Psycho-Pass 2: This Show So Far, episodes 1-4

As anyone who followed me on Twitter when Psycho-Pass season 1 aired knows, I loved its first season. I thought it was a thoughtful example of its genre, with a wonderfully-developed female lead ("You really like Akane, don't you?" said my girlfriend as I put the Akane magnet I got at GeekGirlCon on my fridge) and a refreshingly grown-up (for anime) lesbian couple I shipped hard.

This season, we get a new creepy bishounen who wants to overthrow the Sibyl System, Kamui. Kamui has his own following of latent criminals like season 1's Makishima did. Unlike Makishima, Kamui cries, sees himself as helpful to the people he manipulates (while Makishima, evil though he was, made no such pretensions) and has the ability to manipulate other people's crime coefficients so they can be unpunishable by the Sibyl System while committing actual horrible crimes. Makishima's people were just stealthy about what they did. (I just joked to my girlfriend that Kamui is like a more lesbian Makishima because he wants to talk about feelings.)

The current Division 1 team dynamic is that Akane is still a seasoned badass Inspector, Gino, now an Enforcer, is more mellow and at peace with himself for sad reasons, the woman who joined the group at the end of season 1, Mika, is now a rather dickish Inspector with 1.5 years of field experience under her belt and a thing for Yayoi, and a couple new folks, Tougane and Hinakawa, have joined Yayoi and Gino as Enforcers.

Re the two new members of the team, I don't care much about them (I don't think anyone does), but I have some thoughts:

• Tougane's behavior is similar to Kougami's around Akane and he sure is evil-looking in the OP, but I think the obvious signs of him being ~evil~ are a red herring. Unless the writers are counting on us thinking he's a red herring and not really making him one. Unless they're counting on us thinking that they're trying to make us think he's a red herring... I'll stop. 
• Hinakawa is voiced by Makishima's seiyuu, which either A) indicates he's ~evil~ or B) is just a way whoever made that casting choice decided to fuck with viewers. For now, I think it's the latter. I am ready to be totally wrong about either of these characters, of course.

So far, this season has dealt with a sequence of people Kamui set up to cause horrible shit for the sake of a plan that is becoming clearer.

The most recent Kamui-follower-of-the-week's case ended in a really horrific way. It is the darkest this season has been, but flows logically from what happened in episode 1 of season 1. (What would have happened if a key person hadn't been there?) The ineffectiveness of everyone who wasn't a law enforcement person in the face of immediate danger in this season's most recent episode is frustrating, but follows from what we saw in season 1 of the system fucking with most people's ability to deal with threats that the system hasn't deemed a threat. (i.e. The beating-in-public scene and Akane's inability to attack Makishima halfway through season 1 without relying on a Dominator despite what he was threatening.)

Given how much of the show has been set-up so far, I'm not ready to judge it yet. Imho, what'll make or break this season is how everyone reacts to what happened at the end of episode 4. Mika has been a dick since episode 1, but her attitude didn't result in any really awful consequences until now. Her cowardice failed to prevent the horrible thing in episode 4, and Akane, Yayoi, and Gino are pretty obviously pissed that it happened.

So yeah, Mika sure is a dick. Given how her introduction as an Inspector paralleled Akane's, I expected her to be sort of an Akane II like everyone else who watched season 1. But nope, she really hates latent criminals, including the Enforcers, and doesn't think Akane knows what she's doing.

I don't like Mika, but given her backstory, her behavior makes more sense than a lot of people think. You might recall that when we last saw her during the girls' school arc, she was mourning her murdered friend who she was in love with. And for all she knew, the killer got away. (Of course we know she didn't.) It doesn't make Mika's loathing of all latent criminals any more justifiable than Gino being shitty towards them in season 1 because of his family issues, but it does follow from her backstory. It also helps explain why she doesn't think her co-workers know wtf they're doing. Her still hating them as a group even though one of them, Yayoi, comforted her when she cried over her dead friend and saved her life after she became an Inspector, isn't unfathomable for me either because Yayoi could just be the exception that proves the rule. In real life, there are people who broadly hate certain groups while being fond of individual members of those groups, so yeah, it's shitty of her, but I can see it. Hopefully what happened in episode 4 will will jolt her into realizing she's doing it wrong.

As for her thing for Yayoi, the moment Mika's crush became obvious was funny, but I will not be a happy camper if she gets paired with Yayoi since Yayoi already has someone loads better/Shion. Given that Mika and Yayoi's most recent interaction involves Mika being cowardly despite Yayoi being like "Yo, we need to help these people" and Yayoi being pissed by having her hands tied from being unable to do anything, I don't see that happening, but let's not jinx it, eh?

Anyway, I actually think this season is interesting, but it's still mostly set-up. Hopefully the story will hold together as a whole.

Also, some Yayoi x Shion goodness, please. So far they've been separately competently doing their own thing on their jobs, but I'd like to see them lez it up together more.

Anyway, have some (partially NSFW) Yayoi x Shion fan art.

A look at volume 1 of the Psycho-Pass manga, some Yayoi x Shion goodness, and some rambling on doujinshi

This post started as one thing and ended entirely another. I decided to add some fan art and a link to a good fanfic about Psycho-Pass's yuri couple below this review, and hey, an artist who does fan art I really like of said couple is releasing a doujinshi of them at GLFes (a yuri doujinshi event in Tokyo on May 26) and here's a translation of its preview pages, and here's some more info about GLFes.

