#AniTwitWatches Rd. 12: Shin Sekai Yori 1 – 2

If you’ve seen one of these posts around, you know the drill already. See this post by Jon for more details.

Episode 1

• I’ve watched an ep. of SSY (the 1st) before, but I’m going to rewatch it because I was distracted during the screening.
• First impressions: Reminds me of KagePro.
• The papers are called shide.
• Akizuki is reading from a book that says “ethics” or “morals” (倫理). So this is probably their version of Ethics class.
• The art shifts, I think, only really impress the first time you see them.
• I originally watched this episode in November 2020, but I still can’t really tell you my impressions of this anime from that one episode. There’s a lot compressed into a small space that it makes it hard to think about it.

Episode 2

• So pride makes demons?
• I think the story in Ethics class is gonna reflect on this one jerk kid and he’s going to vanish into the lake like Reiko did…or something. (<- Not sure if I have all the facts straight for this anime just yet.)
• Most of the text in this series is highy stylised calligraphic font, so it’s hard to glean meaning from.
• Come to think of it, this entire Carryball business reminds me of Avatar the Last Airbender. Specifically, how they use bending as a sport. It’s things like that that really draw me into a world – because if you tweak one thing (or many things) that permeate the entire world, then it has ripple effects all over the place.
• …oh! The Monster Cat!
• Iniksbane was doing his livetweets at the same time as me and mentioned “anti-science fiction”. Couldn’t quite get what he meant until he mentioned “advanced technology” (so what he means is “a futuristic society where they’ve reverted to a hunter/gatherer sort of lifestyle”, which makes it in the vein of The Giver, The Declaration or A Time Apart. (Come to think of it, I read the latter while in Japan and that might have added to that sense of “detaching from technology”…I also read some Richard Bachman while in the airport and…lemme just say, do not read Rage or The Long Walk while you’re sleep deprived. It will only haunt you in ways that are not particularly productive.)
• What does the character on the stamp mean? (Don’t think I’ve figured it out just yet,)
• So they still have katakana, even in the future, huh? (For some reason, I thought they would’ve either gone back to the way of rendering everything in kanji or swapped everything to hiragana, much like katakana was used for everything around the time of Kenji Miyazawa.)
• So monster rats are like the boogeyman? They’re not something children in this society are meant to know about, and they’re used to make children behave…?
• I feel like I’ve seen monster rats before…probably on an anime news site or a blog.