Finished Deca-Dence the other day, overall I’d recommend it, it’s pretty fun. Very well-animated, great characters, fun concept. A little flat in a few places, namely anything involving them battling the monsters, and the very end, but it goes a lot of places and most of them are great.
Basically, it’s in a post-apocalyptic world where monsters invaded and now humanity only exists in an underground colony. Above that colony, (minor spoiler) in space, there’s a race of cybernetics, who inhabit avatar bodies to engage in the war against the monsters for fun, as like an MMO.
Both sides are tricked into gathering monster goo which is used as fuel by the cybernetics - humans believe this is the only thing that powers their battle city, androids just do it for in-game points.
The human-side story is what I’d say is the highlight of the show, I love their weird little society and how chipper everyone is despite living in a nightmarish forever war. The main girl loses her entire freaking arm in the first episode:
Each battle involves humans and avatar-body-humanoid androids driving Mad Max-style cars into a giant bug melee. The entire sequence of them pouring out of the megacity into a ground war with the bizarre monsters rules:
I like the main girl a lot, she’s just so used to having an artificial arm made of garbage that she barely gives it any thought. That can-do chipperness in the face of dire hellworld problems is endlessly delightful:
My initial impression after the first ep is that everyone are just whalers in the future, getting that sweet, sweet whale oil from whale-like aliens.
Thankfully it’s not really that predictable. If anything, the monster stuff is under-done and never really well-explained.
Anything further would be too much of a spoiler, but, it twists and turns a lot in some enjoyable ways.
Thoughts on the finale.
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The ending is a little underwhelming, where like, (INCOMING ANIME PLOT) after vowing to overthrow the entire capitalist machine that requires a slave class to harvest robot fuel that is then sold to a pacified robot population, who play a gamified VR to further harvest robot fuel they themselves will have to buy back, they ultimately just change the objective of the game so people build things and plant crops for points. It’s better, just, doesn’t really quite solve the original problem that got them there.
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Very wild idea to have one show about humans in a desperate fight for survival, directly spliced with another show about chibi robots fucking around in a bubblegum spaceship.
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There’s actually a scene in this that is literally Matrix Reloaded, where the main robot hero confronts the main robot overmind, and the overmind informs him that they were created by humans after they destroyed themselves, and that, even though the overmind is constantly making the robots hunt down “bugs” in the system (like the unregistered main girl), the existence of bugs is in fact intentional, and that the main guy has just been doing what the overmind had designed this entire time.
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The ultimate computer AI overmind is of course named “Munin” and looks like this and talks like you’d think a thing like this talks like this:
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I don’t think the creators of Deca-Dence really grasped why exactly the Matrix would include The One as a form of pacification, so there’s no clear reason why the system intentionally adds bugs.
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Long story short you’ll need to watch The Matrix: Reloaded to understand the vast and varied intricacies of Deca-Dence and of course vice versa.
Further notes on finale
I looked online to see what other people’s reactions to the ending were and like, god damn, the Anime News Network’s review wasn’t fucking around:
The evils of systemic exploitation are a complex that can’t hope to be pitched suggestions for reform by a funny little robot cartoon, one that itself has a production committee to satisfy and mugs and t-shirts to hawk. But there are still places where it feels like a cop-out. It’s true that the whims of a tightly-constrained economic system are such that even collapse and revolution can be calculated for as paths to further schemes, but Deca-Dence lays these numbers at the feet of the inherent existence of economies themselves.
That’s how ya do it.
