When a monster called “Monad Proxy” at the heart of a labyrinthine city awakens, Real Mayar’s subsequent investigation leads her out of the shining utopia she’d always known. If you’re a student of classical myth, I suspect you’re already paying attention. Knowing a deeply philosophical anime involving viruses, artificial intelligence, life extension research, and robots that isn’t ‘Ghost In The Shell‘ is out there certainly brightened my weekend.

Vincent Law is an immigrant, apparently from another domed city much like Romdo, who applies for a job working as an enforcer taking out robots who become infected with the ‘Cogito virus.’ As the show progresses, it is revealed that these infected robots go off to find themselves once thus infected, and Vincent uncovers the path these infected robots take out of the domed city.
No model citizen would want to step foot outside the dome, for fear of the strange and unexplained threats that lurked in the devastated environment. Autoraves, or robots, are everywhere, and even each investigator has an ‘Entourage’ which can be ridden, and flying robots equipped with heavy machine guns patrol the exterior of the dome killing any humans they find. Against this background, even more turmoil is evident in the politics of the city itself. Rivalry between Citizen Intelligence Bureau and Citizen Security Bureau has approached positively Shakespearian proportions.

Inspector Real Mayer of the Citizen Intelligence Bureau is the granddaughter of the Regent, and when a monster follows her home and attacks her in her bathroom, she decides to find it and kill it. Being Granddaughter of the most powerful figure in the city provides her with the best equipment, but she finds her every move is blocked by the Citizen Security Bureau. Her Grandfather is the Regent Donov Mayer, who rules the city from the shadows, through the use of four robot proxies named Derrida, Lacan, Husserl, and Berkeley. Real’s chief physician, Daedalus Yumeno, continues these references by having robots named Deleuze and Guattari. While we never see Real’s Grandfather, we do see plenty of Daedalus, and over time his relationship to the strange monster Real encounters in the first episode becomes more clear. The cultural references are a continuous treat, and placards at the end of each episode are worth pausing on to read about various reference that are made. (Hell, I keep expecting to see Daedalus tie an ant to a string.)

Here’s something else I find interesting. Throughout the series, the subtitles have Real’s name spelled just like that, “Real” but in all the wikipedia entries, and subtly shown in the anime itself, she is referred to as ‘Re-l’ as if she might not be quite ‘real’ in the truest sense.

While this conceit was sparkling new in ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep‘ it’s been appropriated as a trope of a genre. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex tackled this topic but only in extension and never consciously. Ergo Proxy embraces this as a central theme and does so with an ambiguity that is clever and engaging. It’s a profound meditation on the nature of existence and the origin of value, while smuggling in that high-brow philosophy shit under cartoon violence and those unsettlingly strange monsters you’d expect in anime.

All of this resonates nicely in the overall plot and the theme of anamnesis that is woven throughout the show, and the visual cues of psychological reveries are even built into the subtitles. Incidents that take place within the character’s minds are subtitled in blue, while characters in dialogs speak in white subtitles if they are on screen, or yellow if they are off. So check it out… And watch closely.

Episodes 1-3 with descriptions from wikipedia:

Episode 1


Written by Dai Sato




When a series of mysterious attacks involving Cogito infected AutoReivs occur, Re-l is assigned to investigate, and encounters a humanoid monster known as Proxy.

Episode 2


Written by Yusuke Asayama & Dai Sato




Re-l struggles to convince her peers of her encounters with Proxy. Meanwhile, Vincent finds himself on the run from the city’s authorities.

Episode 3


Written by Yusuke Asayama & Dai Sato




Romdo is no longer a safe haven. Vincent is shown the way to the outside world by the infected AutoReiv Pino, and Re-l struggles to uncover the true nature of Vincent’s involvement with Proxy.

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