Shin Sekai Yori 25
The last few episodes may have been a little uneven, but this one goes out on top. It's an excellent denouement. It summarizes the themes of the series well, emphasizes the important points, and implies just enough about everything else. It was a great reminder of all the points where this show succeeded so well.
The production was too uneven for this show to be a masterpiece, but its ambition was realized well enough that it isn't a failure. It fills a niche that doesn't get too much attention in anime, so I'd feel comfortable recommending it to people interested in this sort of speculative science fiction.
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It's interesting running some parallels between this and Psycho-Pass. Both shows focus on the difficulty of maintaining order in a society that can be so affected by human violence; on the flaws in a pervasive, controlling society that sacrifices the freedom of its citizens for the sake of perceived safety; on the blind spots and assumptions that can prove fatal to that stability. Shin Sekai Yori's successes in creating a rich, human cast would already put it above Psycho-Pass, but what is more impressive and more rare to me is how this show lets us see the flaws and conflicts on the terms of the world inside it. Nobody in Shin Sekai's new world is interested in philosophy for its own sake. The conflicts in the show are the practical results of people whose interests are at stake. Lectures and exposition are about things that happened or what people experienced, not about ideals and abstractions. Each moment is a real artifact of that world, that life. The show trusts us to interpret those moments and draw our own conclusions about how that relates to our own lives.
Psycho-Pass's world has no shortage of real flaws or conflicts. Its "rehabilitation centers" are worthless, its citizens are at turns apathetic or anxious, and there's a huge dissatisfied underclass with no voice or opportunity. Yet the conflict in the show is between an avatar of Freedom, an avatar of Justice, and an avatar of Order, who speak in old quotations about retribution, or societies as prisons, or what have you. Their personal ideals are interesting when it comes to their characters (and I like how Akane develops over the second half of the series), but their ways of thinking force rigid black-and-white dichotomies on the Sybil System, and keep the world from telling its own story.
Or I'm overthinking the simple truth that Shin Sekai Yori trusts its audience to understand things, and Psycho-Pass has no faith in its audience to understand anything not shoved directly in front of their faces.
that was a good speech.
