Chatty AF 214: Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction Retrospective (WITH TRANSCRIPT)

VRAI: Let me triple-check how many D’s are in it.

TONI: [Laughs]

VRAI: One, two, three, four. There’s four D’s!

PETER: Oh, it’s called “D7” a lot.

VRAI: Yeah.

PETER: They count every “De,” right, in “Dedede.” One, two— But even then, that’d be D8, wouldn’t it be? It’d be— Why do people call it “D7”?

VRAI: Yeah, it’s eight.

PETER: That’s eight D’s.

VRAI: ‘Cause they can’t count!

PETER: “Dead Dead Demon’s,” that’s three. “Dededede” is four. And then… Yeah, whatever. Okay.

VRAI: It’s eight. It’s fine. We’re fine. We’re all fine here.

TONI: [crosstalk] We should keep this as the cold open.

[Chuckling]

PETER: That’s good.

[Introductory musical theme]

VRAI: Hello and welcome to Chatty AF: The Anime Feminist Podcast. And welcome to our retrospective on Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction! My name is Vrai. I’m the daily operations manager here at AniFem. You can find me on Bluesky sometimes @WriterVrai. And joining me today are Peter and Toni.

PETER: I’m Peter. I’m an editor here with Anime Feminist. I’m @PeterFobian on Bluesky.

TONI: Hi, everybody. I’m Toni, editor at Anime Feminist and Anime Feminist resident Dededede evangelizer!

VRAI: Yeah, you really picked up that torch. Thank you.

TONI: You’re very welcome, Vrai.

PETER: [crosstalk] Undisputed champion.

VRAI: I did read, like, the first two volumes when it first came out in English, and then I stopped working at a bookstore and I couldn’t read them for free. And so, then, I didn’t!

PETER: Yeah, to be honest, I feel at kind of a disadvantage here because I remember I bought the first couple volumes when they first came out, which I feel was something like an eternity ago. Was that in, like, 2018? 2017, maybe?

VRAI: I think 2019.

PETER: Okay. Oh, really, that recently? Okay. Well, time sucks. But yeah, so I was—

VRAI: Oh, no, you’re right: it was 2018.

PETER: Okay, nice. I still got it. Yeah, so I was keeping up with it for a while, and I have not jumped back into it, but it sounds like you just both have torn through it recently while I have largely forgotten reading a lot of the manga although I intended to pick it back up at some point, which I should now that both the anime and the manga done.

VRAI: I finished the last chapter ten minutes before we started this recording.

PETER: Nice.

TONI: I dipped in and out of the manga as the show was going on, just to see and compare certain things that I was wondering how they changed in adaptation, which I’m sure we’ll get to during the conversation, because there’s some interesting changes in adaptation, some more successful than others. I’m sure Vrai—

VRAI: Oh, we’ll talk about that.

TONI: Yeah, Vrai will have a lot more to say about that because they read a lot more of the manga than I did. But I’ve read [obscured by crosstalk].

PETER: I will say, I was almost gonna drop off the anime when they got to the title drop sequence from the manga and the logo wasn’t there to do the shot reverse shot. I was so disappointed. I was heartbroken. That’s one of my favorite panels.

VRAI: That is a really, really good… There is a little bit of composition lost with sound effects and titles specifically, I feel like. Yeah, we’ll talk about that. As a heads-up to folks at home, as you perhaps have guessed from the tenor of the conversation, this is a retrospective. It’s going to be a full-spoiler discussion for both the anime and the manga, so we highly encourage you, if this is a series that interests you, to watch it prior to listening to what we’ve got going on here. I think our general suggested viewing order would be: do not start with episode 0, watch episodes 1 through 16, and then 0 and 17 are watched as a pair.

TONI: Yep.

PETER: Makes sense.

VRAI: Personally, I think 1 to 16 is the best experience of the story, and 0 and 17 are interesting errata because of some of the necessary choices of adaptation, but… Like, they’re not useless. I just think that 1 through 16 are plenty strong on their own. As far as content warnings going into it, God, there is so much. There’s a lot of body horror, a lot of images of mass death, a lot of talk of war crimes and the military–industrial complex, bullying, suicide…

TONI: Don’t forget grooming!

VRAI: Oh, yeah, grooming, a teacher–student relationship. Plus a lot of gore.

TONI: It’s a pretty heavy show. Honestly impressive that, with all of that, it remains, for the most part, not only an enjoyable watch but also one that has a lightness to it for a large part of its run that I was not expecting based upon the reputation of Inio Asano.

VRAI: Yeah, I really like Dead Dead Demon. I liked Solanin. I get why people like Punpun. I think that it indulges a little bit too much in the bad things happening to cute things as a way to really hammer a point home, which I’m sure we’ll talk about with this. But yeah, so… Asano is interesting.

PETER: Yeah. This is almost the opposite, where it’s like horrible things are happening but he managed to keep it light, and it runs like one of those series that just has really good dialogue that keeps you engaged.

VRAI: I wouldn’t even say “light.” Like, the tagline for the manga that VIZ uses is “It’s just an everyday apocalypse,” and I really like that as a way to capture the sort of mixed slice-of-life and sci-fi post-apocalyptic feel. It’s very character focused and very focused on taking those breathers and investing us in the stakes of this world before it gets into the heavier stuff.

TONI: What’s interesting to me about it is that… I think if you look at it and you don’t think much deeper than more of a surface-level reading and surface-level understanding of feminist critique, you might say something along the lines of “Well, Ouran and Kadode… You know, after Ouran’s big choice she makes, they don’t really have a meaningful, deep impact on the world around them and they just kind of bum around as the world is going to shit and don’t really do that much to try to change it,” you know, notwithstanding Ouran’s whole deal, which we will get to. But I think that that kind of misses the entire point of the series, because this is a series about what it’s like for everyday people to go through something horrific. Right? 

And the reality is the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of us are not going to be action stars. We’re not going to be involved in the… We won’t necessarily have a huge role to play. And I think that’s part of what makes it interesting, because it’s so focused on people just trying to live their everyday lives in this situation and what kind of choices that they make to care for each other and the power of those choices to care for each other and how those can be, in some ways, just as meaningful as the sort of actions that, say, Oba takes, which does end up saving the world in a sense.

VRAI: Yeah, one of the most interesting things to me about reading the manga, and one of the ways that overall, I think… Outside of losing a couple extra scenes that I respect cutting because you have to cut something for time—I would have liked to see them—I quite like the choices the anime makes. Like, the scene of Oba going to the reactor core isn’t in the manga.

PETER: Oh, wow.

TONI: Oh, wow! That’s wild.

PETER: That’s a pretty significant event, yeah.

VRAI: Yeah, to me, that’s such a thematic linchpin of the anime, right? It’s like, yes, Ouran and Kadode are average citizens, but their relationship with Oba and Oba’s stance as this bridge figure are so important to what makes the story hopeful to me, that, you know, you can’t just magically avert the apocalypse. I feel like we’re in a very cynical place with global warming and just the state of the world where I don’t think that that kind of story reads through in this kind of context. But the fact that they nurtured those relationships and carried that knowledge in a way that led to Oba being able to put in the code, trigger the destruction of the mothership early in a way that’s… you know, the death toll is catastrophic, but that’s still the thing that allows humanity to survive instead of being universally wiped out, which is what was going to happen. I found that so powerful.

