In continuing my burgoening tradition of watching something new every week, I finally gave in to the cultural zeitgeist (which makes it sound like I was resisting the cultural zeitgeist but, to be honest, I was just ignoring it like I was ignoring every TV show and movie for the last couple years) and watched Dandadan. It’s been on my radar for a while, even if all I really knew about it was “there’s a supposedly old lady with tall hair who carries a metal baseball bat?” based on some images I’ve seen on the internet, but one of my friends told me it was actually a really cute love story in addition to the slightly-more action-y episode-to-episode events and I was sold. Who doesn’t want to see a cute love story these days? So I watched it with that in the forefront of my mind, got swerved almost immediately, and then swerved more and more as the first season played out. It was a wild ride, but now I’m a diehard fan and dying on the inside because I’ve got to wait who even knows how long for Season 3 to come out. I suppose I’m lucky in that I only started watching it after the second season had been released so at least I didn’t have season 1’s horrific cliffhanger dangling over me for months and months while I waited. Which, if I had to levy a criticism at the show, it would be the way they’ve chosen to pace things. Not every episode has problems with it, but there’s enough that I kept feeling like I was being jostled around by the ending theme of the show, which is too bad because the opening and closing themes of both seasons are great and the sort of thing I chose to watch each time. It didn’t really impact the quality of the show for me, but I also can’t imagine this show coming out on a weekly schedule and would have been infuriated multiple times if I’d been watching it one episode a week.

The general premise of the show is that our two protagonists have a moment of connection when one of them, a teen girl, stands up for the teen boy who is being bullied. He starts talking to her because he assumes she’s into aliens and cryptids like he is (as evidenced by the large stack of books on his desk) since that’s the only reason someone popular like her would talk to him. It turns out that she actually doesn’t believe in aliens or cryptids and instead believes in ghosts, which he finds absolutely unbelievable. After arguing about who is right, each challenges the other to investigate the site of paranormal activity related to their own interests, both have strange encounters, and the show unfolds from there. It’s a really good time, for the most part, as it deals with these various forms of paranormal activity and suggests that maybe they’re not as different as they might seem to the humans getting caught up in them. Each episode (or mini-arc since they often span multiple episodes) introduces a fun romp of some kind, twists your expectations in fun ways, and never loses sight of the very human and real people at the heart of the show, even as they deal with curses, aliens, monsters, and ghosts. It always wraps back around to the emotions that connect us, the power of being there for each other, and burgeoning love story playing out between our protagonists who I have chosen not to name for a very specific reason (that will resolve itself quickly enough–by the end of the first episode).

While the pacing of the show can be rough–stories seemingly start and end haphzardly in episodes, throughlines carrying through seasons but popping into individual episodes without warnings, and seemingly disparate events being drawn together in unexpected ways–it isn’t difficult to follow. It feels like just the way a lot of modern shows are structured since I feel like more and more shows aren’t striving to be self-contained units that tell a story or a story-within-a-story with each episode, but I can’t say for sure since sometimes the episodes ARE self-contained and resolve where you’d expect them to based on the episodic structure of the show. It really feels haphazard but also like they couldn’t afford to waste a second of animation time so they had very little in terms of drawn-out moments, wasted screen time, or “filler,” so I really don’t know what to think about the structure. One thing I’m much less conflicted about is how often sexual peril comes up. The teen girl protagonist is placed in many perilous situations, some of which involve the implication of sexual violence at a much higher frequency than I expected in this show (which isn’t a high bar to clear, but it cleared it by enough that I’m writing about it). And while the teen boy protagonist is also placed in peril, it is never suggested to be sexual assault or similar to sexual assault in the way that seems to happen so frequently to his costar. Hell, his peril is often played for laughs or to lighten the tone, hidden behind a screen of often humorous innuendo that leans away from anything sexual and more towards the classic alien investigative technique of anal probing (which is also a form of intimate violation, even if it isn’t sexual in common depiction). The violence against the teen girl, though, is always there to increase the stakes, establish a threat, and turn a strange moment more serious.

I have quiet mixed feelings about all that. First, I can see why some of it might not feel like sexual peril to some poeple since it is slipped into the show with a wink and a nudge, but any question of what the show’s willing to do ends with the end of season 1 where the euphamism is stripped away and one of the main characters, the teen girl, is directly and blatantly threatened with sexual assault by a group of older men in a bath house. It’s just such a huge step away from the cute love-story moments, the outrageous-and-visually-striking combat and adventure moments, and the general humor of the parts in-between, so I feel kind of like I’m missing something or maybe over reacting. I mean, I’ve spent as many minutes writing about it here [and now many more as of editing it] as the show spends creating the situations and resolving them (about ten minutes total) but it just feels so blatant. I don’t know. I think my expectations for the show being set by “cute love story” meant I got caught off-guard by the escalation within the first episode alone but it happens enough that I think I’d still be uncomfortable with it no matter what I expected.

It really is just ten weird minutes in the several hours of otherwise delightful and entertaining show, but it’s a ten minutes that stands out to me just as much as the really big action and cool-character moments. So many skip the show if that’s going to be more of a problem for you than it has been for me. I really can’t stress enough how much the tone of the rest of the show is so much better than these few moments of sexual peril that really could have just been standard threats of violence without losing ANY part of the meaning or tone (I mean, the dialogue for all of these moments save the bath house scene often involves talk of organ harvesting, so it would have been so easy to stop short of the visual cues that turn the innuendo toward sexual violence). They really made that choice and leaned into it in ways I have now spent about half of this blog post stewing over despite how good the rest of the show is. The contrast is just so wild since there are so many other great moments, cool character designs, and really heartfelt connections. I feel like I can set that weirdness aside because of how well the rest of the show lands the difficult topics behind some of the events of the show (including some of the not-shown-but-mentioned past sexual violence that exists in this world), but I’m fully aware that this is just my response to it all. I really think the tone of the other heavy moments means that they’re dealing with it all thematically in good ways, but I also think that they could have toned down the sexual peril a bit and not lost anything.

Again, I’ve spent more time writing about it than the show spends showing it. I also am picking at it way more than the show does. It’s not like the show handles it poorly, either. It’s never used to motivate a man, it’s never played for laughs the way other violence and threats are, and though the woman involved often requires some help in escaping the situation, she is still an agent in all of those scenes and not some helpless flower waiting to be plucked out of a bad situation by some strong or particularly determined man. It just feels like a lot for a show with only twenty-four episodes total.

Anyway, it was a good show, had killer openings and closings, felt like it was full of some of the most real character depictions I’ve seen in a while, floats between humor and seriousness really well, and unfortunately has a little bit too much sexual peril levied against a woman for me to be entirely comfortable recommending the show or calling it good without qualifications. Which is a mouthful but it’s the only way I’m personally comfortable recommending it to anyone.