Manga / Appleseed

aka: Appleseed Ex Machina

The story of the original cyber Battle Couple.

Appleseed is a four volume Cyberpunk/Mecha manga written between 1985 and 1989 by Masamune Shirow, of Ghost in the Shell fame. It led to OVA and feature film adaptations. Set in post-apocalyptic 22nd century, the story follows the Action Girl Deunan Knute and her cyborg partner and lover Briareos Hecatonchires. The two join the special forces of the city of Olympus, an enclave of peaceful life on the planet, after its devastation by World War V ^note The English version of the first volume's summary claims that the war that devestated the world was World War III, something that isn't explicitly stated in the manga itself, and which is clarified in Appleseed ID to be called World War V., whose population consists equally of both normal humans and "bioroids", Artificial Humans with genetically suppressed aggressiveness who act as emotional buffer for the former.

The original manga saw Deunan and Briareos join Olympus's counter-terrorism unit ESWAT after being discovered in the wastelands and offered a life in Utopian city in exchange for their combat skills (both were formerly SWAT operatives). The manga follows them as they protect their new home from enemies, both foreign and domestic. Unfortunately, other projects and the loss of much of his notes in a 1995 earthquake left the manga as an Orphaned Series.

The one-shot OVA^note a co-production between Studio Gainax and AIC was produced in 1988 and is loosely based on a mix of both the first and second volumes. The plot concerns a colleague of Deunan and Briareos, who feels that instead of Utopia, Olympus is a Gilded Cage designed to prevent humans from living a fulfilling life. To destroy this cage, he conspires with a professional terrorist and it's up to Deunan and Briareos to stop them.

Sixteen years later, the first feature film was released, directed by Shinji Aramaki. Just like the OVA, it shares little with the original manga and diverges even in the premise: instead of joining ESWAT together, Deunan and Briareos are separated by accident long before coming to Olympus and have to regain mutual trust over the course of the film. The main plot centers on the struggle of two equally extremist racist factions in Olympus, each desiring to destroy either the original humanity, or the bioroids to make way for the other. The movie featured a unique for that time style of animation that seamlessly blended traditional anime designs and CGI and which was later reused in the sequel and an unrelated movie Vexille, produced largely by the same people.

Appleseed Ex Machina, the Oddly Named Sequel to the 2004 movie, is set two years after it and sees the idyllic relationship between the protagonists challenged by the introduction of Tereus, a Super Prototype bioroid who is for all intents and purposes a clone of Briareos minus the fact that he didn't have his entire body replaced with cybernetic prosthetics. The situation is worsened when all cyborgs in Olympus (including Briareos) start getting hijacked by a Knight Templar seeking to unite humanity once and for all... in quite an unsettling manner. The producer of the second movie was John Woo. Yes, that John Woo.^note Which explains the pigeons and the extreme akimbo.

It also has a CGI anime series named Appleseed XIII. The series was produced in 2011 by Jinni's Animation Studios in association with Production I.G and under the direction of Takayuki Hamana with Junichi Fujisaku as script supervisor. All 13 episodes of Appleseed XIII can be seen on Funimation's official YouTube channel here. An English dub of the series was released on DVD and Blu-Ray in June 2013.

A third CGI film titled Appleseed Alpha was released on July 15, 2014, directed once again by Shinji Aramaki. It is a Prequel film that focuses on Deunan and Briareos before they arrive in Olympus, as they are living in the ruins of New York City doing mercenary work for a local crime boss named Two Horns, until one day on a mission they encounter a Mysterious Waif and her cyborg bodyguard claiming to be on a mission for Olympus. This title holds the distinction of being the only entry in the series where the English audio came first; a Japanese dub was released on October 28, 2014.

Not to be confused with Johnny Appleseed, or anything else named after the man.

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Provides Examples Of:

• '80s Hair: Athena and at times Deunan, along with some extras in the background, have really big hair styles that date the series.
• 2D Visuals, 3D Effects: XIII contains a rather strange variant of this - the characters and objects are CG, while several backgrounds are rendered through traditional means.
• Action Girl: Deunan.
• Adaptation Name Change: "Sokaku" from the manga is now called "Two Horns" in Alpha.
• Affably Evil:
  • Despite his racism, General Edward Uranus III conducts himself in a manner becoming an officer and a gentleman, and no matter who he interacts with, he appears genuinely courteous, if a quite bit gruff and professional. His sole moment of true anger is when Colonel Hades tries to kill Deunan, who he considers a family friend through her parents, and Briareos, who had just warned him that the Elders are using him as a pawn in a bigger scheme, one that will render the human race all but extinct.
  • Two Horns in Alpha is Big Fun and loves to joke around and have a good laugh. He also leads the most dangerous criminal gang in New York.
• Age-Gap Romance: In addition to the relationship quirks of dating a cyborg, Briareos is a solid nine years older than Deunan.
• All-CGI Cartoon: The three movies and XIII.
• Alternate Continuity: All of the franchise's works (manga, OVA, films, & anime). Only Ex Machina is directly related to something else, being a sequel to the 2004 film. Appleseed Alpha, even though it's a Prequel, still has problems fitting into any of the existing continuities. It is only loosely based off of the manga (only the first chapter bears resemblance to the movie, and it's mostly the tank battle in the urban city), and it certainly doesn't work with the 2004 film & consequently Ex Machina, since in that continuity Deunan & Briareos were separated before coming to Olympus, while in Alpha they are surviving together in the post-war wasteland.
• Ambiguously Evil: Yoshino, the unctuous Posiedon delegate, and her equally sinister entourage in Ex Machina. It turns out that they're actually trying to hunt down the BigBad, and are only too happy to lend our protagonists a hand.
