Even that one about literal terrorists ends up changing absolutely nothing about society.
Red Sails: The Swerve
Anti-Communism is deeply embedded in the publishing industry in Japan
That being said, some revolutionary optimism sneaks by, I’ve heard One Piece is good.
article link, it’s a good short read
I tried One Piece, but Usopp’s face is way too gonk-adjacent for me to be able to tolerate it
this thing?it’s jarring at first but you get used to the weird proportions eventually
Maybe manga, but anime is expensive to produce and investors need to green-light it. Thus the closest thing to revolutionary ideas being proven right can’t make the investors look like the bad guy that can be defeated.
It would be nice if China did though. I’d love to see a fantasy setting undergo a socialist revolution. Utilizing the magic of the world to advance the forces of production for factories and threw the craftsman mages under the bus to produce magical items in magical factories. The experience alienation. Land use policies change to farm magical animals like unicorns for their magical ingredients in factory farms. Clerics and Paladins that serve gods of wealth drive out all of the indigenous druids and shamans to extract from the land without giving back. Even in death, the workers are not freed from the capitalist system. The exploitation of the workers makes it difficult to pay for things, so when a loved one dies, their body is sold to a necromancer to do eternal mindless labor in the factories to assemble non magical items or till the fields.
The spiritual death of the world offends the goddess of the planet and she strikes back with plagues and storms to undermine the human supremacist, unsustainable ways of capitalism. But the ingenuity of creating magic and technologies can hold the world goddess’s power at bay. Thus she has cast out the ability for magic to work in this planet in many ways. Arcane magic still works, but magic of the gods can’t enter her realm. However some people can cast divine magic spells, but it is only because they work in her favor. She no longer tolerates the gods that even the artificers admit are destroying the world. Those most exploited by capitalism sometimes gain a blessing of the godess, but they must hide this from authorities. It is up to the workers exploited by the system to use their power, whether blessed by the goddess or not to change the world as it is to one that serves the all sentient races and in harmony with nature.
Afaik none, even if there is more or less revolutionary idea or character presented as positive, at some point class collaboration is always presented as the only possibly good outcome. So, more or less like entirety of capitalist media.
Code Geass never discarded its anticolonialist theming
But it never be anything more than wearing anti-colonialism as a theme though. All the anti-colonialism movements are brain dead backward monarchist and other feudal alliance who got infiltrated by a white savior figure that took over the movement for personal benefits. It even tried to frame Japan as a victim of colonialism and imperialism while having no understanding of how brutal actual colonialism is. Worst of all, at the end of the show it was just two cliques of the world super imperialist power duking it out with nukes to see who’s the world emperor, which the white savior guy decided should be his sister.
You aren’t wrong, after the interesting first part that anime really jumped the shark. It still being the only one I have seen that advocates for revolution vs reform is just sad.
It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
Isn’t One Piece revolutionary? I didn’t watch it since you know, number of episodes, but I heard that it is. And which is the one about terrorists?
I guess but it kind of depends on the arc, then again I’m personally jaded with one piece so that clouds my judgement.
Edit: there’s like a legitimate revolutionary movement in the show, I’m more so referencing certain arcs and their values.
might be Terror in Resonance?
Yup, that one felt like it had potential but half-way through it becomes the same old “the problem were the bad aplles in the system”
I just checked that one, idk maybe. It’s apparently from 2014 but the artstyle looks WAY older for some reason.
The Rose of Versailles. I very much recommend.
spoiler
The main characters either die fighting fighting as revolutionaries or get sentenced to guillotine (Marie Antoinette). Also Oscar de Jarjayes (my username) is one of the main characters.
I haven’t finished it, but probably the Karl Marx one(though it is a donghua, not an anime)
The Promised Neverland (read the manga after season 1 of the anime)
was gonna mention this, although I only saw the anime
CW: Spoilers aheadseason 1 was the best suspense ever depicted in an animated work. 10/10
season 2 felt was a huge non-sequitir. The demons that were built up in season1 did satanic sacrifices, and seeing them bustling around like normal people in a bazaar next season felt anticlimactic. I don’t think this was deliberate, but I could BS my way into pretending to believe this was an artistic point: that what we perceive as normal everyday people are pretty much demons from the perspective of animals
I like the allegory for vegetarianism, and I think the concept of injecting blood to stop craving meat is simplistic, but important. I also crave meat less when in certain states, and I think it’s possible to drastically reduce meat consumption by unlocking this state. My suspicions are that this state has a lot to do with the ripeness/freshness/quality of consumed produce.
I don’t think the rest of the manga is as strong generally, though it has a lot of cool points towards the end. Some discussion of the later plot in the manga
spoiler
The more mundane lives of many demons is actually part of the manga and indeed a deliberate point that the demons have a human-like society outside of the farms and potentially can be dealt with as human-like creatures, and I think it is indeed part of the allegory as well as part of a desire to discourage “exterminationist” plot solutions that we see other manga immediately jump to (though this point is debated among the cast). Remember, the kids were never being “sacrificed”, they were being harvested as cattle. There are ritual elements of this, but that’s also true of how humans have historically slaughtered animals in many places.
In general, I would say the message of the story is fine from the outset but ultimately becomes maybe the best in any manga that I have read by the final chapter.
One Piece : I gotta post some spoilers to talk about it:::: large plot spoilers The main characters dad is literally based off Che Guevara and is always portrayed as the side of good. His ship is named Granma, same as Che’s. He’s the leader of a force named the revolutionary army. His second in command is named Invankov: queen of the kamabakka kingdom which is an island of gender fluid people who can physically change genders any time they want thanks to Invankovs hormone powers. They go around liberating islands from the world government and freeing slaves.
The main character and his crew embodies freedom and I’d say communist ideals but they never really explicitly say so.
There is an arc where they must dispose of a king who was hoarding doctors for himself. It feels like a metaphor for socializing healthcare.
In most of the arcs after the introductory ones, they team up with natives to force out occupiers who are displacing them, or straight up enslaving them.
One of the first long form arcs they fight what’s basically a world government funded NGO who is trying to coup a king in the Middle East by controlling the resources (water).
They fight the CIA of their world.
There are consistent themes of freeing slaves throughout.
The world government is controlled by disconnected incestuous billionaires that all gave themselves the title of “saint”
There is a villain who is liberal coded, who creates a Disneyfied kingdom using fear.
Another is libertarian coded who occupied a land that he turned into a weapons manufacturing island.
There is an alt right coded villain who also turns the occupied kingdom into a weapons manufacturing island. ::: It’s a big commitment due to length.
I love the absurd art style (aside from every woman looking like the same character and some portrayals I found insensitive or offensive) but a ton of people have a hard time getting past how goofy it looks. Characters can look ridiculous and proportions mean nothing. Humans heights seem to vary between 1ft - 30ft tall.
The absurdist and cartoony nature of it can be off-putting to a lot of people but personally I love it and wish more things were like it.
There are a lot of problematic elements throughout that you’d need to look past and just enjoy the overarching message.
Iron blooded orphans is good
