This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.
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- Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
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Finished Psycho-Pass (first season on Netflix). Briefly, it's the spiritual successor to Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, directed by Gen Urobuchi (Fate/Zero, Black Lagoon) and animated by Production I.G (GITS, Attack on Titan). Same format as GITS:SAC -- female/male detective team in a somewhat dystopian future investigating a horrific criminal mastermind. The technology level is set slightly lower than GITS -- cyborg bodies are possible but expensive, and it's not possible to emulate a human brain yet.
The titular psycho-pass (which is a pun in Japanese for psychopath) is a metric (associated to a color scale, from white to black) measuring a person's criminal capacity. In this future Japan, everyone's psycho-pass is monitored extremely carefully. People whose psycho-pass becomes "clouded" by stress or mental illness eventually become latent criminals and are contained in isolation until either their psycho-pass clears or they die. Crime still happens, and the criminal justice system uses a combination of inspectors and enforcers to neutralize criminals. Enforcers are latent criminals that have chosen to work in the police force under the close watch of their inspectors. Their weapon of choice is the Dominator, a hand-held electronic pulse weapon that ranges from non-lethal stun gun to complete obliteration in proportion to the threat's criminal coefficient (0-99 = locked; 100-299 = stun; 300+ = lethal).
The first season follows the main duo, Inspector Akane and her enforcer Kougami, as they hunt down a mysterious criminal mastermind who connects latent criminals with the technical expertise they need to commit their crimes, in lieu of committing crimes himself. Akane is a newbie, so we get the standard newbie introduction to the Sibyl system of inspectors and enforcers, and the danger an inspector faces in maintaining their mental health while investigating horrendous crimes. The pattern of tension between a high-ranking newbie with an experienced subordinate occurs multiple times. Naturally, since this is a dystopia, not everything is as it appears.
The animation is high quality, and is especially brutal at times. Both my partner and I cringed several times at some of the fight scenes because they were painful to watch. There are a few filler episodes, but most of the episodes were worth watching, and they are relatively good at avoiding most of the standard Ghost in the Shell tropes (one exception: early on they do a remake of the classic GITS:SAC episode "Chat! Chat! Chat!"). I gave it 8/10, that is, essentially as good (IMO) as the first season of either GITS:SAC or Fate/Zero.
Issues I had with Psycho-Pass:
The SYBIL system deciding things such as what career people would be best suited for seems to damage some people so much that they become catatonic, for no apparent reason except to make sure we know it's bad, like Yvain described in the post about dystopias on his old blog. And that's before we find out gur flfgrz vf cbjrerq ol gur oenvaf bs frevny xvyyref.
One minor villain is a standard "wanting to be immortal makes you evil" type of character, who notably in a tv interview that shows the public face he hides h