11.17.08
Ergo Proxy
A lazy Sunday afternoon and night have now followed the normal shift into Monday morning. I knew full well that staying up all night was in the cards when I set no alarm going to sleep at 5am Sunday morning.Ah, that is what I had already done for the basic training; I wasn’t sure why it would be reiterated in the advanced training. But this is good news, as it means I have completed the advanced training as well.
While not the most productive of hours, I feel happy and relieved I made it through the entire anime known as Ergo Proxy. My brother did hail it as a great show, and I figured it was probably like several others where I needed to devote a significant time block to it. The disks had sat near my TV, teasing me for a few months now. Now I have watched all of them, and I can honestly say it was the second best anime I’ve ever seen. That may not mean too much since I am not a frequent anime watcher. I prefer to only watch the deeper and well written shows that focus on psychology and mentality, such as the two mentioned below.
It is very rare that anything seen on a television screen can provoke not only emotion, but true thought as well. Nearly every episode sported notes to explain some of the more central (and usually more complicated) parts of the episode you just watched. Something that got an extremely brief mention or glimpse for seconds in the show might well receive a nice large paragraph to explain it at the end. This was interesting because many of the concepts covered may not relate directly to the show, but to the Ergo Proxy writer’s allusions. This had me not only interested in the show, but I was always eager to hit the end of an episode to see what kind of information I might receive.
The show tracks three main characters as they venture on a seemingly typical anime type journey for an amnesia-ridden male to rediscover his past. However, the technological twists are very interesting in this show. The characters hail from a dome world utopia where everything is efficient and perfect. The dome is supposedly the only safe place in some sort of post-apocalyptic world. Things run amok as powerful unknown beings know was Proxy’s start to appear and the government of the dome world tries to hide their existence. Later, the characters are troubled not only by the knowledge that there is a world outside the dome, but that it is, in fact, remotely inhabited by humans. The main character, Vincent, attempts a trek across the world to see if he can find his memories in his birth place, a now ruined dome. It is later revealed that the dome world the characters hail from destroyed Vincent’s home town in a bout of revenge for some ambiguous wrong doing. Later, the eccentric and seemingly insane security chief of the dome world launches a thermonuclear missile when he is stripped of power in an attempt to eradicate the ruins the characters seek to find.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the series is the revealing of several Proxy’s and the story behind them. As the world was destroyed (presumably by humans), “the Creators” sought to remake the world. They created Proxy’s, whose sole purpose was to rebuild the world as it healed from the previous destruction. The result is that the Proxy’s are essential God figures. Much to the dismay of most Proxy’s, they find that humans are ill-natured beings who are truly only capable of chaos and destruction. As the Proxy’s experience these failures they begin to begrudge their own existence, hating the Creators. They later realize that without souls they would have never been able to experience the love, hate, betrayal, and other feelings of their creations.
This anime comes in second to Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex/GITS:SAC 2nd Gig and the movies associated with the series (I’m clumping them into one large mass). I’ve never done more personal research or been more intrigued by anything. The show takes place in a near future cyberpunk Japan when most people have cyber brains that allow them to hook up to the net. Many of the characters in the ensemble cast have high performance prosthetic enhancements. The Major, who would be the main character of the show if it had just one, has a fully prosthetic body. This show brings up many interesting points, such as how society would function if people were literally connected to the net, the new crimes that might ensue (cyber brain hacking), and the definition of what it means to be human. The show is extremely complex, well drawn, action packed and technological. Every topic, case, and conversation is interesting and each episode is fun to watch. It is, perhaps, the best animated thing a nerd could ever watch.
The name of the show envelops the proposed answer to the question of what is human. While a person’s body may be fake, you cannot fake the soul, or “ghost”. Each ghost is unique and completely unable to be duplicated or produced. Thus, even though the Major has a fake body and her brain can (and does) get switched to other bodies, it is her ghost that remains intact. So even though they may have advanced AI machinery (such as the thinking, spider-like tanks they use throughout the shows, knows as Tachikomas), none of them can technically be living because to live essentially means to possess a ghost, which you can only obtain through life’s standard processes. This is why ghost hacking is such an important issue, because it is tampering with the very human nature of people. Imagine a world so connected that people from across the globe could delete your memories, hack what your own eyes were seeing, or even delete your ghost (which would kill you).
Interestingly enough, the Tachikoma’s programmed curiosity and linking capabilities allowed what was supposed to be a group of identical machinery to evolve different personality traits. There is an entire episode where the tanks consider some of the greater questions of life: why they have evolved the way they have, and how each one “feels” about certain topics and outcomes. Eventually the Tachikoma’s are credited with having evolved their own ghosts due to their epic self-sacrificing gestures: first, leaving their jobs in the civilian sector after they were decommissioned to sacrifice their own physical beings to save Batou and the Major, and second, for crashing the satellite that contained their AI to prevent a nuclear detonation, which, in turn, stopped a potential war and saved the lives of their beloved coworkers.
Now, before my words and thoughts escape my rattling brain, I plan to have a flurry of posts discussing some of the topics brought up by these shows. They won’t have anything to do with anime, merely the content and thoughts proposed that I have found so interesting.