Dan Da Dan – Episode 1

Content Warning: Sexual violence, attempted rape, abusive relationships, bullying

What’s it about? Ayase just got dumped. More than that, she just got dumped for not wanting to pay for a love hotel for her and her boyfriend. Playing kick-the-can down the halls, she sees Okarun, covered in little paper balls other children threw at him. Why? He believes in aliens. And he wants you to know about them! What a coincidence, because Ayase believes in something a bit strange too: ghosts. And she’s gonna prove to him they exist, whether he likes it or not.

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I could spend this whole review just chronicling every moment that stunned me. When the Turbo-Grannied Okarun comes through the phone, warping his body into ungodly shapes? When Ayase realized her psychic abilities and kicked the alien like it was her awful boyfriend? The entirety of the drop-dead gorgeous and experimental OP, especially the little moments of dancing? This show’s sense of what makes a good fight scene is cut from the same cloth as Kizumonogatari, or that Studio Trigger vibe of absolute absurdity dialed up to 100.

But the moment that honestly stood out to me most was the one moment of complete vulnerability, even tenderness, in the show–when Ayase realized that she had gone too far in blaming Okarun for being bullied because he’s an occultist otaku. She could have just walked away, having done a finishing blow on him, and they would never have become friends. But instead, she picks up Okarun’s alien otaku magazine, brushes it off, and the character animation sells so completely how she suddenly sees, “wait. I just unleashed all of my own internalized bullshit onto this kid. I need to show him some respect, since nobody else showed me any.”

It really captures what makes Ayase such a fantastic female lead: messy, sometimes self-centered, prone to violent rage, but ultimately trying her best to be kind. It also shows what makes her dynamic with Okarun so delightful: what happens when the things we are told to bury about ourselves–with Okarun, clearly his hyperfixations that read very strongly as autistic, and with Ayase, her relationship with her occultist grandmother–become the things others most value about us? One’s vulnerability is, as Björk once put it, the wound-gate through which we can be loved.

We must talk, however, about this premiere’s propensity for sexual menace. It is present from the opening seconds, as Ayase’s boyfriend condescendingly demands sex with her and wants her to pay for the love hotel, and then violently dumps her after a somewhat one-sided physical altercation as she refuses. It is most egregious when the aliens prepare Ayase to be raped through forcibly stripping her and stimulating her brain to make her aroused. It is a deeply uncomfortable scene. It is not framed in any way that makes it obvious what its intention is other than to disturb and to make clear the stakes of the scene; however, there are frequent cuts to her panties, and several shots are framed in a way that feels uncomfortably close to rape-as-fanservice, particularly the point-of-view shots from the rapist aliens’ perspective.

At the most horrifying moment, one alien pulls Ayase’s pelvis towards him as he prepares his gigantic metal penis-thing that would clearly destroy her insides. This part felt distasteful to me, especially given the number of women who as victims of war actually experience rape with blunt metal objects that do in fact cause extreme, irreparable harm to their sexual organs and uteruses. I frankly found such moments cheap and gross.

That being said, that Ayase is able to save herself through re-embracing her relationship with her grandmother to discover her true psychic abilities helps it feel a little less like she is being damseled in a way that completely removes her agency. The main continuing sexual menace is actually against the boy, who has his penis removed. One could write plenty about castration anxiety, emasculation fears, yadda yadda yadda, but it at least evens out the sexual violence a bit between the two genders, even if obviously Okarun is not being sexualized in nearly the same way.

These moments were nowhere near enough to ruin this premiere for me. Science Saru and writer Seko Hiroshi have continued to bring it, and I am thrilled to live at the same time as they are putting out masterpieces of craft like this.

Dan Da Dan is a mess. But it is my mess.

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