Paranoia Agent – Episode 10 Posted on September 14, 2015 Dear lord did Paranoia Agent ever rally back. Paranoia Agent Episode 10: 10 th: Link: Paranoia Agent Episode 11: 11 th: Link: Paranoia Agent Episode 12: 12 th: Link: Paranoia Agent Episode 13: 13 th: Link. RELATED: 10 Awesome Paranoia Agent Cosplays That Look Exactly Like The Characters. None of the victims, including Tsukiko, changed substantially since the first episode. So why there was a 15 foot Lil' Slugger instead of the regular one? This increase in size and monstrosity didn’t make any sense.
The cause of these breakdowns is unique for every victim Lil’ Slugger attacks (see Fig. 1), but they typically come from some deep-seated psychological problem that is brought to its full-height by fear. For this reason, they are unable to deal with their present circumstances. This inability then causes them to look for something that will alleviate their problems, whether it be something as masochistic as Lil’ Slugger, or deceptively comforting as Maromi. But what it all boils down to is repression, and its consequences.
Paranoia Agent Cap 10
For example, there is one kid named Taira Yuuichi who is extremely egotistical and conscious about how others view him. While he tries to hide these flaws through his role as class president, his popularity starts to rapidly decline when the students start comparing him to Lil’ Slugger because of his age and what he wears. He even goes to the point of suspecting another kid for spreading the rumors, though he has no actual proof. So by the time Lil’ Slugger knocks him out with the bat, Taira’s fear of losing his status as the popular kid has overwhelmed him completely. But what occurs after he’s hit is very interesting, because despite having a head injury, Taira is no longer stressed, and he doesn’t remember what caused it.
The same thing happens to the other victims, but as the series progresses, we discover that these so-called “cures” are only temporary. This in turn causes the fear to return, and Lil’ Slugger feeds off of these fears until he nearly consumes all of Japan. Now whether he is real or not is debatable, but what the show implies is that he’s a psychological demon created from Tsukiko’s denial when she accidentally killed a puppy, who happened to be named Maromi, when she was a little girl. So when she created the character Maromi many years later, the reppressed guilt began to surge, and then combined with the fear of losing her fame if she couldn’t meet her company’s demands, Lil’ Slugger came back, and she once again used him as an excuse to hide from her troubles. But because she was so famous, the image of Lil’ Slugger spread into the unconsciousness of the millions who heard the police report, who was then summoned by the mentally deranged who needed a form of escape, which included a sleazy reporter, a woman with split-personality disorder, a man whose ideals clash with a low-life reality, a boy who sees the world as a role-playing game, and a mediocre employee who murdered everyone on his production team.
Paranoia Agent Episode 10 Discussion
All of these people are so far off the beaten path that fear is like a disease to them, and the only solution is through self-inflicted pain, which temporarly makes them forget it. But not everyone is completely clean, because as the influence of Lil’ Slugger increases, so does the popularity of Maromi. Born out of a disturbing event that Tsukiko tries to forget, Maromi also represents repression, but with a more comforting appeal. While Lil’ Slugger’s demeanor is dark and frightening, Maromi’s is innocent and cuddly (see Fig. 2). Its adorable face makes one forget one’s troubles in an instant, taking them to a happier place that lies outside of real life. However, the characters who experience this are completely out of touch from reality, leading to a false black-and-white interpretation that lingers as long as the complex fears remain reppressed. An example of this occurs when Keiichi, after being laid off the Lil’ Slugger case due to a suspect being murdered under his and Mitsuhiro’s pr0tection, falls into a vivid daydream where he’s back in the days of his prime as a cop while being accompanied by Maromi and a younger version of Tsukiko posing as his daughter, even though he never had one. Eventually, images of his wife start to appear, reminding him of the fear he has for her weak health and their shaky marriage. Through her, he learns of her recent death, which snaps him out of the false reality he’s created under Maromi’s influence.
So as you can see, despite Maromi and Lil’ Slugger’s differences in terms of promoting repression, they are similar in that they were made by the same person, and they both feed on the fears of people to sustain their existence. However, their attempts at reppressing people are thwarted by certain individuals, namely the detectives and eventually Tsukiko, because instead of giving into their fears, they accept them in some form. For Keiichi, it was the love for his wife that gave him the courage to realize the truth about Lil’ Slugger. Meanwhile, Mitsuhiro decided to take the path of the spiritual warrior, allowing him to confront Lil’ Slugger on a physical and psychological level. As for Tsukiko, it was accepting the guilt of her previous actions, and that was what ultimately destroyed her inner demons.
