Can someone explain this anime to me?

Can someone explain this anime to me?

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People are shit. Supernatural shit amplifies this. An engineered society is made to counteract this. It doesn't work.

Squeeler did nothing wrong.

Don't trust rats

Human is the bad guy all along, rats did nothing wrong, or at least if human don't fuck their shit up.

Squeeler did everything wrong

Espers got out of control, killed everything and everyone, became demons.

Society enacted safeguards to protect humanity, which also failed.

The rats were the real humans the entire time

The dirty gooksubhuman espers are evil

Oversimplifications: the thread

They didn't fail, they were circumvented by an outside party.

>Espers are bad

Yeah, no. Final stage of human evoloution where we become as Gods, Everything justifies that, even the extreme social engineering and enslavement of the inferior humans.

They failed nevertheless. And that is still ignoring the Karma Demon, which spiraled out of control without any outside influence.

All these problems were eventually solved by the humans.

Nah, it's not different than saying "oh no humans died in this natural society ALL HUMAN SOCIETY HAS FAILED".

They were taken care of. And that's the beauty of this story. Yes, society recovered and both incidents were eventually taken care of.

But you have to realize the context here. There's a reason the book begins with (paraphrased) "I'm writing this so it hopefully never happens again". The demon and the child of Maria/Mamoru were taken care of, but the factors that allowed their kind and the problems they pose to occur still persist. The society in SSY is pretty damn elaborate but still unable to fully contain the problems it was designed against. It works in >99% of cases, but as the story shows, even one case that slips through has massive consequences.

And that's what I like about the story. The faults of human character that lead to the massacres in these books are equally present in humanty right now, but Cantus amplified them massively. They tried to control them as we do today, but have to be way more careful about it. A single crazy person with a gun can kill maybe a dozen people (give or take). But what the society in SSY considers a Devil has way more destructive potential, posing a threat to all of humanity.

A human with a Gun is just a normal man with a minor weapon. A human with Cantus powers is that much closer to a God. There is no way around this difficult and dangerous society, you can't turn back progress in the vain hope of saving some lives. Yes it's miserable, yes it will cause a lot of suffering, but in the ending being reality warping near deific beings is far more important than preventing the occasional social upheaval.

You can't justify undoing that, the ultimate potential of being able to actually and directly warp reality around you is just too fantastic to ignore.

I haven't watched the anime, but you're making seem like the espers are glass god cannons. Incredible power but no defense against it.

On thumbnail it looks like Pride Rock.

Essentially yes, it's why they engineered themselves to have a horrific physical revulsion to the very idea of killing other humans.

Ugly people deserve to die

An acceptable opinion. But that's the general problem we have: Being a reality-warping superhuman is probably really cool, but being one of thousands leads to the issue of humanity not being able to agree on what reality should look like. And that is just the rational side of thing and ignoring emotion and temperament.

Nobody is trying to undo that though. The scientists (which really should have been more elaborated upon) that engineered the SSY society explicitly didn't. On the contrary, they increased the gap of power between cantus users and the to-be-queerrats.

And you would be right. Watch it. It's great.

>humanity not being able to agree on what reality should look like

Which can be dealt with through means of social consent. Nothing radical here, a single insane man could annihilate any sense of social order if he was the one "in charge" of the reality bending powers. This is why those Cantus based kingdoms failed.

It might take them many generations, and involve many set backs, but a cantus capable humanity is equipped and circumvent and solve problems and catastrophes that modern humanity might never be able to deal with. It opens up new avenues of not only survival but prosperity far beyond the scope of any technology. That just can't be ignored, now perhaps if there was an alternative and more functional way to structure a society with cantus users. Then this whole affair would be excessive.

How well is that working for us? That's the whole point of the book/show. What they are trying is just a more extreme version of what we are trying and when it fails it fails all the more spectacularly. Their problems are not different from ours in quality, just in scope.

They might be able to solve problems like diseases more efficiently than we ever could, but they cannot deal with themselves, their most important challenge.

Social consent is not a means but an end. The difficult part is getting there. We're failing at that and so are they.

Sure, cantus would be great to have, no doubt about that, but it seems to me you are missing the point here. It is not some miraculous power that solves all our problems, even though it - as you said - could be. It is a stylistic method employed by the author to amplify the faults of human nature. It is in itself neither good nor bad, it magnifies what is already there.

There's a reason humans are on top of the food chain

>implying squealer isn't human

That's what I mean

Are we now? There's plenty of stuff that eats us like any other animal.

>Don't trust not human.
>Gay is wrong.

