In my “old age” (which I recognize is a completely ludicrous thing to say as a thirty four year old), I don’t watch nearly as much anime as I used to, and when I do partake, it tends to be of the dub-variety because I am fidgety and have an innate desire to multi-task and subbed media requires my full attention.

Mind you, while I am watching less subbed anime these days, I do make it a point to watch at least one per season, and right now that series is Digimon: Beatbreak.

I have been a fan of the Digimon franchise ever since Adventures 01 and have followed most of its major incarnations and movies, but Beatbreak felt different, and it’s not just because the protagonist Tomoro wears glasses instead of the usual heroic goggles.

A large part of it is that my relationship to technology has shifted greatly in the last five years due to the advent of generative AI, a sentence I am tired of typing, but one that continues to remain true so it continues to be spat out. But back in 1999, Digimon represented the more abstract concept of “what if all of the electronic data from computers existed in a digital world that you could interact with” and in 2025, Digimon are now the practical concept of digital monsters born from aberrant glitches to adaptive personality based technology literally called e-pulse that is used in conjunction with large scale surveillance state devices and now you must reckon with the implications of destroying what is seemingly sentient life that literally works off the life force of humans.

It reads a little differently.

Now of course, in fiction, Digimon are actually sentient life that can exist in symbiosis with their partners and they aren’t stochastic parrots. But that’s incidental to the thing I actually wanted to talk about, so pardon the tangent.

No, the thing that amused me the most while watching the first few episodes of Digimon: Beatbreak is that in a world where technology is so advanced living organisms can manifest from data and project portals to a whole different dimension, so much of the villainous things happening in the show are crimes that are happening in the real world right now just without the aid of digital monsters.

Semiconductor theft from trucks. Forcing out residents of a town for real estate. Kidnapping.

This is a world where enough biometric data has been collected and compiled that you get personalized meal plans in school, have access to all of your information in a convenient slightly bigger than the typical pocket egg, and photo-realistic hologram technology, and all of the crime that we’re exposed is so entirely run of the mill.

And the funny thing is, this isn’t even the first anime to deal with emotionally adaptive technology where the biggest crimes happening are banal things like real estate.

I’m talking about Psycho Pass (season 3, specifically).

If you’re unfamiliar:

1) Psycho Pass is set in a dystopian world where a person’s likelihood to commit a crime is determined by their Crime Coefficient, one of the many components of the titular Psycho Pass. As a byproduct, most of the world is structuring around the monitoring of individuals’ hues.

2) Seasons 1 and 2 are largely about murders and conspiracy. Season 3 is largely about corporations pulling scams, including real estate inflation.

3) The OPs are bangers, but particularly this one.

Psycho Pass as a whole is a much darker and mature franchise than Digimon, and there is a lot more nuance about how its adaptive personality-centric technology plays into the greater schemes of government and the wealthy elite, who literally use the system to gamble with people’s lives at a distance. To say nothing about the Eliminators or Mental Trace, or the general question of what is a reasonable price to pay for a “greater good.”

I guess what strikes me as interesting is that these series, six years apart, and probably other series as well can show how fantastical the world is capable of being and how utterly unimaginative crime motivated by capitalism can be. Or maybe it’s how utterly effective crime motivated by capitalism continues to be even with all of the technological advancements.

And perhaps, one day I’ll look at the crimes happening now in the ever evolving landscape of modern day technology, but today, I just wanted to be amused by the fact that I’ve seen two series with adaptive personality technology as a central point of world building, and real estate crime being a plot point.