Fumikoarmy

 A million years ago, in the early 2000s, just a few years when skeptical reviewers were amazed Perfect Blue didn't have tentacles, when hentai was much more synonymous with anime than shonen, scifi anime had a larger presence. But as Susan Napier wrote in her Anime book, a lot of it was fueled by bubble era and post bubble era pessimism. A lot of dystopia. The technology was there but the bright Astro Boy future was not. Films like Akira, Evangelion, films like Princess Mononoke and even hentai like Urotsukidoji basically showed heroes not coming to save the day, or failing when they did. Does anyone remember the Rintaro X film that ended with the villains defeated but absolutely everything lost in the process? In my Jujutsu Kaisen writeups I touched on that I love this kind of disempowerment fantasy. It's all great when everything ends happily but sometimes I want a piece of media that shows other people dealing with failure. There's a comfort to that, over the falsely ti...