TONI: In the manga, is it implied that he did that or is it just completely nonexistent, like we don’t know why the apocalypse didn’t fully happen?

VRAI: No, he has his standoff with Kenichi, and then he passes out and it cuts straight to him being unconscious from… Actually, the scene with him getting rescued by the choppers isn’t there either.

TONI: Oh, but that’s one of my favorite moments in the whole series! [Laughs] That’s so interesting, because to me, Oba is such an important character. I mean, we’ll get to this… Maybe we can use this to kind of transition, I guess, into talking about…

VRAI: I mean, we can talk about the current event stuff first and then talk about it as text, I think. I think the discussion will flow well that way. So, please, go ahead.

TONI: Yeah, Oba’s so important to me, and the reason he’s important to me is… well, for multiple reasons. One of my biggest frustrations with Dededede is its representation of the aliens, which often feels a bit infantilizing, feels a bit like little toy soldiers getting massacred. Right? And so, we don’t get a lot of their interiority or them as complex, interesting characters. I mean, they’re barely differentiable just by having the cute little ornaments which they wear, which arguably also infantilize them because they’re toys, right? 

Whereas Oba is an intensely complex and interesting character in that his story reminds me so much of early 20th-century passing narratives, like somebody who has this secret identity that they have to hide from the world so that they can survive on a day-to-day basis, right, but feels torn between the part of them that is still part of their old community (with passing narratives in the late 20th century, it was the black community; with Oba, it’s the alien community) and the almost-simulacrum of the identity that they’ve created as they’ve passed, which for Oba is human and for passing narratives is white, right? There’s this kind of sense of “Was I ever this way, at all?” that can start to take over. And so for me, for him as this character who is able to, as an alien, have agency in the narrative, attempt to avert the worst of the decisions of both human and alien governments, and form real attachments and connections across these divides, is a really powerful storyline! And it’s a bit shocking that the manga doesn’t focus on that quite as much. And there’s a lot more to talk about with Oba, so I’m curious y’all’s ideas about him.

PETER: I do think he’s really important, largely because, as you mentioned, the aliens… I’m still not quite sure how I feel about them because it just seemed like they didn’t have any sort of interiority or larger— For the longest time, we don’t even know why they’re on the planet, why they came, what their plans were. There was an offhanded mention about one of them talking about making humans pets or something. So you have some uncertainty as to whether they had come to invade the planet, but pretty much all you see them as is… Like, nothing about them is coded as an invader or a colonizer or anything like that. They’re just helpless victims. They’re not even fighting back. So, they have this really weird place in the narrative where they have essentially moved into Tokyo but all they’re doing now is basically fleeing a genocidal military campaign. And, I mean, I guess their motivations are kind of irrelevant with the way they’re being treated, but yeah, nothing about them says that they’re an invading military force, right?

TONI: And from what I understand, they aren’t, right? They were sent to Earth on some kind of overpopulation mission… And admittedly, it’s unclear, I think, in what it said, whether they believed that they could coexist with humans because of the research that that alien does who fucks up Kadode or whether they truly just have this superior colonizer mindset of “Oh, look at these cute humans. I can use them for whatever.” You know?

PETER: I think they believed humans were unintelligent.

VRAI: Yeah, we see aliens on the ship… maybe this is in the manga and I’m mixing up my brain, but a parent telling a child that humans are basically cute and not very smart, so they’ll be used for labor.

PETER: Yep. Yeah, but it does seem like they just did not know humans were intelligent to begin with. And outside of that, I think it’s also sort of implied that they might have been sent there essentially on a suicide mission anyway, since they knew that there was a problem with their reactor and they had a problem with overpopulation.

VRAI: [crosstalk] The implication is that their government, yeah, is shipping them off to steam-vent the population on their home world.

PETER: So, in reality, they’ve essentially been displaced and are being sent to die on the planet, which is being accomplished through a different way than expected but…

VRAI: Yeah. I wouldn’t say that they lack characterization or interiority entirely. We get scenes of Oba interacting with people, we get a lot of scenes that are in the sort of refugee colony and the invaders debating over whether they just want to try to survive as a separatist group or if they want to try to form a kind of… There’s briefly the thought that maybe there will be some kind of military campaign or, failing that, a “We’re taking as many as we can with us” sort of approach. Like, I think all of that is there. I just think it sort of can fall somewhat flat in the fact that every single one of those conversations invariably ends with scenes of mass slaughter, which, I mean, in fairness, is not inaccurate to how genocides do. 

But combined with cute designs, I think it can run into the same things that put me off of Punpun, right? It’s like, no, you’re making a good point, but something about how frequently you are returning to this cute thing combined with grotesque imagery, that guro moe tendency, is losing its impact for me. I feel like that first scene of Fujin showing up at the festival is horrifying. And then he does it three more times.

TONI: Yeah. I mean, that scene… If I remember right, it opens with a shot of the Cool Japan logo. [Chuckles] Which, like… This show goes hard, which I appreciate. [Chuckles]

PETER: And of course, we later see those weapons turned against Japan, as well.

TONI: Yeah, in the prologue, right?

PETER: Well, and then in the… I don’t know what you’d call the final arc, as well, post-timeskip.

TONI: Yeah, well, I mean, it calls to mind this idea that fascism is just colonialism turned inward. You know, you run out of people to genocide and to colonize and you’re like, “Well, I guess we gotta find people within to destroy.”

VRAI: Mm-hm. Yeah, it’s, I think, made really impressively thoughtful, right? Because, you know, we open with Ouran referencing… in the manga, the very first chapter is Ouran talking about “Oh, maybe the spaceship is a US invasion” and talking about the military–industrial complex, and the specter of Okinawa hangs over things. But the manga isn’t content to make these allusions to Japan as a victim of colonialization [sic]. It also, indirectly—which might be mandated by law… You know, even the Hetalia comic got censored back in the day for making some references to Japanese war crimes, so he might have had to be a little bit more sleight-of-hand about it. But there’s definitely implications of this manga as it goes along, and Japan has this sort of bargaining chip of powers within the government and the military who want to use this as an opportunity to turn that against their own citizens, against other nations, and the specter of Korea loometh.

PETER: I really love that part of the manga where Japan cuts out the US military entirely, of course, which turns out to be a mistake, as they… I wouldn’t say they’re attacked; the US just immediately starts infiltrating their government.

VRAI: There’s, like, some stuff— The manga has this ongoing background thing about how, because the world is incumbent upon Beagle (which I think is the Google analogue) tech systems, because they’ve all been used as the backbone for a lot of this military stuff, there’s all these backdoors that Americans can use and have them using to try and get their fingers back in. And actually, one of the more interesting things about the timeskip in the manga is that, because the manga has more time to do more of these… not pastiches, but these little mini-stories with just average characters and other political forces, there’s some stuff in the epilogue about how Americans have decided— Well, first of all, they put the Trump expy in a garbage compactor. [Chuckles]

TONI: [Laughs]

VRAI: It’s very good! But yeah, America decides after the event that, “Actually, we’re going to go to Japan and we’re going to figure out how to get into the shifting space, and we are going to colonize the alien home world. So, now we’re the invaders, do you see?”