Social consents just fundamentally works, particularly when scaled down to small and small bodies of humans. Yes it has serious issues on the larger scale of things because it becomes increasingly hard for a large political body to really "agree" on anything. Yet on a small scale like in their village it would work fantastically. As shown by their general acceptance of the necessity of their sacrifices

My point is that the author doesn't really demonstrate that social constraints and egineering is "bad". Yes it has hiccups but they overcome it. It would have worked better if Cantus itself wasn't so unbelievably fantastic and powerful. However as it is, it's just too good to pass up.

We drove 90% of animal species into extinction, the rest lives because we like how they look or because we enjoy torturing their entire species to put them into out hamburgers.

People are shit and commies are evil

The scientists should have wiped out the psychics for good, especially since they were almost extinct anyway. Instead, they saved the psychics and turned the regular people into The Island of Dr. Moreau because they were complete retards.

Also that not a single one of those bonobo brain motherfuckers understood self-sacrifice, the most human trait of all. Not a single one. That's all it would have taken to stop anybody who went berserk. One person willing to die to kill the other. In fact, it's how the crazy mole bitch got stopped in the end anyway.

So basically, blame the scientists who started it all. Then blame the psychics for being a bunch of ultra-selfish faggots.

Like the plot, or the 2deep4u elements such as the basic theme and meaning?

Explain to me the reason it flopped despite being a masterpiece.

Get in my hamburger

You can't self-sacrifice to kill a Fiend because of the genetic mental inhibitors the society has placed on you to not kill or even harm other humans. That's precisely why Fiends are so dangerous, it's not like their powers go out of control like a Karma Demon's, they just lack the death feedback which, by nature of everyone else having death feedback, makes them extremely dangerous and a threat to society as a whole.

I don't agree with that. First of all, social consent "just working" is not a statement I'd support. Just getting 5 people to agree on anything mundane is a pain in the ass, much less 5000. I mean, just click on one of the larger boards and whitness the shitstorms.

On the social engineering being "bad", that's heavily dependent on your definition of "bad".

1) Bad as in "it doesn't work"? Kind of, it works most of the time.
2) Bad as in "it was done with malicious intent"? Depends. The scientists probably wanted the best for what they perceived as the new humans. But artificially restricting the mental faculties of large parts of mankind to create an artificial slave race? That's pretty fucked up.
3) Bad as in "it creates an end result highly divergent from the state of highest benefit for the highest amount of people"? Damn, that's the hardest one. I'd say no. The society they created is monstrous. They do smash hundreds of eggs to find one foul one. But what is the alternative? It's impossible to tell, but we can compare it to what came before which is even more grim. At least their society sort of works.

So most of their actions I'd sum up as "doing the necessary evil". The show and book are pretty open both about how necessary and how evil it actually is.

Cantus just being too good to pass up on, that is a perfectly valid stance that I will neither agree nor disagree with. The details are simply too unclear and the matter too grave for me to have a stance on it.

Wait, does that mean Karma Demons have death feedback?

The inhibitors just make you sick for trying to hurt someone and you die if you push through them. You literally can self-sacrifice, just all of them were too pussy to do so.

Why did they place the inhibitors in the first place? Couldn't they have left everyone as they were and have american shootouts instead of french ones?

They technically do. They can't think of harming another human. But their subconcious is the one controlling their powers and it doesn't give a fuck.

>Just getting 5 people to agree on anything mundane is a pain in the ass, much less 5000. I mean, just click on one of the larger boards and whitness the shitstorms.

Yet human society has been able to govern itself for millenia through this means. All government relies on social consent. Yes you can to a very limited extent use physical coercion but that still depends on other members of the society agreeing to go along with you in that endeavor.

Because it is based off of a real award winning novel (not a light novel) and has a lot of traits of a novel, such a slower, methodical story, less in-your-face themes, and characters with more subtly nuanced characteristics (which is neither a good nor bad thing).
Typical anime fans don't exactly crossover with /lit/fags in terms of ways they like a story to be told and paced.

Absolutely true. Humanity does manage to do so most of the time. This show is about the times it doesn't work out, however few and far inbetween they may be.

Regardless of that though, intellectual consensus does not account for emotions and outbursts thereof. I mean, damn, I get angry. I don't even want to imagine what could happen if I could kill people with but a thought.

But what if they could kill you just as well? You know, as is the case now.

It means you'll never do gay things in highschool because you're a loser

That's why their society requires more intense social engineering and education than ours does.

Over time however, this WILL work, Squealer was a freak confluence of bad events, if even ONE thing had happened differently he never would have been able to do the things he did.

