Texhnolyze

Why is this never talked about, even though it's probably the most depressing anime ever made?

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>daily texhnolyze threads
>implying

>it's probably the most depressing anime ever made?

Kimi no nawa has already taken that title.

Much like why Cowboy Bebop threads don't exist; it is a subject that has been talked to death over the years.

We have more important shows to watch in the current season.

tex has been talked to death? I've never seen one thread about it with more than fifty replies in three years.

I was pretty alright throughout the entire show until youtube.com/watch?v=NKNv8QKLJeE started playing

The surface episodes were pretty soul-crushing too.

This.

>We have threads all the time
No we don't. I'm also confounded why Texh does not get more attention. It's top tier stuff.

Because it's depressing and because it's not nearly as vague and cryptic as Lain so there's not as much to fire up discussion. Its a 10/10 though and there's not really anything else like it out there.

Maybe most are turned off by the first episode and the general slowness of the series.
>not nearly as vague and cryptic as Lain
Haibane isn't either and still gets some love (occasionally).
Tex being as straightforward and brutal as possible is what makes it so good anyway.

How about you stop being new? It's an almost 15 year old show, of course it doesn't get frequent threads, but there's been plenty of threads with in-depth discussion.
Protip: If you want one, try sparking discussion yourself in the OP instead. Or use a filter to pin Tex threads on your catalog so you won't miss one when it happens.

>It's an almost 15 year old show
So are plenty of other shows that still get a dozen threads per day; tex being old has nothing to do with it not being discussed much.

>So are plenty of other shows that still get a dozen threads per day
Name 3 old shows with no new content that get daily threads.

Evangelion (no, it doesn't get new content and the rebuilds are never discussed), Lain, Haruhi if 10+ years counts as old, LOGH often gets threads too, GitS

Because there's not much to talk about, since you can't shitpost about "whos ur waifu" or "best girl" there's not much for Sup Forums to discuss.

>rebuilds are never discussed
You have to be shitting me.
None of the others have daily threads. They have more threads than Tex because they're entry level shows in the west and there's always someone watching it for the first time, but Tex still gets a very decent amount of threads.
If you want an actual criminally underrated show, try NieA.

Most discussion on Sup Forums is about currently airing or recently aired anime. Anime that either aired farther back than the average Sup Forums user has been browsing or, like Texhnolyze, predate Sup Forums itself receive limited attention. There were never Texhnolyze airing threads and, what's probably more damaging to the show's chances of being discussed, it can't be integrated into the waifu culture that dominates this board at present. It is an entirely humorless work and very much at odds with the current industry's output.

That said, let's have a discussion, since you've done us the favor of starting the thread. Texhnolyze seems to draw heavy influence from the mythologies of Buddhism and Gnosticism. I've heard the Shapes compared convincingly to preta, while both Doc and Ran have a Sophia parallel. Has anyone else picked up on other religious symbolism? I think it's appropriate to draw religious parallels here, unlike in Evangelion for instance, as Konaka's other work shows that his use of religion is more than superficial.

>can't be integrated into the waifu culture
Ran is qt though.

First week on Sup Forums? It gets plenty of threads.

Reminder that no one is more moe than Yoshi

Eva has a peculiar place in Sup Forums; the day the board stops shitposting about it will be the day it dies. Lain discussion is mostly Lain idolatry at this point. Haruhi was incredibly popular on Sup Forums during its prime, but also has been on the decline. I can't account for LotGH, but GitS is constantly getting new content, and is one of the better known anime in the west.

She has a good head on her shoulders.

Yoshii was hands-down the best character, too bad Shinji had to be a dumbass.

>Doc and Ran have a Sophia parallel
I don't see that, care to explain?

BD never

>why doesn't Sup Forums talk about an old as fuck anime that has already been discussed to death and that everyone has already seen it's not like there aren't several new series to watch and discuss every season
but for real because it's boring as fuck and we talk about the better aBe regularly

I'd discuss it with you but my training in theology is nonexistant. Have a bump anyways in hope of discussion and this thread not plummeting to page 10.