• And I Must Scream: Briareos in Ex Machina when he's being affected by the nanomachines. Try as he might, he's largely unable to fight against it without help. Also anyone affected by the signals, as prior to the mind control kicking in, they grab their head in pain and usually fall to their knees as well.
• Anti-Gravity: The Hermes System.
• Anti-Mutiny: In the manga, Athena launches one of these against the Elders once they propose to expand bioroid behavior modification to humanity (sterilization in the movie). Gaia gets the same idea about bioroids in general.
• Arc Words:
  • From XIII: "Vengeance belongeth unto me."
  • Also "paradise", to the point of becoming way overused. See the YMMV page.
• Arm Cannon: Nyx in Alpha has a machine gun built into the palm of her right hand.
• Armor Is Useless: In this universe, cyborgs are surprisingly fragile, with pistol rounds being able to take down even largely metallic ones pretty easily (Talos is almost completely metal, yet Deunan's M1911 does severe damage to him with just a few shots). You'd think becoming a cyborg would make you tougher. It seems that underneath all that metal there are still plently of squishy parts a bullet can ruin.
• Artificial Human: Bioroids.
• Asshole Victim: Some of the "vampire" victims in XIII Episode 5 are war criminals from Eris (said to have committed genocide and ethnic cleansing).
• Assimilation Plot: Kestner in Ex Machina wants to pull this off.
• Badass Army: ESWAT and Olympus Police in general are extremely competent; Deunan and Briareos are just exceptional cogs in an excellent machine.
• Battle Couple: Deunan and Briareos are at least implied in the different continuities to be at least attracted to each other, if not an outright couple, and are both professional police officers who belong to the Olympus City version of the S.W.A.T, even outside of their tendency to get involved with super-criminals.
• Beast and Beauty: Deunan and Briareos, though in the OVA (and Ex Machina, shown in a flashback) they've been a couple since before he had his cybernetic upgrades.
• Berserk Button: If there's one thing Colonel Hades hates more than Bioroids, it's people being preachy towards him. When Deunan pulls the Humans Are the Real Monsters argument on him, he simply responds by telling General Uranus in annoyance that they're wasting their time, but only when Briareos flat-out says he's an Unwitting Pawn in a higher power's game does he snap and break out the firearms.
• Beta Couple: It's mentioned a few times in Ex Machina and XIII that Hitomi and Yoshitsune are an item.
• BFG: Briareos in Volume 4 uses a gun that resembles a sawn-off M1 Main Battle Tank cannon.
• Blade Run: Deunan vs. that construction mecha in Ex Machina.
• Bloodstained Glass Windows The opening sequence of Ex Machina, in fine John Woo tradition.
• Boom, Headshot!: Chiffon, who befriended Deunan, was part of the human insurgency and killed via headshot by Deunan in the manga's first volume.
• Bullet Time: Used extensively in the movies, especially Ex Machina.
• But Not Too Foreign: Averted, Deunan once spells out her ancestry for Hitomi and there is a lot of variety (she's mixed-race Sudanese on her mother's side), but no Japanese. Shirow has mentioned that she won the genetic lottery as far as physical skills go, which is why her employers and colleagues put up with her eccentricities.
  • Also subverted in that Masamune Shirow has said in the official databook that he never thought of making Deunan Japanese or partially Japanese
• Butterfly of Death and Rebirth: XIII has an episode focused on a hotel with a garden in the middle that has butterflies that the daughter of the VIP likes to chase. Her chase ultimately leads to the death of her father as he tries to save her from running off a bridge without rails.
• Call-Back: The timeline in Appleseed ID speaks of an "mobile armored riot police" having been set up by Poseidon, the name of Japan by the time of Appleseed, in the year 2029.
• Cat Girl: Artemis Alpeia from the manga.
• Cavalry Betrayal: There's a bit near the end of Ex Machina where we're led to believe that the Poseidon special-forces are pulling this. Turns out it just took them a while to spot the protagonists in need of rescue, and they turn up shortly afterwards.
• Cel Shading: The 2004 movie is entirely in CG with a blend of motion capture and cel shading. Both Ex Machina and XIII also utilize this method.
• Chainsaw Good: Briareos wields a freaking chainsword in Ex Machina.
• Chase-Scene Obstacle Course: In the 2004 film, robot ninja ladies are driving a van in pursuit of Deunan and Hitomi, crashing into a watermelon stand.
• Chekhov's Gun: The broken machine Matthews is trying to fix at the beginning of Alpha (it's a Landmate). There are a few others in that movie as well, such as the broken highway bridge near where Deunan and Briareos find Olson's body, and the large bullet holes Deunan makes in the spider walker's control center with the Landmate. Both are crucial in destroying the walker.
• Chicken Walker: The "Ostrich" mechs in Alpha have this style going on.
• Cleavage Window: Athena's assistant Nike has one in Ex Machina.
• Compilation Movie: XIII got a pair of them: Tartaros and Ouranos.
• Composite Character: Tereus from Ex Machina has elements of both Briareos and Fang from the manga. Makes sense, seeing as he's a clone of the former.
• Concealment Equals Cover: Very, very averted. As is common for Masamune Shirow works, big guns will chew up the scenery. Of particular note is the huge Gatling guns used by the tanks in the intro of the first movie: they're shown punching straight through thick concrete and brick walls like they were made of stale crackers.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The final episode "Paradisius" in Appleseed XIII directly references the plot of the 2004 movie.
  • In Appleseed Alpha, Talos is searching for a prototype Spider Gun Platform, the same weapons that will eventually defend Olympus.
• Cowboy Cop:
  • Colonel Hades was one during his LA SWAT days; this factored into his expulsion from the group by Deunan's father, which fueled his ultimately suicidal revenge scheme against the Knutes.
