Deca-Dence E1: "Ignition"

This review was comissioned by @Alitur.

I've been told to go into this review as blind as possible, so all I know about Deca-Dence is that it's an anime-original, it's a completed single-coure series, and it falls into a post-apocalyptic scifi or adjacent genre. Also, I thought it was "deca-DANCE" until just now, but nope, E. A play off of "decadence" then, not dancing crabs. Oh well. It might still end up having a crab rave too, you never know. Anyway, let's check out the first episode.

Open on a ruined city surrounded by post-apocalyptic desert. A trio of scavengers, led by a man named Muro, have just found some old broken-down machine that they were looking for, and eagerly start stripping it for parts. Looking through the device's innards, Muro mumbles something about how "there's something strange about our world," and devices like this one might hold clues to the big secret.

Huh, well, this is going places. Not the ones I expected, either.

Muro studies the machine components until the excited shouting of his approaching kid daughter, Natsume. She found "a funny animal" that she wants to show him, and...well, there are obviously a few things about desert survival that she has yet to be taught.

Surprisingly, Muro doesn't seem especially worried about her daughter holding a live scorpion by the tail; more just shocked to see her here at all when he thought he left her at home. She cowers away from his anger at first, but when encouraged by the others she explains that she snuck along in the back of their jeep, and that she was so tired of her father telling her he'd show her the surface when she's older that she just had to hurry things along.

They live in bunkers, I guess? Or caves? Underground, either way. Deep enough for the surface to require a good bit of driving to reach.

Before Muro can say anything else to his daughter, the ground starts shaking. Everyone shouts that a "gadoll" is inbound, and they hurry back to their ATV. Fortunately for Natsume, the scorpion just timidly scuttles away when she heedlessly drops it to the ground; she got lucky, I must say. Muro, for his part, is forced to drop the machine parts he'd been examining in his haste to get himself and his daughter to safety. They hit the ignition just as the gadoll comes into view, knocking over a pair of old buildings as it scurries its huge body after them.

One of the unnamed humans despairingly identifies the gadoll chasing them as an "avispine." I'm guessing the name is a play on "avian" and "vespid," which fits its appearance fairly well.

I guess there are a few different types of "gadoll," all of them being some weird combination of animals? Anyway, from context these bird-wasp hybrids seem to be one of the worsts of the lot.

The avispine gadoll chases them across the desert, keeping up and even gaining on them even as they gun their vehicle up to full speed. They see a weird...thing?...called "the gears" up ahead that don't really look anything like gears, but that they seem happy to see. Like this is their salvation from the monster for some reason.

Erm...I guess those circles might be "gears?" They don't appear to be...I don't know. Maybe those are literal gears, but like...the teeth and axles are invisible, and there's random organic detritis flying around in them? I don't know.

Well, they try to drive toward the safety(?) of the gears, but the avispine throws these giant quills in their path that are big enough to crash the ATV. We see people flying around inside the vehicle, trying to hang on to it and each other. Everything goes dark. When the light comes back on, we are seeing the world from Natsume's POV. The situation seems to have gone...less badly than it could have, all things considered. She's in what looks like a bunker or a field hospital or something, which is a major step up from a wrecked ATV being rummaged through by monsters. Her father is leaning over her, now with some big device strapped to his back, and telling her she just needs to power through this, he'll be right back. Also, the bloody stump that used to be her right arm has been cleaned and bandaged; once again, worlds better than the alternative!

Deca-dence is the name of the bunker or whatever they live in, then. That name is suggestive, and not in a good way. I was assuming that the gadoll monsters were the cause of the apocalypse, but if the surviving humans are living on in "decadence" then I suspect they might be more of a symptom.

Meanwhile, sounds of combat are echoing in from outside. Wherever they've gotten Natsume to, it still isn't by any means secure. Her father gives her some final reassurances, grabs a gun with a barrel longer than he is, and then leaps out of the structure and flies away. It turns out that big machine he's got on his back is a jetpack. Too bad he didn't have a few of those (either jetpacks or kaiju-rifles) onhand earlier when the monster was chasing them, but oh well.

After he flies off and we hear him rally the men for a renewed assault against the gadoll(s), the door closes behind him and we see that the room Natsume is in is actually the back of a large, heavily-armored ambulance. It drives away across the desert as the battle rages behind it. The camera slowly pans out to reveal that the ambulance is driving along the edge of an immense canyon with curiously furrowed edges. Then it pans out further, and...oh. Huh.

The ambulance has already shrunk to a little speck lost amidst the terrain on the right side of the tracks by the time deca-dence comes into view. It's hard to tell, but looking at the size of those little hills in relation to the ambulance we saw a minute ago and comparing those in turn to the tracks, I'd say that the trench deca-dence leaves behind it is at least 30 meters deep and thrice that across. That landship might not be the biggest manmade object in history, but it's the biggest MOVING manmade object many times over.