Why would you want it? It was probably made digitally, no? It would just be another terrible upscale.

It gets mentioned all the time but it has been discussed to death and I don't think I even remember enough to discuss it meaningfully again.

Most of Sup Forums isn't intelligent enough to discuss the philosophical themes and cultural references in TexH, which are definite and unambiguous. Anyone can speculate about Lain, which makes it more appealing. Exceptionalism is the exception. Only remarkably high IQ individuals like myself can really take interest in something like Texh

I'm retarded, could you explain what the philosophical themes of tex are, except the obvious "transhumanism is bad" message

>it has been discussed to death

Any other post on this board at any given time of the day has been made 5 times previously, at the very least. So why do we suddenly tire of redundancy when it comes to Texhnolyze?

I was hoping for a non-upscale BD release, because the visuals are glorious.

Just havin a giggle m8

I'm impressed you can post while tipping your fedora so low

I don't really understand what happened except for he died. It all went a bit weird when they went above ground and I lost the plot then.

It indeed takes a considerable measure of talent and practice, my good Sir.

Couldn't get into it for some reason, no idea why. It's not like I don't like macabre, somber, dark stuff that often revel in obscurantism, I just haven't felt it. Will give it a try again someday.

Did you get past the first three episodes?

>transhumanism is bad
That wasn't the message though. If my memory serves me right, and it might not since I watched this series like 6 years ago, the message was something like humans a shit and only really are alive when they have misery to drive them forward, to ever strive to seek escape from that misery.

I thought tipping was to pull the brim of a hat up, not down. Did I have it wrong this whole time?

>often

Not needed to put that there desu

Watched it all, more out of respect for its storytelling, tone and a certain sense of duty if that makes any sense. It's not bad, it just didn't get me to feel shit.

A lot of people are put off by the first couple of episodes. To put it bluntly, it's pretty fucking boring.

They somehow managed to make 23 episodes feel like an eternity.
There were a lot of cool ideas and some pretty good world building and I think that Texhnolyze can hold its candle next to the big hitters of its genre, but jesus christ that pacing - the pacing is its biggest strength and its biggest flaw. The pay off is really just the end.

It's insanely atmospheric.

>The pay off is really just the end.
And it's probably one of the most powerful endings in anime
The long buildup was definitely worth it, and the ending wouldn't have been as shocking as it was without the slow pacing.

>A lot of people are put off by the first couple of episodes
I for one, found the first episode to be absolutely enthralling. It was really refreshing to have an anime who's entire first episode lacked any sort of exposition dump or extraneous dialog to set up the next few episodes.

>It's boring
Sorry mate, but I disagree entirely, sure it starts slow, but that's not a bad thing. A lot of really good media have slow starts that build up steam as they go, and in my opinion this is one that used it successfully.

Why don't make a stream and watch it so we can dscuss it more freshly?

>lacked any sort of extraneous dialog
it just lacked dialogue

Well, yeah.

>Sorry mate, but I disagree entirely, sure it starts slow, but that's not a bad thing.

That's just how I remember it. I was watching this at a time when my mainstay was DBZ and I was siding thing like Samurai Champloo and the like.

the fans are logh tier and being depressing doesn't mean shit when it's like that from the first minute.

Slow pacing isn't bad per se.
The slow pacing serves a purpose, it just happens most anime watchers are retarded.

Well you are entitled to your opinion either way, I was just saying that I didn't think it was necessarily boring if you know a little bit of what you are in for.

>the fans are logh tier
That's a bad thing I take it?

>being depressing doesn't mean shit when it's like that from the first minute.
It was depressing from the start, but there were high points in the middle. I guess you could say it was really an exercise in how soul crushing they could get without going too far and ending up ridiculous.

>Biggest strength, biggest flaw

I'd like to put special emphasis on this particular statement since everyone seems intent on overlooking it.

