I’m not officially dropping DDDDD at this point. But I’m also not planning on further posts unless it does something to level up my engagement. What I’m getting right now is basically generic and boring, unfortunately. Not good but I really don’t need to search for descriptors – that’s it in a nutshell. Certainly this comes as a surprise to me given the series’ peedigree, but you can’t always go by that. As this series is in the process of proving.

It’s always dangerous to try and get inside the mind of an author. I’m vibing that Asano Inio, having made a name for himself (deservedly) as daring creator of pretty avant-garde stuff, wanted to do something safe and mainstream. Generate some sales and hopefully an anime. And hey, if somebody wants to eat Kobe beef instead of chicken a couple nights a week I’m certainly not judging – very few manga (even successful ones) get rich off their work. But who knows – maybe he considers DDDDD just as deep as Solanin and edgy as Punpun. Or maybe I just don’t get it, and there is really is something more to it.

Not much is working for me at the moment. Not the uneasy undercurrent of xenophobia, not the CGDCT vamping. I’m undecided about the whole conspiracy theory angle, and the detour with Kiho was marginally more interesting than the feedback loop with Kadode and Ouran. But nothing that’s happening on-screen really holds my interest. I’m just checking my watch by about the halfway mark.

The last five minutes of the episode, once the alien comes on-screen, were orders of magnitude more interesting than the rest of it put together. If any series ever needed aliens it’s this one, because without them it’s pretty lifeless. But if they’re never going to be anything more than quick teases at the end of the ep, it’s not worth slogging through the rest of it to get to them. So I’ll stick around one more week out of deference to Asano, but that’s as far as the line of credit extends.