Anime As Prophecy, the Case of Armitage III

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law

I know many of you will be surprised by this, but someone on the Internet likes anime. Now there are several broad categories of anime. The broadest, of course is (1) “What I  Like”, and (2) Crap. However, that isn’t very useful for most discussions, so I will divide the “What I Like” category up a bit. I like anime that makes you think without being preachy. Anime that makes you think is further divided into two categories, Light and Dark. Light, thoughtful anime would include a large swathe of Studio Ghibli (notable exception is Grave of the Fireflies). The other category includes Akira, Ghost In the Shell, Jin-Roh, and Armitage III.

The thing about thoughtful anime is that it brings up questions that retain their relevance over time. The recurring idea of humanity’s relationship to nature, what does it mean to be human, etc, etc.

Armitage III Intro Clip

Armitage III was an OVA put out in 1995. Thankfully, a movie of hacked together scenes was dubbed and released to Americans. This is when I first saw it. This caused me to pick up The Complete Saga, which contains the Original OVA (far superior), the pieced together Poly-Matrix, and the sequel Dual-Matrix.

There are going to be some spoilers here, however, the anime is over two decades old. While I hope you will still watch it, most people won’t.

So, the set-up involves the Human Ross Syllibus and the Android Naomi Armitage. Whenever I see the name Naomi, I have to do a check to see if it's a reference to Jun'ichirō Tanizaki. In this case, it isn't, or at least I don't believe it is. Ross flees to Mars in hopes of dealing with various issues. His partner was killed by cyborgs (or androids) leaving him with a lingering prejudice against both. This is combined with his increasing reliance on various prosthetics as various body parts have a tendency to get blown up in his line of work. This is one of the questions asked by this movie, where is the line between human and non-human. Naomi is the titular character. She is a secret android of a previously unknown type, the Type III (or Thirds). There existence is revealed rather early in the series.

The type III is an android developed with the mental faculties of a human. Actually, from the examples in the Anime, they are actually better than most humans. Their bodies are (ala terminator) flesh and metal. The primary conflict of the series is that someone is killing off the type III androids. These androids had been embedded within society without anyone being the wiser. Those who knew the deceased were shocked to find out that they were androids.

As the story unfolds, we find that a shadowy cabal is doing the killing, Ross gets over his hangups. Armitage gets over hers (”If humans don’t want me, why did they create me?”). They fall in love and they change their names and go into hiding. This sets up things for the sequel.

The shadowy cabal is where it gets interesting. Mars, being a colony, was settled by (mostly) men. Earth had finally achieved the Feminist dream and Feminists were in control. This led to obvious friction between the two planets. Earth had the upper hand however, as without women, there would be no one to bear the next generation of Martians. Shades of "Mars Needs Women", perhaps. Thus the third was invented. Fully sentient gynoids capable of bearing children. It should be noted that they were not ‘enslaved’ nor ‘coerced’. Many were prominent in various artistic and social circles. It seems that none had found mates or produced children (though one of the murdered thirds was pregnant).

As happens with long term projects, things change before they come to fruition. The Martian government came to an accord with the Terran government. The requirement for this reconciliation was the elimination of the threat to the Terran Feminist, the III. The data dump of this is about midway through the fourth and final episode, in case you missed the foreshadowing in the prior three episodes.

Now, I really enjoy the Armitage III anime. As I said, I bought the DVD set. However, what really got me thinking about it was the various diatribes of Feminist anti-Sex Robot rhetoric. A simple Google search will find various opinions on Sexbots and their impact on feminism. MGTOW types view them as detrimental to (latter-stage) feminism, and, given their opposition, later-stage feminism seems to agree.

Now, it has long been recognized that sex is the primary weapon women have over men. It’s been true for centuries. It forms the premise of the Greek play Lysistrada, circa 411 BC. Frankly, men will put up with a lot if the end result is sex. A lot of selfish, self-destructive behavior has been tolerated purely because women decide who they will or will not have sex with. As is common with most socio-political activity, the extreme tends to mobilize the center. Even women who aren’t radical feminists like the idea of more power and authority, so they act in solidarity with the more extreme elements. This has led to an ever increasing set of laws and regulations designed to give more and more agency to women by regulating the one thing men really care about and which they cannot get from anyone else.

Enter the sexbot. Now I remember seeing Real Dolls in the mid/late-90s. I’ve also kept an eye on android research in East Asia. It is rather fascinating, and it was inevitable that these two things would meet. As long as it could be stigmatized as a pet project by low market males that confirms their undesirability, Sexbots could be ignored. However, dissatisfaction with the subjugation of men by women (often codified into law), certain movements (of varying levels of repute) have arisen that called into question whether the refusal to engage in the modern dating game was actually a signifier of low market value. Either way, it seems that, for many men, the limit of what they will put up with for decreasingly satisfying sexual activity has been reached.

"Sex is Boring" clip from Sid & Nancy

So yeah, I don’t really think that an Armitage III scenario will occur within my lifetime, and I doubt that androids capable of reproduction will occur, but I do think that, should the sexbot gain enough traction before the feminists can squash it, it will lead to a radical re-evaluation of male-female relationships. If all a woman offers is sex, sex which can be satisfactorily filled by sexbots, women will have to come up with something else in order to entice men. This may lead to a world where women revert to more traditional roles, or some new expression may be carved out. We may enter a world where high-value men have multiple high value women, and everyone else has sex robots to reduce tensions. Who knows?

To be fair I should probably mention the doomsday scenario. This is the current trend anyway, with sex often being an inadequate substitute for masturbation and the demands of Modernist society (which rates motherhood and children as undesirable) leading to lowered birth rates. There is a concern that sexbots (both male and female) will lead to a world were reproductive needs are sublimated and a viable population is no longer available, in which case, we would stop breeding and the human race will die out. I suppose the question here is how many people are really necessary for a viable population.

Second part of Armitage III intro clip

I Hope you enjoyed these musings.

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Truth is found in the Rubble of Falsehood
Love is the law, love under will

Not really a citation, but this site came to my attention before recording this:
https://campaignagainstsexrobots.org/

Armitage III