Most [group of people] are retarded.

Just wanted to say that I really like how you put it.

Tex is definitely a anime I would like to discuss more, but its night impossible to actually recommend or have people watch it without them dropping and calling it boring.
And its pretty obvious they do it because of the pacing, a shame that its that same pacing that makes it such a masterpiece for me.

I don't really get why slow pacing or silence is automatically seen as a bad thing in anime. People just call shows boring or pretentious if they aren't full of dialogue or action from beginning to end.

Live action movies and tv shows seem to be much more comfortable with silences and long cuts than anime does.

>but its night impossible
Fuck, meant nigh.

>I don't really get why slow pacing or silence is automatically seen as a bad thing in anime.
It's not an anime-only issue.

Because most people dont grow out of the usual kid's taste. I dislike calling it a kid's taste, but there's no other way to put it.
Most people are unnable to appreciate art for itself and need to be entertained with simpler things, like explosions and fightning.

Most shounen back in the day had characters repeating whole phrases while doing exposition vocally even though it was being obviously shown, and this was done mostly because authors recognized that their fanbase was dumb as bricks, and if they just showed it there would be a shit load of people asking how it works even though the answer is right there.

You could even say that slow pacing kind of filters those idiots out of the demographic.

It's a shame this show wasn't made in the very late 90s of cel animation. Would have made it even better.

That's true but it just seems to be more common when it comes to anime.

Obviously slow pacing is not that common in live action either but you still see it quite often compared to anime. Even popular shows like Game of Thrones or Westworld have a more deliberate pacing than almost any anime out there.

I think it's because a lot of people get into anime with shounen shows and then expect all anime to sort of follow the insane plot pacing, action, and escalation of those types of series when they branch out into other stuff. A bit of it might also be holdover from the general idea of "cartoons" being ways of delivering short self contained stories which don't require much investment.

Besides movies and a few OVAs I can't think of many late 90s made for TV shows that really shone because of cel animation. Anyways I think it probably would have had it's problems if it was animated back then too, I can think of more examples of bad or budget TV animation than good.

Anyways as a matter of personal taste I actually kind of like that weird early 00s style.

Literally top 5 anime ever made alongside LOGH, Monster, NGE and HxH. The ending had me in tears.

Not sure about the others but Texhnolyze is top 1-2 for me.

Ran is so cute.

The last episode completly shat the bed

>top 5 anime ever made
>HxH.

Why would I want something so depressing? If I want to be depressed I'll just look at my life.

Because people don't necessarily feel like talking about a show they might have watched ages ago just because you happen to just have watched it.

tex actually made me slightly happier for some reason. Maybe it was so bleak that I realized I was just a whiny cunt

So, did he had sex with the other guy or not? That question still haunts me.

You mean ichise and that girly looking kid who got buggered by his father(?) in a trade? I kind of assumed since they were both and filthy abused prostitutes at one point or another they didn't feel the need to fuck each other but maybe I missed something.

So is it safe to say the entire thing is a riff on Plato's Allegory of the Cave?

The bleakest part of Texhnolyze were the first 2 episodes.
That scene with him going through the city without his arm and leg was brutal.
The ending didn't have an impact like that. Especialy since the forced Texhnolyzation of Ran was stupid as fuck

Not really. The similarities are only superficial.
Texhnolyze is a deeply nihilistic (in the literal sense, not the meme sense) work

>in the literal sense, not the meme sense
That's presuming that there's a difference.
The literal only role it plays in philosophy is to be argued against.

>The literal only role it plays in philosophy is to be argued against.
Aren't you thinking about solipsism? I guess it's also addressed in tex with Kano's character
Either way, I'm not even sure what you mean by that

is it really that depressing? I was planning on watching this the day before christmas.

It's dark and hopeless from the first minute to the very end. I found the surface episodes to be soul-crushing
Watch it though, it's an interesting anime.

