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“A man’s conscience and his judgment is the same thing; and as the judgment, so also the conscience may be erroneous.”
- Thomas Hobbes

The 22th century has come, and with it a new system, a new policy, but overall a new way the sword of the law can pierce the sinner’s heart. Japan has implemented what people call the Sibyl System. In a world in which machines can analyze and quantify each person’s mental state and emotion in order to distinguish between a fair man, anyone with criminal proclivity or an actual outlaw. One’s feelings, ideology, moral ... sense or convictions does not have a role in the bureaucratic work anymore. The vestige of the old State that protects the common sense, the good nature, and punishes the outrageous, despicable and unjust has been substituted by the mechanical hands that can prosecute a rightful judgment. Even your role in society is decided by the system, based on your mental status, seeking an option that would match with your skills and give you the most chances of finding happiness.

Everything starts when Tsunemori Akane joins the Public Security Department, where she receives her Dominator, a specialized modern gun, capable of connecting to the system and analyzing the Psycho-Pass of the one she’s aiming for. According to the judgment the gun can lock and be unusable, unlock and authorize the user to shot rather a paralyzing energy shoot or an annihilator one depending on the severity of the crimes committed. Thus, interrogations, inquiry, prosecution and judgment are old concepts. There’s no need to fear capital punishment, once there are no humans to corrupt the process, and you cannot hide anything from the Sibyl System.

But nothing is so simple, suddenly a series of strangely eerie murders start to bother the investigators, who question themselves about their duty to follow the State’s orders, and if the peace and prosperity that this arrangement has brought us is worth losing our free will.

Sincerely, philosophical anime don’t call my attention anymore, due to a grotesque history of failures. Although, Psycho-Pass has surprised me, in one side the will of maintaining the law and the order and the belief that the rupture of the State will inevitably lead to the war of everyone against everyone, while on the other hand the artist who does not accept to be a puppet for an invisible gear that steals the breath of life that gave us will and desire.

Unfortunately I cannot give a perfect score, since there’s one major problem that has been bothering me since the first few episodes:
T H E A C T U A L I N V E S T I G A T I O N M A K E S N O S E N S E

That’s right, if you are the one longing for a police themed drama, or maybe a Holmesian mystery, I will let you leave right here. If you were waiting for smart tricks, cleaver insights and brilliant deductions may I give you my condolences, it’s just a waste of time. Everything is solved with the intuition of one single character, in absence of any solid proof. As if he could read the mind of the criminal, in an introspective way, predicting their future behavior out of nothing, as in a magic trick.

As if it were not enough, this only one person can damage the show in way deeper forms. He’s totally one-dimensional, all his quotes looks like catchy phrases, there’s neither intelligence nor art in his actions and overall his style is absolutely generic. Unlike most characters who’s convictions are clear and feelings are relatable, Kougami Shinya is the athletic, handsome, humble, responsible and altruist good man archetype that would do anything in the fight against evil and somehow is always right. The only reason for me to continue watching beside my frustration – as a mystery fan myself – was how well the theme has been explored in such a way I’ve never seen in anime before. Many have tried to explain what a crime is, or why do people commit crimes, but Psycho-Pass did never had this ambition. It’s not an anime about crimes, but about the law.

“The Law does not protect people,
The people protect the law.”
- Tsunemori Akane

There are subtle spoilers. I believe people that didn't saw the anime wouldn't understand them, but if you are a Mastermind, be careful.

With growing popularity, Food Wars has become one of the most expected series of each year, but with the coming of the 3rd season, criticism has increased. It’s very comprehensible that the quality of the animation decreased – didn’t know if the studio lacks funds – but I can’t understand how people actually say the plot used to be great and nowadays you can compare it with any shitty basic shounen anime. ...

In my view the story of this arc was the result a very rich background narrative and this is why I loved this part so much.

The difficulty in achieving mastery, or the way to mastery was one of the most interesting themes of the whole franchise. As once said Aristotle: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” This leads us to the idea that we can achieve our goals by practicing, and its right, we can. But, as I daydream every time I see this quote, maybe Aristotle warned us in one of his lost works, that Excellence has its own legs. It means to raise your skills is not like a race looking for a perpetual medal or a static arrival. It seems to be closer to an impossible running with hundreds of coyotes and a fragile roadrunner. This can sounds contradictory but Saiba Jouichiro can prove it’s right. He is the ultimate example of a man, who tried to pursuit the highest levels, but no matter what he tried, people never were satisfied. That’s why being the first one is not a privilege of some chosen genius, but the result of an incessant conflict.
At the start we were all made to think the stay at Tootsuki would be hellish as the central idea of a Shokugeki looks like an unfair betting. You can’t learn in an anarchistic scenario comparable with the Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes (war of all against all).
But in fact there have never been such “state of nature” and the series shows us how the characters can relate with each other as they are “diamonds to be honed”, and the spontaneous shocks with each other makes them shine brighter, or to paraphrase the song: “cause we’re still rough diamonds on the road”. Even so, we can believe the day a day on Tootsuki Gakuen seems like anarchy, but what a beautiful one.