So, they don't live underground. They live in an armored vehicle the size of a town. The expense and resource demands of putting that damned thing on wheels has got to be...well, I'm sure there will be a reason provided. Anyway, when Natsume talked about never having visited the surface, I guess she was used to looking at it from the opposite direction than the one I'd been assuming.

Hmm. Giant tracked vehicles that act as mobile towns. Desert full of monsters, some of them improbably large for such a resource-poor environment. This setting is almost like anime Tatooine, heh.

From there, we fade into a montage of internal shots of the deca-dence mobile fortress. It's got a real WH40K vibe to it, with villages made from stacked shipping crates and surrounded by community gardens built around the massive smokestacks and raised precariously over the immense fuel tanks within this fool-sized vehicle. One gets the impression that while the Deca-dence (lol that name seriously) was designed to house a certain number of people, its population has grown significantly above its design parameters, and now it's basically got shantytowns sprouting all over (and around, and inside of) it to make more room.

The imagery comes with a voiceover history lesson. The global environment was destroyed and humanity reduced to a fraction of its population by the sudden appearance of the gadoll. Nations quickly fell, but fragments of their various militaries who still fought the gadoll ended up merging together into an organization uncreatively, hamfistedly, and engrish-illy named "the Power." The Power created Deca-dence, a titanic war machine fuelled by the gadoll's own alien blood, as a mobile base to try and purge the monster infestation region by region. They had trouble making their extermination efforts stick, though, and slowly Deca-dence ended up becoming more of a refuge for survivors than an offensive weapon.

So, basically this thing's motor runs on kaiju blue. It's not explicitly stated in the voiceover, but it's pretty easy to infer that the lifestyle of the deca-dence tribe has become dependent on the continued existence of the enemy it was designed to fight.

It's been at least a couple of centuries since this stopped being a war and started being a way of life. Deca-dence society is divided into two classes; the "tankers" who spend virtually all their time inside the vehicle maintaining it and running its myriad onboard industries that make life possible, and the "gears" who retain much of the old military rank structure and hierarchy from the Power and are tasked with scavenging the surrounding lands for resources, defending the vehicle from gadoll, and hunting those same gadoll in turn for their blood. God these names are Engrishy lol. I guess the flying circle-thingies that rescued them in the last scene were a squad of soldiers with jetpacks, then, since they were identified as "gears." Those jetpacks leave really weird looking wakes in the air, I guess.

The narrators of this history lesson turn out to be children giving a presentation in a tanker orphanage aboard the deca-dence. Their delivery frames the importance of the gears as the masters and defenders of deca-dence, and the need for tankers like themselves to do everything they can to support and provide for the gears so they can focus entirely on fighting. From the sound of things, their society is a military junta at best and Truck Sparta at worst. Mostly depending on how easy it is to get into the gears.

The final line of the presentation - about the lifelong duty that every tanker owes to the gears - is delivered by Natsume. She looks at least five years older than last time, and has a prosthetic arm in place of the one she lost as a child.

...and she's in an orphanage. Heavily implying that her arm wasn't the only thing she never saw again after the armored ambulance took her back to deca-dence.

Damn. That was a hell of a lot more understated than anime usually is about tragic backstories. It actually hits harder when it makes you do a double take, rather than having a twenty second close-up of the crying protag's face with sad music playing because the creators think you're too stupid to understand how tragic it is otherwise. Anime isn't uniquely guilty of this, of course, but it does do it a lot. Enough to make this exception very noticeable, and very appreciable.

Anyway, the teacher describes what they just said as a "recitation" rather than a "presentation." Which makes sense, and also is very telling. It makes sense because the level of detail is a little elementary for what looks like mid-to-older teenagers to have for schoolwork. It's telling because...this is a ritual recitation that they seem to have drilled into them, all about their loyalty and subservience to the gears. Like the American pledge of allegiance, but significantly worse.

Anyway, this particular recitation will be their last one, at least in this facility. It's time for them to graduate from orphan school and begin their adult lives! The schoolmaster tells them all what line of work they've been deemed best suited for, including food production, weapon maintenance, engine care, medicine, etc. Natsume looks eager and excited to hear her own destiny...but then we cut to a one-on-one meeting with her and the schoolmaster, and she's far from pleased.

Apparently she wanted to enlist in the Power and become one of the gears like her late father. From how the tanker culture has been portrayed thus far, I think it's more likely than not that a tanker orphan would never normally be considered for such a career if they didn't have a gear parent like Natsume did. In her case though, the reason the Power just never bothered replying to her application is probably her prosthetic arm. "A sound mind and a sound body" is one of the gear mottos, and her body is just not sound, sorry. She should just take the tanker profession that was assigned to her and learn to like it.