  • Played straight by Deunan, her exceptional combat ability is the only thing that keeps her from getting killed on multiple occasions. And, not surprisingly, she gets chewed out by both Briareos and her ESWAT platoon leader for it several times.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: the cyborg Sokaku, Ex-SAS, Mercenary, EOD specialist... and total tool. While a total genius in his area of expertise, his showboating and comic relief nature trip him up more often than not.
• Cyber Cyclops: Subverted. Briareos actually has eight eyes: Four in his face arranged around the big central sensor, two at the bases of his "rabbit ear" sensors, and two at the tips, which allow him to safely look around corners. Oh, and the big central sensor mentioned earlier? That's actually his nose.
• Da Chief: Athena.
• Declaration of Protection: Briareos takes his promise to Karl Knute in XIII very seriously, so much that it causes problems in his relationship with Deunan.
• Demotedto Extra: Hitomi and Yoshi, mostly the former though, play large roles in the plots of Volumes 1 and 2 in the manga. But in Volumes 3 and 4, they only appear for a few scenes and have increasingly little with the plot, with Hitomi's appearance in Volume 4 being only a little better to a cameo.
• Didn't Think This Through: General Uranus's plan to destroy the Bioroids involves blowing up the D-Tank, which actually contains a virus the Elders had forced Dr. Gilliam to synthesize that would sterilize all of humanity and slowly euthanize the human race. He doesn't realize that he was unwittingly helping along the death of humanity until it's almost too late.
• Did You Think I Can't Feel?: While the Bioroids do have emotional restrictions, it would be wrong to say they don't have any emotions at all, they're just more subdued.
• Diplomatic Impunity: In XIII, Deia is caught red handed committing an act of terrorism, has to flee Olympus, and then one episode later, shows up again as an accredited diplomat of Poseidon, and goes on to commit several more acts of terrorism while back in Olympus.
• Disturbed Doves: Would Ex Machina be a John Woo movie without them? However, there is also a twist to them in this case.
• Divided States of America:
  • In 1988, the Cold War came to a peaceful resolution with the formation of the Russo-American Alliance, composed of the 13 colonial states, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, California, Oregon, Hawaii, and Alaska.
  • After the 2nd American Civil War in 2016, the United States was once again divided. The United States of America was now comprised of Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, Utah, Washington, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, North & South Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. The extreme right-sided military industrialistic American Empire aka Imperial Americana, took everything else, including Washington D.C.
    • E-SWAT ended up fighting alongside with the Russo-American Alliance forces against Imperial Americana in the manga.
• The Dog Bites Back: It's implied in the 2004 film that General Uranus ratted out the Elders while surrendering to Athena, who quickly confronts the Elders just as they're about to bring about the gradual extinction of humanity.
• The Dragon: Nyx to Talos in Appleseed Alpha.
• Due to the Dead:
  • In the OVA, after Christopher Evans is killed in the line of duty in the opening battle, his ashes are buried in the Olympus cemetery; the small funeral is attended only by Deunan, Briareos, and three others in ESWAT.
  • In Ex Machina, Manuel Aeacus is buried with full honors after being put down when he's infected with a bioweapon designed by Dr. Kestner. Deunan, in full uniform, is one of his pallbearers.
• The End of the World as We Know It: Subverted, as with some versions of Ghost in the Shell , despite two world wars, one of which was nuclear, civilization just kept right on chugging along, without even a die back. That said, the world is still a very chaotic place, and you probably wouldn't want to live there.
• ESWAT Team
• Even Evil Has Standards: General Uranus is appalled and horrified when Hades moves in to murder Briareos and Deunan; upon realizing he had been manipulated into instigating the coup, he chooses to surrender peacefully, refusing to be somebody's tool in spite of his hatred of Bioroids. He also genuinely considers Deunan a family friend and regrets his role in her mother's assassination.
• Everything Is an iPod in the Future: Talos, Nyx, and their cyborg underlings in Alpha follow this design aesthetic, complete with Talos's body being uniformly white while Nyx is solid black.
• The Evils of Free Will: Serves as the villain's primary motivation in Ex Machina.
• Eyepatch of Power: Deunan gets one after damaging one eye of hers during a training accident in Volume IV. She also gets a much more girly, frilly lace eyepatch for civilian wear when she's off-duty at the end of the book.
• The Faceless: Talos, Nyx, and their soldiers all have opaque helmets. Averted with Talos at the end, after Deunan shoots him through the faceplate, we get a disturbing look at what's behind the mask.
• Failed Future Forecast: In the manga, the Soviet Union still exists and a minor character even comes from there, with even a joke about Communism being made. Needless to say, the idea of the USSR having existed up to the 22nd century was wrong. To be fair, the series was made in the mid-80s.
• Fallen States of America: Appleseed Alpha takes place in New York City, which is now a bombed out wasteland crawling with renegade cyborgs and other lowlifes.
• False Reassurance: In the first movie the Big Bad (well, one of them) says "no human life would be taken", but that does not mean they won't unleash a virus upon the world that causes sterility; rather, it means no human would die immediately as a direct consequence.
• Fantastic Racism: Humans vs. bioroids is the recurring theme across the different continuities, as the bioroids were genetically engineered as a Servant Race, but are now effectively humanity's masters due to being the majority of the governmental operations. Some continuities hint at, or outright confirm, that there are bioroids who look down on humanity as an innately savage race, effectively an entire species of Flawed Prototypes compared to themselves.
  • Humans vs. cyborgs also pops up in the adaptations, though it's less prevalant than the human vs. bioroid element, and it's absent to the point of being practically non-existent in the original manga.
