Anime

Same as the books page basically.

I am not writing reviews for all of these because that sounds like work and i already have enough things to pretend i will finish someday.

These are just anime i liked or found worth watching. Mostly stuff around cyberpunk, war, identity, systems, state violence, politics, memory, crime, machines, and people being put inside situations that could have been avoided if everyone logged off for 10 minutes.

This is not ranked. do not treat it like some sacred anime canon. Watch it or don’t.

Stuff worth watching

• Serial Experiments Lain

  Internet identity, isolation, protocol ghosts, and being online before being online became everyone’s full time mental illness.

• Cowboy Bebop

  Cool music, debt, regret, space, bounty work and people running from their past badly. Very stylish. Maybe too stylish but whatever, it works.

• Psycho-Pass

  Predictive policing and algorithmic governance but with guns that can decide if your vibe is criminal. Basically security theatre with better animation.

• Akira

  Military experiments, state failure, psychic kids, biker gangs and a city eating itself. still looks insane.

• Mushishi

  Slow stories about nature, unknown systems and humans not understanding shit. good if you want something quiet but still kind of haunting.

• Ghost in the Shell

  Identity, surveillance, cybernetics and the state crawling inside everything. One of those things people reference constantly, sometimes even after watching it.

• Kaiji

  Debt, gambling, coercion and capitalism as a horror machine. ugly in the best way. everyone is sweating like the rent is due in 4 minutes.

• Neon Genesis Evangelion

  Mechs, trauma, institutions, angels, religion-coded machinery and children who should not be allowed near public transport, let alone military hardware.

• Black Lagoon

  Failed states, crime economies, mercenary work and people who are already too far gone for a normal job.

• Perfect Blue

  Celebrity culture, obsession, identity collapse and media poisoning. Not a comfortable watch, which is kind of the point.

• Planetes

  Space garbage collection. Sounds boring until you remember infrastructure is only boring when it works.

• Texhnolyze

  Cybernetics, class decay and industrial depression. this one is not trying to be your friend.

• Death Note

  Ego, surveillance, power and the very funny idea that smart people cannot be absolute idiots. they can. this is research material.

• Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade

  Counterinsurgency, propaganda, state violence and uniforms doing a lot of heavy lifting. grim little thing.

• Samurai Champloo

  Hip-hop samurai road trip with three idiots moving through a collapsing world. stylish, messy, good.

• Monster

  Ethics, responsibility, murder and the cost of refusing the easy answer. slow burn, but actually worth the burn.

• Cyberpunk: Edgerunners

  Body mods, corporate hell, night city doing night city things. The lesson is simple: the city wins. shocking, i know.

• Haibane Renmei

  Guilt, isolation, forgiveness and soft existential dread with wings. quieter than most things here but it stays with you.

• Code Geass

  Empire, rebellion, terrorism, chessboard politics and theatrical nonsense. somehow the ending lands, which is rare enough to mention.

• Paprika

  Dream tech, psychological intrusion and the interface leaking into reality. very normal stuff, obviously.

• Legend of the Galactic Heroes

  Empire, democracy, bureaucracy, war and political rot on a stupidly large scale. long as hell but that is kind of the deal.

• Ergo Proxy

  Post-collapse philosophy, memory, identity and uncomfortable silence. not always clean, but it has a mood and commits to it.

• Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team

  Ground war, logistics, machines and soldiers stuck under ideology. one of the better gundam entries if you like the dirt more than the space opera.

• Paranoia Agent

  Mass panic, guilt, social pressure and people trying very hard not to deal with their own lives.

• Berserk

  Ambition, violence, fate, betrayal and pain. Watch it if you want, but really just read the manga at some point.

• Armored Trooper VOTOMS

  Military hardware, trauma, conspiracies and one very angry man spending too much time inside a metal box.

• Kaiba

  Memory, bodies as property, identity and one of the weirdest visual styles in this list. looks cute, is not that cute.

• Patlabor 2: The Movie

  Domestic security, military escalation and the idea that peace might just be a managed illusion. very calm about being deeply paranoid.

• Now and Then, Here and There

  War, child soldiers, resource collapse and misery with basically no decoration. not a fun recommendation, but a real one.