Today I will be talking about Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction, from now shortened to DDDD. I will be discussing characters and plot points, so beware for possible spoilers.

DDDD is based on the manga from the same name, written and drawn by Inio Asano. Even if the name is not immediately familiar to you, you probably have at least heard or seen some of his work online. He is particularly famous for the manga Oyasumi Punpun and Solanin, both visceral stories about human nature and experience, dealing with themes of love, , growing up and grief. Ultimately they are impactful and sometimes depressing stories that somehow end up conveying a possitive outlook. And when I started reading the manga, soon after it started being released, that’s what I thought DDDD was going to be as well. I would like to state that despite having the read first volume of the manga as it was coming out I didn’t go back to read the rest. This is purely my thoughts after finishing the anime adaptation.

Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction follows the daily lives of Kadode and Ouran after an alien spaceship filled with “invaders” parked itself in the skies of Tokyo. Despite living through an intense political and military war against the “invaders”, life proceeds as normal for these two girls and their group of friends. As an initial premisse, heavily developed in the inital episodes, I thought it was a strong foundation upon which to build. The characters were simple but clearly on the cusp of adulthood, and a shift of paradigm like an alien war in your backyard is as good a metaphor as any for the tormoil of that transition period. But thats not the route the story, for the worse. So let’s get into the reason I sat down to write this: the fact that I didn’t like Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction, despite really wanting to.

The short explanation boils down to the fact that these two aspects that make up the premisse (the daily lives of Kadode and Ouran and the alien invasion) are almost independent cogs in the machine of the story. They interact in the sense that they both exist in the same setting, but from the prespective of the girls it’s almost as if it doesn’t matter that there are aliens. In the early episodes, a friend of them (that had very little screen time and was basically inconsequentially for the group dynamic) dies after a piece of the space ship falls in the neighbourhood she was in. They cry a bit but by the next episode it’s as if she had never existed and she is never mentioned again through the series. She could have died from a car crash that the impact would have been the same.

If you have seen the show you are now arguing that “the girls actually have very intimate connections with the aliens, actually. They even take one in when they are kids and become their friend” but this is not what I’m arguing for. I would say the story is trying to convey the message that even during a war against alien invasion life goes on as normal to a certain degree, but this only true if the characters are exposed to said war, which is mostly not true. They are exposed to the aliens, but not the war itself. It felt like the story was almost imparting that role onto the audience, because the characters didn’t get exposed to the political conflict but we did, more than what was necessary in my opinion. This also stemed from what I felt was a lack of focus or commitment to the story telling vehicle. Usually stories have a fixed point of view character (or characters, in the case of series like Game of Thrones), and those are the only accounts the audience has access to, or we have a more liberal and abstract narrative voice, an impartial omnipotente narrator that shows the audience the events multiple characters are feeling without being restricted to the point of view of one character. This last is the approach you will find most often, because it’s easier to convey information if you access to multiple prespectives, instead of being tied down only to what your focus character sees (think about how in Boku no Hero Academia Deku is the protagonist but the story will occasionally cut to the vilains’ hideout, If we were restricted to what Deku sees and knows this information would required hidden cameras or a spy of some sort). However there is a middle term between these two oposites, and that is the ensemble cast story. Classic examples of this are Baccano, Durarara and more recently Odd Taxi. These are shows where we do see the prespective of multiple characters but it is very clear who is the point of view character at each moment. This means that if for example a bomb (that none of the POV characters set up) explodes we (the audience) will never know who did.

SO why did I just go on that tangent? Because I think DDDD wanted to make an ensemble cast but didn’t know how and ended up just making an omniscient narrative. The slice of life moments are clearly set from each of the characters prespectives, but the political moments show up out of nowever, like a message from some god, bringing down a spoon with the plot for us to eat up. Until (really) late onto the show we don’t even know anyone that is involved with the political plot, and even then all the characters involved in that section of the plot are cardboard cut outs of “politan puppet” and “militar mastermind” archetypes, with hardly any humanity. And because this part of the story was so removed from everything else it created a big disconnect in the way I experienced the show. The plot was clearly trying to be centered on the emotional core of the show (the two girls), but they never colide with the militarist commentary on racial/cultural genocide, so there is no connection to the theme of “normal life in times of strife”, because our characters are never faced with the violent aspect of it. There are “pro-alien” and “anti-genocide” protests shown on tv, but they never extensively discuss, reject or accept each view and so that makes me reject the show as having a “peaceful and anti-war” message. Only the side characters get to get their hands dirty with activism, while the core cast can just live as if nothing is happening around them. Apathy is all the characters have to provide, which is also never commented on, so I also reject this as a justification as to why “the show was actually about the characters learning to care and not be apathethic in the face of war” angle. And this was surprising to me, because Inio Asano himself has explored apathy in similar contexts before.

Overal, this left me feeling like I was watching two completly independent halves of a show fighting for the protagonism. I will also refute any excuse that it makes it so “the world feels alive, because it’s not a direct response to the main character’s actions”, this “world” hardly impacts the characters to begin with, almost as if they are living in completly separate dimensions of the same story (this will come back later, with the multiverse discussion). These details leave the show feeling a bit empty lacking the heart I usually expect from Inio Asano, unlike in Oyasumo Punpun or Solanin the characters didn’t seem aligned with the core message of the show and that made both characters and the story feel inconsequential. This was not helped by the fact that besides the two main girls, there was a big secondary cast, that kept growing as the episodes went on without much depth. Not that the two main girls have much depth to begin with… This was one of the things the disapointed me the most about this show, because I was expecting the level of character autopsy and analysis that I have come to expect from Asano’s manga, and instead I got a bunch of nothing with a toping of alien-aided dimension hopping. Kadode was as flat as a character can be, no arc to be found because it actually happened in an alternative timeline where she took an alien gun and became an anti-hero killing “bad guys”, killing herself afterward in front of Ouran. I have said this before but will say it every time: “character development in a flashback means nothing, it just shows you how the character got here, not how they changed since the start of the story” and that is true in this case for both Ouran and Kadode. In this flashback we find out that Ouran was actually the introverted one,but became over the top and excentric after dimension hopping to prevent Kadode from repeating the steps that had lead her to becoming a mass murder. No character development happens outside of this flashback, but thats not necessarily bad. After all not all characters need to undergo character development. In “The Anatomy of Story”, John Truby argues that an alternative to a changing character is a changing world, where the character already knows “the truth” and needs to teach it to the world. But as we have already establish when I discussed the politics of DDDD, these girls are just going with the flow, they aren’t going around preaching that love and compassion is the solution to war and genocide (even though I think they should, it would have made for a more interesting show). So this leaves Kadode as a plain character and Ouran as a weird and sometimes really ugly comic relief I never really found funny.

With this said I am left with a bitter taste in my mouth after finishing the show. I really wanted to like it, but I think it’s unfair to judge the show for what I was expecting and not for what it is. What I was expecting was an exploration of apathy and complacency in the face of conflic in our modern era, when we are constantly overwhelmed with societal pressures and social media. I expected character desconstructions of Kadode as someone trying to close her eyes to conflic to fit in, and of Ouran who acts out as a means of escapism from the restrictions of society. What I got was a pretty average show with rather ugly character design (I know it’s on purpose but still) that follow a group of characters I didn’t care about, which also served me a lot of empty attempts of commentary on the politics of civil war on the side.