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animebw · 6 years

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Binge-Watching: Psycho-Pass, Day 2, Episodes 7-11

Ladies, gentlemen, and everyone in between, the game is afoot! In which the big bad finally becomes an enemy worth facing, Ginoza’s assholery gains some critical shades of nuance, and I complain about the show’s increasingly apparent sexism, because at this point what else did you expect from me?

Makishima and Self-Determination

Okay, I accept defeat on this one. Last time, I said that the silver-haired prick Makishima, the guy who killed Kogami’s friend back in the day and is behind this recent string of murders, wasn’t really interesting, and urged the show to make him interesting real soon. These five episodes are basically an extended build-up, watching Makushima lurk in the background and drive the lesser villain’s actions until the plot machinations finally bring him and Akane into each other’s lines of fire. And damn if they didn’t deliver, because once the pieces are in place and Makishima finally gets his moment in the spotlight, he becomes a legitimately terrifying villain. And what makes him so terrifying is that Makishima’s philosophy is basically a realization of all my previous criticisms of this society, the Resistance(tm) if the moral brakes were turned off.

In the broadest strokes, Makishima believes in the force of personal will as the true nature of humanity. He detests the Sybil System for essentially pushing people through their lives one pre-ordained checkpoint at a time, leaving them no room to decide for themselves what they want out of their lives. We’ve already seen plenty of evidence to agree with him on that point, but the show gives us more still with the idea that in this world, self-care and security had become so omnipresent that some people just lose the will to really live and spend their days in an almost vegetative state, lacking the stressors that inspire one to take action. Makishima gravitates towards those with the intense strength of will to act on their own, no matter how destructive they may be. A high school girl who continues her father’s work of painting the grotesque to shock society out of its comfort zone, a man who made himself entirely cybernetic as a means of living forever and finds passion in old-fashioned hunting... these are the pawns in his game of chess. he takes pleasure in observing their actions, giving them the tools necessary to carve their individuality into this city’s scalp. Once they are no longer willing to act on that passion, they are discarded, replaced. No one and nothing matters but his desire to see humanity exert its independent will.

And what’s freaky is that “unorthodox” methods aside, he’s completely right. I’ve talked a lot before about how fucked up this society is, how it doesn’t make sense to mark out people on exploitable algorithms and determine whether they live or die from that. And Makishima proves this by beating the system: he doesn’t register a high Crime Coefficient on Sybil’s system, so the Dominator guns won’t shoot him. He exists in the same tactile world of the displays of dismembered school girls and grizzly hunts he orchestrates through his benefactors. The system this whole society has built its life around can’t touch him. Which means he’s free to leave whatever scars he so wishes upon it. And with no basic human empathy to stop him, anyone in his path is a potential target. Even Akane’s classmate.

In every Urobuchi project I’ve watched, there’s been a moment where I go from interested to utterly absorbed. In Madoka, it was Homura’s first tearful breakdown in episode 8. In Fate/Zero, it was the epic two-episode battle that kicked off season two. And in Psycho-Pass, it seems like it will be Akane unable to save her friend, forced to reckon with the fact that she wasn’t strong enough to save her from a system that inadvertently condemned her to death. The die is cast. The battle has begun. And we’ve got one hell of a mastermind to take down. Kogami, Akane, everyone else, I wish you luck. You’re gonna need it.

Ginoza’s Struggle

In other news, we’ve gotten to know Ginoza a little better, placing his stubborn refusal to buck the system in a dark new light. It’s seeming less like a refusal to change and more like a defense mechanism. In the time before Enforcers were a thing, it was common for detectives to be so affected by the stress of their jobs that the system registered them as latent criminals. And that’s what happened to Ginoza’s dad. First his father, then his partner. Two people he cared about lost to this fucking awful system. And unlike Akane, he doesn’t try to fight it. He just tries to survive it. That’s why he’s so defensive about Akane hanging out with the Enforcers; he’s lost too many people close to him to trust she won’t fall into the same trap.

