This show is a tough one to summarize – it’s told very much like Boogiepop Phantom. That is to say, each episode tells both its own story and part of a greater hole, which are linked by tangents. At least this time around the show tends to move forward in time episode over episode. This does, however, mean that there are loads and loads of characters that bring loads and loads of plots.
The first episode concerns Tsukiko Sagi, a character designer in something of a slump after producing a mega hit. One night, on her way home from work, she becomes the first victim of the mysterious assailant that comes to be known as Shounen Bat.
Shounen Bat is the thread that holds Paranoia Agent together, a figure who appears as a young boy wearing golden roller skates and a ball cap and wielding a crooked golden baseball bat. He appears and clobbers individuals, then disappears, which becomes something of the mystery’s core. Initially, the police pursuing the case suspect Tsukiko of staging the whole thing, mostly because (like a lot of characters in this show) she doesn’t seem quite alright upstairs. In her case, we see her talking to a plush of her famous character, and her dialogues with others are rather disjointed.
The appearance of a second victim, a sleazy tabloid reporter who was hounding Tsukiko, doesn’t exactly clear her but it does create more of a phenomenon. She and the cops will maintain relevance a bit better than most.
The second episode concerns a young boy who goes by Ichi. He’s got every gift in life but a nasty spoiled personality behind it. Unfortunately for him, he’s a dead ringer for the rumored attributes of Shounen Bat (down to having golden skates) which causes his narcissistic dream life to start to fall apart when his classmates suspect and bully him. He fixates on a kid who’s basically his exact opposite – overweight, perhaps a little slow, but very kind – as the mastermind of his downfall, until Shounen Bat goes and attacks said one-sided rival. This leads to Ichi having a total psychotic breakdown before he, too, is attacked by Shounen Bat.
The next starts with a woman who we saw as Ichi’s tutor. We find out that she lives a double life as a prostitute… mostly because she has multiple personality and her other identity enjoys it. Her relationship with her other self decays over their irreconcilable values as life tries to look up for her with things like a good marriage, until she ends up literally fighting herself, taking the battle out into the street where Shounen Bat finishes it.
Here, we start to get a more nuanced picture: most if not all the characters who get attacked by Shounen Bat are going through something that the experience of being attacked appears to resolve for them. The artist in a slump is given a reason to reboot. Ichi is finally exonerated. The tutor is strongly implied to have been rid of her troublesome alternate persona. The scummy reporter and the heavy kid seem to have been part of wishes granted to Tsukiko and Ichi, but all the same this random act of violence stops looking quite so random.
The next focal character is a corrupt cop being extorted by organized crime, pushing him to commit crimes himself. The pattern changes when he doesn’t go down to one hit from Shounen Bat, and actually fights back and subdues the kid, arresting our erstwhile phantom.
This leads us to following Shounen Bat through his interrogation, as he seems to see the world as a jrpg in which he’s the hero, saving the world from the dreaded Gohma, working in figures like the old man and homeless lady seen briefly earlier (in addition to the victims) as characters from the game. And just because, this is told more and more in the style of what Shounen Bat seems to see.
This directs them to the homeless woman, who claims that Tsukiko attacked herself and there was no original Shounen Bat, despite the apprehended one seemingly confessing to every attack except that one. They confront her, but as they do she seems to be struck by a phantom force. This runs in parallel with the story of the corrupt cop’s daughter, who discovers that dad hid a camera to take creeper pictures of her and ran away from home… on the night of a typhoon. She’s ultimately attacked, seemingly by a different Shounen Bat, and loses her memories of her former life in the process.
The next episode follows the cops, particularly the junior of the duo who lends more credence to the strangeness of the case. The Shounen Bat suspect claims to be a copycat responsible only for the attacks on the fat kid and the crooked cop, of which the former is an outlier since the fat kid wasn’t in emotional distress. He comes up with the theory that the real Shounen Bat is a phantom at large, only to have it confirmed when the faker is killed in custody and the real one roller skates into a wall. However, this is logged as a suicide, the cops are forced to resign, and it seems like the police will be off the Shounen Bat case after.
The next episode follows a suicidal trio. They met online, and the adult men are a bit disturbed that their third is a little girl. They fail to die a few times, sometimes by happenstance other times by trying to keep her out of it, and ultimately end up encountering Shounen Bat, now beginning to be thought of as a phantom. Their eagerness to see the potential killer specter sends him running.
As they continue their fun little journey seemingly still intent on the grave, it’s implied the three may already be ghosts based on some reactions to them photobombing. The show does not explain.
