cashew | Deca-Dence - Am I the only one who thinks the anime is really bad? Like, it's actual shit.

So, the last time I felt the need to review an anime was...*flips through tags* holy fuck, 2013!

Ahem.

OK then. Let's get to the review.

TL;DR — Deca-Dence is juvenile and stupid. I'm sorry if you think I'm being harsh, but holy shit, this anime is so mind-numbingly dumb I have to rant about it a bit.

Let's get the general plot out of the way first: The world is in a post-apocalyptic era where the last remaining humans live in a mobile fortress known as "Deca-Dence" (har har, "decadence" got split up into two words, geddit? Geddit? 😑). There are monsters that attack humans and there's some special rainbow colored warrior race of humans called "Gears" who go hunt them. The rest of the regular humans, called "Tankers", stay inside the tank of the mobile fortress (geddit?! 😑). Natsume, who was born a Tanker, wants to join the fighting forces, but was relegated to cleaning duty instead.

Her team leader, Kaburagi, is unsympathetic to her plight. But, in episode two, it turns out (PLOT TWIST!) that Kaburagi isn't a regular human. In fact, none of the Gears are humans. Gears are actually cyborg avatars for android consciousness and the entire world that the humans inhabit is merely to serve as video game entertainment for these androids. In other words, the Gears are the metaphorical gears that keep the system running (geddit?!!! 😑). The "System" (which is both the programming of the game and the name of the AI that runs the program) gets rid of any dissenting AI/humans, tagging them as "bugs". Also, the "System" breeds these monsters with behavioral control chips that programs the monsters to attack the mobile fortress and threaten the human lives, thus giving the "users" something to do in the "plot" of the game.

Kaburagi abhors everything about the system and decides to go against it to free the humans from the cycle of suffering by destroying the monster breeding facility. This resulted a rogue monster to spawn that wasn't under control of the behavior controlling chips and threw the system into havoc. Thus, the system engaged an emergency shut down procedure meant to destroy everything in the game space, humans and monsters alike. To stop the emergency shut down, Kaburagi merges with the mobile fortress to fight off the rogue monster. The battle results in Kaburagi sacrificing himself, the rogue monster defeated, and then the world's game programming changed from Monster Hunter to Harvest Moon.

In short, the anime runs on the conceit of "what if gamers are AI and the NPCs are humans". Unfortunately, everything kind of falls apart from this conceit.

There's the basic world building problem: What exactly do the androids/Gears do when they're not playing the game? If this is supposed to be a distorted mirror of our human experience, then what exactly are these androids doing when not playing the game. There's confirmation that plenty of "users" are "inactive" in the game, so...what do they do when they're not logged in? The world building never addressed how the android society works other than "all must obey the System". Except...android units can literally log off of the system and then...what?

Then there's the giant plot hole: how does defeating the giant monster at the end reset the system? If the monster is literally just another product of the system (albeit buggy part) meant for the entertainment of its android users, then...how has the system been fundamentally reprogrammed through taking actions allowed through the parameters of the system? And yet, the story ends indicating that the system has been fundamentally reprogrammed from a monster hunting game to a farm-sim/city building game. Which leads us to the third problem...

How has the plight of the humans fundamentally improved after this 12-episode arc? As far as we can tell, Natsume (the human main character) is the only person who even recognizes the reality of their world, which is that it is under the control of AI and that humans merely exist to alleviate the android's boredom. Natsume repeatedly expresses that she is not interested in changing the world, only herself. And she gets her happy ending, I guess, by having the courage to go hang-gliding and raising monsters who are now friendly towards humans. But...I guess freedom from AI overlords or disseminating knowledge of AI overlords isn't really that much of an actual priority according to this show. As long as you're not being chased down and eaten by monsters, who cares if there is an entire class of pampered aristocrats living in a spaceship above you for whom you are merely entertainment?

So, as you can see, the message in this anime is seriously problematic. It uses the aesthetic of post-apocalyptic sci-fi to tell a story that fundamentally is against the genre's thematic roots of agitation and rebellion. The post-apocalyptic genre is usually used to portray a future dystopia that reflects on our current dystopia. And the ultimate purpose of this reflection is to communicate that the problems in modern society is systemic. Only by recognizing the constraints of the social system can we escape the dystopia ending. Turning the message around and say that everything is fine, the system just needs to be tweaked a bit...that's not really edgy or provocative. It's preserving the status quo and conservative as fuck. And that shouldn't be what we're going to a post-apocalyptic anime for.

But given the massive amount of positive reviews, I can only surmise that we've truly arrived at the dystopia that the likes of Ghost in the Shell has been warning about.