Dandadan is like a complete mismatch of genres where the author doesn’t know how to write any of them, as he does a terrible job at doing a battle shonen, he does a terribly childish job at comedy, he is doing an atrocious job at doing romance and he is doing a terrible job at doing compelling characters. I have been seeing the joke, or the thing I was hoping that was a joke, that shonen MCs are being more and more emasculated over time while citing as examples characters like Deku or Eren, so when you sit down, watch this show, and see that the premise is that the MC was literally emasculated, it feels ridiculous and surreal, as if trying to double down on what was supposed to be a joking statement.
The humor in this series is extremely childish, who else would laugh at jokes like “dud, he has, like, no balls” and stuff like literal toilet humor unless they are a kid, and this will show some of the most childish comedy while characters are acting stupidly and making “funny faces”, but when I say “comedy” I don’t actually mean it as the show doesn’t have actual jokes. And I guess that’s a problem with the series, it is basically like Kimetsu no Yaiba in this aspect too, but with even worse comedy somehow, as they will show multiple gruesome scenes but still trying to be a show that a kid will watch because everything else is extremely silly. For example, they might show the main girl in underwear and about to be raped, but you know that won’t happen as it was only made to titillate you somehow before it gets interrupted by the MC possessed by a spirit who was asking to suck on his “weenie” in a previous scene; if you can tell, that scene isn’t actually a serious one and it doesn’t make the show less stupid to show some breasts or blood from time to time, one of the times I dropped it in my unpleasant time while reading the manga was when Okarun turned into Kaneki and started rapping about being depressed, it’s really like checking social media like BlueSky and seeing people saying that they are depressed without comprehending the meaning of the word “depression”, because this manga is written as if the author was saying the meme of “how do you do fellow kids?”. I know I’m not the first one to make this comparison, but this show is basically Chainsaw Man, but while Chainsaw Man is for teens who just entered their edgy phase, Dandadan is for people who are still laughing alongside their classmates saying “pee” and “poop” as if they just discovered they aren’t bad words.
There’s a scene where Okarun and Momo are swimming, and in that very scene Okarun says that he can’t swim, but 10 seconds later he is swimming again, it’s like this series cannot keep basic consistency during only one scene. And this lack of consistency happens multiple times, Momo’s grandmother looks completely different in the first episode than how she does when she debuts, even if you think this is a mistake on the manga then it didn’t get fixed by the anime either. The show will also sometimes try to get people to cry about their antagonists by saying some sad thing or that they were actually doing something good before, as if trying to bring some sympathy towards them, but the problem with this is that it’s always only said after the fact, there’s an entire episode dedicated to some antagonist that tells their sad backstory and how they came to be, and this episode is supposed to be extremely emotional or some shit, and seeing the reactions to it tell me that some people are extremely easy to manipulate emotionally, as I cannot build any kind of sympathy for a character we know so little we aren’t even told their name.
I have known for a long while that a lot of writers who do battle shonen usually are incapable of writing romance, and this author is not an exception, he makes the “generic romcom where 2 people blush at each other and that gets considered as romantic development” type series look like masterpieces, none of the romance development here feels earned or that it should have happened at all. For example, there’s Momo with Okarun, where the reason why she has a female boner for him is because he has the same name as her favorite actor, and unless you are incapable of thinking, you can notice how stupid that is, Okarun doesn’t even look like Takakura Ken, but she gets flustered every time his actual name gets mentioned because of this, it really makes me prefer the very simple reason of “I like him because… he was nice to me ONCE!” as that makes more sense than this, and that isn’t even getting into the episodes that try to focus on this “romance”, as they just focus on minor miscommunications that don’t actually amount to anything while their relationship stays the same every single time. And it only gets worse from there, as a second girl falls in love with Okarun, and for absolutely no reason whatsoever, I don’t think he and Aira interacted positively once before the series tells us that Aira loves him, she was nice to him basically to make fun of him in one episode and that’s the most significant interaction they have before the love triangle appears, it’s like this show doesn’t understand that romance isn’t their forte and it actually becomes annoying to watch because of how badly done it is.
You can tell the animation is well done, which I guess is the only positive thing I could mention about it, even if I find funny the first thing Science SARU airs after being bought by a big corpo is premiering a Jump battle shonen, but with writing this bad, it might as well be a turd in a silver plate. However, it almost seems like the direction of this show is actually pretty incompetent, take for example the scene in episode 1 where Okarun mentions his real name towards Momo, in the manga, it is basically a spread where there are petals behind him, meanwhile in the anime they added an explosion behind as if this show was directed by Michael Bay, and it might as well be, because that explosion not only wasn’t there, it wasn’t necessary at all, and all this was while some of the most horrid background music was playing. Really, every time I hear that OST my ears feel like they are hearing a fork scraping a plate, I felt that the guy who did the music for this anime needed to get fired, and it took me by surprise when I saw that the person who did it was Kensuke Ushio, the same Kensuke Ushio who did such magnificent OSTs such as Ping Pong’s and Koe no Katachi’s is doing this kind of terrible earbleeding job, was he being threatened to do the worst he could ever do? Is he ok? Because this definitely is not the same guy I know and he couldn’t have fallen this much in the span of a couple of months, because the soundtrack is absolutely the worst part of this adaptation. It isn’t helped by the fact that the opening is probably the most obnoxious anime opening I have heard this year, I'm surprised Shitty Nuts sured themselves this very year after the already horrible Mashle season 2 OP, it’s like they are competing with themselves to do worse openings every time.
Unless you are the kind of kid who watches Skibiddi Toilet, I can’t possibly recommend you Dandadan, everything about it is, in zoomer slang, “not cooking”.
Thank you for reading.
