I think that the best anime and perhaps just the best media period regardless of what they actually leave you with. Make you feel as though youve learned something profoundmaybe even lifechangingby watching them. The 2011 TV anime Black Rock Shooter is one such property. Combining an absurd amount of talent under one roof for its alltoobrief 8 episode run BRS is a masterclass in welding theme to presentation. While the literal central point of the plot isnt introduced until a bit later the actual focus of Black Rock Shooter is emotion and not just any amount or kind of emotion very raw very exaggerated emotion and a lot of it more seasoned anime fans than myself would be able to guess this simply by seeing Mari Okadas name in the credits as the scriptwriter. Most anime that have serious narrative arcs deal with emotions in some way shape or form and theyre usually fairly stylized so this in of itself is not abnormal. What kind of is though is the sheer unrepentant melodrama that Black Rock Shooter presents and the degree to which it intertwines that with its themes. This is simultaneously the series hook and I must imagine the thing that drives the most people away from it. If youre not able to get a handle on the shows very intense emotional barrages it can be hard to sit through it at all much less enjoy it. So this is a doubleedged sword but make no mistake Black Rock Shooter absolutely would not work without it. To put it plainly a lot of shows have emotional torque BRS has an emotional jackhammer. Negative emotions sadness despair anguish loneliness are often conveyed through exaggerated despairing facial expressions painedsometimes wrenched or even shriekedvoice acting and a soundtrack that sometimes borders on the avantgarde often forgoing simple ambience in favor of deliberately overwrought or poundingly percussive piano or string pieces or disorienting hardtoidentify dissonance. There is also a lot of crying lovinglyanimated beautiful crying. Chipper protagonist Mako shy artistic Yomi damaged willfully hurtful Kagari the enigmatic Yu and school counselor Saya all let tears fall more than once. There are definitely shows sadder than Black Rock Shooter but few shove their characters emotional problems in your face with this much gusto. And all of this ties into an overarching theme of surrogate pain. The audience is subjected to this as much as the characters themselves are and this is put front and center by the battles. About half of BRS takes place in a twisted surreal gothic otherworld inhabited by alternate versions of the characters who fight and die so that their human hosts dont have to sufferthough if they do die their hosts suffer amnesia something that comes into play in the series second half. The otherworld is beautifully designed massive gears chessboard patterns colossal iron rubiks cubes seas of lava and metal skeletons give the place a look that rests somewhere on the same block as a heavy metal album cover but feels fully livedin despite how comparatively little information were fed about it. The fight scenes it must be said are remarkable. CGI gets a bad reputation and its often unfairly associated with budgetless schlock like the 2016 Berserk anime but here it is used to incredible effect. The otherworld is done almost entirely in CGI and the combat here is well above par when compared to just about anything from the last decade. Theyre visceral too the other selves natures as literal standins for emotional trauma seem all the more real when theyre stabbing each other and technicolor blood goes spraying in four different directions. This is to say nothing of the surreal brutality of the weapon designs which often evolve and twist in strange ways from scene to scene sometimes changing shape entirely such as when Strengths Dr. Octopusesque bionic arms turn into a sort of railgun as she whales on Black Rock Shooter herself. And when they dont do that they stretch the definition of weapon to its very limits see Deadmasters undead army capped by a pair of gigantic floating glowing green skulls. This is Black Rock Shooters entire point really. The violent ballet of fight scenes as code for human emotional struggle. The more Mato and the other girls avoid confronting their problems the harder the other selves fight and the more they risk losing their memories and while the literal threat of induced amnesia is obviously not a real one on a less concrete level this applies very much to the real world too it doesnt take a psych major to know that suppressing your emotions isnt very good for you. The theme is revisited repeatedlymost frequently through the inuniverse childrens book The Little Playful Birdand through the abstraction rings crystal clear up until the finale. One of the very last scenes where Mato just out and out squeezes Yomi and cries all over her is emotionally cathartic in a way that a lot of media tries to be but only rarely is the mark hit this well. So is BRS ultimately just a very longwinded metaphor for the power of honesty and a good cry? Well yes and no. Simple resonant themes are worthless if they dont resonate. But its hard especially in 2017 to not feel for Strength whimpering that the real world is scary and in a cultural environment where more than ever we are encouraged to put on fronts and appear to be people were not in order to appease others let it be said that millennials are masters of codeswitching its surprisingly poignant. Combine that with fight scenes that foreshadowed what Kill la Kill would do just a few years later and some of the best CGI the mediums ever seen and its genuinely difficult to not recommend Black Rock Shooter to anyone who can process its emotional extremeness.