This Week in Anime

The Prophetic Visions of Cyberpunk Anime

Sylvia
Lucas, I'd like to do something a little different and begin today's column with a dedication:

In other words, it is 2026, and I still have a lot of feelings about cyberpunk as a genre/movement/aesthetic/reality, and I'd like to talk about that. What say you? Wanna strap on a cool-looking visor and talk about it via cyberspace?

Truth be told, watching Akira in theaters this past week prompted me to suggest this topic. I had seen it a few times before, but the last time was probably 15 years ago. I've changed a lot since then. The world has changed a lot since then. What really struck me this time is how scarily contemporary the story, setting, and characters feel. One of the first morsels of information fed to the audience is that people are protesting en masse against increased unemployment caused by the country's leader making a boneheaded economic policy decision.

I love, too, that the bartender is visibly bored by this report. It's nothing new. He's numb to it. That's just where Neo Tokyo is at that moment, and way too many people seem way too calm about that.

Domestic terrorist attacks are happening in concert with an increased and heavily militarized police presence. They're turning gymnasiums into interrogation/detention centers. A growing number of people are relying on conspiratorial religious fanaticism to make sense of the world order. I may as well be describing present-day America. Not so many giant teddy bears filled with milk in the headlines, though. I suppose it could always be worse.

And Tetsuo, at the center of all this, makes complete sense as the Angry Young Man who has been failed by every link in the chain, and who, once given a taste of power, becomes the architect of his and the city's demise.

He's a very sympathetic character! As a foil for Kaneda, Tetsuo isn't cool, confident, or manly, and he's deeply insecure about it. A lot of people, myself included, can see some of themselves in that struggle. But instead of finding his own way of being, he overcompensates by overperforming masculinity. And because his concept of that is so warped by his environment, he becomes more and more violent as the movie progresses. It's childishness dressed up as manliness. Like, his iconic look in the last act is a little kid's idea of what a superhero looks like, cape and all. Which I think also speaks to the oversimplified worldview we see expressed all the time by contemporary talking heads, politicians, and other people with large platforms. The "information age" has been a resounding failure.

Right? It's kinda amazing that such an old and well-trodden series can feel so fresh, despite, as you said, being the adaptation closest to its original incarnation. And unlike Akira, which is largely told from the perspective of the underclass, The Ghost in the Shell stars a bunch of cops who aren't exactly the greatest at protecting the lives of innocent bystanders.

Yet this perspective on technology is also valuable, because it correctly surmises that any sufficiently enhanced cyber augmentations will become the military's playground and the government's property. In Akira, it's psychic powers. In Ghost in the Shell, it's the reminder that the Major's full-cyborg body was not given to her out of the goodness of the government's heart. It's a contract that extracts value out of her.

I know this scene hit me and many other transfems like a freight truck, so on behalf of all of us, thank you, GitS.

May we all one day be as cyberpunk and as oiled-up as a Shirow drawing.

Unfortunately, this is what cyberpunk in the real world is actually like. It's not the neon signs and Orientalism. It's weirdo tech lords whom the government refuses to regulate (because they're technologically and economically in bed with them). It's a corrosive force eroding our day-to-day quality of life and, ironically, our quality of technology. Computer parts are skyrocketing in price. Consumer tech is getting worse and slopified. All the cool shades in the world aren't enough to blind me to that.

Well, I enjoyed it enough to give Cyberpunk 2077 a shot after I finished the anime, so that's one answer. It's also the series that gave us Rebecca, who is the best, so that's another answer. I will note, though, that Cyberpunk 2077 really disappointed me with its lack of Rebecca. So I liked Edgerunners more than that video game.

And more seriously, Edgerunners largely worked for me as both an exercise in the aesthetics/themes of cyberpunk and as a character study that follows David down his Tetsuo-like spiral into cyberpsychosis.

That's where the "punk" part comes into play!

But your point about the whole game-advertisement aspect is salient, and I think it speaks to an inherent contradiction at the heart of cyberpunk. Because a genre that, from the etymology of its name alone, should be the vanguard of rebellious and counter-cultural thought has instead largely been interpreted and sold to the masses as a set of aesthetics. And while all popular art is commodified in some way, that "punk" aspect causes a lot of highly warranted skepticism and cynicism. It begs the question of whether any kind of rebellious art can weather capitalism's influence, or whether cyberpunk was ever that punk in the first place.

On one hand, I recognize that the malleability of cyberpunk's definition is a point of contention when trying to critique it properly. But on the other hand, it's cool that we can absolutely call Evangelion cyberpunk. A future dystopia, a disaffected protagonist, a focus on militarized technology, and a predilection towards fundamental questions about human psychology—yep, that's a cyberpunk!

Again, I think we can draw potent parallels between Shinji and Tetsuo in how both deal with their insecurities by trying to escape or lose themselves in the "safety" of violence. Both also end up being bad news for their respective Tokyo relocation. Although Evangelion's runtime and focus give us a lot more to chew on when it comes to Shinji's arc, Tetsuo's role in the movie is more abbreviated and abstract. Still, both works are commenting on what modernity and crumbling systems of support do to children.

This creates an interesting contrast with The Ghost in the Shell, whose first episode deals with an exploitative orphanage, yet it is not a rescue mission, nor are the children the focus of the story. As the show progresses, this becomes just one of many shadowy places the Major infiltrates.

We could interpret this through the lens of the Major, as an adult, being more stable and better suited to working within the structures of her cyberpunk dystopia. She knows which rules can bend and which can break. Yet she too is not immune to probing her psyche.

Yeah, Lain didn't end up with the most technologically accurate prediction of where the internet would end up, but it feels like it got the vibes right, especially with how pervasive conspiratorial thinking, fueled by online communities, has become. In fact, if Lain got anything right, it definitely nailed the blurring of the line between the internet and reality. Twitter is many people's reality now, and the entire world is so much worse off for it. There might not be anything more cyberpunk than that.

And I'm interested in seeing where Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 goes with that. A point in the first season's favor was that, because it went direct to Netflix and not TV, it managed to emulate the hyperviolence and sexual content of the old, formative cyberpunk OVAs like Cyber City Oedo 808.

It's great to see nipples in a contemporary anime, but there is a lot of thematic territory that could potentially be covered when you're less concerned with censorship.

That's the thing, right? The ills that plague cyberpunk fiction and our present day are both extrapolations of 1980s events and policies that stratified economic and political power into the hands of those corporations with enough money to dictate the future of technology, irrespective of the public's thoughts or desires regarding that. Even if cyberpunk as a genre remains stagnant, it will remain relevant as long as we remain mired in our current hellscape—one that has remained constant literally my entire life. And I don't know about you, but when I think about that too hard, it makes me feel like I'm about to...explode...