• Flawed Prototype:
  • The prototype Spider Gun Platform in Appleseed Alpha is incomplete. A missing armor plate enables the heroes to Attack Its Weak Point.
  • In some continuities, the bioroids regard humans as this to themselves, arguing that their heightened emotional output makes them inherently incapable of sustaining an effective civilization as they are too aggressive by nature.
• Flying Car: Sort of: They float above ground.
• Fragile Speedster: Nyx turns out to be this in Alpha when she fights Briaeros near the end. She is no match for him physically, so she has to rely on a lot of She-Fu and jumping around to dodge his hits. When she does try to match him blow for blow, the results speak for themselves.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: Some close-ups of Talos in Alpha show that his body has the word "Poseidon" stenciled on it, making it extremely likely that he, Nyx, and their team are from that country.
• Friend or Foe?: The IFFs of the autonomous combat drones in Alpha either don't work, or nobody remembers how to designate themselves as a friend. Either way, the drones attack everybody.
• Future Copter: The transport helicopter that appears in the beginning of the 2004 movie looks very much like a heavily upgraded, futuristic V-22 Osprey. Ex Machina's aircraft seem to use Anti-Gravity rather than rotors. Meanwhile, in Alpha, Talos and his team make use of a more contemporary looking V-22 that seems to have had all its design flaws ironed out and is equipped with a chin-mounted machine gun and rocket pods that can launch a Macross Missile Massacre.
• Gambit Pileup: Even after repeated rereads, it can be difficult to pick out the specifics of Athena vs. the Council.
• Gangbangers: Two Horns and his crew.
• Gatling Good: Very good. The giant siege platforms have at least four gatling guns the size of buses in addition to their Wave-Motion Gun.
  • The Movie has Deunan pursued by two tanks mounted with gatling guns. These tanks are lifted directly out of the manga's designs.
  • The Appleseed Alpha movie demonstrates this again with the urban tank that chases Deunan & Briareos around the ruins of New York City, as well as the gatling guns mounted on the "Ostrich" mechs and the prototype giant spider tank.
• Gentle Giant: Briareos when he's off-duty. Makes his predicament in Ex Machina all the more disturbing.
• Good Colors, Evil Colors: The eyes of Briareos and other cyborgs changed in colour from red to green between the first and second movies, so that we could see when they were Brainwashed and Crazy thanks to the ominous red glow.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: Argus, the Poseidon officer from Ex Machina, has a long scar covering his permanently-closed left eye that makes him look rather sinister. It's misdirection, though - he's not that bad a guy, and even helps save the world (and, later, our protagonists) by the end of the movie.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: Both Deunan and Briareos did that when fighting battle-androids: They ripped off an arm and proceeded to beat the android with it.
• Gun Kata: Briareos pulls this off every time he gets more than one gun in Ex Machina. Justified in his insane reflexes and multiple eyes.
• Guns Akimbo: in fact, Briareos can shoot three guns at once in Ex Machina: two with his mecha's hands and one with his own.
  • Just one with his hands because it's a Landmate sized one. He could theoretically use hundreds of weapon systems wired directly to his "brain". His cyborg chassis is named after the Hecatonchires, the hundred-armed giants of Greek mythology, for a reason.
• Gun Ship Rescue: Happens in the beginning of the film for Deunan after she gets trapped.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: In Alpha, Briaeros defeats Nyx after he is able to retrieve his sniper rifle and blows her in half at point-blank range. Later, Talos comes back for one last act of revenge against Deunan, but Iris drops an automatic door on his spine and chops him in half.
• Hand Cannon: Deunan's "Gong" in the manga.
• Head Crushing: The Action Prologue of the film briefly shows a combat cyborg crushing one of Deunan's squadmates' heads in its hands.
• Heel–Face Turn: A bit of a delayed one in Alpha when after Nyx tries to kill Two Horns, he still goes after Briareros and Deunan. It's not until after he gets his rear end handed to him again that he decides it would probably be a better idea to team up with our main duo to take down the Triton commandos.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Tereus saves Deunan from being impaled by Xander's Combat Tentacles. And survives.
  • In XIII, Kottos saves the ill bioroid child from being blown up by an RPG charge and dies right before her eyes.
• Hero-Tracking Failure: Occurs at the start of the first movie, and receives a brief Call-Back in the opening fight of Ex Machina, though that huge gatling gun looked pretty difficult to maneuver even for a cyborg. Alpha does this again during the chase in New York between Briareos and the tank, but not unexpected since Two Horns is on the gun, and he wasn't expecting Briareos to be able to move so fast considering how sluggish he was just the day before.
• The High Queen: Athena is the effective head of the government of Olympus, making her effectively the ruler of the city.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Who else? Deunan and Briareos.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Deunan reminds General Uranus that as untrustworthy as he believes Bioroids to be, at least they're not killers like their own kind are.
• Humongous Mecha: A 13-foot tall death machine appears in volume 4 of the manga, but is taken apart by just two veteran landmate pilots (and a Tank Cannon).
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: XIII has the episodes are named after the twelve labors of Hercules.
• Ignored Epiphany: After Briareos delivers a Kirk Summation to the Regular Army, everyone realizes what they had almost gotten themselves into... save for Colonel Hades ("I've heard enough—and I'll be damned if I let some machine tell me what to do!").
• Improbable Aiming Skills:
  • Briareos. Of course, he's a Cyborg with multiple eyes and mechanically stable arms, so he has advantages that a regular human don't.
  • Deunan, too, as shown in one memorable moment from the manga: their only hope of saving the city is to prevent a computer jack from plugging into a specific port, closing a connection. The problem is, the port is thirty meters away, at the end of a supercooled vent that nobody can enter, and they can't simply destroy the port. The solution? Take out half the gunpowder from a hollow-point bullet, put a single apple seed inside the tip, and fire it such that the seed blocks the port. It's not the most impossible shot in the world, but they've only got one chance, and the fate of the city is riding on it. Naturally, she makes the shot.