I mean look at Nietzsche who retards think is Nihilist when in fact the entire function of the Übermensch was an argument against Nihilism.
Or Camus with his Sisiphos

>Argued against
You mean strawmanned and held up as something that shouldn't be adopted or even considered for adoption (since from within that philosophy there is no chink in the armor to attack)

>solipsism
I was about to mention this as well, in essence it's the same, right down to the fact that if you actually accept it there's no real arguments against it. These sorts of black holes in philosophy are almost always held up as examples of what shouldn't be.

Camus' whole shtick was to rebel against meaninglessness so he's basically the opposite of a nihilist.
I don't know which philosophers could be considered true nihilists.

>since from within that philosophy there is no chink in the armor to attack
Since Nihilism's only conclusion is suicide

eva is the dark knight rises of a

Yes I know.
And I can't think of one either

That's a faulty conclusion, to imply that absence of external meaning in and of itself is a meaning which ought to cause people to do anything is still reliant on the concept of meaning as something external to be acted upon. You are thinking as someone from the outside looking in, try thinking of it as someone from the inside looking out.

If you give yourself a meaning it's no longer nihilism.
You're closer to Camus

Is a nihilist never a true nihilist? Since to be a true nihilist means you would kill yourself

The Buddhism angle deserves more of a look at, honestly. It seems to be a greater influence than most people (reviewers or otherwise) realize. The Shapes/hungry ghosts comparison is one thing, but there's also the cyclical nature of all the underground cities, and of course, Kohakura in the last episode where he directly compares Lux to the Buddhist repeating/reviving hell.

There's also the more obvious Shinto stuff that people have brought up before with Ran's fox mask and that deity's importance to agrarian communities (like Gabe).

Quod erat demonstrandum

>It's no longer nihilism
I wasn't saying "give yourself a meaning" so much as saying that if everything is meaningless, there's clearly no reason to kill yourself, because that too has no meaning. One would only kill themselves because the act itself has a meaning in a total absence of meaning objective or otherwise even that fact would have no meaning and therefore there's no real conclusion to be drawn.

Anyways like I said things like Nihilism, Solipsism, etc are philosophical black holes, utterly worthless since they are too pure a stance to have any practicality (or real world adherents) but in the end are ultimately unbeatable because they negate all presuppositions that the rest of philosophy is built on.

You can be a real world adherent to solipsism. It's just not very interesting.

In Nihilism suicide is the only action with a meaning because it ends meaninglessness and replaced it with nothingness/death

Well true, I kind of had pure nihilism in mind when I wrote that part. I don't know how many real world hardcore metaphysical solipsists there are, though I can't imagine it's very many.

>There is no meaning
>Except for this meaning
That doesn't make sense though, it's still ascribing meaning to an action and a state of being. If nihilism is really about a total lack of meaning, or a lack of any meaning because there is a lack of objective basis for meaning, then suicide would be just as meaningless as any other action.

Neither is as strong as the Buddhism ties, but the moment where Doc reveals that she imbued Ichise's limbs with part of herself struck me as a potential link, although her eventual ascent to the surface has a twist to it. For Ran, she and Kano form a demiurge/Sophia duo, plus her soul seems to be both tied to those of other humans and bound to the lower earth through the obelisk.

Transhumanism honestly seemed like one of the least important themes in the story, since Texhnolyze never made any attempts to present its form of cybernetics as scientifically plausible or worth literal, logistical consideration, compared with something like GitS.

I'd love to see more analysis of that end of the series, since after watching Ghost Hound, it's clear how much work Konaka puts into developing those motifs. The Americana mixed into the show (the "city upon a hill", the Edward Hopper) is also intriguing.

As for Texhnolyze's pace, I think that's really too subjective to call "good" or "bad". It definitely limits the size of the potential audience who would enjoy it, but those who remain seem to view it as one of the show's central strengths. It's a series with a niche appeal, to say the least.

Well shit, I thought Sup Forums ate my post but I actually posted another thread for some reason. Fuck.

Yoshi did nothing wrong