“This isn’t forever. We haven’t seen our last peaceful day.”
The above prediction, delivered by the invader Yuriko shortly before her death, seems unlikely to come true. In these four episodes alone, we see a military operation on a college campus, the continued activities of a young adult vigilante group, AI-powered bipedal robots equipped with automatic weapons, and the proliferation of hostile businesses and smartphone apps, all of which result in the mass death of invaders. A resistance group aimed at stopping this violence has begun distributing plastic guns to its members, promising human-on-human conflict. The mothership hovering over Tokyo is now emitting white smoke, signaling the imminent explosion of its internal reactor, which will blanket the earth with an endless rain of contaminants. Hell, the show itself is throwing messages such as “5 DAYS UNTIL THE END OF HUMANITY” on screen to highlight this seemingly inevitable disaster (that one constitutes the final shot of episode 13).
Being an adaptation of an Inio Asano manga, Dead Dead Demon was always going to have a bleak outlook on humanity’s future, no matter how high-concept it got. That it puts the lie to an alien’s hopes for peace is a logical extension of that pessimism. But there’s a tiny undercurrent of hope to these episodes in the character of Ooba, which I find strongly appealing. As an invader in the body of a human being, he bridges the gap between the two species, and his evolving ties with his human friends compel him to “protect everyone” – a declaration he makes after Ontan expresses her fear that something terrible is going to happen. Ooba’s relationship to Ontan is particularly complex, as it’s recently taken a turn for the romantic, but he can’t be completely honest with her, since he wants to shield her from the truth of humanity’s impending extinction. Toward the end of episode 12, she pleads with him, “Don’t go anywhere,” but Ooba doesn’t answer, knowing that the hope he represents will require him to leave her before long.
The upcoming cataclysm, as well as his plans to stop it, aren’t the only things that Ooba keeps secret from his new girlfriend. In episode 10, his memory viewing device (dubbed “mecha mandarin” by Kadode for its round, orange appearance) gives him a glimpse into Ontan’s mind, where he sees the alternate reality in which the two girls came into contact with the alien scout, and all the tragedy that followed. When I saw this scene for the first time, I slotted it into my theory that Ontan was also an invader in a human body, and that she had lost her memories upon arriving in the present timeline. After Dead Dead Demon entered its beach arc, however, the truth was revealed: Ontan was always human, and her other set of memories originated from the timeline where Kadode committed suicide. After the alien scout gave Ontan the option to travel to the present timeline, she took it, and her consciousness sublimated itself into the mind of the present Ontan, resulting in the loquacious personality we know and love. Pretty wild stuff.
Episode 13 was where these reveals occurred, as the show once again used the mecha mandarin to grant Makoto a look into Ooba’s brain, thus granting us the same learning opportunity. Its balance of new information with a recap of the other timeline was quite well-managed, I thought, but I do have two points of criticism. One lies with the involvement of Ontan’s brother, Hiroshi, in her decision to abandon her Kadode-less timeline and travel to the present one. Why would he go along with the idea, despite being so attached to his sister? His parting speech to her as the doors of the alien’s Shift Machine closed was nice, declaring that he would “always be on her side” (which she would later echo to Kadode in the present), but a siscon allowing their sibling to vanish from reality doesn’t compute for me. Additionally, the depiction of Ontan, Hiroshi, and the alien scout approaching the Shift Machine, while excellent in concept, was ultimately visually lacking. Presenting them as giants and arranging them at odd angles in relation to the smaller landscape were great ideas, but the storyboarding here was too zoomed in most of the time, so the show couldn’t make the most of the contrast.