Outside the door, some of her classmates are listening in with smug expressions. I get the impression that Natsume has either been trying to lord her military ancestry over them, or they just resent her for thinking she might have a higher status future than them. Not nice of them either way, but it remains to be seen how much of this ill-will Natsume may have invited through her own behavior.

Anyway, Natsume doesn't manage to change her situation. Cut ahead a little while to her sitting around miserably at a food court, surrounded by people haggling furiously over the cost of meals. I'm surprised this place has a market economy for essential things like food, honestly. It's a weird combination with what otherwise seems like a pretty centrally controlled everything. Maybe the market is just for cooked food that's better than your basic bitch distributed rations or something, idk. Well, anyone, the miserable Natsume is joined at her table by a friend of hers who tries to cheer her up...and then immediately afterward by one of the jerks who was giggling behind the door when she got rejected, who...drops a dead bug into her ricebowl. Wow, wtf. The jerk (who turns out to be tailed by a crowd of other jerks) then just bully Natsume harder when she tries to push back, which includes getting sort of creepily handsy.

This social tension seems to be quite a bit more extreme than I initially thought. Damn.

...

One extra reason for me in particular to hate purple-haired bully girl, also, is that her stupid bug stunt interrupted a little pre-meal prayer that Natsume and her friend were just starting to recite, preventing us from learning anything about the deca-dence tribe's religion. Interrupting the worldbuilding just to be a bitch to the protag? Well, that means you've just crossed the line into being a bitch to the audience as well!

Yeah, the writers of this show know their shit alright. Kill her, Natsume. Stuff her in a cannon and shoot her at a gadoll.

...

The bullies finally leave, and Natsuri growls that one day Purpley will be slaving away carving up the corpses of gadoll that Natsuri has hunted, mark her words. The animators, meanwhile, just lavish attention on Purpley's retreating ass as she leads her posse of snickering friends away.

You have to see it in motion to get the full effect, but trust me, you can definitely tell where they spent the most effort.​

Cut ahead a while to Natsuri and her friend sitting around on a wharf-type-thing over the gigantic fuel tank of monster blood. Natsuri's friend, now named as Fei, tells her that she thinks it's better this way. It's rare for tankers to be accepted into the Power, and those who are have very high mortality rates, Natsuri's own father being a case in point. She'd much rather have Natsuri as a living friend than her death as a painful memory.

Natsuri at least manages to pretend to be cheered up by this, regardless of how she actually feels. At the very least, it's a reminder that at least one person in this seemingly uncaring world wants her to stay alive.

As they talk, Natsuri spots a pair of newcomers riding a lift platform down toward the other side of the fuel-lake. A pair of gears, seemingly coming back from a scouting mission. Natsuri sighs wistfully and wishes she could have been born into a race of purpose-bred soldiers like them. Also, they look like this:

Okay, this actually is much more Truck Sparta, then. There's a distinct (seemingly transhuman, in this case) lineage of citizen-soldiers, with only certain favored helots being given the "privilege" of military service alongside them. Those soldier-helots also taking disproportionate casualties meat-shielding for them in major engagements.

Not subtle, but again, this is a (titular!) civilization that's literally named "decadence," so subtlety was never part of the advertised package.

Fei points out that this is yet another reason why Natsume shouldn't have ever wanted to be a soldier in the first place. The gears are the ones who are gengineered for it. They're better at, and more likely to survive, combat, even before you consider the added handicap of Natsume's prosthetic hand. She's not a gear, so why want to be in a situation that's best left for gears to handle? Natsume nods along with Fei's argument, but clearly hasn't had the yearning to follow in her dad's footsteps (albeit hopefully for at least a decade or two longer than he himself did) argued out of her yet. Fei then asks what kind of work Natsume DID get assigned to, which prompts a smash cut to her reporting to work on the upper spires of the deca-dence, hundreds of meters above ground level.

We learn, in quick succession, that Natsume is a) afraid of heights, and b) now a part of the deca-dence armor maintenance crew. Sure, the bureaucracy may have put her in a position where she'll be in too much constant fear and anxiety to work efficiently, but on the bright side at least she'll be able to look down and see the soldiers coming and going and living the life she always wished for but will never get to experience. Every day. For the rest of her life.

Not sure if this is malice on the part of said bureaucracy, or just incredible inattentiveness and apathy. Probably the latter, but it could be that her family had enemies, in which case there might be a bit of the former as well.

She's quickly introduced to her overseer, armor maintenance foreman Kaburagi. He never smiles, barely talks, and has zero fondness or enthusiasm for fresh-faced new crew members no matter how polite and eager to work they present themselves as being. Also, all new team members spend the first five years of their careers scraping rotting bits of dead monster off the sides of deca-dence before they even earn the right to start learning how to weld.

So, how has this place not been brought down by sabotage and terrorism yet?