PETER: We gotta bring democracy to aliens, yeah.

TONI: [Laughs]

VRAI: Yeah, the Gifu forced labor camp that the girls reference is apparently an American-run military comms station.

PETER: And of course, the Google stand-in is in collusion with the US military, as well.

TONI: Yeah, which I think is a really important point, because I think that the show—and I’ve said this many times—that it has a very granular understanding of the military–industrial complex that I think is really sophisticated. I mean, right now, Google AI is being used to determine which sites are going to be bombed in Gaza. The confluence of technology, AI, and mass murder is only getting more present and clear, and I think this manga has so much to say about that, even in just depicting it very matter-of-factly. I think that it punctures a lot of narratives about futurism that sci-fi is often incumbent on. And in general, I think this anime is really, really relevant nowadays, because there’s so many different analogues within it to real-world situations. I mean, S-H-I-P… it’s interesting that it is… I mean… [Chuckles] Even the acronym is like two letters away from SJP, Students for Justice in Palestine. Which, I don’t know if that was intentional, because—

VRAI: I don’t think so.

TONI: —I don’t know when Students for Justice in Palestine was created. But it’s interesting. I have complicated feelings about the way that SHIP is treated in the manga because, on one hand, SHIP is like… It depicts a lot of what I often feel when I encounter student organizing or when I’ve been involved in student organizing, which is a lot of “Well, we definitely did a lot of protesting, but have we succeeded in getting our demands met?” sometimes, I guess, you know. But there is this deep sense of futility, I think, to a lot of the student organizing that happens in it, which I think captures a lot of the feeling you can feel when you’re a student organizer.

PETER: Yeah. I wasn’t quite sure where he was trying to fall with that, Asano, because when they were first introduced and as you start to learn more and it turns out that they’re gearing up for a political assassination, it kind of came across as sort of Kingian to me, like how Randall Flagg is introduced in The Stand, where he’s just got pamphlets for radicalization on the left and right and there’s no difference. If you’re radical, it doesn’t matter which side you’re on; you’re just as evil. I’m not quite sure. It just seemed like it couldn’t end up anywhere because the plot was bigger than anything they could possibly influence. But even the assassination at the end was kind of personally motivated by the SHIP leader, wasn’t it? So, was—

TONI: Yeah. Which was so fucked, you know? [Chuckles] I did not like that.

PETER: [crosstalk] So, was it criticism of movements like that, or was it, as you said, just the idea that these kinds of groups really can’t accomplish anything at the end of the day?

VRAI: I think it’s more that SHIP is kind of… SHIP is the manga looking backwards towards the Japanese protest movements of the 1960s, and then specifically I think SHIP evolves into the Japanese Red Army, right, which was a militant arm of leftism that was eventually branded officially a terrorist organization. There were some really big articles, actually, a few years ago about how one of the most prominent leaders… she was released from prison. So, I think that’s a pretty direct lineage of what’s going on with that. And at the same time, yes, arguably, what they’re doing is futile, but so is everything else.

PETER: [Chuckles] True.

TONI: Right. Right, right, right. [Chuckles]

VRAI: And I think, actually, the manga has a lot more respect for them and especially for… Oh, God, what is her name? Cute nose.

PETER: [crosstalk] Futaba?

VRAI: Yeah, and for Futaba and her desire to do things than it does for— Like, I think there is… even if there is cynicism towards it, I think there’s a lot more respect for boots-on-the-ground attempts to do something than for online activism.

TONI: Oh, yeah. [Laughs]

VRAI: Like the scene in the black mist zone, where the reporter and the woman she’s interviewing both get crushed, and they’re like, “Well, post it online. Well, do something about it.” You don’t see it, but it’s confirmed in the manga that the reporter dies and, of course, the woman who counts herself as a survivor gets picked up by…

PETER: The bad guys.

VRAI: Yeah. By Kenichi’s group.

TONI: By Koboke-kun’s [sic] group, yes.

VRAI: Yeah. And I think what really sells that little aside for me is an additional page in the manga where we see the tweet that they sent out asking for help, and there’s a reply to it that says, “Oh, no! This is terrible! Someone is doing something, right?”

TONI: [Laughs]

VRAI: Like, Jesus Christ. Yeah, that about sums it up.

TONI: Yeah. Yeah. And I think the thing is, right, even if you’re capturing the sense of pain and futility that can often come with organizing and often lead to burnout, which is kind of what happens to the activists, right, I don’t think it’s so much about necessarily, actually, the reality of futility, which is debatable, so much as the feeling of futility and burnout, if that makes sense, which are two very different things. And I think that Asano’s coming from, as you said, a place of really deep respect for most of the organizers except for the personally motivated one.

VRAI: I do find that a little bit like, “Oh, of course, this woman was motivated by being jilted by a man.” Like, jerk-off motions, you know? That’s a little… I let it slide because there are so many other well-developed female characters in this work, but that’s a trope I hate.

PETER: Yeah. Yeah, especially when she was talking about purging Futaba later, it really kinda… And that ended— Well, everything ended pretty abruptly after that, so…

TONI: Well, we can take comfort in the fact she’s probably dead.

PETER: Oh, yeah, almost certainly.

[Chuckling]

VRAI: This series is juggling a lot. And we haven’t really talked about the stuff it’s doing with Kenichi as sort of this avatar of malaise and untreated mental health and angry young men who feel like they haven’t gotten what they deserve in life and that sort of slide into right-wing reactionaryism. Which, I’ll see If I can find a really good article about right-wing online spaces in Japan that came out a couple years ago. But yeah, definitely that’s a thing going on there.

PETER: Mm-hm. Well, then the other side of that—I don’t know if that’d be like a triangle… The intersection of the triangle would be Hiroshi, right? And he was kind of a hard character for me to pin down early on when I was reading the manga, too, because… [Chuckles] I don’t know, he just seems to be kind of like… he kind of comes across initially as kind of a black-pilled online guy.

TONI: It’s interesting—

VRAI: I’m waiting for him to talk about clown world.

TONI: When I first encountered him, honestly, I didn’t even have that reaction, because I think that him being kind of like a shut-in was, to me, only a part of his character and I immediately saw in the scenes with him going running with Kadode and Ouran the deep love that he had for Ouran. I immediately clocked that and the care that he has for both of them. And to me, he’s interesting because even as he has lost a lot of hope in institutions in collective change, I think that he represents this feeling that even as one has lost hope in collective change, one can still have hope in these individual relationships, which I don’t think is necessarily the ideology that the manga is trying to promote, by any stretch of the imagination. I do think that the manga is very interested in collective change and collective liberation.

VRAI: Is it though? At the end, it always comes down to individuals who have marked another individual that make the largest change. I don’t think it has much faith in collectivism as anything but an inevitably corrupting force should they acquire any degree of power.

TONI: Interesting. Can you say more about that?

VRAI: I mean, SHIP becomes a violent group because peaceful protest does nothing. You know, all of the governments are extremely corrupt. The Google techs are all either completely detached from what’s happening or aiding and abetting the AI situation. Everybody who’s famous is a puppet of the military–industrial regime. The Sony analogue becomes a tool to further militarism because capitalism says that’s where the money is. And meanwhile, all of the positive relationships are down to Hiroshi telling Ontan, “You can’t save everyone, but you can protect one person.” You know, Kadode’s main problem in her alternate timeline is her belief that she can… The series continually talks about this sense of justice as a poisonous one and this idea of casting a universally applied prescription of what is the right thing to do is a poisonous idea.

