I have been reading a lot of manhwuas lately, especially after the cancellation of windbreaker after the said scandal that occured. It's been on my top list of manhwuas to begin with and hearing that news made me pick up the hobby immediately. But I'm about to talk about something else, a show, an animated one. Pantheon. I've watched a lot of animes, a lot of series, alot of animated series, but somehow this one was able to get its way up to my top three series with best season ones. Pantheon was that show, well, until they decided to rush season two. But it deserves the credit. A good show is a good show, irrespective of a fall off along the way.
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Pantheon. I can't believe I never heard of the show till this year, and it's been a while. I am utterly disappointed with the Internet and social media for not putting this in my face sooner. But still, I got to experience peak. By the way, something called a part two of the legend of vox machina was learnt by me today. Does anyone perchance know the difference between the actual legend of vox machina with Vax and Vex and this one? I heard they're two, I'm not sure.
Back to Pantheon by the way. It's a world where UIs exists. UI is short for Uploaded intelligence. Uploaded humans. It basically means life on a server or according to the show, a cloud. Maddie Kim is fourteen years old and already tired of life. Two years ago, her father David died, or so she thought. Now she's the new kid at school, getting relentlessly bullied, and her mom Ellen keeps trying to get her to "engage with the real world" when all Maddie wants is to lose herself in technology, the one thing her dad taught her to love.
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Then one day, someone starts messaging her. Just emojis at first. Weird, but helpful. When her bullies mysteriously start getting exposed for backstabbing each other (resulting in a glorious bathroom brawl that Maddie witnesses), she realizes her anonymous helper isn't just some random internet stranger. The helper reveals himself to be David, her supposedly dead father, explaining that his consciousness was successfully uploaded to the cloud following an experimental and destructive brain scan by his employer, Logorhythms. The company lied about the whole thing going wrong.
So now Maddie's dad is basically living in the internet. Not exactly the reunion she imagined, but she'll take it. With help from others, Maddie eventually gains custody of her father's digital consciousness, setting him up on servers in their basement (much to the neighbors' confusion about all the industrial equipment). They reconnect through their favorite video game, battling chimeras together like old times.
But this is where things get complicated, because Maddie isn't alone in this digital consciousness mess. We have Caspian Keyes, a brilliant seventeen year old computer prodigy she meets in an online forum. Caspian has unknowingly been raised in a constructed environment, constantly monitored by Logorhythms to fulfill a specific purpose. When he starts noticing inconsistencies (like Google Earth images mysteriously changing), he tears apart his computer and phone to find tracking chips embedded in both. Then he discovers his girlfriend Hannah was hired by his own mother to keep tabs on him. Yeah, his entire life has been a carefully orchestrated lie.
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As Maddie and Caspian find themselves caught in the middle, a sprawling global conspiracy unfolds that threatens to trigger a new kind of world war. Caspian turns out to be the key to fixing a critical flaw in the upload technology, something that could change everything.
As we go further and further, the series concludes with a mind bending twist: Maddie and Caspian exist outside the simulations, having run countless trial and error scenarios to retrieve versions of her father and Caspian from a reality where she lost them both. Together, they decide to re enter the simulation where it all began, choosing to forget everything and start fresh. Because sometimes, even digital immortality can't fix a broken heart, but maybe a fresh start can.
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This show has to be one of the best animated series I've seen my entire life. It was a beauty, shinning so bright in my eyes. I want you to see it if you haven't. It's a lovely series and I'd rate it 4.8 out of 5.
Thanks for reading