As Natsume grudgingly starts work scrapping rotting meat and congealed mucus off the hull, she happens to see a vehicle convot departing down below. She has a hand-telescope ready, which she uses to watch the ATV's up close. Same style of jeep that she lost her arm and her father in.

Apparently, these conventional resource scavenging missions are traditionally conducted by tanker battle-thralls, while the gears actively hunt for gadoll and hopefully draw them away from the squishies in the process. Kinda figured as much.

Natsume wonders if "Kurenai" is part of this scavenging fleet currently heading out. Have you met a character named Kurenai yet? Maybe it was one of the other guys who accompanied her father on that fateful mission she stowed away on years ago, or another student in the orphanage-school who I guess ended up with the job Natsume wanted? Could be either, or could be someone we haven't been introduced to yet. She smiles, and then frowns wistfully, clearly wishing she was also down there. Then joyless foreman Kaburagi asks her what the fuck she's doing just staring into space, get back to fucking work scrub.

This is the first day of the rest of Natsume's life.

Some inspirational military-sounding bagpipe music plays over a montage of Natsume trying to make the most of her new life. She seems determined to meet every disappointment with a resilient positivity, every difficulty with only-momentarily-broken cheer, and every person with a desire to get along. It's admirable, especially given how much her world seems to try to discourage such an attitude (with her new boss being sort of a living example of the sort of attitude it encourages). She manages to quickly endear herself to the rest of the crew, Kaburagi aside, and even turns her stiff, slow-moving robotic hand into something of an asset for securing tools to.

It's heartwarming, but also sad. The vibe one gets is that sooner or later, her optimism will run out. Her cheer will be slowly worn away. She might not ever get beaten down quite as badly as the foreman, but she'll still end up a hell of a lot more like him than her current self if she stays in this role for decades.

There's some nice worldbuilding imagery intercut with this montage, also. We see that Natsume's bedroom (at least she now has one of those to herself, even if its really just a little corner with a door welded over it) has a private sprout farm and some other little table-hydroponics in it alongside the old family photos from back when she had a family, with the implication that some personal food production is normal for tanker bedrooms. To signal the passage of time, we see the deca-dence slooowly tear its way across the landscape as the sun rises and falls behind it, moving gradually from desert to an area with some patchy bits of forest. There are also a couple shots of the senior team members doing actual welding work, removing enormous rectangular patches of armor by crane and then welding them back into place after they've been restored.

Through it all, though, Natsume is still just scraping bits of rotten monster off of the hull, slowly conquering her fear of heights and avoiding thinking about the soldiers down below. She also tries to endear herself to boss Kaburagi, but he's stoically unwilling to not be miserable to everyone all the time. She makes friends with the rest of the team, but not with him.

He does seem to at least have some appreciation for things like natural beauty here and there, even if his reactions to it are still very understated.

And, to his credit, he does the grunt cleaning work himself alongside the newbies when necessary, and doesn't seem to even acknowledge that it's more unpleasant than the welding; just that it requires less skill, and thus his own time is better spent on the more complicated tasks when there are such to be performed.

There's no cruelty or egotism in Kaburagi. Just dull, exhausted pragmatism. He expects everyone else to have the same work ethic as himself, and doesn't have the energy to deal with deviance from it.

A couple weeks into her new adult life, Natsume gets cornered after work by a slightly older coworker named Fennel. It starts out with them commiserating about working under Kaburagi, but Fennel quickly changes the subject to wanting to get dinner with her. She seems fairly receptive to his advances at first, but then he gets really pushy and starts making her uncomfortable.

She manages to find her escape from Fennel by spotting a water bottle that Kaburagi forgot when he went home this evening, and telling Fennel she needs to bring it to him right now. Lol.

Cut to the little decompression chamber thing that Kaburagi calls home. He miserably feeds his dog (seemingly the only creature he has an affectionate, non-professional relationship with) and sits down to miserably fix a tool when he hears a knock at the door. A knock that continues repeating itself long after he resolves to ignore it.

He grudgingly pulls himself out of his chair, shambles to the door, and is greeted by a peppy, smiling Natsume. He immediately slams it again in her face.

She keeps knocking. Looking even more miserable than before, he opens it again and demands to know what the hell is so important. She offers him his bottle, telling him he forgot it. He takes it back and then slams the door again without saying thank you.

She knocks again. He, nearly growling now, opens it. She asks him on a date.

...what?

Does she actually have a crush on him for some reason, or is this just to make herself look unavailable to Fennel?

Technically, she says "welcoming party" instead of "date." But that was also the phrasing Fennel used, and he made it pretty clear at the time what he was talking about. Also, she reveals that she's brought a bunch of food and drink with her, so she clearly intends to have a private "party" with just two people in Kaburagi's quarters. So, yeah. Not sure what her motivation is here, but she definitely is at least going through the motions of coming on to Kaburagi.