>you'll never do gay things in highschool
That's a good thing because gay things are absolutely gross unless you're a cute girl.

You probably weren't one in highschool because you're a loser

Wait, are you not a cute girl user?

Is that supposed to make it better? I consider myself emotionally mostly stable and wouldn't want that responsibility. It's hard to imagine what less sane people would do with it. Imagine MAD, but everyone gets a button. Someone is bound to press it.

Even worse now that I think of it. It isn't even MAD. It's:
>If noone pushes this button, everyone lives.
>If anyone pushes this button, the first one to push is the only one to live.

That's one hell of a social experiment right there and we would fail it so hard.

Will it work though? And what is working in this context?

The thing about freak incidents is that however rare they might be, they still happen. And this one drove their society to the brink of extinction.

That's one of the themes of this show. You can eliminate error to an infinitesimal chance but when this error spells total annihilation that is still to much.

>Will it work though

It is demonstrated to be working to a pretty considerable extent in the novel. They go hundreds of years without major incident, and when one does happens it's usually contained or stopped thanks entirely to their extensive social engineering.

The only time everything REALLY falls to shit is because they underestimated the Queerrats AND had two people run away into the grips of a particular group of queerrats who were intent on destroying humanity.

But this isn't MAD as far as i remember. It's just extremely powerful psychic powers, imagine machineguns with unlimited ammo or something. Shit went down because no one could do harm to psychics. And their Karma Demon "crisis" existed solely because they stripped the populace of the ability to do harm to the Demons. Shit, they kill their kids in a roundabout way anyway, what is the big deal.

Your scale is somewhat off, but the comparison is valid so lets go for it. Imagine being in a room with 50 people, 1 of which is a fucking lunatic and you each have a machinegun. Doesn't sound like fun to me.

The Death Feedback wasn't in place to prevent Karma Demons, it doesn't even work against them. It's there to prevent more common occurences of mass slaughter.

And killing their kids is a pretty bid deal.

How much of a brainlet do you have to be to not get it?

They did go for almost a millenium without an incident, correct. And then it didn't. Of course the circumstances were rare but so what?

Think of it this way: If an event has a one in million chance of occurring within a certain timeframe, given enough time the cumulative chance of >0 occurances will approach 1.

Seems like a self-correcting problem with the added benefit of less angst.

Anarchy and slaughter are not a damn solution.

If a species is so inclined to violence that it cannot co-exist among itself, why should it live?

Does having a lunatic with a machine gun in a room with 50 armless people sound fun to you? That's what i'm getting at.
I never argued that Death Feedback was in place to prevent Demons, i argue that if and when Demons do appear, no one can do anything about it. Having a lunatic kill some people to then die himself is miles better than having a lunatic bring your fucking race to extinction while you kill your kids to prevent that.

A valid question. My personal answer is "because I really enjoy it".

You're completely forgetting the part where the entire reason the "science" society lives in small villages inside the "holy barrier" is because everyone is constantly subconsciously leaking cantus power, which twists and warps the fabric of reality and other living beings nearby. The point of the barrier is to shunt all of that leaking power outside, away from the area that people are living in.

If there were no restrictions or barrier in place and everyone just continued trying to live normally, the crazy shit we saw happening in the region around the karma demon would eventually happen everywhere, all the time.

We may technically "survive" as a species, but in what sort of twisted, monstrous form?

Don't forget, bestgirl only survived being anywhere near him for any length of time due to his conscious effort at maintaining maximum power output and control on thousands of floating objects. Otherwise she would have either exploded, or ended up like the dog.

>but in what sort of twisted, monstrous form?

The form of a God.

Homosexuals ruin everything. Squealer did everything wrong but people are too stupid to notice that.
Death feedback doesn't really work if you're good enough at lying to yourself but noone seems to notice.

>Does having a lunatic with a machine gun in a room with 50 armless people sound fun to you? That's what i'm getting at.
I know what you are getting at. That is kind of where the comparison falls apart though because of two reasons:

1) First of all we are talking about a superpowered machine gun that can eradicate all human life here. The best solution then would obviously to remove the lunatic from the equation and the second best to remove the machine guns. The society in SSY try both and of course can't get it 100% right.
2) Everyone can go nuts. The SSY society screens for it rigorously and removes those that have the highest tendency to do so, but in reality every single human has the potential to become a massmurderer under the right circumstances. SSY is based upon the premise that it is almost laughably easy to act upon such urges.

It's not that they could kill you, it's that (some of them) could kill your entire fucking COUNTRY at once with a single thought.

