As author Cory Doctorow has said time and again, science fiction can only predict the present. That’s exactly what makes Psycho Pass so great.

Psycho Pass ostensibly takes place one hundred years from now. But through its increasingly unforgiving lens, we see our modern issues merely magnified. As machines take over people’s lives, they solve some problems of comfort and convenience, but make far bigger ones that may even put human rights at stake.

Portrayed in a stark palette of cool colors and smooth surfaces, this gritty cyberpunk mystery leaves us with more questions than answers. One of the biggest being, can we truly identify and prevent criminal inclinations before a crime is ever committed?

This scenario has a lot in common with Philip K. Dick’s short story turned blockbuster, Minority Report, in which a policeman has an ordinary life arresting pre-criminals… until he discovers the machine in charge of identifying murderers has named him as the next.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it, but Philip K. Dick is my favorite author. Though clouded by his occasional misogyny, he understands human nature like nobody’s business. And, as with all the best science fiction, his stories tell us more about the times he lived in (the mid-20th century) than some nonexistent future.

Dick is regarded as a genre writer in America (though scholars’ leanings are changing in recent years), but his books have been bestsellers in Japan since the 70s. It may owe no little credit to the fact that many of Dick’s postwar works feature Japanese protagonists in positions of power, as a reverse future where the Axis beat the Allies was one of Dick’s favorite themes.

So you could say I had a fangirl moment when the series’ villain, Shogu Makishima, encourages a crony to read Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? Makishima says he sees the town, ruled absolutely by the Sibyl System, as a parody of the novel. Do Androids begs the question of what it means to be human. Makishima is a man both frustrated and freed by his inability to be recognized as a normal human by the Sibyl System. And this sense of alienation, paired with his intelligence, makes for a truly formidable antagonist.

It’s no wonder anime academic Charles Dunbar called Psycho Pass the show that made him love anime again. Forget the pandering and panty shots. Psycho Pass is truly an anime for the intellectual mind, forcing us to contemplate sometimes uncomfortable truths about our time.

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This post is the fifth installment of The Twelve Days Of Anime, a blogging series in which anime fans write about shows that inspired or impressed on them this year.

Today is John’s birthday! This is one of the reasons I married him. With a birthday just four days before mine, he’ll always understand what it’s like to be overshadowed by Christmas.

But today, I’m not writing about my husbando. I’m writing about my favorite 2D waifu, at least formerly— Kuroneko from Oreimo, the show also known by the name My Little Sister Can’t Be This Cute!

I wasn’t all that enthralled with Oreimo, but Kuroneko kept me watching. I loved her attitude, her opinionated nature, her endless creative endeavors from cosplay to fanfiction to art. Have you ever watched an anime where one character made the show for you? That was how it was for me with Kuroneko, and no doubt with plenty of other viewers.

I watched the second season for more Kuroneko, but I shouldn’t have bothered. Her personality is completely different. Kuroneko builds a new cosplay—to get a boy’s attention. She painstakingly writes a book—of things she wants to do with Senpai. I was even disappointed when we learned her real name; the old Kuroneko would have seen that as a privacy violation.

There’s no getting around it—in season two, Kuroneko was ruined. She went from a well-rounded character with plenty of endearing personality traits and imperfections, to just another part of the harem. There’s never any reason given for why she’s even in love with bland everyman Kyousuke in the first place!

Then again, I don’t know what I expected about an anime about dating your sister. So long and good riddance, Kuroneko. I’ll always have my Nendoroid figure of you.

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This post is the fourth installment of The Twelve Days Of Anime, a blogging series in which anime fans write about shows that inspired or impressed on them this year.

I’ve always believed Madarame was a sex symbol. The first time I heard the word moe, it was in a Genshiken fan sketch of Madarame. “I’ve always thought Madarame was the most moe character in Genshiken,” the artist commented.

Even though I’ve since learned that “moe” is a word more often attributed to babyfaced high schoolers with huge, glittering eyes, the connection in my neurons is still stuck.

Hence, the most fascinating part of Genshiken: Second Season, also known, confusingly, as the third season of Genshiken, is the self-fulfillment of this prophecy. Virtually every girl (and boy!) wants a piece of our favorite 2D loving misanthrope.

Well, except for the one he wants.

Like most longtime Genshiken watchers, I’ve always held a torch for the appealing but impossible Madarame/Saki pairing. The scene in which Saki finally gets Madarame to admit his feelings—only to gently turn him down—was the most emotional scene I’ve watched all year.

