Eh it can be argued that Courier is still a villain protagonist and that Swindler has become one considering Swindler has gotten plenty of innocent people killed with her plan at this point. Its just that the world they live in is so fucked up that they look slighty heroic for trying to tear it down.
Caught up with the anime.
Holy shit, this series completely subverted my expectations, and not in the bullshit kind of way like The Last Jedi.
The biggest and the most obvious bit is that while I thought the Akudamas will initially bicker in the beginning but grow into a much closer and ultimately heroic team, but actual results could not be different. It's surprising, but also refreshing and to be honest more plausible.
What I also didn't expect was that the Akudamas died off really fast. There're like only three members left.
Although the main character is obviously the Swindler, for some reason I feel as if the Brawler had the most presence. Coincidentally, the tone really started to shift with his death.
Continuously reading, studying, and (hopefully) growing.Episode 11:
Favorite Parts:
- Courier's backstory in some cluster mindfuck...
- My boi Hacker being heroic!!
- In relation to (2), Hacker's Heroic Sacrifice
- Sagishi's determination in wanting to save Brother and Sister from Kanto, which for some reason is a quantum supercomuter housing all of the people in some fucked up utopia...
Junior questioning the fine fine line between Executioner and Akudama...
Next episode is the last... I really don't want it to have a Downer Ending...
Final Thoughts: Akudama Drive
This series was jam-packed with action and thrill. Apart from the censors, this anime was of course not afraid to tackle the violent, the dystopic, and the existential. The art was so vibrant in capturing this dystopia, and the plot was equally vibrant in symbolism and allusion to deliver a lot of the points home. I say, this might as well be one of the most defining anime of Fall 2020!! Kudos!!
Edited by thuse on Dec 24th 2020 at 10:56:43 PM
So this is it, the last episode. Akudama Drive ended the way it began:Courier doing crazy shit with his bike, explosions and a 500 yen coin. Things turned out more or less how I thought they would, Courier and Swindler's deaths were nicely done and everything blew up in the executioners' faces. Hope Brother and Sister ended up somewhere nice, at the very least they deserve a good ending.
Edited by AbrahamOmosun on Dec 24th 2020 at 8:10:15 AM
Cowboys vs SamuraiFinal episode: Plenty to nitpick, but all of it forgivable in light of how damn cool it was.
Swindler gets her freaking Akudama-style introduction! Hot damn. Her last con was incredible. I was reminded of V for Vendetta, in that while she might be dead, she's planted an idea in the people's heads. Kansai is now in chaos and it's all because of an unlucky 500-yen coin. I'm also going to give a shoutout to Hacker here, because his postmortem hacking came in clutch.
Courier dies after taking the Executioners for a ride, and using his META ARM AS PART OF A RAILGUN. Badass.
I hope that our survivors find a happy ending in Shikoku.
Its a bit of a downer or pyrrhicc ending. Brother and Sister live but both Courier and Swindler die to make sure they make it out. Swindler, true to her name, manages to turn the entirety of Kansai against the executioners as she recorded her own death with her playing the ordinary citizen card (and since she looks quite a bit different to the bounties she looks it too to the citizens). Its kinda implied that all of the executioners were killed in a riot for killing ordinary citizens which was started by a little girl shooting Junior for the Executioners killing her parents. Courier dies after he takes out the last 3 Kanto bots that were trying to kidnap brother and Sister.
The only characters I kinda wish we saw a bit more of near the end was maybe Pupil and Junior just giving up on the executioners after that whole thing. Its kinda clear that the executioners at this point were just licensed Akumada.
Edited by Wispy on Dec 24th 2020 at 3:26:54 AM
Remember that an 'Akudama', according to Kodaka, is someone with a single-minded, obsessive focus incompatible with society and humanity. Akudama burn impossibly bright and incredibly short by definition, and an 'akudama drive' is basically a Freudian death drive. The only question is whether they find A Good Way to Die or not.
What's precedent ever done for us?Solid ending. I have some issues with it, but they're essentially just my issues with the series as a whole
Overall, a very good series that falls short of being one of the all-time greats by not really having much thematic meat. The dystopian setting is there to propel the action, not to say anything
Cyberpunk is noir mixed with punk, with the futuristic setting mainly serving to take the strangeness and bleakness of those genres to deranged extremes and extrapolate existing social trends as satirical commentary. It's about the moment when humanity is on the verge of achieving transcendence, damnation, or some mad cocktail of the two. Western cyberpunk tends to pit its outsiders, rebels, and weirdos against monstrous hypercapitalism, whereas Japanese cyberpunk (Ghost in the Shell, Psycho-Pass, and so on) tends to focus on technological state totalitarianism, with the corporations that exist mainly serving as appendages of a central government rendered unaccountable from its citizens by the march of technology.
Akudama Drive takes the theme of obsession, and uses the exaggerated trappings and transhumanist elements of cyberpunk to explore its full beauty and horror. Protagonists and antagonists alike use fragile human bodies (their own and other people's) as fuel to try to forge something greater, burning away even their names as they seek to ascend from imperfect humanity to perfect archetype, and the show asks what is left when all that fuel is spent. Cyberpunk fiction is always about our modern understanding of humanity being distorted around some ideal, and Akudama Drive is about what happens when those ideals go to war.
What's precedent ever done for us?Not entirely about Akudama Drive, but on the lack of a general Too Kyo thread, here's my readthrough of Kodaka and Uchikoshi's most recent interview
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It's actually hilarious how Doctor died, considering the BS she's pulled off before. But I'll file it under karma and theatre.
Also cool that we got confirmation that the people in this setting have no names, just IDs. Great job to whoever caught that. And given the announcement on how Kanto needs them, well, that smells like they're being treated like livestock. Or lab rats. Looking forward to getting some answers next episode.