TONI: Yeah. Yeah. I’m gonna connect it to a couple different series that I think might… this might clarify the ideologies that Dededede is playing with. There’s two of them. The first is The Last of Us, because I think The Last of Us and Dededede are actually playing in somewhat of a similar space. Everyday life in the realm of apocalypse, when everything is falling apart around you, when institutions are failing, when the government is falling apart, you can choose one person who you can protect and care for, and fuck everybody else. And I think that The Last of Us really underlines that with some of the final episodes. 

But the overall strand of The Last of Us is: if you have a trolley problem and you’re gonna decide between the death of your beloved person and the rest of humanity, you should always choose to save your beloved person and fuck the rest of humanity, right, and that the only love to be found is between one person and the person that they’re caring for and protecting, which is, in this sense, a very masculinist kind of ideology. It reminds me a lot of what I’ve read about Clarence Thomas’s ideologies, where he doesn’t believe anymore in collective liberation for black people; he just believes that male patriarchs in the family, using a gun and using capitalism, should protect their one tiny little family and fuck everybody else. And I think that Dededede… I don’t think it’s going quite that far. I really don’t!

VRAI: Well, I respect Dead Demon a lot more than Last of Us, because Last of Us is firmly a world set in “We have this world, and this is the one we’ve got and we know that. And even knowing that, fuck y’all, everyone I’ve ever met, everyone I will never meet and all of their children, because of my daughter,” whereas Dead Dead Demon has explicitly set up this kind of spiritual parallel dimension element. I don’t know, it’s got more flexibility to it in its ideology. And also, the character making the decision primarily is a child. She’s a child, and also it’s established that you lose all your memories when you shift from one reality to another. You can make a guess at the decision, but really we’re all stabbing in the dark. And as not-Isobeyan points out, their species doesn’t really use this technology because, to them, it’s pointless to redo the past. You know, eventually everybody returns to a unified consciousness.

TONI: Yeah. Mm. It’s interesting. And— Okay, I’m gonna continue to connect it to a couple more texts. I hope that’s okay! [Laughs] Because one of them, I think, is one that I want to bring back to Kohirumaki [sic]… (oh, I don’t know how to say his name) Kohiruimaki before we move on to Dededede as a conversational text, which I guess is a good transition into that. Kenichi, yeah. His arc reminds me so much of Naomi Klein’s book Doppelganger, which is very interesting because what Naomi Klein argues is that the feelings and general experiences that make somebody radicalize to the left and to the right are sometimes the same, in terms of noticing the failure of institutions, noticing the world is kind of going to shit, noticing that the media and all the forces that manufacture consent don’t want you to really be paying attention to it, and Dead Dead Demon’s is very clear about that, right? 

There are so many different moments where there’s media cover-ups, there’s cover-ups of a genocide, manufacturing consent for the genocide, right? Many different things, right? But then, that can lead to either a false consciousness, where somebody with all those negative feelings… Those feelings are then redirected onto the most vulnerable and be like, “Well, they’re to blame. They’re the scapegoat. Fuck them,” right? Which is what happens to Kenichi. Or you can develop real consciousness and blame the actual failure of the institution and figure out the root causes of that failure. And I think Kenichi’s a really interesting example of that.

VRAI: Yeah, he super is, because he is a sad character, to begin with. He’s clearly struggling with self-loathing and depression, and there’s a lot going on, we see, from his vent account. But he doesn’t really have any help yet—not that this manga goes a whole lot into Japan’s mental health system, but there’s little bits around the edges about it. And then, he builds his entire identity of himself as special around a dead girl who dumped him for being shitty to her last time they met. And I think the manga really goes out of its way to make him a really pathetic figure. Like, he doesn’t have the aesthetics of fascism going for him to be like, “Oh, yeah, he’s evil, but look how cool and suave he looks!” No, he’s got a shitty bowl cut, in the future he wears an ugly-ass helmet when he’s in his cryptofascism era, and the second his actual life is in danger, he turns into a blubbering mess about how unfair it is that this is happening to him.

PETER: Yeah, and they kinda make it clear, at the end, he doesn’t really have any ideology. He’s just in a death cult. He literally wanted to just end everything. I think one of my favorite lines from him is that he just said, “I’m only going to believe the things that are convenient to me,” or something like that, which basically just says, oh, so you don’t believe anything. Whatever feels best in the moment, you’re going to do and you’re going to say that that was the right thing to do or that’s the proper belief to have.

TONI: And that’s literally what a lot of right-wing people think because they’re just waiting for Jesus to come down and murder all the heathens! It’s really a bizarre ideology that we’re confronted with on a daily basis.

VRAI: Yeah, this is the part where I take a little moment to tell people to go listen to Knowledge Fight, which is an excellent podcast about tracking, accounting for, and breaking down Alex Jones and the sphere of right-wing grifters and the lack of consistent ideology versus a narrative of white victimhood and extremely warped far-right, specifically, version of Christianity… is as fascinating as it is depressing.

TONI: I was going to compare it to Crime and Punishment, because I think that what Dostoevsky is doing in that book is very similar in terms of… This main character, Raskolnikov, he comes up with the idea he’s gonna murder somebody who represents to him all the broken institutions of society, like the capitalist problems in society. And then he realizes, like, “Wait, if I just did this and people did this to all the people who they thought were responsible for these shitty institutions, this would not lead to any actual real change.” [Chuckles] You know? And I think that Asano is making kind of a similar critique of violent fantasies of revolution. But so, yeah, anyways, which I think gets us to where you were going with it as a metatext.

VRAI: Yeah, because… Yeah. I mean, I think Dead Dead Demon is a really deliberate metatext. You know, it gets its little meta reference at the end, where [in] the green glasses timeline Kadode is talking about trying to get this weird, esoteric author to do a sci-fi series, reinventing a classic, beloved children’s manga for adults. And, you know, the core premise for Dead Dead Demon is “What if Doraemon is real and he will help you kill?”

TONI: [Laughs] It’s also “What if Death Note was good?” which is kind of where I was going, you know? [Chuckles]

VRAI: Yeah, which is a bold thing to undertake and I love that. [Chuckles] Obviously, the flashback art in the alternate dimension is just Kadode going through her Light era, but a lot more grounded because we care about these characters and it’s a nice, slow, focused build. And that continues in the post-apocalypse scene where Makoto has their little Mello scar, which makes me laugh.

PETER: Oh, true. Yeah, yeah.

VRAI: Mm-hm. It’s also coming out— You know, it’s worth noting that the manga starts running in 2014, ends in 2022. You know, I think it has, as we watch the anime, a lot of connections to the genocide in Gaza, but as the manga starts up, it’s really in conversation with a lot of post–US-invasion-of-Iraq texts. On Bluesky the other day, I was talking about how my partner and I were making up glib taglines for Dead Dead Demon’s, and one of them is “What if Pluto respected women?”

