#dddddddd

So in the years leading up to writing Cockatiel x Chameleon (2020 or 2021), I was in a group chat with an aromantic person who liked to post this out-of-context panel:

I had no idea what this panel was even from, but the quote stuck with me as an encapsulation of the contemporary mood, and so it wound up appearing three times in Cockatiel x Chameleon, first in Intermission A (the first letter from Mimmy's stalker):

real girls wont even look at me anyway so why not just beat it to drawn chicks rofl. just masturbate fearlessly to death lol.

Only a couple of chapters later, Gramme (as part of the doubling between him and Mimmy's hatemailer) echoes it in his footnote to the term "guro":

The Japanese porn game is too strong; although that hasn't helped their birthrates, which are below replacement. Why bother with other people when you have porn? Why not fearlessly masturbate to death?

Lastly, Harper -- remembering, at least subconsciously, more than she lets on -- says it during the climactic HELL OF SWALLOWED?! chapter:

Everyone else was dying too, the whole world; it was simply time to masturbate fearlessly to death.

Fast forward three years, to 2025. My webfic friend Lurina (read The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere!) has put up for a groupwatch the arcanely titled anime Dead Dead Demon's Dededede Destruction, which I have never heard of before. We start to watch, and after about five minutes a character appears who looks vaguely familiar. Black hair, thick eyebrows, twintails...

I realize it's the girl from the masturbate fearlessly to death panel. Immediately, I get excited.

And the anime did not disappoint. Dedede is perhaps the pop cultural work most befitting the current moment in history, dealing adroitly with mass media, the internet, misinformation, cultism, activism, cult activism, the complete impotence of all stations of authority against encroaching crisis, the fact that no matter how many crises seem to crop up life continues to trudge along with a shrug, war crimes, COVID, Trump, and the breakdown of interpersonal communication, among many other things. The story is maximalist in presentation, spanning a massive ensemble cast that covers every stratum of society, while also depicting quiet, interior, and deeply personal feelings of ennui and isolation. This, in my opinion, is what the great artistic works of today should strive to be, and what I tried to make Cockatiel x Chameleon be. Dedede puts a particularly anime twist on the idea, juxtaposing ordinary slice of life with the extraordinary apocalypse occurring around it, often to unsettling effect when these two worlds do collide.

Dedede also has some setpiece scenes of staggering artistic achievement on a purely aesthetic level. The scene that particularly stands out to me involves a commercial airliner flying past a UFO full of aliens that the Japanese government promptly guns down. There's an incredible shot as the airplane passengers stare out the window while hundreds if not thousands of alien bodies come tumbling out of the exploding craft into the water below, an image which ends with text that proclaims 30 DAYS UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD.

I also appreciate the show's willingness to actually get dark and dirty with its characters. One character, initially presented as major, unceremoniously dies in an early episode. Another character puts a gun in his mouth and shoots himself dead on TV broadcast. Meanwhile, one of the two main characters is in a relationship with her teacher. A soldier grapples with the war crimes they automatically committed because they were ordered to. Politicians and low level staffers wonder how complicit they are in atrocities. Every character capable of acting seems to act badly, either by choice or because there is no other option; the only characters with clean hands are those who dwell in complete, almost superhuman ignorance of the annihilation slowly enveloping them.

There are a few missteps, though. There's a part of the story that's basically an edgy, adult take on Doraemon, where an alien gives a child charming gizmos which the child then uses, following an incredibly facile philosophy of justice, to enact Death Note style murders. I thought this idea was done a lot better in Death Note and was pretty limp here in comparison. Likewise, I have some issues with the ending. (Ending spoilers in the following paragraph.)

I could tell as soon as the timeline shifting technology was introduced that there would ultimately be a timeline shift out of the apocalypse. The reset timeline/universe has become a common tool in Japanese pop media that is otherwise actually willing to slaughter its cast en masse, a sort of having-your-cake-and-eating-it-too maneuver. When I first saw this done in Higurashi, I'd never seen anything like it and found it an incredible moment of catharsis. When I saw it in Mirai Nikki, not so much. (It's also, of course, a major aspect of PMMM, though at least PMMM has the decency to leave a good chunk of the cast dead/nonexistent after the reset, dodging the overly sentimental and happy tone these types of endings tend to engender. Rebellion goes a long way toward making the show's ending work for me.) I'm 50/50 on how it's handled in Dedede; there are aspects of the ending I like (we get a pretty extensive epilogue set post-apocalypse) but also a lot that feels cheap and perfunctory. There's a part of me that really, really wishes the show ended after Episode 16, with the final shot being the two leads watching as Tokyo -- and half the cast -- are wiped off the face of the planet, and the only mollifying conciliation being that due to some heroic efforts, this is only a partial apocalypse rather than a total one.

Demon’s

Dead Dead Demon’s Dededededestruction! -- Chapter 1