actor on Twitter to voice the character in Japanese as a gag. Having dabbled in stop-motion before, I was pulled in by the presentation and after doing more research on the game downloaded it myself. I was doing rather well at the time making it to the second chapter, but ultimately the game bent me over and painted my ass creamy white. It defeated me and made me feel like a whore wearing thick tooth floss while doing so. Gacha games have a drawback for repetitive gameplay and grinding for those who can’t fork over cash to advance. (Still more honest than EA’s bulls[ka-ching]t lootboxes and Konami’s pachinko machines, I guess.) And Girls’ Frontline is no different.

Multiple attempts to get past a level had me repeatedly grinding earlier levels to get more tokens to progress and upgrade, though doing so meant waiting literally minutes to hours to get anywhere. I don’t remember if it had a system to use real money, but it was at a time where I also wasn’t making any money of any kind, so putting a few bucks on the game at the time wasn’t an option for me. These days, the most I’ve done was drop a few bucks on monochromes for Zenless Zone Zero because I have a MIGHTY NEED to get the shark maid.

No! Miss Ellen! You can’t give up now! You’ve got to have pride in yourself!!

— Vegeta Corin Wickes

Perhaps I’m showing my bias or whatever but MICA Team’s first installment in this franchise left a boot print in my ass and I haven’t looked back. Until I learned that it had an anime adaptation. In the case of media franchises Girls’ Frontline has a leg up on, say, Touhou Project or Idolmaster in terms of foreign accessibility, and my experiences are unique. Should you choose to engage in the mobile game, I’d better hope you have a better strategy than simply press buttons and whatnot. As for the anime, there’s better series and there’s worse series. Make of that what you will.

Credit: hitsukuya

Dystopian Fiction

TiberiusLeave a comment

And now for something completely different

Before we start, I’ll say that I meant to have something up either by Friday evening or sometime yesterday, but I missed it because I was tired after work and yesterday there was a local comic con in town that me and some friends wanted to attend. Also the two topics I had lined up for coverage–a review of the Undead Unluck anime adaptation, and a chronicling of the reboot Planet of the Apes series–would require me to both finish the anime, and to at least see the new Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes movie. The first of those can be done more easily than the second since while in TRADOC (Training and Doctrine Command) if you go off post, you need to be with at least two more people, and I haven’t found anyone to go with yet. So my thoughts on the anime adaptation will come later, and my series review of the Apes movies will also come later. Back to the topic.

I’ve gotta be honest and say that I had forgotten why I put this up as one of the many topics to blog about. As much as I like sci-fi, the dystopian side of things isn’t something I actively seek out on purpose. Often, what I find just so happens to have dystopian elements in the plot. This might’ve been on my mind at the same time as the Civil War movie back in April. I haven’t seen that movie myself yet, but based on what I’ve heard from people like Brandon Herrera, there seemed to be a lot of build up with little pay off. That, or everyone was expecting the same kind of hullabaloo that came with the political landscape of releasing a movie like this during an election year, and most people’s expectations weren’t in line with what the movie had in store. If I see the movie, I may share what I saw.

Jesse Plemons’ appearance in the trailer certainly added to the hype until release.

Anyway, I’d say that for me, the appeal of dystopian sci-fi comes from an added appeal to the fantasy, as in a lot can be done even with this one specific filter. It could be and often is a world similar to ours but with a few new rules that make it a darker and bleaker place. Think of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. The theme of this world is that of suppressing dissent. One way to go about this is burning books. All of them. It’s illegal in this world to even own a book let alone read it, so firemen are employed to do the opposite of what we know firemen in the real world do: light the books on fire. But with all the calls to burn the books, it can only mean that there’s a resistance of some kind to this draconian law and sure enough there is. An underground society of sorts that serves as a gathering of rebellious readers, sort of like a book club in tacit defiance of the Gestapo-like firemen.

As we can see from the book and its movie adaptation, the world is not dissimilar from ours except reading and literature are criminal acts where the offender is disappeared while their illegal library goes up in flames. In this case specifically, it calls back to the pre-war Nazi German laws where anything critical to national socialism was up for a mass purging, writings included. Of course, knowing Nazi Germany, this boiled down to anything perceived to be penned or endorsed by their enemies, namely communists and Jews.

Based on that example, the dystopian genre can also provide some social commentary on the real world, and it doesn’t necessarily have to take itself seriously. Comedic examples like Futurama, select episodes of South Park, or even certain skits in Robot Chicken do a lot to make a commentary on the real world, often through speculative warnings. And the operative word here is “speculative.” In my research for this blog, I found that utopia and dystopia normally go hand in hand, often as a response to one another and from my perspective either of them can and do address the issue of logical fallacies, namely slippery slopes and depending on the writing and phrasing tu quoque and/or middle ground fallacy; slippery slope since the more pessimistic of the two can be argued that X will happen if blank is allowed, tu quoque since either side can argue convincingly that the other is behaving naively and unethically, and middle ground since a third party can attest that the most ideal solution lies the furthest away from the two extremes and unlike the extremes, the middle ground attestation isn’t under the same expectation to provide supporting arguments.

Sounds familiar, right?

Well, like real-world politics, utopia/dystopia and everything under that umbrella can come in many different forms. As such, there’s a lot of elbow room over what a work of fiction can look like and/or talk about. Tell me your favorite examples. Mine has to be the beginning chapters of the Dr. Stone manga. Shortly after awakening, Senku, Taiju, and Tsukasa all agree to harness the titular anti-petrifying agent to awaken humanity and reclaim the Earth from that evil queen we call nature, but the conflict arises over who to revive. Senku chooses all of humanity should be revived no matter what, but Tsukasa disagrees, citing the existence of bastards and monsters in this world, many of them bitter geriatrics that we could do without and essentially starts off as an antagonist reviving a handful of warriors he believes are incorruptible while Senku, Taiju, and later Yuzuriha continue on without Tsukasa’s might and brute strength.

The question dealt with here in the beginning is that of morals. Both the antagonist and protagonist in this arc accuse the other of being nonsensical and provide compelling arguments for this case.

The manga obviously follows the protagonist who won out and eventually recruited Tsukasa to his side, save for several dissenters spouting his original tenets for the next arc or so, but if the manga was more Seinen instead of Shonen, we probably might see the perspectives of both sides or even a third side emerge, though depending on who you ask a third side already exists and its called the legal system.

Joking aside, since I’m already a fan of sci-fi and more specifically the alternate history side of things (See: my recommendations for Alternate History Hub and Monsieur Z/Dean Mosley), the dystopian side of things has its appeal for me for a lot of the reasons listed, offering interesting stories and scenarios to explore.

And since the subject is on dystopian fiction, I offer these novels as my personal recommendations:

Stand on Zanzibar (1968) by John Brunner

A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess

Anything by Mary Shelley (1797-1851) (I’d be more specific, but there are too many examples to choose just one, though I do encourage looking beyond Frankenstein)

A Scanner Darkly (1977) by Philip K. Dick

Planet of the Apes (US)/Monkey Planet (UK) (1963) by Pierre Boulle