I’ve started watching Casshern: Sins, a new series from the Fall 2008 line-up.  It’s a bleak rewrite of the original Casshern story that started out as a serial  Kodansha’s “Terebi Magazine” and Akita Shoten’s “Boken Oh”  and was given the animation treatment in 1973 wTwNjzVFVU

Taking a page out of the “Gundam Guide to Writing for Animation”, “Casshern: Sins” completely discards the established continuity.  In the original story, Casshern (aka Tetsuya Azuma) is a human-turned-cyborg superhero who teams up with a beautiful girl named Luna and a robot dog named Friender to rid the world of rampaging robots lead by the villainous Braiking Boss.

These robots were originally created for the betterment of the world and humankind by Casshern’s late father, Dr. Azama.  But the robots came to the conclusion that in order to restore the Earth’s ecosystems and to make the world a better place, humankind must be destroyed.  (Hard to argue with that logical conclusion. ;-)  Together with Luna and Friender, Casshern defends humanity against the robots and fights to stop Braiking Boss once and fo rall.

However, in Casshern: Sins, things aren’t so rosy.  The world has been destroyed.  Humankind is on the very brink of extinction thanks to the robots.  But Robotkind itself is dying due to an “affliction” called “The Ruin” which rapidly breaks down their components.

And it’s all Casshern’s fault… or so he’s been told.  But Casshern has absolutely no memory of his identity, let alone what had happened to the world.    All he knows is that everyone, everywhere is out to kill him (partly due to a rumour that his body will stop “The Ruin” in any robot or android that ‘devours’ him) and that he may have been responsible for the murder of a young woman who might have been able to stop the cataclysm.

So how the hell did things go so wrong?

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