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.hack//Sign brings human approach to anime
.hack//Sign is one of those animes which you can watch as an adult and not feel like you’re indulging an immature guilty pleasure.
Released in 2002, this anime series is one of the few that you can call rather mature (for a cartoon) and possibly profound.
By “mature,” I don’t mean lots of nudity and violence. Instead, I mean the themes and restraint the series shows in telling its story.
.hack//Sign takes place in 2007, two years after an event shuts down the the Internet, causing chaos worldwide which nearly led to a nuclear war.
Yeah, I totally remembered when that happened.
The writers probably would have been better off pulling a version of the Max Headroom “20 minutes in the future” by saying something like “five years from now.” That tends to work a little longer considering we mostly miss those markers when it comes to science fiction. By pulling the Max Headroom trick, you kind of bought yourself an extension until all the stuff in your story actually comes to pass or technology makes it look dated.
