Ichise loses his arm in the opening minutes—not as dramatic turning point, but as procedure.
The texhnolyzation happens in a clinical space with industrial lighting, and nobody discusses consent or loss or what it means; they discuss compatibility, functionality, parts that fit.
This is the visual grammar of the entire series: amputation as rational optimization. The city of Lux itself is the machinery that demands this—citizens get replaced piece by piece not because the city is evil but because the city requires it.
Workers need prosthetics to survive in toxic industrial zones, so prosthetics become the cost of staying. The show never frames this as dystopian oppression; it frames it as structural necessity. Watch Ichise's trajectory—he doesn't resist the dismantling, he resists staying in the city that requires it. The escape isn't about reclaiming his body; it's about finding a place where his body doesn't need continuous replacement to be economically legible.
This tells you exactly what the show's creators understood: Japan's economic collapse wasn't a crisis of meaning but a failure of efficiency. The problem wasn't dismantling—the problem was dismantling in a system that offered no elsewhere.
Watch the first fifteen minutes of Texhnolyze and pay attention to how the camera treats Ichise's amputation—specifically, notice what kind of music, lighting, and pacing the show uses for the procedure itself, then compare it to how it treats his later emotional moments.
Read the production notes on Texhnolyze's director Hiroshi Hamasaki's approach to body modification in his earlier work 'Serial Experiments Lain' (1998)—Hamasaki was already developing a visual language where technological integration wasn't corruption but rationalization, which makes Texhnolyze's logic explicit rather than metaphorical.