This kind of “twist” seemed to me as a shy cat hidden in the shadows waiting for brushing your leg when you turn backwards. It was comfortable, surprising and joyful. We just discovered that if Shokugeki is a monster, it is not a bloodcurdling way of imposing the will of the strong, but a brave mother bear protecting his puppies.

At this point the normal “elite” viewer is thinking on how conveniently the main characters has this sense of empathy towards the academy while other characters just want to support Azami’s Ideal because they are non-important characters. I think this is quite funny. Of course it seems like a normal shounen counter-revolutionary arc, it’s what it is, but this time done correctly. Just think a little bit on how convenient it is for you – a normal student – to stop competing with “very talented genius cockers” to survive in a hellish academy and start following a well oriented cocking project that promised to “democratize” mastery.

You can look thought it and perceive almost none of the Elite 10 council has a reason for supporting Azami. They just want a comfortable position to continue their work and training. No one really believes Azami will create a perfect cuisine and everyone would adopt it, they just want everyone to cock what they want because they believe they are the bests.
At the end Azami team are the real “elitists” since they can’t refute the “honed diamond” principle and they use and abuse of it to create the perfect team for his cuisine instrumentality project, while the rest of the students are just puppets to this porpoise. He wants to protect them from the beast so called "Shokugeki" by taming the students. The way how he admired Jouichirou’s “Shura’s trend” can help us to understand his way of thinking. It also proves his psychopathic Godly cuisine ambition. It all turns back to the “diamonds on the road” statement. Azami’s road looks like Jouichirou’s sandstorm path, while Soma’s road would be in a very cheerful, wooded and graceful village. Azami can just see the progress in front of a corpse pile where he could escalate to the sky. He can’t see it in a form of a bashful roadrunner.

His ideology promised to revolutionize Japan’s cuisine, but what he did was to kill the magical link between the creator and the creation, stifle the entrepreneur spirit and transforming artists into proletarians.

Madoka Magica is a very unique anime that change forever the history of “mahou shoujos” since “changing the history” is the main idea the show wishes to state.

The Plot is about Girls who can have any of their desires realized by a little white colored bunny/cat called Kyuubei in order to obtain power and use it to defeat abstract things called witches, with are the manifestation of hatred, loneliness, sadness and other bad concepts that causes death and bring evil to mankind. It may sound cheep and cliché but ... the more the show explores the characters motivations, feelings and porpoises the more it manage to shows you the burden of your will, how difficult decisions need to be taken and you need to accept the outcome of your choices.

Agreeing with the plot premise, the characters were really amazing and reveal us how different thoughts and heartiness in extreme conditions, between Hope and Blame will inevitably get in conflict with each other. I purposely mentioned how Madoka changed history – in both meanings – because the most interesting part of the anime was to see how sentimental humans with most meaningfully objective is the pursuit of happiness and a scientificist, emotionless, rational beings that wanted to maximize life had different answers to Hegel’s problem on what moves history. As a mere rational existence, a part from humans in Madoka Magica Kyuubei did not had moral as a category of action and could not possibly understand why humans can’t accept his positivistic view of fate, the ineluctable intervention of his species in order to move history forward to the unavoidable end. But the characters with their experiences, feelings, ethics and different thoughts, even causing internal conflict they could appreciate that natural order of live more than to turn a lifeless shell that systematically chose the optimal and most efficient way of surviving.

Even if you don’t want to think a lot when watching animes, Madoka could give you a good relaxing sensation while enjoying epic battles of unmatched designed Magical Girls against imaginative and creative designed witches. The use of well planned abstractness is even more complicated than normal designs as far as the compound of sounds and visual effects herewith the symbolisms can transcend an explainable knowledge and get in your mind as just one thing.

