This article is part of a web-original series
Marco Cian (Hyogo)
Is it really a Bubblegum Crisis spinoff if it doesn’t have weird sex stuff in it?
I guess not.
Parasite Dolls
In the future… mumblemumble… robots called boomers… mumblemumble… AD Police… mumblemumble… these are the cases…
Okay, look, you already know the drill. New cast of characters, but same ole shit.
Man, this was painfully 2000s. Like, the kind of 2000s I explicitly tried to avoid, like Ergo Proxy or Lain. And honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if this was pumped out simply to ride out that new wave of cyberpunk popularity that emerged from shows like that.
The problem is that Parasite Dolls is an alteration of an alteration of a remake of a collection of shows that came out over the course of a half-decade over a decade before this, which means that it’s so wildly different from the IP it’s ostensibly related to, it makes one seriously wonder why they didn’t just do something original.
Wikipedia says this is set in the original Bubblegum Crisis continuity. It’s not. They don’t even call it Tokyo. It’s GENOM City (like in the previous installment of the franchise). And the reason boomers go rogue is once again different this time around. And also, the boomers aren’t even really that important to the plot. The actual story centers around terrorists as the main antagonists.
You can tell that this was made after 9/11.
And that whole plotline is resolved so anticlimactically, it feels like the show realizes it’s on the clock and needs to wrap this shit up. Which is funny because it spent so much of that episode’s runtime with people standing silently and sullenly in somber lighting. It’s incredibly slow and then anticlimactically fast.
All that said, Parasite Dolls isn’t the worst BGC spinoff. It’s just the most baffling. It has actual themes and ideas. The characters are alright. Everything is decent enough. But it’s never more than decent enough, which makes the whole thing feel even more like a cash-in that nobody’s heart was really in.
Oh. Yeah. Gotta do the
Is this a Cyberpunk?
Cyberpunk is about the little people – Not really, no. Even if you count cops as little people, these are members of a special crack team that’s in thick with high-ranking politicians. It’s the cream of the crop, as Macho Man would say.
Cyberpunk is pessimistic – I… don’t know? In order to really be pessimistic you have to give a shit, and this doesn’t really feel like anyone gave a shit. Brooding, maybe, but more in a sullen or moody way than an angry or bitter way.
Cyberpunk isn’t about changing the world – No. An evil politician uses the protagonist’s college paper on how to do 9/11 x 1000 to do 9/11 x 1000, which kind of has a big effect on the world. And then our heroes shoot him. Typing all that out now I suddenly realize just how silly the whole thing was. Come to think of it, why did our protagonist write his college paper on how to do 9/11 x 1000?
Cyberpunk is set in today, turned up to 11 – Yes. Give it to the show, it really does feel like a distinctly 2000s vision of the future.
Cyberpunk wants to look cool – I… guess so? It certainly wants to look like all the other scifi anime that was coming out at the time, at least.
So… that’s it. My Cyberpunk Summer has reached an end. Even with the worst of the things I had to watch at the end, I can’t say I didn’t have fun. Even with the bad, I’d say the good made the whole journey worth it. And even if my time as web editor here is ending, there’s certainly a part of me that hopes I get to take another journey like this with Connect in the future. Just because this summer is ending, there will be other summers in the future. So who knows? Until then, take care, and goodbye.
-Marco Cian