The Weird Part of Dandadan
By, well, Dan
Light spoilers for the first episode of Dandadan on Netflix.
When I was 16, I got a really shitty job at a pizzeria in a food court. For the longest time the staff was me, a 17 year old girl, and some dudes in their 30’s1. One day, a girl my age started working there, and we flirted a little. The adults seized upon this immediately, taunting us so bad that I didn’t want the girl within 500 feet of me. We never really talked again. Eventually, the manager was fired for dating the 17 year old.
I haven’t thought about that story in a long time, but it came back to me recently while I was watching this new anime Dandadan.
Dandadan centers around Ken, a nerdy social outcast, and Momo, a popular girl with a rough and tumble edge to her. He believes in aliens, she believes in ghosts. A fateful encounter leads them to make a bet — he’ll go to a haunted tunnel, she’ll go to a hospital rumored to be a location of alien abductions. They’ll see which one is right. It turns out both of them, leading to a whirlwind of possession, abduction, explosions, and battles.
It only takes one episode to know that the show is a stone cold masterpiece. It’s fully hilarious, as watching Ken and Momo bounce off each other is just infinitely funny. The action and animation is incredible, with scenes that are genuinely unbelievable to look at. There’s an episode-long chase scene that is unfathomably cool. It's rooted in a deep sense of empathy, with moments that are heartbreaking to watch. The theme song is a certified banger.
I want to talk about the most awkward part.
Dandadan is about a lot of things, by design. Aliens, spirits, psychics, romance, high school, friendship, self confidence, and fate. Probably other stuff eventually, there have only been 9 episodes.
But at its core, the show is about how fucking weird everyone is about teenagers sexuality. It’s a love story, but the obstacle isn’t “we’re from two different worlds” or some crap — it’s that nobody will mind their own fucking business.
While Dandadan is easily my favorite anime, maybe show, of the year it’s been hard to recommend. Once someone agrees to check it out, I have to do a trigger warning. The centerpiece of the first episode is Momo being abducted by aliens, who prepare to do a “probing”. This turns out to be an attempted rape. While Momo is saved at the last minute, the lead up leaves nothing to the imagination and feels pretty real. The aliens keep reiterating what nice and friendly guys they are. They use psychic powers to try to make her accept it. It's heavy.
They are promptly ripped to shreds by feral granny spirit and awakened psychic powers in a ballet of chaos. It's rad.
People have taken issue with this. Surely the show could have pointed the camera elsewhere or cut the scene short. The question is raised if we’re supposed to be titillated by the assault in any way — it’s not like anime doesn’t have dirty laundry there. It also doesn’t feel particularly delicate in how it handles the subject. It’s as bombastic and over the top as any other element.
And if I had my choice, I’d probably cut the scene down to ribbons. But I’d be wrong. The assault scene, and all the discomfort that comes with it, is the conceit of the whole thing.
Across town, Ken runs into the ghost of an old lady in a dark condoned tunnel. She swirls her dentures around and says “I’ll let you suckle my teat if you let me gobble your weenie.” It’s gross and terrible and you can sort of imagine it happening to you in real life. She then proceeds to (magically) disappear his genitals. He doesn’t get them back any time soon.
Both kids are sexually assaulted, Momo is unwillingly sexualized, Ken is unwillingly desexualized. Both are the results of an adult arbitrarily deciding something about their sexuality. And for both of them, they don’t get to dwell on this. They have to dust themselves off and keep fighting, because there’s no other choice.
There’s a very sweet romance at the center of Dandadan. Through some very clever writing, the show creates a sort of implied romantic destiny for these two characters. But aside from that, Ken and Momo are just friends who, despite being very different, like each other a lot. They make each other laugh, they value and respect each other.
A large part of this is that Ken is the only character in the show that appreciates Momo as something OTHER than a potential sexual or romantic partner. Even her female friends, other popular girls, only talk about her potential boyfriends or hookups. Ken just wants to talk to her about aliens.
Hints of attraction between them are fleeting and, this is important, always interrupted by someone. Maybe it’s by an alien screaming about Momo’s womb, maybe it’s another teenager asking if they’re going to kiss. Every time this happens, it drives them apart before they can even explore these feelings.
The aliens and ghosts are, at least so far, metaphors for the various creeps that a teenager has to stave off in your day to day life. Sketchy perverts, people projecting their issues onto you, weirdos with agendas on what you should be. But behind that there’s just this overwhelming wave of a world that won’t stop perceiving you, judging you, and enjoying you based on what you may or may not do with your body. Being a teenager fucking sucks, now more than ever.
And as unpleasant as this may sound, there’s a real beauty to it. You’re witnessing something pure and kind persevere.
Yes, I know we haven’t written one of these in a while. Yes, I know this is a weird topic to come back with. Sorry.
One of those dudes kept trying to sell me hommade moonshine. Bunch of sketchy dickheads.