Even that one about literal terrorists ends up changing absolutely nothing about society.
Red Sails: The Swerve
Anti-Communism is deeply embedded in the publishing industry in Japan
That being said, some revolutionary optimism sneaks by, I’ve heard One Piece is good.
article link, it’s a good short read
I tried One Piece, but Usopp’s face is way too gonk-adjacent for me to be able to tolerate it
Maybe manga, but anime is expensive to produce and investors need to green-light it. Thus the closest thing to revolutionary ideas being proven right can’t make the investors look like the bad guy that can be defeated.
It would be nice if China did though. I’d love to see a fantasy setting undergo a socialist revolution. Utilizing the magic of the world to advance the forces of production for factories and threw the craftsman mages under the bus to produce magical items in magical factories. The experience alienation. Land use policies change to farm magical animals like unicorns for their magical ingredients in factory farms. Clerics and Paladins that serve gods of wealth drive out all of the indigenous druids and shamans to extract from the land without giving back. Even in death, the workers are not freed from the capitalist system. The exploitation of the workers makes it difficult to pay for things, so when a loved one dies, their body is sold to a necromancer to do eternal mindless labor in the factories to assemble non magical items or till the fields.
The spiritual death of the world offends the goddess of the planet and she strikes back with plagues and storms to undermine the human supremacist, unsustainable ways of capitalism. But the ingenuity of creating magic and technologies can hold the world goddess’s power at bay. Thus she has cast out the ability for magic to work in this planet in many ways. Arcane magic still works, but magic of the gods can’t enter her realm. However some people can cast divine magic spells, but it is only because they work in her favor. She no longer tolerates the gods that even the artificers admit are destroying the world. Those most exploited by capitalism sometimes gain a blessing of the godess, but they must hide this from authorities. It is up to the workers exploited by the system to use their power, whether blessed by the goddess or not to change the world as it is to one that serves the all sentient races and in harmony with nature.
Afaik none, even if there is more or less revolutionary idea or character presented as positive, at some point class collaboration is always presented as the only possibly good outcome. So, more or less like entirety of capitalist media.
Code Geass never discarded its anticolonialist theming
But it never be anything more than wearing anti-colonialism as a theme though. All the anti-colonialism movements are brain dead backward monarchist and other feudal alliance who got infiltrated by a white savior figure that took over the movement for personal benefits. It even tried to frame Japan as a victim of colonialism and imperialism while having no understanding of how brutal actual colonialism is. Worst of all, at the end of the show it was just two cliques of the world super imperialist power duking it out with nukes to see who’s the world emperor, which the white savior guy decided should be his sister.
It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