Remember when they were talking about the split-pupil dude who was the most powerful person in their village? They said he could "split the planet in half with his level of power". The context was not one of over-exaggeration either.

>continue to live as humans in human form with limited powers and extreme social engineering and genetic limitations
or
>assume the hideous forms of the great old ones, and effectively gain their powers, while probably causing everything everywhere to die
hmm

Who wouldn't want to become fucking Cthulu if given the chance. I know I would.

Hard to decide. You cannot know that being Cthulhu doesn't actually suck.

Yeah but I'd rather give it a shot honestly.

>most powerful person in their village
>died miserably without any chance of fighting back
True suffering.

Obligatory:
shinsekai.cadet-nine.org/

And remember kids, it's not spoonfeeding if nobody asked for it.

it's not just "becoming fucking Cthulhu"

it's "becoming Cthulhu and also probably everyone you know, care about, and love is probably dead, and you're probably one of a half-dozen beings left alive on the entire planet/solar system (since the planet was most likely destroyed)"

Yeah but can you honestly tell you'd turn down the chance? I maybe it ends up being mediocore, but becoming another species eldritch horror is just too good to pass up frankly.

but you still have powers without becoming an abomination, that's the thing

they're somewhat limited in that you can't just go kill someone whenever you feel like it, but it's not like you remain the weak, useless bags of flesh we are now

I'd lean toward keeping society intact, at least until the people I care about die

past that point, sure, fuck it, I'd travel to the other side of the planet and try becoming Cthulhu

What's so heinous about being an abomination? Hell that sounds like half the fun. There are certainly other alien societies out there they can continue on the rather played out game of "social animals cooperating for a greater sum" she-bang. There might not be another chance for one of them to create some sort of reality warping super being.

If Squealer was human, how could Saki kill him?

Checkmate squealerfags

If you watched the show, why didn't you pay attention?

Never got around to watching it.
Should I bother now that there's no longer threads on Sup Forums?
Is it worthy of my backlog?

>eusocial rat things
>humans

I don't think so lad.

Everytime I scroll past this thumbnail I think it's pride rock from Lion King

It's okay though because the only genes that survived for males were cute boy genes which are nearly as good as cute girls.

Yes. It's one of those rare shows that stick out from the mud of mediocrity.

Watch it. It's really good.

Alright, guess I'll watch it.
Thanks, anons.

>relying on Sup Forums to drive your viewing habits
Fuck off and make your own goddamned decisions.

Myself and many others ( I dare say a majority) considered it to be one of the best shows of the season, and excellent on its own merits.

It's a character and story driven drama, so don't go in expecting fucking shonenshit.

Ignore episode...7? That's the only time gay shit is really shoved in your face to get the fujo crowd's money.

>gay shit is really shoved in your face to get the fujo crowd's money
It's tame compared to the books.

>Fuck off and make your own goddamned decisions.
Why is it not OK to ask for other's opinions?
If 99% of people think it's shit, it's very likely my perception of the show would be the same.
And as I try not to waste my time on shit, I try to navigate around it.

>replying to a thread about a show and asking if its good instead of READING THE FUCKING THREAD

you would have very easily gotten a feel for whether other posters like it or not based on taking 5 minutes to skim the thread

lurk moar

Your first point was entirely different.
Doing what you write in this post would still result in:
>relying on Sup Forums to drive your viewing habits
My way was simply faster for me, and people could always choose to ignore my post, but luckily for me, they didn't.

Going to stop posting now, in order to not derail the thread even further.

Because it's not a matter of cross-referencing the DNA makeup of the target, it's about whether the Cantus user percieves the target as human, or rather, their own race. That's why the the queerrats were confident with their control of the Fiend child, because if it tried to kill any of them, it would just get Death Feedback'd.

>Ignore episode...7? That's the only time gay shit is really shoved in your face to get the fujo crowd's money.
This person is a closet homo.
There was what, one scene of Satoru and Shun kissing? I'd hardly say it was shoved in our face.

It's like Kemono Friends but not aimed at children.

>lurk moar
>please refrain from using this websites posting function
Could you stop trying to desperately fit in?

Shame we rarely see anime adapted from actual novels.

I understand WATASHITACHI WA NINGEN DA

Well WMT is (was? is?) a thing.

It's basically what the world of Raildex will look like in a thousand years.

all humans are evil except squealer

that one episode was pretty gay

Yeah but it makes their powers weaker or slower too. That one guy was the strongest in the world and been trained his entire life and lost to a kid with literally not a day of advanced training in her life