Posts from November 2012

Future Imperfect

Already no stranger to delving into the future, anime this season sees Production I.G. produce two forward looking series with Psycho-Pass, a mid-future cyber-noir and Robotics;Notes, a close-future hyper-commercialised world of robot fetishism. A1-Pictures meanwhile adapts the far future Shinsekai Yori (From the New World) novel into a series, followed by newcomer studio 8bit adding a TV series to Busou Shinki's already voluminous roster of media and merchandise. Finally there is the alternate history and fantasy-leaning K from GoHands, best known for their recently completed movie trilogy Mardock Scramble.  All of them take a stab at a high-concept future but if the first three episodes are anything to go by, some are more successful than the others.

glassy-eyed pixies don absurd (yet still revealing) armour to knock seven shades of tar out of one another

Psycho-Pass for instance takes the dystopian world of Philip K. Dick's Minority Report - where law enforcement is no longer a reactive element of government - while mixing in some of Brave New World's deliberations on a ruthlessly enforced gilded cage. It tackles the same ethical briar patch as Minority Report: whether it is just to pre-emptively arrest, or in this series' parlance "rehabilitate", someone based upon the prediction of a third party, in this case the omnipresent Sybil System. Human judgement is taken out of the equation with even the gloriously titled "Dominator" guns unable to fire without the system's say so.

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She's A Rainbow

Correlations and theories on Eureka Seven AO

As a way of organising my thoughts and pontifications on Eureka Seven AO before the airing of the final episodes, a semi-coherent brain dump (with subheadings!):

  1. Terminology and background
  2. Timeline
    1. Past
    2. Present
    3. Future
  3. Map
  4. Factions and organisations
    1. Scub Coral
    2. Secrets
    3. Allied forces
    4. United Okinawan and Rykyu Archipelago
    5. Generation Bleu
    6. Gekko State
  5. Characters and groups
    1. Ao and Noah
    2. Naru
    3. Truth
    4. Eureka
    5. Elena Peoples
    6. Ivica Tanovic
    7. Team Harlequin
    8. Team Goldilocks
    9. Nirvash
  6. Miscellaneous
    1. Quartz and Quartz Gun
    2. Third Engine
  7. Theory
  8. References
    1. Callbacks to Eureka Seven
  9. Notes and versions
    1. Version 1.0 - 2012-11-02

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