He closes the door again, but she wedges her face in the way and desperately babbles out that she, alone among the work crew, cared enough about him to bring him his forgotten bottle. Is he sure he just wants to shut the door on that? Is he really sure? Really really? Really really really?

Kaburagi lets out a defeated sigh, and lets her in.

Jump cut to Natsume and Kaburagi sitting across his table from each other, food and drink spread out. Natsume has clearly been drinking. If Kaburagi has, we can't tell it, because not even alcohol is capable of unfreezing his face. Natsume pours out her heart to him, her usual cheer and chipper having given way to sadness and frustration as she lets it out. Kaburagi continues giving her the same expression he gives to everyone and everything at all times.

After she finishes ranting and finally lets her spinning head rest on the table, Kaburagi asks her why she wants to be a soldier so much anyway. He either doesn't know about her father and the complexes she likely has because of how she lost him, or he hasn't put it together yet. He doesn't seem like the type to avoid raising the subject out of sensitivity or the like, heh. When she answers that she wants to feel like she's actually working toward improving the world and taking humanity's planet back, he asks her what the hell gave her the idea that the Power is even still *trying* to do that. Maybe rhetoric like that gets thrown around as part of the civic ritual occasionally, but everyone knows that survival is the one and only real agenda of the Power, and of Deca-Dence society in general, at this point. And, speaking of survival, there are only about 200 tankers in the Power at any given time, and they have a high attrition rate. Natsume can help her people much more by doing her job here in the fortress, and living a long time to keep on doing it.

Natsume asks Kaburagi if he really thinks it's best to have no ambitions, no dreams, no hopes for advancement or aspirations to change the world for the better. He tells her that those are her words, not his, but if that's how she wants to phrase it then yes.

The world outside is the world outside. The gadoll rule it, and will continue to. Tankers serve the gears, and will continue to serve the gears. That's how it is. That's how it will always be. Imagining a world that is not so is a waste of time; which is fine, but only as long as she makes sure it's only her own time she's wasting and not the armor maintenance crew's.

Hmm. Inability to distinguish between environmental and social realities. "Trying to change the way our society is organized is like trying to change gravity or thermodynamics." A frustratingly common attitude, and one that establishment elites often work hard to encourage.

...

On the other hand...hmm. I feel like another way of looking at this dialogue is one of modernity versus the ancient world, or...that's too general, since there are periods in ancient history when this very much wasn't the case either, but...well, two different historical paradigms. I doubt the writers INTENDED this, but bear with me for a moment.

For much of humanity's existence, history happened very, very slowly. It's hard for us to imagine this, but take an Egyptian peasant living in 2500 BC and an Egyptian peasant living in 1500 BC. That's a thousand years' temporal separation. That's as much time as there's been between us right now, and the Norman conquest of England. Those two Egyptians would have lived in more or less the same type of hut, farmed the same crops with virtually the same tools and pack animals, and paid basically the same tribute to a man in basically the same silly hat who was called the Pharoah.

In modern times, it's very easy to laugh at the kind of smallminded conservatives who doggedly insist that the way things are is the way things always have been and will be and that trying to change things is foolishness at best and heresy at worst. For much of human history though, those conservatives would have been - at least practically speaking - correct.

So, depending on how long it's been since the deca-dence civilization fell into its current homeostasis, and how detailed their historical records of the world before the apocalypse are, either of these two could be the crazy one for thinking the way they think.

...

Suddenly, the latch of a sideroom/closet door turns, allowing the door to swing open. Kaburagi reacts in alarm, and changes his demeanor on a dime, telling Natsume that she's taken up too much of his time already and she needs to go home and let both of them sleep at once. She protests that she hasn't even helped him clean up after their meal, and he insists that he'll do it himself, she needs to go home NOW.

As he barks at the confused girl, his dog sneaks out of the sideroom it just figured out how to open the door of and slips passed Natsume's feet. Only, now that we get to see it clearly it turns out that it isn't actually a "dog," per se.

Heh, clever. The show only let us get looks at it from behind, in shadowy environments, so it looked like just a slightly weird-looking pug dog. Well played, art team.

Natsume recognizes the creature as a small gadoll variant, and dashes for a kitchen knife to stab it with. In addition to it being dangerous, this is her big chance! Killing a gadoll that managed to creep into the deca-dence will distinguish her from the other tanker peasants and hopefully pave the way for entry into the Power! She grabs the knife, lunges at the terrified creature, and is promptly yanked back away from it and thrown onto the floor by Kaburagi. She's not going to kill this gadoll. It's harmless, and it's his pet.

She accepts that explanation much more readily than I'd have expected her to, considering both her personal goals and the culture that produced her.

Once she shows it some affection, the little gadoll quickly loses its fear of her and allows itself to be petted. I think it's like...a beluga whale/hornworm caterpillar hybrid? It has a blowhole, which makes its head overall beluga-like, and the legs and tail-antenna make me think of a hornworm more than anything else. If the gadoll are all a mix of two animals, then I think this one is a mix of those two animals.

