Most individuals, whether or not in or exterior of the anime neighborhood, are aware of the cyberpunk style and what it usually entails. Both traditional names and extra up to date main franchises — Neuromancer, Blade Runner, Johnny Mnemonic, The Matrix, Akira, Ghost within the Shell and Cyberpunk 2077, to call only a few — have made main impacts on normal fiction and the science-fiction panorama over the many years.
However, as standard because the cyberpunk style has develop into, fewer persons are as aware of what’s referred to as post-cyberpunk, which can have largely arisen from cyberpunk however has nonetheless shaped a definite id inside science-fiction narratives. While post-cyberpunk, like many types of media, generally is a considerably fluid and nebulous time period, its various approaches to storytelling nonetheless comprise quite a few commonalities, together with within the comparatively small variety of anime titles that match into the style.
The phrase ‘cyberpunk’ tends to evoke pictures of wet night time streets lit by glowing neon commercials and folks strolling by with a motley number of cybernetic enhancements. The surrounding panorama is probably going ignored by looming megacorporate towers whose tops disappear into the mists. While elite businessmen and shady authorities employees could reside like gods up of their skyscrapers, the final populace down under can solely attempt to survive day-to-day, buried below the load of a collapsing social construction due to the fixed presence of maximum poverty, illness, air pollution, habit and crime. In quick, the cyberpunk setting is a futuristic dystopia that mixes ‘excessive tech’ with ‘low life,’ typically together with Nineteen Seventies-inspired punk and hacking tradition influences.
All of the above cyberpunk components could be present in tales each previous and new and throughout a variety of mediums, from novels, comics and video video games to motion pictures and TV exhibits. In distinction to such a bleakly cynical outlook, post-cyberpunk stands out for its relative optimism. Idealistic moderately than darkish and gritty, post-cyberpunk largely emphasizes the ‘cyber’ over the ‘punk,’ specializing in a world during which expertise is used to assist the final populace moderately than harm it with insurmountable class divides or out-of-control consumerism or capitalism. The similar excessive tech remains to be there in a single kind or one other, but it surely has not contributed to society’s downfall; as a substitute, it has been built-in extra seamlessly into it and is ceaselessly used to its profit.
In phrases of anime particularly, there’s definitely no scarcity of cyberpunk titles on the market. These vary from the dynamically gory Akira and the trippy, existential Serial Experiments Lain to the intensely violent Psycho-Pass, the extra quietly philosophical Ergo Proxy and Texhnolyze and the high-energy, high-octane Akudama Drive and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. In comparability, post-cyberpunk anime sequence are far thinner on the bottom, however they do exist, with some really predating a number of of the well-known old-school franchises akin to Akira, Ghost within the Shell, Battle Angel Alita, Armitage III and Cyber City Oedo 808.