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When they erect statues of me for my work as an anime journalist (aim high, kids), there will be a plaque reading, “Give me your weird, your irreverent, your huddled tentacles yearning to wriggle free” at its base. I love it when anime gives me the unexpected bizarre and turns my world upside down, so it probably won’t surprise you to learn that Dan Da Dan is one of my favorite shows of the Fall 2024 anime season. It isn’t like anything else airing on Crunchyroll and Netflix right now and that fills me with unimaginable joy.       

Just a quick warning that we’ll be discussing light spoilers for Dan Da Dan episodes not included in the theatrical release.

First off, I have to level with you all; I almost noped right out of Dan Da Dan during the first episode. There are some moments of absolute weirdness early on – the male lead getting his genitals stolen by a ghostly Turbo Granny, for example – but I seriously wondered if this was the show for me when the female lead was abducted by aliens, stripped naked, and threatened with a terrifying robotic phallus. If it wasn’t followed by her using her new psychic powers to destroy the offending aliens and their entire ship in a spectacularly animated display, I might have spent my time elsewhere this season. It isn’t that I’m particularly squeamish (I’ve read Berserk and Battle Royale without batting an eye). I just have other needs from my anime right now.

But then it hit me like Ayase’s grandma with a baseball bat – this isn’t really a show about aliens and ghosts. I mean, it is about those things, but it is also about sex. Specifically the horrors and wonders of sex during your teenage years, when sex is still an almost foreign concept. That’s why Okarun (we don’t say his real name, remember?) refuses to show his genitals to Ayase, even though there is nothing there to show. Because he knows he shouldn’t let girls see that part of his body, even when he’s as smooth as a Ken doll. He is old enough to know that there is a taboo there but not old enough to know exactly why.

Sex at this age is scary; it carries with it intense but different pressures for every gender. Dan Da Dan's plot is weird and fraught with danger, but so are relationships as a teenager. Anyone who tells you differently doesn’t actually remember going to high school. Even if you didn’t necessarily have to deal with alien abductions or Turbo Grannies, you had that boy or girl you were too afraid to talk to. Or that first relationship where you were both fumbling your way through things that society hadn’t prepared you for but also insisted you were ready for. You had those moments where you were sure you were becoming a grown-up years before you even knew what that really meant.

That is what I am loving so far about Dan Da Dan; it is weirdness with heart and a message. The beautiful, mind-bending animation certainly helps, as do the unique setting, the bizarre monster designs, and the catchy music. But what has made it one of the highlights of this season and might even make it my favorite anime of 2024 is that its weirdness has a purpose. It all comes back to these two kids, trying to figure out their relationship with each other at an age where they have no baseline for normal.

There is no shortage of weird anime out there, but Dan Da Dan goes further than most and makes its weirdness part of the message and I absolutely love it for that.

Each week, Popverse's resident anime expert Trent Cannon runs down the latest and, dare we say "greatest," in anime and manga in Popverse Jump. Some recent columns have included... 

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• Piracy is baked into anime's past, but, like Crunchyroll, we should move on from it
• Flying whales, mechs, and Miyazaki vibes: Inside Netflix's Leviathan anime with the people who made it
• How AI translations of manga continues the 'enshitification' of the medium, and why Japanese publishers are "less precious" about it
• I never wanted a Cyberpunk Edgerunners sequel, but God help me I'm going to watch it
• The Summer Hikaru Died delivers its cosmic horror at an agonizingly slow pace
• The one thing that Dan Da Dan does better than Demon Slayer ever did
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