• Ironic Echo: From Alpha: "Hope. What a concept." Interestingly it's said on two different occasions by two characters, both of which could not possibly have known the other said it. And even funnier is that the phrase is directed at the same target, Two Horns.
  • Two Horns repeats back Briareos' "Do I look like I'm joking?" at the end of the movie. Though given that it's Two Horns, he really is.
• It's Personal: What blinds Colonel Hades to the fact that his vendetta against Deunan's father for booting him off of LA SWAT, which he hopes will destroy the Bioroids, could actually lead to humanity's extinction.
• Karma Houdini: Prime Minister Athena in the movie never has to answer for having mercenaries kill all Deunan's comrades in the wasteland, and trying to capture her alive, and later sending outright assassins after her. She was trying to prevent a genocide, that she feared Deunan could unwittingly partake in, but it seems that Deunan never even gets to learn the truth, let alone decide what she decides to do with it. But then, Athena wasn't sure until midway through that she could trust Deunan, and being reminded of her connection to Dr. Gilliam during a hearing on what to do about the terrorist attack on the Bioroids was likely a factor in her deciding she could trust Deunan after all.
  • The Manga also has her drug the food of a bunch of ex-soldiers brought into the city to gauge their reactions. Of course, given that their ultimate reaction was to jump into their landmates and go on a rampage after Tartarus put the question of her wrongness into doubt.
  • Likewise General Uranus; he was trying a coup and a genocide, but apparently calling off your attempt at the last minute and saying "sorry" is all that it takes to be forgiven. On the other hand, it was implied that the Elders were manipulating him into taking action and that it was his own race that he was unwittingly endangering (and not the Bioroids like he had thought for most of the film), which might have factored into his rather lenient sentence.
• Lady and Knight: Talos and Nyx are a villainous variant of this in Alpha, with Talos being a Black Knight and Nyx being a Dark Lady with Evil Wears Black.
• Land of One City: Olympus.
• Lethal Chef: Deunan in the manga.
• Lightning Bruiser: Briareos uses (or, more accurately, is built into) the Hecatonchire-class full-body cyborg chassis, a towering juggernaut of a military prototype that is amongst the strongest, toughest rigs ever to exist, and boosts his reflexes to superhuman levels as well.
• Lost Superweapon: In Alpha, Olympus sends out a team to destroy what turns out to be a prototype Spider Gun Platform. However Talos, a renegade member of the team, decides to activate it for his own use, only to discover that it's a revenge weapon programmed to march on New York and destroy it if the war was lost and New York was occupied by the enemy.
• May Contain Evil: The Connexus in Ex Machina.
• Meaningful Name: Several, but Briareos has the most obvious - he's named after one of the three Hecatonchires, the hundred-armed giants who overthrew the Titans. He's also a hulking Lightning Bruiser of a cyborg with sufficiently sophisticated targeting software to wield dozens of weapons at once. In case you missed it the first time, the model name of his chassis spells it out for you. In the 1988 OAV, his last name is even given as "Hecatonchires".
• A Mech by Any Other Name: Mini-Mecha are known as "Landmates", while Powered Armor are called "Protectors".
• Mecha Expansion Pack: In the fourth volume of the manga, Briareos uses a series of attachments that basically turns him into a Landmate.
• Mechanical Insects: The fourth volume features arachnid robots with distinct abdomens that are almost entirely made up of a minigun and its absurdly large ammo drum.
• MegaCorp: Poseidon in Ex Machina.. They seem to be One Nation Under Copyright, to boot, in XIII. They even have national boundaries and territorial waters. This is because it used to be Japan.
• Mercy Kill: Deunan does one to Xander in Ex Machina.
• Mid-Season Twist: Episode 7 of XIII has the pilot of the rogue Hecatonchires Landmate turn out to be Deia.
• Mini-Mecha: Landmates (kinda).
• Motifs:
  • XIII features a lot of imagery relating to the twelve labors of Hercules.
    • A large statue featuring statues for the labors is a reoccurring feature of city shots.
    • A lot of Greek styled hand painted images are spliced into the show.
    • An episode is about a sculptor who has been sculpting statues of the labors
    • A large room featuring a ceiling painted to show the constellations is often used for spliced in shots
    • The episodes are named after the labors
  • XIII has a lot of shots of a compass. Especially the one belonging to the antagonist.
• Motion-Capture Mecha: Landmates.
• More Dakka Spider Gun Platforms in the manga and OVA, Mobile Fortresses in the first movie.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: Landmate arms typically act on a Master-Slave system: The Landmate's arms mimic the motions of the operator's real arms, which are usually external (and safely armored). When Briareose hooks into his Mecha Expansion Pack as mentioned above, he can actually control all four arms independently (as any Hecatonchires cyborg could).
• My God, What Have I Done?: It's implied during the final act of the 2004 film that the realization of what he had gotten mixed up in prompted General Uranus and the Regular Army to surrender.
• Mysterious Mercenary Pursuer: The entire Triton team in Alpha, who are all faceless, professional, and relentless in their pursuit of Olson and Iris. And aside from Nyx and Talos, they're all voiceless as well.
• Never Bring a Gun to a Knife Fight: Deunan grabs her knife when going for the ubercyborg during the Church Shootout in Ex Machina... and kicks his ass badly. She takes out three guys with a very large knife (she insists it's a sword) in the manga, too. In the last episode of XIII she also uses a large folding knife in her Landmate to take out an enemy Landmate. Finally, on foot she also uses a large combat knife to stab a prototype combat robot wrestling with Briareos. Let's just say Deunan really likes her knives.
