Parasyte: The Maxim (Kiseiju: Sei no Kakuritsu)

Humans are bad. They ruin the beautiful planet earth. No, wait, humans are actually good and all bad people aren’t humans. Eating meat is evil, or it’s a part of nature. Killers kill because they’re unrestrained and society is the only thing that keeps us from killing all that surrounds us. Planet earth is beautiful, and the fate of the world is in the hands of a teenage sex bomb and his, well, talking hand. Also, bass occasionally drops.

The concept isn’t bad. A talking hand gains automatic Cool Points and it doesn’t prevent the story from exploring deeper things. Having a sex bomb for a main character isn’t a death sentence. It’s when the anime juggles 90’s Sci-Fi weirdness with no insight or boldness. The parasites are cool at first, but not for 24 episodes. Shinichi is a good-natured sex bomb and people are evil because they’re evil, so where’s the shock value?

The problem with Parasyte isn’t that it’s stupid. The problem is that it wants to be smart. Too many times it points to a bigger idea, something about human nature and eating meat. Then it undoes every insight it has by having sex bomb characters, pornographic violence and cheap emotional manipulation. The techniques don’t match the aim of the anime.


Parasyte ends up joining the ranks of pretentious grimdark anime who think violence equals depth. The violence is fun for a while. Limbs are torn off without a second thought. The Parasytes distort the human body in Cronenberg’s favorite ways. You can’t carry an entire show based on that though. The creators quickly run out of visual ideas. Besides the blades, muscle tissue and eyeballs everywhere the Parasytes don’t have much to offer. Blood stops being shocking after a few gallons. The action scenes are hardly action scenes. A lot of fighting is simply blades clanging in the speed of light.

Clearly, the series wants to be more than a silly Sci-Fi story about bodysnatchers. It’s hard to take it seriously when the lead character is a sex bomb and nobody points out how weird it is. Every female character with a speaking role expresses interest in him. The teenage ones’ affection are clearly towards romantic. Does that sound like a harem premise to you?


The difference between this anime and other harems is that it’s serious. It never addresses the fact all the females somehow love Shinichi. Yes, it should considering it happens so much. There’s even beating up of another girl’s asshole boyfriend. From a distance, the abundance of female characters is nice since stories like these are often criticized for the lack of female presence. Then again, if the main thing they do is to stroke the main character’s ego what’s the point?

Having sex bombs for characters in such serious shows is always funny. While the anime preaches to us about how horrible the world is, how horrible humans are and how dare we eat meat it forgets losers and winners are everywhere. Sexuality isn’t some antidote to our violent nature. Sexuality and violence go hand-in-hand. Both have winners and losers, defeaters and defeated. The difference is, violence is more fair. Unless you disabled, you can use your fist. I guess the creators are all sex bombs too.

Is calling Shinichi ‘privileged’ making me look insensitive? He loses people left and right, and yet he still comes off as a boring, privileged dude. External and internal troubles are not the same thing. Although a lot of terrible things happen to Shinichi, he has no internal struggle. He has no lens through which to view the horror.


Attack on Titan is an obvious comparison. Both deal with an epic battle of humanity against another being, and in the center is a teenage superhero. Eren also loses loved ones and is knee deep in the abyss. Unlike Shinichi, he has a clear personality through which the suffering is filtered. Eren doesn’t just feel bad over his troubles. He views them in his idealistic, hero-delusional lens. In contrast, Yukki (Future Diary) and Shinji (Neon Genesis Evangelion) react to the danger with fear and avoidance. Shinichi has no such lens. He gets sad and screams in sorrow for a while.

Nothing actually drives him. Survival doesn’t count, since all organism are driven by survival (or well-being). He’s barely active in the story. Things happen to him and that’s it. The only decision he makes are whether to fight or flee. It almost sounds clever, since the anime wants to say something about how humans are still animals. Only it’s not true, of course. Humans are the only organism who are aware of their own death, of their consciousness. You need such cognitive abilities to start thinking about existence. The Parasytes start going existential, too.

Characters die all the time. The light/dark contrast is clever and will never lose its shine. Here it ends up being a cheap trick. Nearly every character that’s introduced will die. Some die in the same episode they’re introduced. Others are lucky to survive a few more episodes. The game of ‘who will die next?’ may entertain some, but that’s just gruesome RealiTV. It’s easy to recognize who will die and how. Many characters die so Shinichi can grieve over them, feel bad and then not change. He doesn’t have a personality that can change. The result is cheap manipulation of the viewer. Introduce a character, makes us relate to them and then rip their heads off.


There is a little spark, a little energy here. The anime is based on an old manga, and you can see it. The tropes and storytelling style all belongs in an older time, of moral heroes and sci-fi paranoia. It’s another thing that’s almost clever. They could’ve mixed the moral heroism/optimism of Shinichi with the 90’s techno-paranoia that gave us “Spaceman”. There’s no attempt to bridge these two, though. Shinichi is moral for convenience and the darkness is here to shock. He would’ve probably been one of Reznor’s ‘pigs’ with how bland he is, or one of Manson’s Beautiful People.

It’s nice the soundtrack keeps up with the times and gives us Bass Music of all kinds. I love Skrillex and Zomboy and Knife Party and all these. The soundtrack is so good, in fact, that I hope it will make its way to Excision’s Shambhala mixes. Sadly, the few bass drops don’t make up for a shitty story. They make it slightly more bearable.

Parasyte is crap. There’s no way around it. What starts off as fairly bizarre loses its shine quickly. It’s another grimdark anime where people die violently and this is somehow reflective of how terrible life is. Parasyte plays a little more with light and dark, but in the end it all leads back to the abyss. Don’t expect the depths you can get by going to suicide communities though. It’s so much of an abyss as it is a black wall.

1.5 bad Cronenberg movies out of 5