[Laughter]

VRAI: I like Pluto a lot. That’s not a strong suit of its. But, you know, it ran from ‘03 to ‘09 and it’s very much in the same vein of it’s taking Astro Boy and reinventing it as this sort of hard-boiled detective thriller in a way that’s also this globe-spanning ethical quandary about an othered, marginalized group. Yeah, there’s a lot of connections between Dead Dead Demon’s and Pluto. And then, you know, you have NieR in 2010, which Yoko Taro, of course, has talked about being directly inspired by the invasion of Iraq, and that is a game pretty much entirely about the thoughtless othering of a faceless force and doing a lot of, then, sort of meta character and layered timeline things with that. And of course, I don’t think you can avoid talking about the fact that, as this manga is running, Gen Urobuchi again pretty much defines sci-fi in the 2010s with Psycho-Pass, I feel like. I think you could make a solid argument that it’s the Ghost in the Shell of the 2010s.

PETER: Unfortunately.

VRAI: Yeah. One of the things I really like about Dead Dead Demon is that, because it has that high school arc at the beginning, I feel like we get a lot of time really just centering our characters in their lives before—not before tragedy strikes—as there’s this simmering undercurrent of dread before violence breaks out to really establish who they are as people and why they would be drawn into the poles that they are. Whereas, I think, even at his best, I don’t think one can deny that Urobuchi is prone to a sense of narrative fatalism where a character becomes kind of a sock puppet for the ideology they represent and there is no breaking from that point; it’s just sort of a clash of these firmly closed belief systems and who’s going to come out on top. Whereas I feel like Dead Dead Demon is a very human story wherein characters are sort of polarized to actions that end up corresponding to this world and these ideologies that make up this world.

TONI: Yeah. I mean, I’ve often joked about the interactions between, say, Ouran and Kadode as being like “What if Homura and Madoka were written by people who actually knew what teenage girls sounded like?”

VRAI: [Chuckles]

TONI: … just because I really do think that… one thing I admire about Dededede is that, for all of the complicated ideologies that it is depicting, it mostly depicts them through… very “show, don’t tell.” It’s depicting, like I was saying earlier, the granular aspects of the system and showing how it operates from the inside, all the cogs and how they’re turning. And it just kinda speaks for itself how broken it is, right, rather than necessarily having a character say, “Well, this is bad because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And in fact, there’s a little bit of a satire of that when Ouran constantly jokes, makes these absolutely ludicrous statements about capitalism and, you know, “I’m going to kill all the capitalist pigs when I become the head of the revolution,” right? It feels—

PETER: Iconic.

TONI: Iconic, yes.

[Chuckling]

TONI: And we love her for that.

VRAI: She has no idea what she’s saying, really, or even— Not to say she’s stupid; she’s a very smart character in her way. But there is no context or weight to that kind of thing at her age and her position, where she’s had a pretty sheltered, financially stable life.

PETER: Yeah, it’s just an aspiration.

VRAI: Which I do support. I support her. Yeah, one thing especially— The manga, much more so, I was really struck with how this is a very Watchmen-like text. Which, I want to be careful to clarify that I don’t mean “Dead Dead Demon is trying to be Japan’s answer to Watchmen,” because I don’t think it is. That’s stupid and pointless. I just… I think, in the subjects it’s pursuing and the form that it takes, it ends up doing some very interesting similar things. You know, every volume of the manga is bookended by Isobeyan comics, which are initially superficially relevant and then later, as we find out, very directly thematically tied to what’s going on with our main characters, very much in the same way that the Black Freighter comics work in Watchmen. 

The manga spends a lot more time doing asides with just random people that we’re not necessarily going to meet again, but they’re sort of like a temperature-taking on the state of the world as it evolves towards this moment of apocalyptic crisis. And in Watchmen, that was about the Cold War and specifically Reaganomic America. You know, in Dead Demon, it’s more about 21st-century, US–Japan relationships in specific, but in the manga there’s this ongoing thread with a Google dev who’s working on an indie game with his best friend. And it starts out that they’re complaining because their game got flagged for censorship because it violates child porn restrictions in the US, so people aren’t going to be willing to market that. And he’s complaining about how “this stuff is all over the place in Japan. You know, they’re really good at this. And they love peace over there.”

TONI: [Chuckles]

VRAI: It’s very interesting. But then we get to the end of the series, and when the apocalypse hits, they’re the ones who make the mechs.

TONI: Oh. Like the mechs to fight the Japanese government?

VRAI: Uh-huh. Yeah, and they end up being an independent third-party force and they’re the ones who build the mechs that are fighting the mega-Fujin.

TONI: And I think that that shows… I think that the series has an understanding that when we are in such complicated situations, we often form complex ties of solidarity that are not as simple as left or right. And I really appreciate that about this manga and about this show.

VRAI: Yeah, it’s a very tapestry— I mean, like the scene with the documentarian in the contaminated zone, there’s just a lot more small character-building snapshots like that in the manga that it has time for, that I understand why you cut for the anime to focus it in on Ouran and Kadode because you have less time, but it’s also why I think that the stuff with Kadode’s dad coming back to him in the 11th hour works a little better because we spent a lot of time just cutting away to other characters and what’s going on in the White House, what’s going on— Honestly, I think that the character who gets sort of the shortest shrift and is still a major character in the anime is Sumaru. There’s a lot more time establishing what’s going on with her in the early chapters of the manga, I feel like. She’s the one who’s the PR person for the toy company and ends up [obscured by crosstalk] the biokey. 

There’s a lot more about her feeling like she is complicit in war crimes, unquestionably, but also just the build-up of her feeling trapped into the situation. And boy, it feels a lot more in the manga than the anime that this is a coerced sexual relationship she has with the president, which is kind of interesting, because actually, by and large, I think I’ve come away from the manga feeling like the anime has mostly made really smart cuts and choices about cutting out the smattering of moments throughout where the manga kinda lets its female characters down. Like, there’s just a small handful… There’s a panty shot and a couple weird, out-of-place moments in the manga that are gone from the anime. Interestingly, because of what we’re about to talk about, the anime is actually gayer.

TONI: Oh!

VRAI: So now we have to talk about the thing.

TONI: Okay!

VRAI: Because— Yeah, no, you do your thing first, and then we’ll unpack it.

TONI: Okay, well, sorry to take a happy mood and turn it sour. Well, if you haven’t watched the whole thing yet, do it before I say what I’m about to say. The anime seems to imply that it kills Ouran and Kadode almost immediately after their kiss.

VRAI: I don’t think— Like that’s… well, a period of time later.

TONI: Maybe not almost immediately.

VRAI: Like, long enough later.

TONI: Long enough later.

VRAI: They do die in their timeline. Yeah.

TONI: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

PETER: I mean, yeah, in your watching experience almost immediately after, but a timeskip’s worth after, yeah.

TONI: Yeah, like maybe three or four years’ timeskip after, right? So, it’s implied— So, in the anime, which is a scene that—my impression is—is not in the manga (please correct me if I’m wrong, Vrai), there’s—

VRAI: It is in the manga, but it’s— The mech fight is in the manga, but like I said, it’s connected to these two minor characters who aren’t in the anime, so it gets distilled down to just being “This was a thing that they were involved with,” and we see the mechs are shot down. In the anime, these mechs were shut down, Makoto implies that it was probably Kadode and Ontan, and they look for the bodies, so they’re probably definitely dead, you guys; whereas in the manga, the mechs get shot down but Makoto is talking about other mechs that have the D on them for “Demon,” and Makoto thinks… has no frame of reference but a gut feeling that those two are still alive.