• No Flow in CGI: Deunan's hair is animated as a number of locks, which moves according to physics, instead of animating every strand separately. Extras and Background models are simpler, and have completely un-animated hair.
• Non-Action Big Bad: Talos leaves any fighting to be done to Nyx and his troops.
• No-Nonsense Nemesis: Talos in Alpha when after downloading the information he needs out of Olson's brain, Talos doesn't waste any time gloating about it but simply draws his pistol and empties the mag into Olson, then drops him out of the V-22 at high altitude.
• Obviously Evil: Poseidon in Ex Machina. They're a MegaCorp and One Nation Under Copyright, their executive and diplomat is an Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette in a black leather catsuit with a soft, smooth voice, and their battle commander has a rather ugly scar covering one eye. They're also so polite and smooth about cooperating with Athena and Olympus that any smart viewer would expect that they're up to something seriously devious. Nope. While they did accidentally leave some dangerous experimental Applied Phlebotinum lying around, they cooperate fully with the protagonists when it comes time to clean everything up, and their offer to surrender control of their weapons to Olympus is entirely genuine.
• Oddly Named Sequel 2: Electric Boogaloo
• Oh, Crap!: When the first police team busts through the to arrest the terrorists, just to walk in front of a gatling gun ambush.
• Older Than They Look: While Hitomi acts and looks younger then Deunan, she's actually much older then both her and Briareos, as she is more then 50 years old by the time of the first volume.
• Ominous Floating Castle: The Halcon base is a giant floating Borg-Cube-esque giant laboratory floating above an artificial island.
• One-Word Title: Also a Portmantitle.
• Orphaned Series: The manga. Apparently, most of Masamune's notes for Appleseed were destroyed in the 1995 Kobe earthquake, and he has expressed little interest in continuing the series.
• Our Vampires Are Different: The Eris molecular weapon (probably nano-machines) "Erinyes" turns people into vampires (they got enhanced strengh and regeneration at the price of having to suck blood).
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": Hitomi.
• Phlebotinum-Induced Stupidity: In Ex Machina, Briareos would likely have found unearthing the movie's central conspiracy much easier if the lingering nanite poisoning they used to temporarily take him over hadn't compelled him to take the most stupid, pointless, and needlessly violent actions possible whenever his adrenaline levels spiked. Luckily for him, there's a treatment.
• Point Defenseless: Averted in Appleseed Alpha with the prototype Spider Gun Platform, which is bristling with weapons, including dozens of CIWS Phalanx cannons that shoot down the vast majority of the missiles launched at it.
• Portmantitle: Also a One-Word Title.
• Post-Cyberpunk: In a world of rampant cyber-augmentation, hyper-advanced technology, and super-powerful corporations... things are mostly okay, really. There was that one war, but mankind pulled back from the brink, and is chugging happily along.
• Post-Script Episode: The final episode of Appleseed XIII, "Paradisius," is a rather strange change in tone and has absolutely nothing to do with the main plot thread of the rest of the series, especially since the main plot was already wrapped up in the 12th episode.
• Powered Armor: Protectors, Landmates (kinda).
• Precision F-Strike:
  • From the 2004 film: "You son of a bitch... you betrayed us!"
  • From Ex Machina: "Don't fuck with me!"
• Product Placement:
  • In Ex Machina, the credits tell us that two of Deunan's outfits were designed by Miuccia Prada.
  • Write OLYMPUS in a sans-serif font and it will enevitably resemble the logo of the Olympus camera company.
• Production Throwback: Doctors Matthews and Slade are characters who previously appeared in Shirow's previous manga Black Magic, but who also show up here. There's also a cameo of Sybil from that manga's very loose adaption Black Magic M-66.
• Punch-Clock Villain: In "Alpha", while it is mentioned by multiple characters that the numerous nameless cyborg thugs working for Two Horns are criminals and gang members, none of them act that unpleasant nor are shown doing anything evil throughout the course of the film. The worst any of them do is attack the better armed and more dangerous Deunan and Briareos when directly ordered to do so, and when ordered to return to the tank rather than continue attacking go so far as to look at each other, shrug, and calmly leave. The red one that acts as second in command to Two Horns in particular is portrayed as surprisingly mellow, level headed, and non-confrontational. Minor hints scattered throughout the film imply that these men used to be soldiers during the War, and after the war was over they simply continued to do the same things they used to just under new managment.
• Race Lift: Though it's nearly impossible to tell in the manga due to the lack of a... well, a FACE, Briareos is Black North African originally, as seen in some artwork Shirow has done (including a very odd-looking beach-scene). In the 2004 film and Ex Machina, Briareos is retconned to be a rather Japanese-looking Bishōnen.
  • Word of God is that Briareos was Black Caribbean (where, he never specified).
  • XIII makes him black again. Not just Briareos either; Deunan's mother was white in the 2004 film, but black in XIII (also an indicator that XIII is an Alternate Continuity). This one's a plot point in her Death by Origin Story: she was gunned down for crossing an apartheid line.
    • Actually, that's not alternate, that's pretty much Deunan exposition in volume 3 of the manga, animated.
    • In the manga, Deunan explains that she was gunned down by some random racists in San Francisco, so her Death by Origin Story was changed as well. Deunan also said in the manga that she was a "Cafe Au Lait''.
• Real Men Wear Pink: Implied by way of Fridge Logic in Ex Machina, when Deunan receives a top-of-the-line and very, very pink Landmate from the Poseidon assault team she's working alongside. Meanwhile, the Poseidon commander, Argus, uses the ESWAT model that she turned up in. Now, normally, one would expect him to use his own suit... unless, of course, he'd given it to someone else to pilot instead. Perhaps bubblegum pink is a signifier of rank in Poseidon?
