>>281226537 (OP)This is a trend that extends beyond Japan. The fall of the Soviet Union meant the loss of any central ideological antagonist for works focused on the capitalist powers, and the relative economic prosperity of the era in those areas meant that a lot of ideologues felt that society needed to prioritize stability and growth over any other kind of development. See Fukuyama's "The End of History" for a contemporary take on the topic. The natural development here is that fiction focused on military and the police shifted focus to destabilizing forces, ie terrorism, specifically anarchist or niche-ideological terrorism.
Most western voices place the end of this era squarely at 9/11, where you see an immediate shift in media to villainization of religious terrorism and a quick return to nationalism as a driving force in military fiction. In Japan you generally saw real-world military topics in manga and anime fall in popularity altogether after the 90s, but there's a lot of nuance here because that coincides with the fall of the OVA market, the rise of ultra-merchanised streamlined corporate franchises, the increased focus on western markets, etc.