TONI: Right, which is very different! [Chuckles] Like, that is a very, very, very different framing, and it changes a lot because it also changes the motivation of their dad, right? In the manga, I think their dad goes back… it feels to me like he realizes that he really fucked up in raising Kadode and he’d like to get a second chance, and also, [it’s] unlikely for him to actually be able to reconnect with Kadode, given that she’s busy being a secret soldier that would be purposefully very difficult to find, because if it would be easy to find her, then the Japanese government could find her, right? So, his motivation still makes sense. But in the anime, it’s like, “Well, she’s probably dead. Gotta go find a new one!” [Chuckles] Which feels… I don’t know. I don’t like that as much.

VRAI: No, I don’t really like it either. Like, I can see, I can see why you would make the choice as an adapter because it’s like a firm sense of closure and they went down together in a blaze of glory as girlfriends. But I don’t really like it. I don’t think you need to do it, because what’s sort of interesting to me about that decision that, oh, we don’t know what happened to them, is that it’s Asano kind of playing around with the genre of sekaikei, which was this genre that became very popular after the bubble burst. Evangelion is a very famous example. A lot of Makoto Shinkai films also use this, where it’s a massive, usually apocalyptic, world-changing event that you experience through the lens of this very concentrated relationship between two people, usually adolescents. You know, it’s like this intensely stormy moment in an individual’s life, and then the apocalypse becomes a representational backdrop for that. 

And there’s been interesting literary criticism of it, in the decades since, about it as this… You know, it’s an undoubtedly escapist genre. Is that an okay or interesting thing? Is that a masturbatory shirking-of-responsibility thing? There’s a lot of interesting academics about it. But I think the choice to have their fate known in the manga is an interesting way to say, “We’ve lost track of our protagonists, but all these other people in this world still matter. The world has gone on.” And I think that works well, them missing.

TONI: And also allows their story to end with a kiss and them holding hands. They don’t stop holding hands because they kiss. There’s no awkwardness. They just… They kiss. You know? And I don’t know, what’s gayer than ending a story with a kiss in front of a mushroom cloud, you know?

VRAI: Okay, so it’s— Oh, by the way, the other things I wanted to complain about that the anime cut out that I liked better. In the manga, in the post-timeskip stuff, it’s implied that the invader who took over Kadode’s dad was lovers with the girl who got killed. Why is that there? And also, the younger sister doesn’t do a bravery to try to help him escape from Kenichi’s soldiers. She just gets shot. Like, aw, that’s not as interesting.

But yeah, I actually do find the anime a little bit more invested in the romantic side of Kadode and Ontan’s relationship, just because of a couple little tweaks it makes. Like, the kiss is still in the manga, but the shot on their hands isn’t. That shot of their hands entwining while they’re watching the light isn’t there. You just see them sort of standing side by side and you can’t see their hands. And then, in the green glasses timeline, you’ve still got “Crab crab” sign. But there’s also a little aside about them talking about a guy Ontan is maybe interested in at work. Bullshit. Like, she’s got that cute, complicated relationship with Oda [sic], which I think is quite nice. But Ontan is the most lesbian-ass character I have ever seen. Like, oh, my God. She is so peak “I’m in love with my very intense, perfect, wonderful best friend who’s perfect, and I have to protect her, and these feelings are just pure and intense, and I get upset and jealous and histrionic about the dudes that aren’t good enough for her.” Which, in fairness, this dude really does suck shit.

TONI: [Laughs]

PETER: Oh, yeah, when it turned out she was dating the teacher in the final timeline, I… ugh… I let out a loud unhappy noise. [Chuckles]

VRAI: I do kinda— Yeah, the finale is interesting, right? Because there’s this implication of, “Well, is it actually a happy ending? Because the apocalypse is averted, but there’s also still… we’re still dealing with all of the regular human problems that we have, and all of our characters are choked by ennui and can’t bring themselves to do anything or change their living situations.” But also, as the anime ends, I kind of believe that Ontan is going to get around to actually confessing her feelings in a way that gets through to Kadode someday; whereas in the manga, because there’s not that reaffirmation of the moment with their hands, and because we go to “Well, Kadode’s dating this shitty teacher in the final timeline and Ontan’s maybe starting to… getting the hots for a guy at work,” it’s almost like the kiss is this spur-of-the-moment thing that’s affectionate but also “Ah, gosh, we’re all dying! Kiss the nearest person to you.” I don’t know, I feel like the anime really sells it, even with the “Why did you feel like you had to really strongly imply that these gays are dead? Why did you bury them?”

TONI: Yeah, it’s a frustrating thing, and it’s really complicated because I’m so, so, so happy that a series that is this gay got this competent of an adaptation. I love just how gay it is and how it’s not just gay; it also has explicit trans rep in a way that is—

VRAI: Yes, we should talk about Makoto.

TONI: —in a way that is undeniable [Chuckles] and an intrinsic part of the text, in a way that can’t be just headcanonned away.

VRAI: I could go on the internet right now and I will guarantee that there are people out there calling Makoto a femboy.

PETER: You might be underestimating denialists. I’ve seen comments to that effect, actually.

TONI: I have, too, yeah.

PETER: Not that they are worthy of being listened to, yeah.

VRAI: I know, they all suck, and fuck ‘em!

PETER: Yeah.

TONI: But yeah, it is an imperfect adaptation, but it is also… wonderful. [Chuckles] The visuals are so stunning. The music is gorgeous. I love the OP and ED. The ending theme is basically a love song between Ouran and Kadode where they are singing about how much they love each other through the apocalypse. And with—

VRAI: Mm-hm. Also, if you only—

TONI: Yeah, you were saying?

VRAI: Please go ahead. Sorry.

TONI: Some of the lines seem to maybe reference gay marriage, like, saying that they love each other in sickness and health. I don’t know how that’s translated in Japanese, but that is definitely a wedding vow in English. [Chuckles] It’s a gay show! And then Makoto, yeah. Talk about Makoto, please.

VRAI: Yeah, it’s interesting because I feel like Makoto hasn’t figured out what’s going on with her gender stuff, but I support her nonetheless. You know, she’s clearly still early in coming out—it’s only been a couple of months—but also is clearly really, really attached to her wig, which is such a feel.

TONI: [Laughs]

VRAI: I don’t know. It’s just nice that she— It is interesting how she goes back and forth through spaces, right? When she goes over to hang out and they’re playing video games together, Futaba refers to them as… makes food and calls out to her and Ontan, is like, “Hey, are you girls ready to eat?” which is nice. And then later you have the moment where Makoto is next to Oba and they sort of confide in each other. Which, by the way, I don’t know if they’re dating or they’re besties, but I love them.

TONI: They are so in love. I’m just saying… [Laughs] Okay, it’s the scene where Makoto finds Oba and starts crying on top of him in the manga, because I don’t know about you, but characters glomping each other and crying as they literally are on top of each other… that is a very, very, very romantic moment in most Japanese stories I’ve read.

VRAI: Their love is good! So, you know, that’s two queers who aren’t dead in the apocalypse.

