If you’re anything like me, a human being with eyes and ears and a functioning brain, it’s safe to say you’ve probably witnessed quite a lot of upsetting shit over the past five years, to say nothing of the last three weeks. In the words of a malfunctioning spambot posing as a horse, “everything happens so much,” and often our immediate response to cope with the onslaught of existential dread brought on by a clusterfuck of intersecting crises is to simply try not think about everything all at once, if at all. Dissociate, compartmentalize, and go about your regular routine as best as you can. I get it — believe me.
Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction, the new apocalyptic sci-fi anime from Production +h, understands this feeling on such an intimate level, you might find yourself wanting to turn it off from how real it gets. You should watch it though, because it’s great, even when it makes you cringe out of embarrassment, discomfort, and occasionally horror.
Image: Production +h/Crunchyroll
Based on Inio Asano’s 2014 manga series, Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction (or Dead Dead Demons for short) centers on the story of Kadode Koyama and Ouran Nakagawa, two childhood best friends attending high school after an alien mothership appears in the skies over Tokyo. Despite the mass hysteria and death left in the wake of the ship’s arrival, neither Kadode nor Ouran seem particularly phased by this event. In fact, the same could be said for most of the people around them. It’s just like what Steven Yeun’s character Squeeze told Cassius Green in Sorry to Bother You: If you get shown a problem, but have no idea how to control it, then you just decide to get used to the problem.
Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction isn’t exactly what you would call a conventional alien invasion story. In truth, it’s a pitch-black coming of age comedy about a group of crass, disaffected teenage girls growing up in a patently absurd time where the existence of advanced extraterrestrial lifeforms is treated with same blasé attitude of quiet, bitter resignation as one would reserve for something like, say, the environmental impacts of climate change or the rising spread of fascism.
“I have a feeling that the future won’t be as bright for us as it always is in my manga,” Kadode tells her teacher Watarase in the anime’s second episode. Picking up three years after the mothership’s arrival, Kadode and Ouran are part of a close-knit group of friends who don’t much care about the potential end of humanity. They’re more concerned about the things that pertain directly to their own lives, like getting their crushes to notice them, or finding a new restaurant to eat at, or ditching homework and studying to play the timed beta of the latest tactical military shooter. They’re just regular teenagers, dealing with regular teenage bullshit, albeit cast in the omnipresent shadow of an alien spaceship.
The precarity of humanity’s future in the face of the mothership’s arrival colors the fears of each of the girls in Kadode and Ouran’s friend group in their own way, even if they don’t necessarily give voice to these fears. Although academically competent, Kadode chooses to be an underachiever, owed in no small part to her lack of hope for the future, both for herself and the world at large.
“Even if I study super hard, pass the entrance exam and get into a top-level high school, and then to a top-level university, the economy could collapse, the birth rate could hit zero, and I’ll just end up becoming a slave for an evil corporation anyway,” Kadode tells Ouran as they walk home from school on a hot summer day. “Then climate change will change Tokyo into a desert, and then it’ll be just like we’re living on the moon.” It’s at this thought that Kadode and Ouran break out into a fit of mischievous, morbid laughter — and if that isn’t the purest encapsulation of the series’ tone, I don’t know what is.
Image: Production +h/Crunchyroll
Even at its most bleak, Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction still finds moments of hope and affirmation amid the torrential downpour of self-destructive absurdity. If not in the future of any one person, let alone humanity, then in the bonds and communities we stubbornly nurture and hold together even in the face of oblivion. “If something terrible happens, we won’t have much of a choice but to accept it as our new reality,” Ouran’s older brother Hiroshi tells her in episode 5, which takes place many years before the arrival of the alien mothership. “If that’s the case, do you know what the best thing to do is, so that you don’t lose hope? Protect one person; you can’t worry about everyone, just one is enough.”
Human beings can be stupid, irrational, myopic, and selfish. Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction does nothing to conceal this, quite the contrary. Even so, the series makes a point to emphasize that in spite of all those qualities, and all the bullshit of growing up in a world that seems hellbent on teetering towards its own collapse, in the end all we have is each other. And even having said all this, I feel like I’ve barely even begun to scratch the full extent of how strange, off-putting, and utterly fascinating it is to watch this anime unfold from episode to episode. Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction is a gem tucked away beneath the flood of anime premieres airing this summer, one that’s more than worth the effort necessary to find the time to sit down and experience for yourself. At the very least, it sure beats doomscrolling.
Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction is available to stream on Crunchyroll.