You make tthis series sound very interesting, but much like my refusal to watch Zoids: Genesis, I don't do "darker and edgier".

it's not really "darker/edgier", they are very careful to avoid getting /too heavy/ too fast. It's more like a better animated, better quality Digimon series aimed towards an "older" audience which grew up with the original and has fond nostalgia for it. As a result: they gave it more nuance.

Unlike Genesis: which was just weird and "trying" to be darker within a framework that doesn't allow much of it.

Digimon Tri is basically decently-written fanservice. But it does require patience. The pacing is a little "Soap-opera-like" at first.

I forgot what Donnie Darko was like, I watched it "Pre-enlightened" -- it was a pre-2012 thing when I watched so anything I seen before then I think I totally blanked on.

Did not know that the Bunny was like an Angelic entity, didn't know He was anything but a creepy furry in a costume.

Thought the Jet Plane was just like a Surreal Alternate universe thing that was the real reality and the whole day He had in the real movie was dreamed and He died pointlessly because it was one of those "And life is just like that sometimes" things.

According to the director's commentary, it was intended to be closed-loop time travel with free will, where Donnie decides to sacrifice himself rather than go through an endless, month-long "Groundhog Day" that ends with tons of people dying (and him shooting somebody) over and over again. The bunny in that was (according to director Richard Kelley in the commentary) indeed, intended to be an agent of divine intervention, sort of like a "check engine" light put up by the universe indicating that something broke. Which is considerably less existentialist than it seems. From what I've seen in anime, this sort of ending is not unheard-of. I feel like anime has been struggling with the transition from postmodernism (existentialist/nihilist basis + reality-questioning and shock factor, like Ghost in the Shell and Paranoia Agent or literally all of Satoshi Kon's filmography) to post-postmodern (metamodern) because the whole "constant crisis, reason tempered by faith, Joe Campbell language of mythos reconstruction" thing was something that they were already doing by the time it became en vogue in the west. The struggle they had was in how to create novelty, when all the formulae are layer bare like that. Although, I think it may just be a waiting game. Since the way the academic Metamodern in the west has veered politically Left, to a tremendous fault (for example, Slavoj Zizek referring to literally anything and everything as "violence", among other things). The Japanese Metamodern has not, or more specially cannot go so far left, because Marx does not work as a messianic figure in Japan, and their insulated history produced a ton of home-spun mythology which is more accessible to them than the mythology in Marxism, which at best, has to be heavily modified to work, but loses much of it's potency because it has very little to offer in a developed, homogenous country that is very efficient at communicating its values. Of course, I'm reading into this too much, but in Digimon Tri, the only rationale ever mentioned by the Big Bad was that he wanted to "Liberate" digimon from the regular world, even at the cost of the existence of both, because of a perceived power struggle of cultures (humans use things, digimon enable them to do so, and absorb their ways in the process) - which sounds like a Japanese critique of metamodern marxism's tendency to value culture over people's well-being (where "integration" and cultural mixing are labelled as a form of "violence" in the Slavoj Zizek sense of the term, which includes things like listening to music in another language or buying a Baja hoodie or literally any form of communication between two or more people with different ethnic composition no matter how benign or indirect. Really it's nuts.)

It seems my length filter broke. That's what happens when I post early.

Well, I can't disagree about the Postmodernists.

I can kind of disagree with The Reasons that The Japanese can't adopt Marxism -- because it's mainly because it's at heart a Godless Philosophy with Faux Messianic elements to attempt to hack the religious tradition to impose a new societal model of collective idealism.

And that this kind of is because The Japanese are still loosely kind of religious as encapsulated in this Japanese joke about how japanese are "Shintoist at births, Christians at weddings, Buddhist at funerals." And loosely move between any ideology that allows them some conceptual grounding.

Besides that, I think Zizek should probably change the definition He has of violence and refer to all instances of actual violence as violence and all "memetic" violence like you describe Him describing as "Meta-violence" -- since it's only really Metaphorical at the very least or Metaphysical at the very most.

He's actually sounding less Marxist and more Nietzschean to my meta-ears, I know the difference because I'm headlong into the N-man's thought-wells.

I like the concept "Metamodern" -- even though on some level I think Post-post-modernism feels like it's just a recursion to Modernism if it's anything like how Dadaism became Surrealism/Stuckism and later engendered Bulldada. -- Don't know though, don't know the Ideological basis of Modernism by heart you know.

Like at some point of adding Anti- after anti- it becomes ridiculous, not sure if that works with Post- and post- though obviously.

I have to say I think on some level valuing culture over well-being is necessitated if it means longer-term well-being for future generations.

But this seems more like an Individualistic issue, since a Collective Ideology would only ever be concerned with Utilitarianism - so like, Ideal Capitalism and Ideal Communism kind of form two halves of the same coin in my mind.

I kind of would say I value culture over well-being in myself, but then again I'm also only imposing that on myself -- in a group framework I could see telling people to promote "wellbeing" since it would naturally allow people who value culture above wellbeing to push against Utilitarianism for themselves.

Of course, that fact is also what makes me extremely misanthropic, cynical, sarcastic and sardonic and hateful, but hey, that's just me.

I had to parse this down, it was ten times longer than what you see here, so that's why it might seem disjointed.