It’s the near future and the peace of Japan can only be kept by having heavily armed high school girls murder everybody who threatens it.
Lycoris Recoil touches on an uniquely Japanese sort of right wing paranoia. The idea that modern Japan may look peaceful on the surface, but in reality is a criminal cesspitt where monsters and terrorists are only kept at bay through extralegal government directed death squads, usually consisting of cute high school girls. The sequence above, in the opening two minutes of the first episode is particularly blatant in expressing this paranoia. To me, this feels different from similar law and order concerns in e.g. US media. The crime in movies like Deathwish is not hidden, but out in the open. Everybody knows that the city is riddled with crime, but nobody can do anything about it. The police are helpless, tied down by bureaucracy and political correctness and you need a vigilante like the Punisher to step up and take a stand. Which is the second difference, in that the heroes of western fantasies about restoring law and order tend to be outsiders rather than government employees. With the Japanese version you have the fear that there are monsters lurking behind the surface of polite society, but also the fantasy that the government will protect ordinary citizens from discovering this truth and is competent enough to keep the monsters at bay. Not an idea that plays well in America.
It’s ironic that Lycoris Recoil came out in the week in which former prime minister Abe Shinzō was murdered by a guy with a self made shotgun, apparently due to Abe’s ties to the Moonies. Perhaps that paranoia is not entirely unwarranted…
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