Quote:
Originally Posted by Kaioshin Sama
It's the anti-bishoujo. This character type is becoming so common in anime in general that it was only a matter of time before someone did a deconstruction of it. i just didn't think it would be so soon. Gen seems to be all about taking whatever character archtype tropes are popular with otaku and just twisting them into something creepy and unnatural yet not forgetting to preserve the surface elements that made them popular in the first place. He did it with Madoka and Magical girls, he did it with Fate/zero and shonen gar concepts and he seems to be doing it here with moe tropes in general.
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The similarities between this episode's killer and victim, and the two main protagonists of
MariMite, is pretty remarkable:
In both cases, you have an all-girls school with a certain air of refinement to it. In both cases, you have a taller, respected, older, smooth-talking, long-dark-haired beauty. In both cases, you have a shorter, charming, twin-tails girl that looks up to and admires her.
At least somebody on the Psycho-Pass Production committee was
clearly influenced by MariMite, and decided to darkly invert it. As a big fan of MariMite, I found this quite chilling and effective.
What I think Gen is good at is taking these almost iconic images that anime fans tend to have warm mental associations with (these yuri/shoujo-ai archetypes, magical girl aesthetics, etc...) and showing how you can have this same imagery but with a much darker reality behind it.
It's very effective. It would be kind of like a comic book where the lead villain has the same appearance, mannerisms, style, and strengths of Superman, but is a brutal killer. Not Bizarro Superman, but something much more disturbing than that because the visual similarity is greater.