The Psycho-Pass manga adaptation, re-titled Kanshikan Tsunemori Akane (Inspector Tsunemori Akane), is currently running in Jump Square, a magazine aimed at the oldest subset of the shounen demographic, late teens. As someone whose first exposure to Psycho-Pass was through the anime that premiered last fall, like most people who've tried at least one iteration of Psycho-Pass' story, it's hard for me not to compare Miyoshi Hikaru's manga adaptation to the anime.

As in the anime, the manga's story takes place in Tokyo in 2112. The government has implemented the Sibyl System, which monitors every citizen's psychological state (or psycho-pass) to deduce whether they will commit a crime. If one's psycho-pass becomes too "clouded", one is judged a latent criminal. In theory, latent criminals with low enough crime coefficients can be rehabilitated through therapy. In practice, they're fucked, and have next to no chance of returning to normal society.  The Sibyl System, unsurprisingly, has very flawed criteria for judging people. (Btw, I love the people who criticize this story on the grounds that a society enabling such an obviously flawed government institution is implausible enough to constitute a plot hole. Yup, that never happens.)

It's disappointing that the most extreme example of Sibyl screwing up isn't included here- Kagari Shuusei telling Psycho-Pass's protagonist Tsunemori Akane, a non-latent criminal, that he has been a latent criminal since Sibyl judged him one at five years old. That information not only illustrates how much the Sibyl System can mess with people's lives, it's Kagari's only background information and gives more context to his resentment of the amount of choice Akane has had.

At least in the manga we still get Karanomori Shion mentioning that she had a medical license before she became a latent criminal and Sibyl figured she'd be most useful as a physician/lab and data analyst for the Public Safety Bureau's Crime Investigation Division; see Kunizuka Yayoi reading a guitar magazine (which alludes to her past as a guitarist in a band, as the anime later shows in a flashback illustrating what Unit 1 of the PSBCID was like when she joined them); hear Masaoka Tomomi's explanation of his past as a detective who became too good at what he did; and see hints of what made Kougami Shinya into a latent criminal, which fuels his vendetta against the story's main villain.

Akane, just out of school, joins the PSBCID as an Inspector. Inspectors go after latent criminals and plain old criminals on Sibyl's behalf. They work with Enforcers, latent criminals Sibyl judged as having the aptitude to catch latent criminals and criminals. Enforcers aren't able to leave the PSBCID unaccompanied by an Inspector. The other Inspector in Akane's unit, Ginoza Nobuchika, sees latent criminals as subhuman while Akane wants to work with them as equals. This becomes a source of tension between them.

Chapter one covers Akane's first day on the job, in which she and her co-workers deal with a hostage situation that escalates- thankfully, not as badly as it would have if Akane weren't willing to make up her own mind rather than follow whatever Sibyl says.

Chapter two covers the anime's episode two, in which Akane deals with her guilt over having hurt Kougami to save the hostage's life. As in episode 2, she and Masaoka arrest a latent criminal at the mall. In a weird story change from the anime, Kou, who should be recovering his ability to move in a hospital bed, having been hit with a heavy duty stun gun, decides Akane and Masaoka arresting a run-of-the-mill latent criminal is enough reason to break out of the Public Safety Bureau (something he took elaborate measures to do in the anime, for a much more crucial reason) and run to the mall so he can help. This scene is supposed to make him look like a badass, but just makes him seem like kind of a drama queen. The low amount of danger Akane and Masaoka are in aside, the idea of instantly recovering from being temporarily disabled because of sheer willpower is stupid- that's not how being disabled works- but again, I guess the editor or someone thought it would seem cool.

Chapter three brings us halfway through the story covered by episode three, in which Akane and the other members of Unit One investigate a series of suspicious deaths at a drone factory. Not being able to connect to Sibyl or any outside communication within the factory puts them at a disadvantage.

I've only mentioned the changes I don't like. ^^; Better changes: seeing the day Akane found out what Sibyl considers her viable career options, and seeing her break the news of her choice to her parents, who weren't pleased but stopped opposing after she told them why she wanted it. (Her parents' opposition was only alluded to in the anime. Also, now I wonder what would happen if someone said they wanted to do a job outside the range of what Sibyl deemed appropriate for them. That was kind of sort of answered with Rina. She sang anyway and- assuming she isn't a special psycho-pass snowflake like Akane- I guess stayed free by dodging getting her hue measured by staying in the underground scene of a less regulated area of Tokyo?) We also briefly see Akane's training at the Academy and her meeting her boss before being sent to her first day on the job.

That said, time to bitch about another change! Yayoi and Shion, who are lovers in the anime? The first scene indicating that they're together in the anime is toned down here. So you better understand, here's a visual comparison.

I shouldn't need to explain the difference, but there are people who missed the point of that scene in the anime even though it was as clear as the sun is bright for most viewers. In the manga, Yayoi isn't putting the last touch on getting dressed while leaving Shion's office and Shion isn't lying on her office's couch while pulling her pantyhose back on. The fact that she's pulling on thigh highs instead of regular pantyhose also makes a difference, and it's impossible to contrast these scenes without sounding like a perv isn't it. Ah well. I've already translated the first part of a smutty doujinshi (that I'm buying) below, so I suppose I'm past the point of no return already.

Tl;dr, there are many good things about the anime and some of those good things are still here- but going from this volume, this is still the beta version. I didn't read this volume looking for a carbon copy of the anime. I wanted some changes, since I might as well re-watch the anime for the exact same take on P-P's story, but I wanted the changes to more consistently not make me go : \

But whatever, I still really like the anime. (Reader: "What the hell was the point of this review, Katherine?")

This review also gives me another excuse opportunity to post fan art, as well as a fanfic rec. I found a really good fic on how Yayoi and Shion got together, "In Darkest Red" by Jen.

And some of the fan art is nsfw-ish, so I'm placing it all under the cut below.