From the writer behind the famous against convention Madoka series, Gen Urobuchi returns with this brutal series. I personally recommend this series because watching it felt like forensic psychology, abnormal psychology and creative psychology made into an anime. There are criminals that are highly intelligent and provocative in their execution (literally and metaphorically of how they are animated and how they speak). The series is littered with literary references both from the East and West, my favourite being anything Proustian.

The story of Psycho-Pass takes place in cyberpunk future, in which the technology to read people's psychological dispositions is available. The city is run by the Sybil system, a system that takes into account one's psychological disposition and ability to give people the jobs that most suit them and judges people that aren't worthy to participate in society. The police force, known as Inspectors and their cohorts, known as Enforcers, are armed with guns known as Dominators, with the ability to read criminal latency. Enforcers themselves are individuals with highly psychologically unstable states, or latency states. They have the mens rea to genuinely become criminals, but have yet to actually commit any crimes. The enforcer characters all have the potential to be locked away for good, but have chosen to use the fact that 'they can think like a criminal' to hunt down actual criminals, individuals that have actually comitted crimes. Deviants from society, or rather potential deviants from society with high chances of addiction, murder, self harm, so on so forth are locked away by the Sybil system at a young age in the norm of this society. Sybil is in reality a dystopian society because even without the Actus Rea (the act of breaking the law, or murder) individuals can be locked away for life.

Now onto the actual plot of the story, the series follows the story of Akane Tsunemori a new inspector to the team and she finds herself uneasy at treating the Enforcers as anything less than human. She stands as the idealistic voice of 'human nature is inherently good' philosophical adherent. Shinya Kogami is the Enforcer she's been assigned to watch over, and he reveals that he was once an inspector, but the psychological stress of trauma of losing one of his officers and not being able to resolve that one case has demoted him to enforcerhood. He also is a deviant in that he refuses to rely on his gun alone  or the sybil system itself in determining a criminal's future actions, because he uses statistical methods and criminal profiling methods that have been outlawed because of the stress of taking these university courses. (Trust me, it takes a course on genocide and learning to be able to eat lunch through such a course in terms of desensitation for me to in real life even sit through the forensics psychology classes at University of Toronto without feeling squeemish) The professor he goes to is out of work because of his specialization in criminal profiling, it breaks my heart watching that episode to imagine my own professor out of commission because of his skillset being outlawed.

The Dominator guns have a single flaw, that is actually correct in terms of my textbook material. If it is relying on fMRI scan technology, then based off of current research, the ability to experience emotion is something that psychopaths in real life are unable to do. Quite literally, a real life scan of the lobes responsible for emotions (well the connections between frontal lobe and what not) will be black. Where you should see emotional information, there will be nothing. The guns going pitch black from fluorescent blue is accurate.

This makes Makishima, the highly charismatic and main villain of the series all the more interesting. The Dominator guns will not work on a psychopath (if there's nothing going on in the brain, then why would they murder? THERE IS NO WHY). I suspect the guns would also not work on a sociopath (sociopaths would only commit crimes if it benefited them in terms of rank, status, or monetary gain so yes the 'socio' in sociopath is an indicator to what it means plus they are capable of the emotion of Pride, so that's an indicator of possible emotional ability), but that's besides the point.

If Akane is representation of the ideal- that one can follow the laws and lead a relatively happy life within the Sybil system, then Kogami is one that recognizes the laws need to be changed ot achieve a true ideal, and will genuinely go out of his way to prove this in friendly banter. Whereas Makishima recognizes that he does not fit in society, even if the Sybil system did not exist, it will not change the fact he does not feel, so his crimes are complicated by the fact he has no mens rea. Makishima breaks laws not necessarily to prove a point like Kogami, he breaks them because he CAN. IF there was a WHY, he wouldn't be a psychopath!

One watches this series not because of the violence, one watches this series in hopes that Urobuchi the writer has a sense of reality through examining distopia. He has been creating violent anime after violent anime. So with the intention to see if he voices through Akane, a voice of a positive potential and goodness of humanity being a liberal ironist, rather than a liberal idealist, most fans watch this series in hopes that season 2 will show her transformation from ideal to ironist as a positive one, not a negative one.

As an aside, some fans just watch the series because they were fans of the Hitman Reborn artist. Or some will watch it because Urobuchi goes out of his way to break convention, this is not a cute large eyed rainbows and unicorn anime, this is a genuine Film Noir opening by The Animators behind the RedLine movie (the completely handrawn it took 7 years to complete anime about racing) and grim tale about the potential in all of us to be terrible human beings and how to combat bystander apathy. Do not and I mean this DO NOT stand there with your cellphone recording a murder like the characters do in this series, DO not upload it to youtube or niconicodouga, CALL THE POLICe if something like that happens THEN DO THE RECORDING TO SUBMIT IF POSSIBLE AS EVIDENCE IN A COURT OF LAW. That's the main message of this series and I stick to it as a psychology major, this is the MESSAGE *I* personally hope people take away from this amazingly dark anime.

I have no idea how they can possibly trump season 1, but because it's Urobuchi as a writer, anything is possible!