In a way, Saki was letting all of us down in this scene. But it’s clear that Genshiken mangaka Shimoko Kio did his best to go easy on us—in the form of a ready-made Madarame harem the very minute Saki stopped being an option. Will he pick the beautiful, crossdressing Hato? The bold, American Angela? Or petite Sue, who looks like she walked straight out of Madarame’s 2D loli fantasies? Kio better not leave us hanging.

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This post is the third installment of The Twelve Days Of Anime, a blogging series in which anime fans write about shows that inspired or impressed on them this year.

I think I may have made some of my readers uncomfortable while Free! aired this summer. It certainly compelled me to share a very fujoshi side of myself, culminating in the post, Do you think anime characters are sexy?

But in my personal life, watching Free! was far from a lewd experience. In fact, I got together each week with my husband and a mutual friend, Grant, to watch it. I doubt they were as hooked as I was, but they certainly humored me. What I didn’t expect was how much watching Free! with two straight men would impact the way I experienced the show.

By now, even western audiences have accepted that a romantic relationship between two attractive men is a type of fan service, in the same way lesbian kisses are. But anime publishers know that fan service that overt could drive viewers of other sexualities away. As a result, fujoshi have learned to take even the tiniest cues as evidence of a gay romance. In Free!, CPR between two hot guys is likened to kissing. And hugging after a big win? Totally gay.

It wasn’t until I was watching this with guys that I realized how much this limits men’s behavior. As a result of our seeking out “coded” gay gestures, the briefest male/male contact can be perceived as romantic. Case in point: the band One Direction, whose fandom’s fervor for finding hints of a forbidden love has actually hurt bandmates’ relationships with one another:

“This is a subject that was funny at first, but now is actually hard to deal with as I am in relationship,” Louis said in July. “Me and Harry are best friends, people look into our every move, it is actually affecting the way me and Harry are in public.”

I asked Grant to write a bit about his experience watching Free! He wrote enough for a guest post in itself (comment if you’d like me to post it!) but this is the paragraph that stuck out for me:

“Free! was an interesting viewing experience for me. I had been trained to look for ‘coded’ gay gestures for years as a matter of defending my claim to manhood, and doing it in this context—for humor and titillation—was different because the stakes were different. I was interested to discover that I was able to appreciate Free! in many of the the same ways I’d appreciate a hetero-male-oriented comedy, by looking for more-or-less overt innuendos and laughing at the characters’ ‘accidentally’ bawdy behavior, for example, or finding humor in a ‘fish out of water’ situation. It also helped me understand how some women can enjoy fanservice shows made for straight men.”

Free! may sexualize male touch, but as Grant points out, this isn’t breaking news. Long before Free! taught him to look for subtle homosexuality, he was already aware of it. It’s not fujoshi that robbed men of male touch, but decades of homophobia. The only thing different is the context.

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This post is the second installment of The Twelve Days Of Anime, a blogging series in which anime fans write about shows that inspired or impressed on them this year.

Shows have always defined eras in my life. It’s no coincidence that I latched on to Welcome to the NHK after I got my master’s degree, only to become underemployed and move back in with my parents. Sweet, sentimental slice of life Honey and Clover defined the first few year I dated John, when we were both still in college. The Devil is a Part-Timer, which aired this spring, was the background music to my transition from no time to part time to full time.

Fittingly, The Devil is a Part-Timer is an anime that some reviewers have guessed was designed to get hikikomori revved up for the simple pleasures of minimum wage earning—living on your own, getting a promotion when you’re barely making ends meet, splurging on a beloved bicycle. After all, the Devil loves this lifestyle, and he’s the supreme master of Hell!

I quit my job in December 2012 and I spent a few weeks laying low, feeling drained. But after a month or two, it was my bank account that was feeling drained. I had to get to work, but I had lost confidence. I was rusty at reporting. My ebooks didn’t sell. My blog had barely 100 readers.

I had been slowly taking on new work since February, and at first it crushed my ego to realize that I spent 75 percent of my time pitching places, and only 25 percent getting accepted and writing articles. It felt like I was working very hard for little payoff.

But by the time I’d gotten halfway into The Devil Is A Part-Timer, my life looked very different. I was working full time again by juggling two part time jobs, and I had more offers for freelance work than I was able to accept. Work no longer felt like a means to an end. Like the Devil, I saw the satisfaction of completing a task and feeling like I did my best on it. I also realized the ability to work the way I do, making my own hours, choosing my own assignments, is a privilege. I felt grateful to have work, instead of begrudged.

I didn’t find the ending of The Devil Is A Part-Timer satisfying at all. It got too caught up in the weeds instead of focusing on the major plot. But by then, between planning for my wedding and working my new jobs, I hardly had time to watch it anyway.

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This post is the first installment of The Twelve Days Of Anime, a blogging series in which anime fans write about shows that inspired or impressed on them this year.