Anime News Network·Japan·Tuesday, September 22, 2026 at 05:51 PM
This Week in Anime - The Prophetic Visions of Cyberpunk Anime
Translate
Sylvia and Lucas ask the big questions, like "Is the entire cyberpunk genre prophetic?"
Disclaimer:The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network. Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.
Remember back in the late 2010s when it was decided that Tokyo would host the 2020 Olympics, and a bunch of people online made memes out of Akira as a prescient piece of media? Turns out it was way more on the money with its depiction of governments that have a growingly antagonistic relationship with their citizenry, the collapse of the social contract, and disenfranchised young people creating non-traditional communities, more so than it was about a quirk of its setting.
Sure, our jackets aren't as cool, and our social media and AI-motivated psychoses are a lot less badass than the ESP that pops up in the film, but it's largely spot on otherwise!
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.
I agree with your analysis on the information age, and good on you for finding more grace for Tetsuo than I can manage! Though, as some of these harder sci-fi cyberpunk series explore, it's less about the technology of our current age failing and more about technology's exploitation laying bare some of the most uncomfortable truths of humanity and the societies we've built.
Case in point, Science SARU's The Ghost in the Shell is the most faithful adaptation of the 1989 manga we've ever seen, and its depiction of Cold War-informed geopolitical strife and bureaucratic abuse is as relevant as ever! While we likely won't see the technology that lets us put our consciousness inside the body of a pretty lady who casually weighs as much as a car within our lifetimes, the story beats this series hits using this futuristic tech are wildly relevant.
I cannot stress enough how surprised and delighted I was, after a lifetime of vicariously knowing GitS as "super serious sci-fi," to learn that the original series is something like a "sci-fi vice unit" story in tone and execution! These kinds of stories can be fun as well as insightful and, honestly, it makes this world and its fables hit harder knowing that Motoko is using her government-owned robo-body to have stoned cybersex with her besties during her vaycay days!
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.
Truly, that is the future liberals want! Though the one we're stuck in also unfortunately involves needing to be mindful of how the technology needed to enjoy or even just experience life is being used for unsavory military purposes.
Palmer Luckey, the face of VR technologies used for recreational gaming, has rolled those technological learnings and connections into a military sub-contracting career. Similarly, there is a very real possibility that mapping and traversal data generated through the mobile game Pokémon GO could be used to remotely pilot drones through areas a given military can't survey directly. I know I sound like King of the Hill's Dale Gribble for even mentioning this publicly available information, but they're very real and VERY concerning!
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.
Thankfully our irl technocrat overlords are much less clever (and cool-looking) than even the most middling villains from the most lukewarm cyberpunk anime, and they're more than likely to knock this house of cards down by their own incompetence than due to the actions of some modded-out cyber punks.
Speaking off, did you ever watch Cyberpunk: Edgerunners? Would love to hear your thoughts on a series that I really struggled to get into!
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.
Shoot, I wish I had the source of this line on hand, but I like a quote that goes something like, "Art that critiques capitalism is inevitably absorbed and commodified by capitalism, turning rebellion into a profitable product." Everything we've talked about in this column is art produced in a capitalist system that primarily needs to make money so the people working on it can have any kind of stable life. That sucks, but it also doesn't diminish the critiques raised in these works. After all, it's not like there's a piece of cyberpunk fiction that's both super influential and created by such a famously mismanaged studio that it largely sidesteps these concerns in a vacuum...
Oh, wait, the original distribution of Evangelion exists, and folks can now stream it legally on the Criterion Channel!
Yeah, I had an internal debate going into this column about bringing up NGE, but ultimately decided to because 1) it's a deeply influential work whose impact is still being felt to this day and 2) LOOK AT THAT COLOR PALETTE AND SHOT COMPOSITION! This is just what cyberpunk looks like!! Even the stuff from series that came out before Evangelion looks more like Evangelion than this work!!! I know that doesn't make any temporal sense, but visually Eva really does feel like a crystallization of everything that came before and a rubric for everything that would come after.
But on a more thoughtful note, with so much of cyberpunk focusing on the alienation that people experience in modern society, Evangelion more than deserves examination of Shinji's depression and emotional repression. Even with the internet playing a functionally non-existent role in this story, it captures the spirit of the genre incredibly well.
While this GitS mostly plays the Major's own childhood traumas and questioning of her personhood for laughs, this does speak to a lot of the horror and discomfort in cyberpunk fiction being rooted in being unable to navigate systems and places you don't understand, which is a universal dread experienced in childhood and early adolescence.
For this reason, I'd be remiss if we didn't mention Serial Experiments Lain at some point in this column because, while it might not be as action-packed or punk as other "cyberpunk" anime, boy, is it a terrific, elevated look at how the internet and the culture around it can mess up a young person who doesn't have the psychic antigens to fight off the worst of its effects.
You heard it here first, folks! Lain isn't just heavily featured in an AMV pivotal to the craft; it's also a damn good piece of cyberpunk!
Though this iconic video also makes clear that the best works in this genre are often chock-full of themes relating to sexuality and gender identity, which makes sense with how transhumanistic this kind of fiction is by its design.
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.
Honestly, one of the most punk things any airing exclusively on digital media platforms can do is not self-censor into following traditional broadcast standards! Those are thematically meaningful nipples, damn it!
And I'm excited to see what future anime of this genre have in store for us as well! As it becomes increasingly clear that the world is preparing for a shift out of its current host of empires as a new age begins, I'm sure there will be no shortage of cautionary glimpses into what might happen if the problems plaguing our current society go unchecked.
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...
discuss this in the forum |