What do you think? Leave a comment.
| Synopsis: | |
Tsukiko Sagi is the young and reserved designer of the latest mascot to take Japan by storm: a little pink dog named Maromi. Her already anxious life is thrown in to complete chaos when she is attacked by a mysterious figure in the middle of the night, a boy on golden roller skates who strikes his victims with a bent baseball bat. As Detectives Keiichi Ikari and Mitsuhiro Maniwa investigate the seemingly random assault, people all around Tokyo begin reporting similar attacks by the boy, who the public comes to call “Lil' Slugger.” A victim of schoolyard bullying; a sex worker with a fractured psyche; a wannabe mobster with big ambitions – people from all walks of life soon find themselves in Lil' Sluggers path. As the mystery grows more sinister, and the connections pile up, our detectives must begin to reckon with who – or what – Lil Slugger is, and what the consequences will be once the entire city is consumed with the chaotic fever of paranoia. | |
| Review: | |
It's been years since Paranoia Agent has been legally available to watch or own in the West, what with Geneon's original DVD release being out of print since the mid-2000s. Given that this is the one and only television series to come from the mind of the late, great Satoshi Kon, it would be an understatement to say that Funimation's acquisition of Paranoia Agent is kind of a big deal. While it'll be some months yet before we can get our hands on the upcoming SteelBook Blu-Ray set, all thirteen episodes of the show can be streamed via Funimation's website and app, so newcomers and old fans alike can learn just why Paranoia Agent has been so well-loved and remembered in the decade-and-a-half since it originally released. Anyone who is familiar with Satoshi Kon's cinematic filmography – specifically Millennium Actress, Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers, and Paprika – will immediately recognize the director's signature vision and style all over Paranoia Agent. In fact, it wouldn't be entirely unfair to describe the series as a kind of grab bag of Kon's favorite visual motifs and thematic obsessions. As an anthology series, it has the benefit of being able to throw in all manner of disparate moods, plot points, and themes. One episode will be a moody, psychological thriller about a woman whose various identities are starting to come into violent conflict, and the shades of Perfect Blue will be obvious to any fans of that movie. Just a couple of episodes later, then, you'll have the series' two detectives running around in a suspect's farcical fantasy RPG mindscape, which will make anyone who loves Paprika as much as I do very happy, indeed. As in Millennium Actress, many of the episodic stories in Paranoia Agent deal with the recursive and fragile nature of memory and experience, with Lil' Slugger's rampage affecting its victims on just as much a psychological level as a physical one. This is also a uniquely Japanese story, like Tokyo Godfathers, where the lost and culturally disaffected are painted in broad but nevertheless human strokes. To be clear, Paranoia Agent's willingness to plumb the wells already explored in Kon's other work is not a weakness. The fact that these stories take the form of a television series allow for the show to be playful, experimental, and diverse in a manner that isn't often possible in a single feature film. Not every character's story is going to hit with the same impact for each viewer, though, and that lack of consistency may prove frustrating for folks who prefer a more uniform viewing experience. Some episodes try to walk the razor's edge between existential horror and humor in a manner that is often beautiful and heartbreaking, but that dissonance can be hard to parse. There is specifically one episode that I had completely forgotten about, for instance, wherein the attempted suicides of two adult men and a young girl are played for very dark laughs, a kind of Waiting for Godot in anime miniature that sticks in the craw of the mind. I loved it, and I think viewers that are willing to play along with Paranoia Agents multiple trains of thought and purpose will be greatly rewarded, but the show is just as much an acquired taste now as it was back in the day. It helps that the show's sterling direction and generally impressive production values hold up to this day. The art style that Studio Madhouse is working in might be considered a bit old fashioned compared to glossy, modern anime, but few shows in the last fifteen years have achieved such consistent and compelling feats of atmosphere and tone. Many stories stick purely within the realm of realism, or they at least make gestures towards realism, where other head-trips devolve into phantasmagorical nightmares to supremely entertaining effect. Susumu Hirasawa's music also cannot be overlooked as a key ingredient to Paranoia Agent's success; at turns eerie, hilarious, and weirdly infectious, the score perfectly captures the different faces of Paranoia Agent that manifest throughout its episodes. The Geneon dub is just as good as I remember it, too. There's just the right amount of mid-aughts cheese to balance out the genuinely well-done voice-acting, and the English script manages to be faithful without getting too mealy-mouthed in the translation. What is the most important thing to remember about Paranoia Agent is that it is a mystery story where the answers to the mysteries are not as important as the questions they raise. There are answers there for those that seek them, but they exist like the spider-web fissures that spread when one makes a wrong step on the surface of a frozen pond. For every satisfying splinter of truth that splinters and cracks out from the epicenter of the Lil' Slugger attacks, it only becomes easier to see how dark and murky the depths below really are. If each individual human heart represents a world unto itself, Paranoia Agent is about what happens when those worlds are given up to their own little apocalypses, where the predictable malaise of life can suddenly swell up and strike with the catastrophic fury of an atom bomb. Whether it's the struggle to make ends meet in a world ready to swallow you whole, the crises that come with shaping together the jagged shards of a broken personality, or the simple, everyday terror of being pursued by a shadowy figure brandishing a crooked baseball bat – Paranoia Agent understands that the most evocative and haunting stories are borne from the tiniest pinpricks of suggestion: A rumor whispered in the dark; a half-forgotten dream; a pang of long-buried shame and panic that spreads across the mind like a fever. The virus of our collective fear is right there just waiting to be released - to be indulged - and all we can do is bear witness to the ones responsible for putting their worlds back together in its aftermath. |
| Grade: | |
Overall : A Overall (sub) : A Animation : B+ Music : A- + A haunting and deeply felt fable of human experiences told with Satoshi Kon's signature flair, eerie and funny in equal measure, visuals that will stick with you for years to come | |
| discuss this in the forum (17 posts) | | |
Full encyclopedia details about |
Paranoia Agent 1080p Torrent
Paranoia Agent 1080p Mega
Review homepage / archives