• Reasonable Authority Figure:
  • Athena tries to get Deunan killed at the start of the film; however, in truth she didn't know Deunan's role in what was going on at the time, and when the Regular Army comes close to committing genocide she sends her, along with the rest of Kudo's ESWAT unit, on a mission to retrieve the Appleseed (which can save the Bioroid race and was long thought destroyed by Dr. Gilliam until an Elder revealed its existence at an emergency meeting called by Athena to discuss the implications of a terrorist attack on the Bioroid day care center).
  • General Uranus is willing to engage in debate with his opponents, even during a tense standoff involving the Regular Army, and despite his Fantastic Racism he's at least smart enough to carefully consider the consequences of his actions whenever they come to light.
• Redemption Equals Death: Possibly; it's been theorized that the Elders, realizing that Deunan's determination to preserve the future of humanity came from possibly a purer motive than they had, had entered the last letter of the Mobile Fortress password with the last of their strength, allowing Deunan to save humanity with the push of a button.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: In Ex Machina, a cyborg's eyes turning red is your cue to run away very, very fast.
• Red Shirt Army: Pretty much anyone not named gets killed off rather nonchalantly. And even the lesser named characters may not make it either, particularly if they start sharing their backstory or show any character development. The main characters survive largely thanks to Plot Armor.
  • As an example, when Deunan, Briareos, and Tereus attack the abandoned research center in Ex Machina, there are a few non-named characters that go with them. The minor characters get killed off rather brutally, while Deunan survives long enough to crash her suit (after jettisoning from it) into one of the enemy suits.
• Relationship Upgrade: Inverted in XIII. While Deunan still has feelings for Briareos, Bri seems rather clueless as to how much she cares about him.
• Replacement Goldfish: Kestner's SHODAN-esque cyborg replica of his dead project leader is a particularly creepy example.
• Robot Antennae: Briarios' head-mounted antenna appear to be rigidly mounted in both the contemporary film installments, yet in the manga an the 1988 OAV they were flexible, and moved to help convey his emotion, drooping when depressed or confused, and upright when surprised.
• Robot Buddy: Kotus, especially in his Day in the Limelight episode in XIII.
• Rouge Angles of Satin: In the 2004 film, we get a good look at a computer disc labelled "SEACRET". Also, Appleseed XIII somehow managed to misspell Olympus and Deunan's last name in several episodes. "Olumpus?" "Kunte?" REALLY? And that goes double for the misspelling of Deunan's last name, even!
• Samus Is a Girl: The shocking reveal in XIII of the pilot of the recurring terrorist Landmate. Especially effective since in previous episodes, the mech's loudspeakers used a deep, male voice to speak.
• Scary Black Man: In the original manga, Briareos was black before becoming a full-body cyborg.
  • Two Horns in Alpha is a ruthless cyborg crime boss with a face like an oni mask.
• Scenery Porn: Utopia or not, Olympus is truly something to marvel upon.
• Schizo Tech: In this universe cyborgs and typewriters exist side by side.
• Sensory Abuse: "Coro", composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto for the 2004 film adaptation, consists of loud, discordant chiptune blasts and buzzes meant to invoke an atmosphere of chaos and disorder.
• Sherlock Scan: All Nyx has to do in Alpha is simply wave her hand over a few spent shell casings to obtain an absurdly detailed picture of a battle that was just fought half an hour ago.
• Shout-Out:
  • Ex Machina has a scene very similar to the shooting range scene in RoboCop (1987), but takes it to another level by showing Briareos's multitasking capability.
  • The drones guarding the Halcon facility in Ex Machina look and behave VERY similar to the Sentinels from The Matrix.
  • The Ostrich mechs in Alpha look oddly similar to the Gekkou from Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, minus the bio-organic legs.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: In Appleseed Alpha, Iris & Olson are very much on the idealistic scale, believing they can build a better world, Deunan is somewhere in the middle, while Briareos is firmly cynical. This flips a bit halfway through after they find Olson's corpse, where Deunan briefly loses hope in finding Olympus, but this leads Briareos to adopt a more idealistic viewpoint if only to keep Deunan's spirits up. The villain, Talos, is far on the cynical scale, believing that Olympus's ideals are nonsense and that humanity needs war to continue existing.
• The Smurfette Principle: Deunan is the only on-screen female in ESWAT, but she is The Hero and leads a team of elite soldiers.
  • Not so much "only" in the manga.
  • Nor is she the only woman in ESWAT in Ex Machina. At least one other woman is shown on the team.
  • At least in the OVA she is the only female Landmate pilot, or at least that's implied.
  • XIII has another woman on the squad named Gina, who speaks with a rather strange accent that seems to vanish and return.
• Spider Tank: Spider Gun Platforms, and smaller Spider Drones.
• The Stinger: Appleseed Alpha has a post-credits scene where it's revealed Iris was a bioroid clone based off of Hitomi, and she doesn't plan to send any forces from Olympus to pick up Deunan & Briareos - at least, not yet.
• Super Prototype: Tereus is the first bioroid designed for combat.
• Super Window Jump: Through a stained glass window in Ex Machina, no less.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Colonel Hades's expulsion from Los Angeles SWAT is an example of how a real-life police department would treat a Cowboy Cop. Unfortunately, the fact that it was Deunan's father who expelled him helped set the plot of the 2004 film in motion, as Hades wasn't just any Cowboy Cop, he was a proud Blood Knight who revelled in the violence he inflicted on others and sought to redress the damage done to his pride any way he could.
• Take That Us: During his Motive Rant Talos starts talking about how humanity glorifies war, even to the extent of creating fictional heroes.