TONI: There we go.

[Chuckling]

VRAI: But yeah. But they have that moment where Makoto is willing to make the overture to Oba of, like, “You know, we’re both guys. You can be honest with me.” So, on the one hand, I think you can read that as like, oh, well, it’s acquiescing to, in fairness, a sort of a different way that the trans community in Japan has a different relation to the assigned-at-birth idea of the physical body versus emotional body, right? Just from a character beat, I think it’s interesting as Makoto has made a place of feeling comfortable transitioning spaces and transitioning self in this fluidity. It’s really nice.

TONI: Well, and I’ll also say that that’s accurate to a lot of the experiences of some transfemmes. Like, I mean, even in my own experience, right? I find that when I’m around girls, I feel very much like I want to be one of the girls, right? I don’t want to feel like a guy in the space. I want to feel like one of them, right? And I think in On Liking Women by Andrea Long Chu, she talks about how the experience of desiring womanhood and desiring to be a woman came partially with wanting to be one of the girls, wanting to go on shopping sprees and having these very specific experiences of aestheticized girlhood that were shut off from her in a male identity, and that oftentimes a measure of one’s affective relation to a gender is about your relation to other people as much as it is about, you know, just something you feel deep inside. One of Andrea Chu’s most important arguments—and one of her most controversial—is that you cannot separate gender from, like, sexual desire, from homosocial desire, right? And I think that there’s an element of that’s explored in Makoto’s nonbinary identity, right? Yeah, I don’t know.

VRAI: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, and I think it is very sweet that after… That connection is also what gives Makoto the confidence to feel safe going swimming without her wig, like her identity won’t be invalidated by these people not seeing her performing girl mode.

TONI: And they love her so much! And they tell her, when she goes back to [her] hometown, just to be herself, which… like… you know…

VRAI: Girl, I love you, but don’t come out yet.

TONI: [Laughs] Yeah, it’s such obvious— It’s such teenager-to-teenager advice that’s well meaning but probably not the greatest. [Laughs]

PETER: I’m sure it’ll work out okay.

TONI: [Laughs]

VRAI: It’s late in the conversation, but I also want to say— By the way, I watched this all dubbed. The first two episodes are a little rough, but it’s a really, really good dub! It gave me feelings, and that just made me think of it because Makoto’s voice actor is very cute. It’s like a cast almost entirely of unknowns or people who don’t usually work in anime, which I think always adds a really interesting texture to the vocal performance.

TONI: Oh, wow. That’s so interesting.

VRAI: Yeah, like, Ontan’s voice actor normally does Western cartoons. If you look at her resume, she’s mostly a My Little Pony voice actress.

TONI: What? [Chuckles] Hilarious.

VRAI: She’s really good! She’s doing sort of a nasal Peridot-ish voice, but it really works. And also, I feel like, because nobody is watching this show, I don’t have to go online and hear people discoursing over whether it’s okay that a series that takes place in the 2010s is using 2010s internet slang for its characters. Yeah, no, listen. Absolutely, absolutely, the phrase “fake news” and “deepfake” would come up! Fuck, this is a good show.

TONI: It is so good! And I… yeah, just… I’m so happy it exists. This has honestly rocketed up to my list of top ten anime of all time. It’s very, very, very, very special to me, and I’m so glad that I got to talk it through with y’all.

PETER: Yeah. Yeah, I wish it had come out along with the rest of the season—like, launched at the same time as the rest of the season. I feel like if you missed that window where everybody’s kinda… We’re so engineered behaviorally to look for new titles at the beginning of each quarter, and so if it misses that window, I think people are a lot less primed to pick up a new show at that time.

VRAI: It’s also like different people will hit differently on… Like, my partner and I watched episodes 1 through 11 all in one day, and then we kinda slowed down a little bit towards the end. I feel like a lot of people probably can’t or would not want to binge this because it gets so heavy.

PETER: Well, I do think, based on how you watched it, I think the first 10 to, what, like 13 episodes are a lot of the more breezy stuff aside from some pretty visceral scenes involving the aliens, and it’s only in that, like, last four episodes that it really gets into the Evangelion-esque, horrific, apocalyptic stuff, so I think that kinda tracks.

TONI: It’s worth shouting out the production values, too, because holy shit. As much as I dislike the mecha sequence for what it does, storyline, in this version of the story… Which, you know, the thing is, when you know what happens in the manga, you can kinda just be like, well, it didn’t really happen. You know? It didn’t really happen that way.

VRAI: And they were totally fine! We don’t know. They don’t know. They don’t know!

TONI: Yeah, and it is also implied—

VRAI: They could be any charred corpses.

TONI: [Chuckles] But I mean, also, it’s heavily implied that Kadode and Ouran somehow found a way to be traversing universes at the end, so there’s that, too, which is like, ooh, that’s too much going on there. But at the very least, helps me know—

VRAI: They’re so gay and in love!

TONI: They’re so gay and in love! So cute, so beautiful. Love them so much. But aside from what it does narratively, it’s so beautifully animated. I was like, holy shit, this mecha sequence is gorgeous! And everything in this show is so beautifully done. The character animation is— Oh, my fucking God. So many of my favorite shots in this show are things that were not in the manga, like, even in the first episode, Kadode wielding her little paddle like a knife to threaten somebody with or, you know, things like that. That’s just not in the manga. And I think that it’s very, very, very satisfying, and I think that’s partially because it was originally a film. But I really hope that this is a sign that more series that are experimental or interesting in this way are going to get competent adaptations.

VRAI: Well, and I think… The director’s done an incredible job, but I think a lot of praise has to be laid at Reiko Yoshida’s feet because she’s taken a source material that she had to cut down so much and fit to two films. I think in some ways the choice to move up a big chunk of the flashback scene to much earlier in the series is one that’s a little bit thematically [Hums dubiously] because the manga is so carefully paced that… actually I had a great conversation with my partner—who is, you know, not only beautiful and funny but also an incredible scholar—where I was like, “Oh, apparently all the flashback stuff is a lot later in the manga,” and she was immediately like, “Oh, so it goes here,” and was exactly correct because the plotting so thoroughly funnels you to the build-up of “This is the moment where everything sort of collapses to its core point. And this is the point where we would have the intimacy to find this out,” and all of the flashback stuff happens during the sequence where Makoto and Oba are using the device. 

But I see why it is where it is because of the necessities of the construction of the film. Like, when you think of it as “Oh, this had to be two films and now we’ve put this section into this first film,” you’re still getting the emotional draw of an arc for these characters, and you’ve instead made the hook “Okay, but what happened to Kadode? Was Ouran able to bring her back from the dead? How did we get to where we are?” which I think is fucking smart within the constraints of medium needs. I have so much respect for the work that she did here.

TONI: Agreed.

PETER: Yeah, it could really seem like an ass pull in the second movie right at the end just to kinda bring everything to a conclusion. And yeah, what you said before, 12 volumes in less than 20 episodes, or two movies, is a lot. Just thinking about that, it’s a lot of content that they had to work through. It never felt like they were rushing through the story or anything like that. So, very good adaptation.

