Lately, I’ve been making an effort to get into watching more stuff. Mostly because I bought a month of Netflix a few weeks back to watch Frieren with my siblings when they came to visit, but also because I need more variety in my life and watching something while doing a bunch of mindless crafting in Final Fantasy 14 makes the time pass better. It’s also kind of nice to not eat all my meals at my desk and instead eat some of them sitting on my couch, outside of my office, in a much more relaxed manner. Most of my meals at my desk are quickly consumed in order to get things out of the way so I can focus more completely on FF14, so being able to eat relatively laconicly while watching a TV show or something on my nice, 4K TV is refreshing. I haven’t had a Netflix subscription in a few months and I spent most of last year in a weird mood about watching things by myself, so I’ve been building up quite a list of things to watch on Netflix (a much larger list than I’d accumulate in a few months on account of not feeling like watching stuff for more than a year at this point). It took a bit to pick something since part of me wanted to dive back into the old familiar stuff, but I was brave (this is a joke) and pushed myself to watch something new, which is how I got started on the only (currently, at the time of writing this) available season of Dorohedoro. It’s a bit of an odd show, overall, and that weirdness starts with the show’s title card on Netflix. It claims to be about a guy trying to find the person who turned his head into a lizard’s head, and while that’s weird, it’s a pretty normal kind of weird. Once you start the show, though, it immediately ramps the weirdness up.

The show opens upon our “hero,” Caiman (yes, like the lizards), who has apparently opened his massive, lizardly-jaws and bitten down on the head of a man. Inside his mouth is a weird magical zone presided over by an unidentified man who pronounces that the bitten man is “not the one.” Outside, we see a punk kid try to do some kind of magic at Caiman who is uneffected, see a woman in a jumpsuit absolutely wreck that kid, and then the man bitten by Caiman is released, asked about what the interior guy said, and then murdered quiet grotesquely after providing the answer since Caiman “has no use for” him. This man’s hand, in one last act of magic, creates a doorway that lets the punk kid get away and then the first title theme plays. The show spends the next three episodes getting weirder and weirder, seemingly throwing facts about the word out at random: Sorcerers (the magic users) are ruled by a crime lord named “En” who is exactly the kind of weirdo freak (complimentary) that would fit right in with Hunter x Hunter characters. Caiman is immune to magic, but no one else is. Caiman also loves dumplings. The woman from earlier is his best friend and definitely not a romantic connection (despite all the hints at the two of them having feelings) who keeps him supplied with his beloved dumplings. Caiman has no memory of his past. All of which is just sort of tossed out there in no real order in a way that defies sense and storytelling traditions in a way I can’t even attempt to replicate because my brain has subconsciously sorted all of that information in ways that make it more sensible. Even the episodes themselves feel disjointed, with very little carrying over from one commercial break to the next sometimes as this assortment of information about the world is dispensed without connection or build-up.

I almost stopped watching it when I reached episode 3 and went from what seemed like the beginning of a narrative throughline at the end of episode 2 to some unimportant-except-as-worldbuilding scene that only ties in to the previously established throughline after the title theme plays. I only learned this after juggling back and forth between episode 2, episode 3, and the show’s list of episodes because it felt like I somehow skipped one. I almost gave up then, but figured I’d give it one more shot and, suddenly, it was like I was watching a different show entirely. All of the disjointed worldbuilding stops as each moment stacks upon the last to slowly build the story through the rest of the season. Tensions are established. Rules are demonstrated. Questions are posed. A story suddenly forms out of the odd assortment of facts like you turned a magic eye puzzle just enough to see the other picture and so firmly that, also like a magic eye puzzle, it is difficult to see it the way you used to until you’ve taken some time to reorient your brain. All of the random information starts to drop into holes in the story, shoring up the foundation as it builds quickly toward a series of dramatic moments in the latter half of this short, 12-episode season, until you’ve watched the whole rest of the season in one burst. It does not erase the strange, uneasy flow of the early episodes, but it moves so smoothly from episode 3 onward that it feels difficult to believe that it was ever so disorganized that it was difficult to follow.

The story itself is fairly standard: Caiman had his head turned into a lizard head, lost his memories, and wants to find/kill the sorcerer who did that to him in order to release the spell. All of this happens with the misery of Human existence in the background, showing just how awful it is to be anything but a Sorcerer as Humans are relagated to living in the toxic waste and by-products of magic, always at the mercy of any sufficiently powerful Sorcerer who shows up to mess with them. Caiman wants to kill all Sorcerers as part of his quest for vengeance, but things are not so simple as that. Turns out class divides are also a problem in the Sorcerer world and there’s a lot of Sorcerers who are just people trying to live their lives and they’re not all maniacs intent on causing as much Human suffering as possible, so maybe not everyone in the Sorcerer world deserves to die. A lot of the questions that might crop up from that information aren’t asked since the story is too focused on the tensions it has established and the esoterica of Sorcerer Society to drill deeply into questions like “is it bad to just kill random people because they’re Sorcerers, aka members of the ruling class?” The story doesn’t really suffer for it, and the way the season ends suggests that the questions are merely delayed, not entirely ignored, but it is difficult not to notice the hypocrasy as you watch a man who is on a quest of vengeance because of the random violence Sorcerers inflicted on him and humanity inflict a whole lot of random violence on Sorcerers.

I don’t know that I’d recommend it to everyone. It’s a very violent show, with a bit of a disjointed animation style that mixes more traditional 2D and 3D animation in ways that are clearly meant to serve the show’s budget and production, so I can definitely say it probably won’t appeal to everyone and maybe not even most people. But the violence is rarely lingered on in any kind of lascivious way and the intermingled, disjointed animation doesn’t actually look bad. A little stuttery sometimes, but not bad. It’s the sort of thing I noticed through episode 4 or 5 and had largely forgotten about by eipsode 7 or 8. It stands out at first, but it’s consistent enough in its own way that it fades from the front of your mind as the story takes up more and more space. If any of this intrigues you, I suggest watching the first 3 episodes before making a judgment call. There will be no violent or weird animation worse than what you see in the first three episodes and that’ll get you through all of the discombobulated worldbuiling, so you should have a good measure of the show by the time you finish that third episode. I mean, I enjoyed it, so I suspect other people will too, and I enjoyed it enough that I’m eager for the next season (which is supposedly coming out this year). I might even go buy or borrow the manga once my finances have recovered from the holidays, just to get the whole story, because while it is all fairly ordinary, I have to admit that it is well parceled-out and I’m dying to know what is going on and how it all plays out in the end. What weird, complex, and thorough worldbuilding! What a melange of personalities! What strange, interesting characters! Which, honestly, is probably the biggest tell I can give you: if you like Hunter x Hunter and all its weirdos, you will probably like Dorohedoro too. And you won’t need to spend over one hundred episodes just to get the whole thing! It’s only twelve so far!