Because of the nature of the 24 episodes that make up R2 so far, and because of the twisted mental state produced by watching too much too quickly I have essentially surrendered my critical faculties for the moment. This post is just me being silly about some nonsense, and its probably ideas others have got to first, but what the hell.

Oh Japanese sci-fi! It’s so cool that we get to meet a culturally distinct presentation of imagined futures. It’s also cool that we can see the interaction with our own sci-fi traditions, which evidently have had a massive influence on what Japanese thinkers and fantasisers produce. And for extra kicks we get to see our culture(s) as mirrored by xenophiliac foreign authors.

What my interest in Japanese sci-fi presumes shows is that the value of sci-fi isn’t necessarily in its technical vision but its human vision. That the future is as much about changed human experience as new mechanics. But how do we capture this human experience? What image is used, how do we paint the picture? Images don’t occur out of nothing, they’re human products and they have to come (if indirectly) from the world we perceive. History is a rich source of such ideas.

Amongst the many silly tangents deployed by the writers of Code Geass, the introduction of a plotline centred around a marriage of convenience struck me as notable. Perhaps just because I found that bit of the show pretty tedious and had to think about something to fill the time. Anyway, looking past some of the rhetoric, it was the good old true love vs. artisocratic marriage story consistent with a tale of kings. Y’know the sort which is all about how the king comes to understand love and people and shit, and how that makes it OK for him to do what he wants.

This is sci-fi as the age of kings and knights. Well sure, and it was in R1 too. And anyway, didn’t that whole setup have more to do with China? Well, yes. But it any case it focussed my mind on Geass as a fight between kings. And in tribute to the writers I’m just going to ignore rational approaches for a minute and say what I want.

The Zero of capes, masks and chess games has never been a literal “Zero”, a faceless god of revolution. In a manner consistent with its lack of focus and willingness to play sophistic games the show suggests that Zero and the people he fought for were one and the same – that the individual behind the mask was nothing. This is not truly the case, it matters that Zero is a hero, a king, a one man miracle factory – an undemocratic figure.

He’s always been an elitist symbol in a plush costume with specific gestures and intonations which create a sense of aristocratic charisma. And not a particularly Japanese aristocrat. To make a parallel within the deranged ideoscape of the show – zero relates to his own nothingness in the same way that people can be seen as essentially nothings before a god which includes them all. But, like all true heroes, I conclude that the human mask matters. There’s an element of truth in this idea, even though that doesn’t make it right.

[When we got Geass adopting Evangelion's language of the individual vs the human mass we got grounds for an interesting comparison. Eva drew the individual as neurotic and scared, Geass is about the prince ascendant. For Eva losing individuality was a retreat from the self, for Geass it was a ploy in a game between lunatics. This is why despite both shows sharing massive inconsistency and a tendency to throw symbols about for no good reason, Evangelion is able to be emotionally important to people. It's democratic, Geass is not - although its cast of royals and servants offers considerably more wank-fodder.

In fact Geass as porn-bait is a genuinely solid way to read the series. It's a series which ignores all scientific probabilities and realities to focus on individuals. On spinkicks. On kings. It's obsessed with human individuals, all pop-psychology and no intellectual trousers.]

As a counterexample of sci-fi anime with added ermine, Wolf’s Rain mixes apocalyptic futures with aristocrats, it has knights with sonic weapons. The gothy villain Darcia is shown in flashbacks in a fairy tail castle, Lord Jagara is a bonkers mix of vampirism and heavy metal armour. This is the reassertion of past insanities as a dystopia – the grim dark ages as the right aesthetic for the end of the world. Thus in Wolf’s Rain we see the medieval past drawn as gothic rather than camp arthurian (Geass).

Mediaevalism colours these worlds. It brings to them elitism and class structures, but also a sense of the brutal. After all, our closest encounters with the history of this period aren’t with art, and there are few written documents which cover the day to day human experience. We mainly read political histories – the rest is guesswork. Which means that our image of the period is one battles, regimes, and historical tides. An age best understood in the broadest and most violent terms.

Is this distinct from the Japanese past, from their age of kings and killings? Yes – but mainly in stylistic terms. The Japanese medieval cannot be flavoured with quite the same camp as Code Geass, although it can take on its own guises (see Samurai Champloo). All civilisations bring multiple (but limited) stylistic associations. From the imperial cycles of China to the missionary civilisation of early Islamic cultures, the temple societies of South America to the organised madness of colonial European history, we can see templates for alternative societies – each with its own associations. Yet there remains a peculiar romance to Old Europe – kings, Machiavellians, capes, knights.

Looking beyond the sci-fi to Miyazaki, Kigeki, the Final Fantasy games, Claymore, or Berserk, we can see the Japanese fascination with the European repeated in fantasy landscapes. Clearly European styles exist in a mythologised form in Japan. They do within the West too – Asimov’s (comically outdated) Foundation series paints the distant future as distinctly unprogressive. Hell, here in the UK Victoriana is like football for the speccy kids – a national sport. But there’s a wider significance to shows like Geass which use the image of the past in soft (i.e. less scientific) sci-fi.

The anime series of Ghost in the Shell (Stand Alone Complex) draws a society which owes its imaginative debts to the present day. It’s closer to reality in its lack of central villainy, although typical of the modern age in its total fear of the massiveness of political power. A contemporary nightmare recast into the future as opposed to a version of the future reliant on the past. The perverse joy for me is in seeing this uniquely Japanese version of a foreign past as an alternative to building a potentially scary realistic future. An escape into Europe. Which surely contributed to the enormous sense of fun in the program – the baffling glee which lies behind its best and worst.

Our ideas don’t come from a vacuum, and in the political realm its much harder to be “purely” imaginative. The story of Geass suits medievalist styles in its fetish for royalty and its implicit love of elites. Perhaps its just the joy of soft sci-fi, that elements of your proposed future can be flat out absurd, can present the most illogical of fantasies by choosing not to imagine their story as a development of contemporary trends, but as a reimagining of the past. And its unsurprising in this show that the stylistic palette is really a convenience – a set of incoherent borrowed ideas thrown around for our escapist pleasure.