TONI: Unsurprising given that she also did Heike Story and so much else with Naoko Yamada. I mean, something comparable could be her script for A Silent Voice, which also adapted an extended manga into an astonishingly short movie. You know, whether that was— I like it. I don’t adore it but I like it, and I don’t think the faults there lie with her. [Chuckles] So she certainly had practice. Or Heike Story, for that matter. But yeah, I— This is… It’s so good, and I’m really— The director is pretty much unknown, so I’m really curious to see what they do next and… Oh, did you know that the music writer also did the music for Yuri on Ice?

PETER: Oh, my God.

VRAI: Oh! Yeah, that tracks. Honestly.

PETER: Appropriate.

VRAI: Like, cool.

TONI: [Chuckles]

VRAI: Yeah, and like we kind of implied up top, you can, in the AniFem discord—which, by the way, you can join for $5 a month by going to patreon.com/animefeminist…

PETER: Nice.

VRAI: The Discord had a really good chat about this, where they were talking about… you know, you can really watch 1 through 16 as one complete, emotionally satisfying, contiguous story and then kind of look at 0 and 17 as an interesting AU OVA. And that still works perfectly fine.

TONI: It good. I don’t have anything more to say, other than “It good.”

VRAI: If you somehow made it all the way to the end and you still haven’t watched it, I hope you’re convinced. I think this is a series that benefits from going in as fresh as possible, but I don’t think it’s a series that’s ruined by knowing what’s coming, because in a certain sense, you can appreciate the intricacy of it at that point,

TONI: Even though I watched the prologue, Episode 0, I still had no idea how on earth it was going to get there and what the implications of it were, so…

PETER: Yeah, same here. And I’d read the manga, so… [Laughs] I was like, “Wait, what is this?” I didn’t even remember her dad at all. So, yeah, it really came around and circled back very well, considering.

VRAI: I will say, also in favor of the manga, there is an early mention just in an offside… somebody on the street reading a newspaper. He does plant early on in the manga that there is an invader who took over somebody’s body. So it’s not a complete ass pull in the manga.

PETER: Mm-hm.

TONI: Yeah.

VRAI: Or, specifically, that somebody went missing and then turned up years later with no memory about where they’d been.

PETER: Yeah. Yeah, that one honestly felt less of a left turn than the multiverse stuff, for sure.

VRAI: This series is good. Any last thoughts before we wrap it up?

PETER: Well, I feel like this has even come across kind of in the way that we’ve been discussing it. There are a lot of other touchpoints that we could mention and have mentioned over the course of our last couple seasonal podcasts, where we’ve been keeping up with the series, what is it, since summer? So, if you’re interested, you can always listen to those.

VRAI: Yeah, we could easily talk about this for three hours.

PETER: Yeah, yeah. It’s almost like there’s a fear of getting into certain subjects because they could just blow out into 20-minute conversations on their own. This is a dense text, and there are a lot of things that you look at happening in DDD and just go, “Oh, that’s happening right now in seven places in the real world,” and you could be tricked into thinking that it’s specifically about, like, Gaza, we brought up a lot of times. So, watching it, especially now—or probably at any time, to be honest—is quite the experience.

TONI: Every five minutes of this show, there’s like five different things to unpack. [Chuckles] This is a show that— Yeah. And I appreciate that. Yeah, that’s all I have to say.

VRAI: I will— Yeah, and I guess, considering we talk delightedly about how gay it is (and it is!), just keep in mind that this is a little bit of a… [Sighs] I’m almost a little bit hesitant to make this comparison, but it’s another episode with a kiss in the sort of last episode, so it’s a little bit of a Kill la Kill situation where, like, this is absolutely about the emotional relationship between these two characters all the way through but it’s not going to explode into romantic tension until literally the end, so [Inaudible audio] overt romantic tension.

TONI: Oh, but it is very satisfying for what it is.

VRAI: It’s so good! Like, my God, yes, we all see it! Thank God! Thank God, you also see it!

TONI: [Laughs]

VRAI: [Obscured by laughter]

TONI: [through laughter] It was—

PETER: And hopefully, we’ll be seeing it again at the Anime Awards.

TONI: God, it deserves it.

VRAI: We’ll see. I mean, it’s not a shounen, so…

TONI: [Groans with annoyance]

VRAI: Does it even exist?

TONI: [Laughs]

PETER: It has been known to happen.

VRAI: [Chuckles] You’re right. It’s not a shoujo, so it does have at least a fighting chance.

PETER: Mm-hm. Yuri on Ice once won an award.

[Chuckling]

TONI: One singular award.

PETER: Well, actually many awards that year Yuri on Ice came out. Yeah, the first Anime Awards. But yes.

VRAI: Let’s not relitigate that.

PETER: Yeah.

VRAI: Goddamn it. There’s no— This is not— This is completely the wrong place, but I did want to just tell y’all, and maybe this will end up… But Peter, you mentioned super early on the really cool shots that are iconic with the titles in physical space and the reverse shot.

PETER: Yeah.

VRAI: The title of the manga makes way more sense if you’re reading the manga because, you know, obviously, the title itself is a massive spoiler, which I must admire the spine of doing. That Demon is dead dead.

TONI: Wait, wait, wait, wait. Explain, explain, explain, explain, explain. I don’t even get it.

VRAI: Because the nickname they used to tease Kadode in elementary school was Demon.

TONI: Right, right, right.

VRAI: So, this is the— And she, in fact, very dead. That was what provoked Ontan’s entire character arc.

TONI: [crosstalk] Oh, that’s right. Right, right, right, right, right, okay, okay, okay, there we go.

VRAI: “Dead dead Demon.”

PETER: Repeatedly so.

VRAI: Yep!

PETER: “Dededede.”

VRAI: “Dededede” is the sound effect used for machine guns in the manga.

PETER: Ah.

TONI: [prolonged] Oh!

PETER: For real? That’s…

VRAI: Yeah, right?

PETER: [Chuckles] That’s, uh…

TONI: That’s fucked. Oh, my God.

PETER: [crosstalk] That’s a pretty insane pull from the future.

VRAI: Uh-huh.

TONI: Yeah, this… Wow. [Laughs]

VRAI: Yeah, the Fujin machine guns are rendered as “Dededede… dededededededede.”

PETER: Ah, okay. I see.

TONI: [crosstalk] Oh, my God. That’s gonna haunt me.

VRAI: Yeah! It’s fucked, right? It’s very good!

TONI: [through laughter] Oh, God!

VRAI: And by good, I mean horrible!

TONI: Shout-out to—

VRAI: Anyway!

PETER: [Chuckles] Let us ponder that one. [Chuckles]

VRAI: [crosstalk] Yeah, no, the manga’s all on the VIZ app, by the way. If you have that subscription, you can just read all of the manga on the VIZ app. That’s what I did.

And yes, thank you so much for joining us for this meandering discussion, AniFam folks at home. We hope that you enjoyed it. If you liked what you heard, you can find more from the team by going to animefeminist.com, where we have podcasts and articles for your perusal. If you really like what you heard, consider tossing us a little bit of money. Patreon.com/animefeminist is how we pay our recurring bills, and ko-fi.com/animefeminist is where we save up for projects. Currently, we were able to raise our pay rate for contributors in 2024 to $75 an article. We really want to keep doing that next year, and we’re halfway there right now. So if you go to the Ko-fi and you just want to do one-time donations instead of a subscription, you can do that there.

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