Gatchaman Crowds is remarkably ambitious for a single-cour series, managing to cram in an engaging and surprising story full of unique and incredibly atypical characters while exploring many unusual themes and ideas in the space of 12 episodes.

Bearing the same name as an ancient sci-fi anime franchise yet having basically no connection to it in any way, Gatchaman Crowds revolves around a group of young superheroes (of the regular-ish people who transform style) chosen by a quiet and mysterious God-like individual, an obscenely popular and powerful social network that encourages and rewards individuals using their unique abilities to help others known as GALAX, and an insane, maniacal villain who aims to destroy the entire world, all set in a very near-future Japan. There haven’t really been any stories I’ve encountered that got it.Įnter Gatchaman Crowds.

But despite social media’s importance and prominence, I can’t help but feel that there haven’t really been any meaningful attempts to explore and utilise it in fiction, to make it a core concept and central theme of an entire narrative.

The signal-to-noise ratio is abysmal, of course, but the way that society is now more connected and linked than ever before, and how information can propagate globally within minutes as a result, is nothing short of fascinating and unprecedented. It’s an undeniable fact that the social and information structure of the current world has been dominated by social media – by the desire to share and opine from people of all walks of life and social stature.

Gatchaman crowds