Concrete Revolutio
Sho Aikawa almost kept his parallel world obsession in check for a full series, but he couldn't help himself.
Even if it didn't stick the landing as cleanly as I would have liked, this hugely ambitious series still ended on a pretty damn strong note. It mixes a lot of metaphors in its efforts at political commentary (US/Japan tensions, environmental concerns, student protests, communism, past tradition vs. modernism), but it also manages to juggle a number of satisfying character arcs among its massive and diverse cast. And dammit, all the way through up to the end, it's trying to be something relevant, to confront the eternal dispiriting struggle to change the world that every generation in history faces and find an optimistic message on the other end. In that, it mostly succeeds. I give it a lot of credit for that.
It's interesting to see a Japanese work try to use the country's pop culture to recontextualize its own history. Watching the show exposed me to a lot of elements of 60s and 70s Japanese culture that I probably wouldn't have stumbled across otherwise, and its focus on politics and historical events gives its tales of giant robots and supernatural creatures a very different vibe than anything else I've really seen. I'm very glad I picked it up and stuck through it.
