Why You Should Watch Parasyte: The Maxim

Parasyte: The Maxim remains one of my absolute favorite shows to this day, and I’d love to rant about it for a quick little minute.

Our main character’s name is Shinichi. We’re introduced to him as this charmingly dorky, slightly awkward teenager in his senior year of high school in Japan. He has a loving father and mother, a close friend/crush named Murano, and an otherwise completely normal life.

There’s these crimes occurring in and around Shinichi’s neighborhood in Japan called the Mincemeat Murders, where people are getting butchered and oftentimes eaten by what the public perceives to be a group of cannibalistic madmen. In truth, a race of strange alien beings is attacking other humans in human bodies. While originally rather small and worm-like in appearance, they are able to completely control human bodies by entering them and consuming the brain, killing the person but leaving their body intact.

An alien enters Shinichi’s window one night and attempts to kill him and take over his body, burrowing itself into his right arm and heading right up the artery to his brain. A very panicked Shinichi is able to stop it by wrapping his earbuds cord around his arm and stopping its path, saving his own life. The parasyte fails to take over his brain in the process, but it is able to eat and gain control over Shinichi’s right arm, making both Shinichi and the alien somewhat of an anomaly to other parasytes and humans.

What follows is the story of a once ordinary boy who now has a curious, creepy, slightly adorable little alien for an arm. The fun and spooky thing about the parasytes in this show is how adaptable they can be. They are shape-shifters, and once they take over a body, they take on a regular human form unless they are fighting, in which they look absolutely horrifying. They are able to open their dead human hosts’ faces and torsos into tendrils of flesh and tissue that can harden or expand however they would like. Personally, for my horror fans, they always reminded me a bit of The Thing.

The alien is able to shift back into the shape of Shinichi’s arm so he can function normally, wanting his host and itself to be able to survive together. Shinichi is repulsed and apprehensive at this, but he is left without much of a choice in the matter. Because the alien has taken over his right arm, he names it Migi, the Japanese word for right.

This set up makes for such a creative and intelligent show. While still carrying its absurdity and humor, the way the themes of trauma, death, delusion, and human morality are delved into throughout the anime is extremely interesting. Migi, who cannot experience human empathy, is often questioning of Shinichi’s soft and emotional nature that drives him to make some of the decisions that he does, and Shinichi is appalled towards the purely logical outlook Migi has on the world around it, detesting its selfish, survivalist nature. However, as both continue to survive and influence each other, they begin to unlock new perspectives and ideals. The relationship between Shinichi and Migi, and this continuous trade of empathetic and logical thought, is so well written and evolves in the very best way.

This is one of the best television shows—not just of anime, but of all time—that I have ever seen. The horror elements, the characterizations, the dialogue, the themes and how creatively and cleverly they are touched on in the series—Parasyte: The Maxim truly has it all.

Thanks for reading! 🖤