• Tempting Apple: The titular MacGuffin is a technology that allows Bioroids to have a lifespan just as long as humans.
• Theme Naming: Many characters are named after characters from Greek mythology.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: In the Manga, Kotus takes down a terrorist with a leaping double axe-handle strike that leaves the poor sap as a smear on the floor.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: Deunan and Hitomi.
• Too Dumb to Live: The whole plot of Ex Machina is solely driven by lots of highly stupid decisions by anyone involved. Possibly hundreds of thousands of deaths could have been avoided if the PSAs not said "might pose a risk to health" but "will turn you into cyber-zombies and might force the police to kill you".
• Trailers Always Spoil: Funimation's trailer for Appleseed XIII spoils who the big bad is, which itself is a huge Plot Twist.
• Tragic Villain: Secondary antagonist Calon in the 1988 OAV. He used to be a happily married cop who genuinely believed in Olympus, but then his mentally disturbed wife committed suicide by jumping out of the window of their highrise apartment right in front of him. Even then, he might have brushed off her assertations of Olympus being inherently antithetical to the human condition and its sterile, safe, ultra-managed environment only being suitable to the artificially engineered bioroids who make up 80% of the city's population... if some of those some same bioroid governmental figures hadn't kidnapped him from his apartment and subjected him to invasive Mind Probes because he was too slow to answer them when they demanded he explain why his wife committed suicide. This caused him to believe that she legitimately was Driven to Suicide by the bioroids, and that humanity needed to be free of their control, however ostensibly benign it might be, causing him to ally himself with the anti-bioroid terrorist Sebastian to destroy Olympus.
• Turned Against Their Masters: The master computer Gaia in the second volume of the manga. Ironically, it was trying to protect mankind.
• Turn in Your Badge: General Uranus in the movie does so without being told to after Briareos warns him that he and the Regular Army were really the Unwitting Pawns to the Elders.
• Unexplained Recovery: In Appleseed Alpha, the gang leader Two Horns is remarkably resilient. His persistent failure to die is never explained.
• Unorthodox Reload: Briareos has spare magazines stored in his forearms in Ex Machina.
• The Unreveal: In Alpha, it's uncertain exactly why Briareos's software was malfunctioning at the beginning of the film. They float two possibilities about whether Matthews may have sabotaged him deliberately to keep him indebted to Two Horns, or if it was just normal wear and tear. But Deunan and Bri don't spend much time dwelling on it, figuring it doesn't matter so long as the problem's fixed. At least, in that part of the film. In the final arc Matthews flat-out admits that Two Horns made him do it, but since he's arriving as part of The Cavalry, bringing Duenan a rebuilt Land-mate with him, the matter is quickly dropped.
• Unwitting Pawn: The Regular Army in the 2004 film. Briareos calls General Uranus and Colonel Hades on it during their confrontation outside of Dr. Gilliam's laboratory. Not that Colonel Hades will listen to him, of course...
• Villain Has a Point: When General Uranus states his case to Deunan, she concedes that he might have a point before reminding him that at least it isn't in the Bioroids' nature to kill even their own kind.
  Deunan: Maybe you're right. Maybe they can't be trusted, but after what I've seen I know this much: Bioroids don't try to KILL each other!
  Colonel Hades: [annoyed at Deunan trying to use the Humans Are the Real Monsters argument against the Regular Army] ...General, we're wasting our time.
• Villainous Breakdown: Talos starts losing control of the situation in Alpha when he forces Iris to activate the prototype spider tank, but 1) it's only about 2/3 complete and extremely difficult to control and 2) it's on a pre-programmed course to go straight to New York City and self-destruct.
• Villainous Legacy: Overlapping with a touch of My Death Is Just the Beginning due to the circumstances of the demise in question in Ex Machina. The Big Bad dies halfway through the movie. It doesn't slow his plans down one jot.
• Visionary Villain: Talos in Alpha has a grand vision to rebuild the world and bring order to a shattered globe, though exactly how he plans to do that is a bit muddy. Said vision would also entail getting rid of undesirable elements such as Two Horns and his gang. His plan at least definitely has something to do with a superweapon from the pre-war period, specifically an Arachnoid-class land battleship that was under construction by the U.S. government that was halted when America lost the war.
• War Is Glorious: Talos certainly believes this in Alpha.
  Talos: "It is human nature to romanticize war. If we didn't, life would be so desperately boring, don't you think?"
• We Can Rebuild Him: Briareos in the OVA.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist:
  • Arguably so with the Elders in the first film, who wish to preserve the Earth and rid it of the evils inflicted upon it by mankind; unfortunately, their ultimate means to do this is the sterilization of the human race.
  • As bigoted as he is, General Uranus merely wants to restore a human majority on the Olympus legislature and believes destruction of the D-Tank, which is assumed by many to contain an anti-Bioroid agent, to be a last resort in the event that the Bioroids are about to replace humankind completely. He will tolerate coexistence with Bioroids but genuinely believes he is acting in the best interests of his species.
• We Used to Be Friends: Maybe not friends, but Olson and Talos knew each other before the events of Alpha by way of working on the same project to find and disarm pre-war superweapons such as the American land battleship.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: A large part of the hatred humans in the army have for the bioroids.
• Work Off the Debt: This is the major reason why Deunan and Briaeros are working for Two Horns in Alpha, as he was apparently responsible in some way for saving Briareos's life and getting him a cyborg body.
• The World Is Just Awesome: When we're first shown Olympus city.
• World War III: And IV, for that matter.
• Zombie Apocalypse: Not exactly, but the Brainwashed and Crazy mob in Ex Machina looked much like it, right down to the Zombie Gait.
  • You can see one on TV in the second volume of the manga, but it was never explained. Presumably people are still making horror movies in the future.

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