English Dub Review: Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction “Episode 2”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

As the military gets ready to make a big fight against the UFO, Kadode and Ouran end up doing different things after school

OUR TAKE

The main vibe, for lack of a better term, of DDDD is experiencing the end of adolescence while major sci-fi stuff happens in the background as if it’s normal. If that wasn’t clear before, it for sure is now, as illustrated by having the main plot of the episode showing how Kadode and Ouran choosing to spend the day in different ways has an almost higher emotional importance than the Japanese military getting a giant robot ready to shoot a big laser at the mothership. The alien stuff could be substituted for any major political changes happening that teenagers can’t wrap their heads around, like global pandemic or a struggling economy or whatever. It’s just that having kinda realistic sci-fi alien stuff is a lot more interesting than any of that, so I’m all for it. It’s also nice to see how much thought went into the worldbuilding of this world in a cold war with a big alien ship that hasn’t done anything in years, with people like Ouran scavenging the crashed smaller ship and, to reiterate, A GIANT GODDAMN ROBOT. All things, both real and fictional, can be improved by adding giant robots. You dig giant robots! I dig giant robots! We dig giant robots! Chicks dig giant robots!

…sorry, where was I. Oh yeah, we should probably talk about Kadode following her teacher home with the intention of sleeping with him and him only kinda pushing back on it. He still ultimately handles it the right way and she doesn’t go for it, so that’s overall fine, but it’s best we look at WHY this scene happened. As mentioned, part of this story is showing the end of Kadode’s adolescence as she comes of age in a world on the verge of First Contact with alien life. Compared to all the stuff happening with the mothership, a student coming on to her teacher is surprisingly normal, but still TOTALLY WRONG. And yet the way Kadode decides not to go through with it shows that she still understands that she is not an adult, which is ironically the more adult decision. And the more adult decision by the author Inio Asano, as I’ve seen many go for the more exploitative option for shock value, so I’m glad to see things take a different turn here. Ouran, in contrast, admonishes her for chickening out, which shows her LACK of maturity and hints at what will probably be her character arc as the series progresses. Their friendship and clashes in personality is one of the main things that drives home the human element among everything supernatural going on, but if the imagery in the OP and ED are anything to go by, the two friends are going on very different paths once shit really hits the fan, which it looks like it very much will be next week!