It brings her a piece of pipe that Kaburagi had laying around, and seems to want her to play fetch with it. She decides to nickname the creature "Pipe" at once, which Kaburagi objects to. He says it doesn't have a name, it doesn't NEED a name, and that even if it did need a name "Pipe" would be a stupid one to give it. Natsume doesn't care.

For a moment, we go into Kaburagi's POV, and he has this virtual heads-up display thing that calls a lot of attention to itself.

The icons and reticules are all so bright, tacky, and cheerful looking, too. It really seems like a clash with the rest of the show's used-future post apocalypse aesthetics.

Does everyone in deca-dence have a cybernetic HUD like Kaburagi's? Only some of them? Only a secret few who also are in on the whole "some gadoll can be pets" thing?

If nothing else, I'd have expected to see surgical scars or something on Kaburagi's head. Or at least weird colored eyes, due to high-tech contact lenses or whatever. This doesn't seem like it should be a world with unobtrusive non-disfiguring cybernetics (compare this with Natsume's ugly, clumsy, only-slightly-better-than-modern-prosthetics hand replacement), but I guess aesthetics can be deceiving?

Seeing Natsume carry on playing with Pipe, Kaburagi says he's surprised to see her warming up to the little gadoll so quickly. Didn't a gadoll kill her father and maim her? Okay, so he does know about that. I guess she may have just told him this evening, or he could have known before. She shrugs the question off almost without a thought, simply saying that this particular gadoll seems innocent enough to her.

Hmm. She certainly is willing to change her worldview on a dime, considering that she'd just been making impassioned speeches about her dreams of exterminating them all and taking back the world. Or else she just hasn't put two and two of "cute critter" and "no joson i have to kill the demons" together and confronted the cognitive dissonance yet.

Cut ahead to sometime later that night. Natsume has presumably gone home. Kaburagi is walking around the tanker habitation area built into deca-dence's upper fuel tank. A random drunk guy stumbles through the hallways and keels over, and Kaburagi runs up to the unconscious man and uses a little handheld tool to extract a...thing?...from the drunk's neck. He then leaves the unconscious man laying there in the hall, and sends a mental status update to an unseen commander.

The bugged chip has been removed. Error code for this one was 411. The remote commander informs Kaburagi that though he did good work tonight, his rate of malfunctioning chip detection and recovery is still unacceptably low, and he needs to apply himself much harder. He makes Kaburagi repeat the mantra "the world must be rid of bugs" a couple of times before ending the technopathic skype call.

Okay then. There's a LOT more going on with these neural cybernetics than it looked. Kaburagi's HUD is just the tip of the iceberg; it seems like there might be some kind of covert transhuman shadow-war going on within deca-dence. How the gadoll are related to this is unclear, but it can't be coincidence that one of the secret transhumans participating in it also has a secret pet gadoll when most people think that's impossible.

The next day at work, a terse follow-up conversation between Natsume and Kaburagi is interrupted by a blaring alarm siren. Gadoll attack incoming! Looking out over the sea of clouds, Natsume can even see...okay, is that a mountain, some kind of gadoll base/hive/thing, or a gadoll organism nearly the size of Truck-Sparta itself?

There's a close-up on what looks like a monstrous face for a moment, so...yeah, I think that is a gadoll organism nearly the size of Truck-Sparta. The ones we've seen them fighting up until now were just the itty bitty little babies. There's a reason they built Deca-Dence so large when they didn't even know they'd have to shelter a civilization in it yet, and that reason appears to basically be "Pacific Rim, but moreso."

Speaking of the genre, the craggy dorsal spike-mountain-thing on that giant gadoll's back has got to be a deliberate nod to Godzilla's design.

Cut to the command room, a dissonantly pristine-looking array of white spires sheltered in the upper-middle of the vehicle. A Commander-General Minato seems to be calling the shots as the senior command all prepare for battle; I think we can infer that he's the closest thing Truck Sparta has to a single leader. He seems to have four lesser generals answered to him, each operating their own computer console while he stands in the middle of this funky-looking augmented reality...thing...to coordinate everyone. It's too dark to tell if these five people are gears or baseline humans; I'd assume the former, but I can't tell.

Speaking of uncertain identities, l thiiiink Minato is the person who Kaburagi was having that technopathic exchange with during his secret chip-hunting mission the night before, but I'm not sure. His voice is similar, but he hasn't said enough so far for me to be certain.

Anyway, an underling reports that there's a large swarm including members of six medium-sized gadoll species moving across the ground toward them, and their "mothership" organism - a "giant giland" - is bringing up the rear. Minato gives the order for Deca-Dence to moor itself to the ground and brace itself to deploy its full arsenal.