Putting those issues aside, it’s fascinating to consider the differences between the two timelines, as outlined in episode 13. In the “original” timeline, where Kadode and Ontan were the ones to stumble upon the alien scout, Kadode’s horrifying use of his futuristic tech convinced the alien that humanity was “arrogant and violent” and “not capable of coexistence,” and he relayed that message back to his homeworld. That means the show’s present violence against the invaders, as well as the potential annihilation of the human race, wouldn’t have occurred in the original timeline, had Ontan opted to stay there. At least, that’s what the scout claims – but there’s a counter to this theory present in episode 12, courtesy of an invader that Ooba attempts to save from Kenichi (the vigilante leader of the Unified Youth Front). As he lies dying after the attack, the invader speculates that “we were never supposed to make it back” – that their leadership had sold them a false promise of easily “retaking their ancestral lands,” but that in reality, they had used them as the first wave of bodies in a deliberately engineered conflict with humanity.
Is the invader correct about his government’s malicious intentions, or did Ontan truly usher in an avoidable future by hopping timelines, prioritizing Kadode’s survival over all else? Did the invaders truly live on Earth before humanity, or is that propaganda designed to motivate them to serve as soldiers in an eventual war? At this point in Dead Dead Demon’s run, we don’t have the answers to these questions. I’ve seen the whole series at this point, and honestly, I don’t remember whether those issues are ever cleared up, or whether they’re ultimately important enough to raise in the first place. The complexity of the show’s multiple plots and timelines makes it hard for my fuzzy old brain to analyze, but I do want to mention some of its other story threads here, because there’s more to address than just what’s happening within our primary trio’s sphere of influence.
Episode 11 in particular devotes most of its time to secondary characters, with Kadode and Ontan not appearing until nearly 15 minutes into its run. To aid the audience in processing this change of focus, its three stories are all built around a similar theme: tension between aggressors and pacifists. The most important of the three occurs in a nearby prefecture contaminated with black fog, where a colony of invaders has taken up residence. One of them, Tsutomu, is a pacifist, who carries with him the hopeful spirit of his deceased lover Yuriko (whose quote opened up this post). He’s outnumbered, however, by those who want revenge against humanity, especially after a pair of autonomous Fujin units slaughter the majority of the colony. Despite the horrific nature of that attack, there’s more than a little irony to it, as the Fujin are decked out in cutesy polka dot and floral armor, designed by idol-slash-artist Dorii Rattatta. The episode establishes this connection during the cold open’s Cool Japan Paradise expo, which exemplifies Inio Asano’s sense of humor – using otaku bullshit as a futile mask for the horrors of modern life (in this case, AI-driven mass murder bots).
Aside from the pacifist-aggressor dynamic between Tsutomu and the invaders’ leadership, there’s also a confrontation between Futaba and Kenichi at a SHIP demonstration, where the latter espouses his views on the futility of peaceful protest. Of course, Kenichi doesn’t propose a viable alternative to SHIP’s ineffectual calls for peace, and there’s the obvious issue of his psychopathy at play, as we see him killing invaders at multiple points across these four episodes. But there’s a kernel of truth in his twisted logic, which is that violence is necessary to enact truly meaningful change – he just has the wrong group in his crosshairs. On the flip side, we have Ikeda, the JSDF officer who’s been involved in several anti-invader operations thus far (including the one on the girls’ college campus), taking leave to visit his family. It’s possible that he’s killed as many or more invaders as Kenichi, despite having come to recognize their intelligence, but he sides with neither his aggressive parents, whose nationalist leanings are abundantly clear, nor his pacifist sister, whose online slacktivism is ineffectual (much like SHIP’s virtually inaudible protests) in a world that favors hate over tolerance.
There’s so much more to write, not only about these four episodes but about this show as a whole. With our Anime of the Year post coming up, however, most of my anime-related attention is going to other (mostly lesser) series from 2024, so I’m not sure when the final Dead Dead Demon post will appear. Honestly, there’s a possibility that it never will – the combination of my real life obligations and our declining activity on the site may lead to a timeline where the last batch of episodes never receives coverage. Regardless of my personal failings as a blogger, though, I hope some of you out there watched and enjoyed this show, as it’s certainly one of the most ambitious that the previous year had to offer. Expect it to rank highly on my list (though not necessarily our joint list) of 2024’s best anime, which ought to appear within a couple weeks. Until then!
The post Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction – 10-13 appeared first on Star Crossed Anime.
