User:Darkclaw91/sandbox

Production

Themes

Psycho-Pass explores many societal and psychological themes, such as the price of living without stress, as the majority of Japanese society does not experience much stress. According to Moar Powah!, the "serenity from the system and from a “removal of stress” or a removal of any ambition results in the vegetables states people enter from abuse of the psycho-therapy". Since those who think of doing anything that could cause other stress are quickly punished by the Sibyl System, the concept of punishing someone because they have the potential to do something considered wrong is explored multiple times. Questioning if punishing someone for having potential to do what society considers to be bad is explored in the first episode where a woman is raped and due to her trauma, her Psycho-Pass is raised and the police prepare to kill her for it. In response, the woman reacts violently against the police with only Akane's intervention saving her. As Anime News Network states, "We are all capable of doing bad things at times – should we be punished because we thought of hurting someone before we act on it? Or because we were victims? It really all comes back to that first episode and Akane's reaction to the victim who presented as a violent criminal".

The theme of emotional repression is also heavily present in Psycho-Pass. The judgment of who is a latent criminal is shown to be partially based around not feeling emotions that society judges as negative, such as sadness or anger. To avoid being judged a latent criminal, one must not feel these emotions heavily when outside where their Psycho-Pass can be scanned. Kotaku states that "because of these scans, Psycho-Pass shows an interesting future where "mental beauty" is as sought after as physical beauty. It is also a future where the police's job is little more than to watch the latent criminals they control—because if they did any real detective work, they might start to think like the criminals they are trying to catch and thus become latent criminals themselves." Many of the main characters in Psycho-Pass also feel nostalgia throughout the series. The many references to older literature, philosophy, music and theatre create a "nostalgic world building for a time before psycho-passes".