Tags: blog, tv, animation, sci-fi, 2025, recommended

Author: KickingK

Date: Saturday October 25th, 2025

Dan! Dan! Dan! Dan! Dan! Dan! Dan!

What am I doing here? Watching anime as a middle aged man is a deeply weird experience. When I was younger I was witness to the original UK anime/manga boom of the early nineties. Akira, Appleseed, Manga Mania. It was always weird but... It was a kind of weird that was curated towards a young western audience. It was a slice of Japanese culture carefully selected for the kind of teenagers who'd be receptive to it.

Now though? There's so much of it, so many different styles, so many different genres, such a wide audience. And, seemingly, for this audience it's all so normalised. When I was reading Gunsmith Cats as a teen I knew, right from the get-go, that this was something a little out there. That was what I wanted. But it seems like Attack on Titan is as standard to today's kids as Stranger Things.

Which, conversely, makes the act of watching this stuff when you're not completely immersed in this culture even more weird. I have no way of understanding it as part of a wider culture.

Is DanDaDan normal? Is this level of bizarreness de rigueur? Or does it stand out even amongst the, quite frankly, impenetrable field of anime weirdness?

I have no idea. And I have no idea how to critically evaluate it or, ~waves hand at the entire, diverse field of anime~ how to evaluate that. I once watched two episodes of Attack on Titan and they were the worst two episodes I've ever watched of anything, in my entire life.¹ So I clearly don't know what I'm talking about.

But I do know that DanDaDan manages to capture teenage friendship and crushes in a way that's delightfully endearing. The whole show is deeply, deeply horny but in that oddly innocent, early teens way of having deeply intense longings and not having a clue what to do with them. And even though there are whole episodes where all the characters are fighting demons whilst stripped to their underwear, it never leers or objectifies.

The most intense, and most affecting, moments are when they're just trying to navigate the fact that they think they've been stood up during lunch, or their fingers touch whilst sat next to each other in the car. It's oddly sweet for a show where the main running plot-line is about trying to recover a characters genitals.

Sorry, yes, the plot. Two senior school nerds meet and argue about the merits of the occult vs UFO's. Momo was raised by her (absurdly hot, ridiculously cool, seemingly barely older then her) Grandmother who's a witch and dares Okarun, an introverted sci-fi junkie, to visit a haunted underpass to see a ghost. In return, he dares her to go to a notorious UFO sighting spot. Obviously, he gets possessed by the spirit of a demon-witch and loses his balls, she gets abducted by aliens.

That's episode one. It get's rapidly more grandios and unhinged from there.

It does do some of the stuff that turns me off of a lot of anime. Characters start shrieking at each other for no reason. In the rush to the next plot device, nothing ever gets completely resolved. And whilst it's attitude to gender and sex is mostly positive, series one is bookended by threats of sexual assault. The fact that these are kind of played for laughs makes it even more of an incongruous miss-step.

But somehow, it has a charm and vibe that's infectious. Two series in and I'm looking forward to a third.

Where to Watch

1. I only watched the second one because I couldn't believe that anything could possible be that bad. It was.

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