Overall, Madoka is one of the great shows that show up that even if humans are locked in a vicious circle of life and death, you may be aware to transcend your fate by accepting your own choices. Even if the universe responds you with despair in the same proportion of your hope, as Madoka did it, by accepting it and maintaining expectance you can achieve a true happiness even over the good and the evil. After all your desire is also proportional to your will.

What made neon genesis evangelion one of the most incredible and unpredictable anime witch success remains over a decade with such a ridiculous plot as: “a very depressive guy needs to pilot a giant robot for the sake of saving the world but he do not really want it” was of course the way how the show manage to conciliate so concepts in a consistent and interesting story, and most of all how all the scenes, despite how simple they appear to be, has a hidden porpoise or even an double interpretive line – what ... seems to occur a lot – and drives you to a fantastic mind blowing resolution without really resolving anything.

Of course this show would not have been so amazing without the magnificent character development over the episodes. This anime have done the perfect mixture of metaphysical elements like: “being”, “existence”, “conscience”, “identity” with the psychology ones that gives us the sensation of reality in the characters relation with each other. The majority scenes both tells us the story, with lots of metaphors that can be inferred, while develop the characters mind’s problems in a wonderful script. As numbers philosophers like to say 3 is a perfect number, since he is not alone as number 1 and is not imperfect as number 2 that means the dualism, in other words the triad: story/characters/narrative works perfect each one optimizing what is better in the other ones.

This review may contain spoiler:

One interesting thing is how the anime manage to relate the real explanations with good metaphors, for example Adam an Lilith with on the story are two forms of live that in contact to each other will cause a catastrophe that they called the third impact. Despite the Christian reference to an impossible love – what is quite obvious – the Adam/Lilith beings are also convenient ways to bring the men/woman dualism to the story. The way how a men and a woman feels attracted to each other and this desire of touch can generate something new – life – is well represented in the relation between Kaji and Misato and also means that human beings can open the chamber of guf an analogy to the place where the unborn souls rest. This is just a piece of how the most important philosophical concepts in evangelion are subtle showed during the day a day scenes.

Another objective concept is the LCL that is literally life in a liquid, analogue to cosmological and metaphysical thoughts on substance of matter and soul. (I’m saying objectively cause LCL is literally a substance) It’s also fascinating how these concepts are well put together with empirical science researches like perfluorcarbons a breathable liquid.
Since I don’t want to extend myself so much let's start what's important.

Because of what I said before I can’t separate the characters from the story so I’m going to analyze them together. The story starts showing us a giant monster resisting all the army ways to combat and what looks like a post-apocalyptical Tokyo without people except for a young boy waiting for a woman and in other scene the woman going to pick him up. The scenes are so well planned that you can deduce that they were expecting the monsters arrive, the army is irrelevant and Shinji hates his father just before those things come to be proven. The human instrumentality project is mentioned just in the start and it’s very easy to figure out that it’s not just about “save the world”. In the middle of the episode we discover the leader of NERV, Shinji’s father, called him because there are not a pilot to the robot called evangelion which can destroy the giant beings called Angels. The anime do not massively explains you why the world is in dangerous or why they are called angels, but since this might be a deep state secret you will find out as times goes by. Instead of that it is much more interesting to see what Shinji thinks about piloting the evangelion, his feelings and why he stills doing so.

What made me continue watching the anime was obviously the consistence of NERV as a military force. Misato really works like a battle strategist since all her strategies were interesting, creative and more than everything plausible. One of the common mistakes in mecha shows is to ignore the characters that support the pilot, but the way how evangelion use a few quantity of characters allow it to develop them as well as it could have been.

Besides Misato, another special mention is Asuka, who change the pace of the anime once she is the most energetic character with competitive sense and desire to pilot Evangelion. While I don’t want to spoil the story so much in this review I’m going to focus on how brilliant it was to show up the concepts of Angels – the beasts- and Evangelion – the robots – while develop Shinji Relation to Misato, Rei and his father before Asuka’s appearance. It gives you time to understand how NERV works and to understand some depressive and minimalist characters like Rei and Shinji, who don’t know very well how to express their feelings without being boring and during enough time to apparently running out of ways to entertaining you before Asuka’s arrival.

Overall the anime has pretty dense information to show in just 26 episodes and it would be not possible to develop the characters, presenting their uncertainty and mind problems, showing the hidden story of NERV and SEELE and their contribution in the second impact while made us entertained in epic robot’s battle without the entire director’s efforts. Hideaki Anno really emerged on the story to do the scrip perfect as it was and that’s why I can say without a sign of doubt that he is evangelion.