Delico’s Nursery – Episode 1

Content Warning: Blood/gore, fridging

What’s it about? Dali Delico is a member of the Vlad Agency, an elite detective task force that’s been tasked with solving a serial murder case. The apparent perpetrators seem to be fanatical devotees of TRUMP (True of Vamp): the progenitor of all vampires, source of the race’s lost immortality, and apparent urban legend. Dali has given up detective work to raise his children after the death of his wife, but agrees to take on the case under one condition—that his fellow detectives also try balancing casework and child-rearing.

Do YOU want to see hot anime men in nurturing roles? Does it sweeten the pot if I tell you they’re also wearing vaguely Victorian fantasy clothing? How about if it happened to name its antagonist after one of the notable despots of our time without much apparent self-awareness? Boy, have I got an anime for you.

Okay, credit where it’s due: the “TRUMP” franchise started out as a series of stage plays in 2009, which the director then turned into a manga before writing the adaptive scripts for this very anime. And honestly, I can’t tell if that means I should scold the script for not being snappier or be surprised that it isn’t worse.

There’s nothing terribly wrong with Delico’s Nursery. Yes, I found myself pining for the magnificent style and more inventive worldbuilding of The Case Study of Vanitas throughout this episode, but Delico clearly lacks ambition as a mystery show. The dialogue might try to put “creeping intrigue and child-rearing” on equal footing, but I know a Hot Dadime when I see one.

Or…kind of, anyway. Nishikiori Hiroshi has worked on some solid action and fantasy titles over the years, but none of them are ones I think of as being notable for male eye-candy. It is trying, mind. The murder mystery bits are largely expository and kind of dull, while watching Dali (and eventually his colleagues) be a faildad is where the episode stores all its energy. The most intimate moments with the camera are of Dali trying to soothe his infant son, where there’s a bit of softness and complexity to his features. But for a good chunk of the episode the visuals remain stiff, relying on the lavish character designs to carry the day.

The unexpected emotional heart that emerges is Gerhard, who’s both the uptight perfectionist to Dali’s sardonic slacker and the one who killed Dali’s wife. The “why” of that scenario is the actual mystery the show’s set its bedrock on, and it’s a lot more compelling than the cult. The setup also badly wants you to ship the two of them. Or at least, I think it does? All of these men have supposed biological children, but there isn’t a whisper of women existing in this equation outside of Dali’s extremely dead wife, and we’ve put them in a room to co-parent for plot reasons, a setup guaranteed to light the fire of shipping fuel—just as the Spy x Family fandom. Gerhard also clearly has a bit of hero-worship for Dali, too, in spite of the whole “murdered your wife” thing.  

Which makes it kind of disappointing that the visuals insist on keeping the pair of them a metaphorical five feet apart in every scene. Maybe I’ve just watched enough vampire shows at this point that I wanted it to work a little harder to invest me in its cast. Maybe I was missing the effortless eroticism of Vanitas. Maybe it’s that sense of stiffness I mentioned before. Maybe I just get cranky when a vampire show doesn’t bother with any of the actual drawbacks of vampire lore—hell, any of the lore at all beyond pointy teeth—and instead grinds it down into “basically humans but with enforced cravats.” I can’t even begin to comment on the depiction of the children, since they’re only tiny agents of chaos and not yet characters.

For all my griping, I still think this is worth giving the three-episode test if the “hot dad” element appeals to you. There’s a quiet undercurrent of nurturing masculinity that comes with it, albeit wrapped up in the conceit that these men are ignoring their children because of their nobility rather than explicitly a gendered division of labor. I’m curious to see how far Delico is willing to develop that theme, and if it can break its cast outside their currently exacting molds.