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Psycho Pass
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:CreationDate: 2015-03-08 16:16:16
:Id: anime/review/psycho-pass
:tags: - anime
- review
:rating: 4
:original: http://www.easternkicks.com/reviews/psycho-pass-complete-season-1-collection
How do you recognise a criminal? How do you make sure that innocents
are not targeted or even inconvenienced by law enforcement? How do you
balance control and freedom? These are some of the questions that
Psycho Pass poses, from the point of view of Japan's current society,
with its emphasis on conformity, and its very low tolerance for any
kind of deviation from the accepted way of life.
It's the 22nd century, and the Sybil System can detect the state of
mind of every person, optimising their lives for happiness, by for
example suggesting their best career options, but also calculating
their propensity for crimes. The whole law enforcement system is based
on this "crime coefficient", and the police is equipped with special
guns called "Dominators" that will paralyse potential criminals, or
kill them outright if their coefficient is too high. No arrest, no
tribunals: if the Sybil says someone's a criminal, that's enough.
This rather direct and violent approach tends to destabilise minds, so
the police uses Enforcers, potential criminals that have been selected
by the system, to do most of the hunting down of other criminals.
Inspectors are tasked with detective work, and supervision of the
Enforcers.
Tsunemori Akane joins the police straight out of school as an
Inspector, and has to find her way among her colleagues and
subordinates, wrestle with moral questions, and avoid letting her
crime coefficient rise.
UROBUCHI Gen (虚淵 玄) of Nitro+ has written a story with layers: the
"good" characters are not always as good as you'd expect, and the
"bad" characters have motivations that at the very least make sense to
them, and in some cases are indistinguishable from those that in other
stories are attributed to heroes. This is not a good-vs-evil plot.
There are some issues. The worldbuilding has holes, that may have been
put there deliberately to provide the hooks for plot twists and for
more interesting character development and moral questioning, but
still undermine the consistency of the setting. Some parts of the
story feel a bit paint-by-numbers, and, especially in the first few
episodes, there's just too much expository infodumping. But I think
that it's all forgivable, given the overall result.
I've seen Psycho Pass compared to Ghost in the Shell, and I can see
the similarities: they're both set in a technocratic future, focusing
on police work. The questions they ask are very different though: GitS
(especially the movie version) asks "what's the essence of humanity,
and what would it take for you to recognise a non-human life form as
human in spirit?"; Psycho Pass asks "what are you prepared to
sacrifice in the name of social stability and average
contentment?". Neither work provides answers, but they definitely
provide food for thought.
As a note on the English edition, the translation appears to do
justice to the complex dialogues and ideas, which is sadly unusual.