Ginoza may be an asshole, but he’s an understandable asshole, driven to his assholery by pain and self-preservation. That doesn’t make the moment where Akane chews him out for trying to step over her any less cathartic, nor the moment when Masaoka does the same. He’s still wrong, and if people are going to stop getting hurt by this broken system, it’ll be because someone has the balls to break it, not by everyone just trying to be a perfect little sheep and weather the storm. But maybe he’s starting to learn; he apologized to Kogami for doubting him about Makishima’s return, recognizing the wisdom in his former friend. Maybe he’ll get there eventually.

The Girls Are Not Alright

And now, we come to the annual TABW tradition of complaining about how the show he’s watching lets its women down. Only this time, my frustrations take a slightly different form. See, Psycho-Pass doesn’t really have fanservice in the way a lot of other anime do; the Buch is smart enough to recognize that such juvenile nonsense would make a mockery of his otherwise extremely dark and serious story. But the way it treats and frames women still carries sexist attitudes of a much different, yet no less insidious stripe. This is the edgy, more detective-noir specific kind of sexism, where the darkness and cruelty of the world at large is reinforced with as many artfully constructed depictions of sexual menace and assault as it can possibly fit in.

There were shades of this in earlier episodes as well; hell, the first episode was focused on a random, nameless woman being completely powerless against a would-be rapist. But it becomes pretty damn inescapable here. The hacked-up school girls are framed with bosoms glistening in the fresh blood, hips artfully curved to hide vagina lines. The murderer herself gets a scene where she’s nude in bed, a similarly nude corpse by her side, her breasts barely hidden by the covers while she opines on why she does the things she does. Akane’s friend is forced to strip down to her panties by a potential criminal who doesn’t even bother explaining why until after the fact, and when Makishima later captures her and hangs her life in the balance to taunt Akane, he yanks her shirt down to expose as much naked back as he can, as well ensure that her cleavage is even more prominently visible against her low-cut night shirt. It’s not fanservice in the sense that you’re supposed to want to masturbate to it, but it still disempowers its female characters and presents their sexuality as something for our (meaning guys) consumption, masking its leering, predatory eye under the guise of gritty realism. It tries to make it “okay” to exploit these women’s sexual humiliation from as many angles as possible by pretending there’s a point behind it that couldn’t be made with less ugly, outdated signifiers.

Sorry, but I don’t buy that. Trivializing such a traumatic real-world thing for cheap shortcuts to genuine darkness is juvenile in the extreme. Psycho-Pass has done a fantastic job of organically building a bleak, uncomfortable world with its themes and ideas; it doesn’t need to fall back on this lazy, offensive trope to compensate for anything. Do better, show. Please.

Odds and Ends

-That said, Akane’s obvious thirst for Kogami’s glorious abs legitimately had me chuckling.

-Some dialogue moments in this stretch felt a liiiittle too over-explainy, like the first season of Fate/Zero often struggled with. Hopefully this won’t become a trend.

-You know, I don’t think that’s quite what feminism wanted, Oryo. Like, I appreciate the criticism of the system that impresses “chastity” and “purity” onto girls to make them perfect subservient wives, but generally the desired outcome should be less dead women, yes?

So max security doubles as a gas chamber that can kill all the super-latents if things get out of hand. Got it. Cool. This society is fucked up.

-Geez, that’s a body canvass alright.

-aksjdhaskjda Akane you are so bad at explaining things

-HI DEMON DOGS GET AWAY PLEASE

-So, how the fuck do those Holo clothes work? Like, is it a base clothing that the images are projected onto, or is everyone really just walking around naked with images surrounding them?

-God that cyborg man is fucking freaky. Well done on so expertly capturing the uncanny valley, animators.

-Also, your love for Ode to Joy seriously creeps me out, dude.

-That’s an interesting idea. We already rely so much on electronics for our daily lives, so who’s to say we’re not cyborgs already?

-Why the fuck would you make a pipe out your victim’s bones what the everlasting fuck

-That is one big-ass mousetrap.

-I do like the harsh primary color contrasts in the subway fight.

And that’s all for tonight. See you all next time as the next battle of the war begins!

#anime #the anime binge-watcher #tabw #psycho-pass #psycho pass #akane tsunemori #tsunemori akane

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