After that we get an anthology episode of stories being told by the local gossips (and the younger housewife who doesn’t quite fit in with the group) all about the mysterious manifestations of Shounen Bat, ending when the harangued wife goes home and finds her husband has been beaten within an inch of his life by Shounen Bat, only for her to be violently obsessed with the story rather than concerned for his wounds.
If that wasn’t enough of a ghost story, the next is an overworked anime production team being picked off one by one by Shounen Bat as they finish their roles.
At this point, I’ll take a moment to say that the pattern being seen here struck me as something much like a much later product – In/Spectre, specifically the Steel Lady Nanase arc. Shounen Bat’s first appearances were fake, or caused minimal lasting damage. Now, as his legend has grown, he’s striking more often, with less provocation, and often fatally. His seemingly ghostly powers have grown from a lad with a baseball bat to a full-fledged slasher along with his fame, and this time there’s no Iwanaga to explain the seeming monster of the imagination away.
Again, the show itself gives no answers… at least for a while. It does ultimately confirm the concept that Shounen Bat is given form and power by the rumors about him.
The next concerns the elder of the two (former) cops and his ill wife. Shounen Bat appears to the latter, but she… talks him down, and he seems unable to harm her since she’s gained the resolve to move forward in life even when (per rumors) he swells from child to monstrous hulk. The police office, feeling the sting of losing his purpose, may not be so lucky, becoming lost in a sort of dream world.
At this point, we hit episode twelve of thirteen, which is where the show starts to pull things together. We start with the hulking monster Shounen Bat having a battle with a mysterious swordsman.
The swordsman is actually the younger cop, gone full Chuuni because when you need to fight a monster of the imagination and can’t dispel it from popular consciousness, imagination is the next best weapon. He discovers that while the mascot Maromi is based on the lighter parts of Tsukiko’s childhood, namely a beloved pet, Shounen Bat is seemingly conjured from an attack she suffered as a child, making them two sides of the same coin, both now corrupting humanity.
This comes to a head as Shounen Bat once again meets his maker, now in a far more terrible form. Maromi takes her to the dream world, while our would-be hero, having tracked down most of the truth, is able to wield it against Shounen Bat. Unfortunately, Shounen Bat seems to enter its final form as Maromi vanishes from the mortal world, appearing as clouds of darkness that begin to swallow up everything, moving to seemingly apocalyptic events.
The elder cop’s dying wife manages to meet him in the dream world, and her goodbye gives him the strength to shatter it, returning both himself and Tsukiko to reality. There, the dark form of Shounen Bat continues to swallow up the world. Finally, in the depths, the designer is forced to face the truth: that she invented Shounen Bat as a way to cope with the fact that her beloved dog, Maromi, died to her inattention, and she feared her strict father’s wrath. Once she accepts her pain, Shounen Bat at long last vanishes, leaving behind a Tokyo in ruins likened to the aftermath of war.
Two years later, the city is mostly rebuilt, dogs are out, cats are in, some folks we know seem to be settled into new lives, and our chuuni ex-cop is now the madman scrawling formulas in the hospital parking lot, shocked by some new revelation before playing us out with a hint that history may repeat itself
The end. If you have questions, like how one person had the power to form this all-destroying monster of fear, or what the meaning is of all the folks who seem to be tied into it when it came from one girl’s internal world… keep asking, but don’t anticipate a straight answer.
This show has a… very particular energy. Though older than some of the examples I’d give, I’d say it has the storytelling of Boogiepop Phantom, the content of In/Specter’s Steel Lady Nanase, and a little salt from Chaos;Head towards the end. Season with extra madness to taste.
I’ll be honest – Paranoia Agent has been a show that’s been on my radar since I first started really digging into Anime, and it came with a certain reputation for being dark, twisted, psychological, borderline impenetrable, and pretty solid despite that last one.
Honestly, it lived up to all those points.
While I can say the themes and style do have similar numbers, this is ultimately a very unique show. The elements coordinate with each other to create this deep experience of unease and unreality. It makes you feel adrift and unsure of its reality without ever really losing you, which is a delicate line to walk. If a show is too strange, or doesn’t seem to have rules or a consistent theme, viewers just reject it. Paranoia Agent is just consistent enough to take you on the trip it wants to take you on.
While I respect its artistry, I do think that the show has its blemishes. It’s often hard to connect with its characters, which when their inner worlds are so important is a problem, and the ending does occasionally feel like they wrote themselves into a corner, having a great idea for how Shounen Bat would grow but less in terms of how he’d be taken down.
For all that, Paranoia Agent gets an A from me. All things considered, it was worth the hype.