There's a complicated steampunk-y succession of gigantic machine parts moving as the deca-dence halts its movement, pushes its buttressing "anchors" into the soil around itself, and sinks its undercarriage over the treads so it can deploy several additional layers of ablative armor. Then, Minato has them open the main hangar bay and release their own swarm of smaller combatants. Dozens of ATV's and other armed vehicles emerge into the sunlight, their crews hurrying to battle stations.

We momentarily zoom in on one ATV in particular that is being commanded by Kurenai.

Like I said, I don't think we've ever seen this lady before. We just know that Natsume knows her, somehow. I'm guessing she was a friend or understudy of her father's, seeing as she's also part of that small tanker military corps.

Also, is it just me, or is that hangar design really, really inefficient for what they're using it for?

The absurd height would make sense if they had several aisles of those vehicle-racks lined up in there, but if they only have them lining the walls then...well, why not just build more racks and a lower ceiling? Would be easier, more space-efficient, and more structurally sound.

My best guess is that they used to have much bigger vehicles stored in there. Possibly flying ones that need room to maneuver during takeoff/landing as well. The little ATV type things are just all they've got left at this point, either because they had so many of them to begin with, or because they've just lost the know-how to fabricate more of the big boys.

Just my best guess.

As the soldiers hurry out into the battle and the officers and technicians reformat the fortress into static defence mode, a piece of armor that the maintenance crew had had the bad luck to be poking at gets shaken loose. Bad timing. It falls, crushing a walkway and knocking Natsume, Kaburagi, that creepy Fennel guy, and a no-name off the ledge to plummet down toward the ground hundreds of feet below.

Let's see what unlikely coincidence saves Natsume, Kaburagi, and possibly one or both of the others. My money is on the guy with a name living at least a little longer than the guy who lacks one, but this pilot has already surprised me a couple of times.

Down below, the vehicles close with the monster swarm, and...okay, these battles are apparently *really* weird. In ways that you wouldn't even expect from the already weird premise of the show. Those guns that the humans are using fire these hollow flechette type things that impale the monsters, but seemingly not that deeply. Then a bunch of people leap off of the vehicles wearing those jetpack things, and...the monsters are the ones who emit those weird spherical air-vortexes. It's not clear if they only start doing that because of the flechettes poking into them, or if they would have done it anyway. Either way, those spheres either have really weird air movements going on inside of them, or they just outright suspend gravity, because both the monsters AND the people are able to fly inside of those vortexes but not outside of them. The jetpacks only work within the air-vortexes that the gadoll project around themselves.

And...I think the packs are also sucking blood from the monsters, when a soldier flies close enough to one of the hollow tubes sticking out of them? Maybe? They're also shooting them with more of those flechette-tubes, and stabbing them with spears that have a similar structure.

The four armor-maintenance people are fortunate enough to fall into the mass of gadoll air-vortexes, which gently stops their descent and brings them all to an easy hover after just a few tens of meters of deceleration. They are unfortunate, however, to be left helplessly suspended in the air within reach of the gadoll projecting those vortexes.

An octopus/flatworm hybrid proves that the situation is serious by tearing No-Name apart right in front of the others' faces. Oh no, they killed No-Name, who could have ever foreseen such a tragic turn of events, truly this is a series in which no character is safe. While that's happening though, Kaburagi grabs the jetpack-tank-thing off of a dead soldier whose body happened to float within reach. Before the octofluke can tear Natsume apart for the crime of being the next closest person within its field of vision, Kaburagi impales the beast, grabs Natsume and secures her to himself using one of the extra tethers hanging off of his pack, and commences an extremely fast-paced and well animated action sequence. Bouncing around through the mess of overlapping antigrav-spheres, he uses dropped flechettes to impale gadoll after gadoll, trying all the while to get the two of them to safety.

And yes, when the action isn't too frenzied for me to track the details, it becomes clear that those flight packs really are actively sucking blood out of the monsters' bodies whenever they come within a certain distance of an embedded flechette-tube. As if it's magnetically drawing in the blood, and only the blood.

The gadoll deflate almost like water balloons as they're bled dry, as if their bodies are mostly just sacks full of the green fuel stuff. On that note, it was mentioned earlier that people eat gadoll meat, and we saw that gadoll remains rot and putrefy like normal animal tissue when they get splattered on the deca-dence's hull. Their bodies are made of normal, native Earth proteins and carbohydrates, but their blood is this highly exotic green power source. And their bodies seem to basically be sacks meant for holding as much of that green stuff as possible. Earth life mutated into perfect hosts for this liquid alien thing? Maybe.

Additionally, it occurs to me that if they weren't constantly in need of fuel for their city-sized gas guzzler, these people could make fighting the gadoll much safer for themselves. Just put explosives inside of those tubes and launch them from a little further away.

The action sequence continues for quite a while, and it keeps being impressive both in terms of animation and direction/choreography. Kaburagi kicks them off of the dead octofluke, dodges an avespine or whatever the birdwasps are called, weaves between the tentacles of the earwibranch that they find themselves passing over next and slays it as well, sneak attack and drops another earwibranch before it can turn and spot them, and loses a heavily armored spidurtle that chases them across a rocky ridge while taking care to stay within its antigrav field. The music is also pretty great. Not too ostentatious like a lot of anime fight music can be, but still very memorable and a strong complement to the scene.

The other soldiers - gears and basline tankers alike - are awed at this rando who no one recognizes and the havoc he singlehandedly wreaks on the gadoll. If other characters - including characters who are themselves established to be bioauged like the gears - are noticing something strange here, then that *probably* means that Kaburagi is using some crazy cybernetic reflexes here. And that such crazy cybernetic reflexes are not common, or even known to the general public at all.

As this is all going on, the giant giland - which appears to be some kind of whale-sauropod-snail mixture, now that we see it up close - stomps right over the battlefield as it approaches Deca-Dence. Kaburagi looks up at the dueling titans, and mentally wishes Commander-General Minato the best. We don't hear an answer, which could mean that that wasn't actually Minato he was brain-linking with the other night, or it could just mean that Minato kinda has his attention elsewhere right now lol.

Cut to Minato on the deca-dence's bridge. He orders them to fire the rocket-propelled bloodsucking harpoons. I guess when they're fighting a monster at this range, they need to use conventional hoses to suck out the magic juice instead of that weird magnetism thing, because the harpoons have plain old tubes attached.

The big boy creates its own county-sized air vortex the instant the harpoons pierce it, which suggests that the gadoll only emit those in response to injury. Weird. Really weird.

Then we see the blood flowing into Truck Sparta's fuel tank, waterfalling down passed the Tanker city and raising its float docks, and...okay, this raises questions.

If they can collect THAT much magic happy juice from the big monster, why are the soldiers risking their lives to collect a few paltry backpacks-full from the little ones? The total harvest from all of the smaller gadoll put together isn't going to amount to so much as a single percent of what they get from Boss Snailwhale. Why not just waste all the mooks with explosives from the safety of deca-dence's hull?

I suspect that the main reasons for these life-wasting, zero-benefit sorties are social rather than tactical.

Once the tank is full and the deca-dence is completely within the snailwhale's antigrav field, Minato gives the order to fire the main weapon; the weapon that mobile fortress deca-dence derives its name from. Officers shout technobabble jargon over comms as machinery aligns and combines, the upper section of the vehicle reshaping itself to an even more radical degree than before. Glowing, bio-mechanical tissue strands and fibre-optic nerves tense and pulse under their metal coverings. It looks, well, Evangelion. Even more Evangelion than the basic genre assumptions would neccessitate. The end credits start slowly rolling over the scene, and I swear the outro song sounds just enough like Cruel Angel's Thesis for me to think it might be deliberate. Finally, everything is aligned. Eldritch blue light blossoms forth from the deca-dence like the rays of an alien sun. A firing mechanism that could only ever work within the gadoll's own bubble of altered physics echoes its report across the landscape, and...a giant rocket-powered fist flies out and punches the monster in the throat.

Amazing.

Absolutely amazing.

It's all framed and built up in JUST such a way that you feel a tremendous disappointment when the rocket-punch happens. Not because it's cheesy; this show hasn't shied away from cheesy giant mech anime cliches in general, so I wouldn't have expected it to. But, because everything in the leadup to the punch looks so ethereal, so futuristic, so perfectly engineered and high-concept, that the instant the stupid metal fist flies out you're *instantly* reminded of all the other waste and inefficiency we've just seen throughout the battle. All this technological wonder and ingenuity, and the society using it is just barely a step up from Iron Age barbarism. Instead of using this incredible science and engineering to retake and restore the world, they channel it into powering a giant fist to punch things with.

I haven't seen nearly enough of Evangelion to say if this is a satire or subversion of it, or just a different approach to the same themes. But I do feel like the creators want you to make that connection at that moment, for whatever reasons.

The leviathan stumbles kilometers back and then falls, its corpse disintegrating and spraying across an entire landscape. On the ground nearer to the fortress, everyone cheers and hollers. Completely ignoring the needlessly dead bodies of their friends and comrades-in-arms strewn about the battlefield in between monster corpses.

Fennel the creep peeks out from under the ATV he'd managed to hide himself under and breathes a sigh of relief. Natsume and Kaburagi sit down and catch their breathes.

In a cartoony-ass Tron place full of silly robots that look like they came from a little kids' cartoon or something, it is announced that the target was eliminated successfully. All personnel, remember to fill yourselves up on fuel and reboot your operating systems as per routine. That's all; have a very profitable day, everyone!

What.

That's the end of the pilot episode.

What.