Deca-Dence E2: "Sprocket"

To recount where we left off at the end of the pilot episode: what.

Let's continue!

On the ground, Natsume and Kaburagi watch the fall of Boss Whalesnail. Natsume moans aloud at the unbelievable power and spectacle. I guess either these kaiju encounters only come once every couple of decades, or she just isn't used to actually getting to see them happen instead of just feeling the room around her shake.

Well, after the smoke has cleared and the hostiles are all neutralized, the cheers and hoorahs give way to the whimpers of the wounded and dying. The sortie was a costly one, even if they won.

Once again, the viewer is reminded of how questionable the necessity of these ground-skirmishes really is. Why go out and fight the little monsters in dinky little jeeps and jetpacks when you could just shoot them from the deca-dence and let the big ones provide for your fuel needs? Additionally, the artists were good about tracking the details and drawing a disproportionate number of baseline humans among the dead.

As they look over the carnage, Kaburagi asks Natsume if she still wishes she could be a soldier, after seeing this. Natsume doesn't say anything. Just stares at the aftermath, either in shock or just in deep thought.

Cut ahead to late afternoon. The wounded have been triaged, the dead humans removed for whatever funerary customs Truck Sparta practices, and the dead monsters are being carved up for edible and otherwise useful bits. Whatsername the mean girl with the butt is here among the other butchers, cutting steaks out of dead tardigrizards. Natsume just sort of quietly avoids her. Off to the side, we see Kurenai (the tanker field officer that Natsume admires) conducting the funeral. She seems to be the tanker corps' chaplain-equivalent, whatever else her position entails.

The military band they have playing the bagpipes for the ceremony includes quite a few solemn-looking gears. However, Natsume also overhears a few other gears off to the side whispering much less respectful things amongst themselves about idiot tankers who idiotically put themselves in harm's way. We don't see Natsume's reaction, but I think we can probably infer it.

Kurenai cremates the bodies, and the smoke climbs high against the backdrop of deca-dence's towering shape. Then, we cut to what is either the OP, or just a special informational intro for this episode, and...what

...

*blinks. repeatedly.*

Uh...o-okay...?

Deca-dence is not some virtual reality netherworld like the many others you could be wasting your eternity in, oh no. Almost the entirety of the realspace Eurasian continent has been placed under an environmentally controlled force-dome, and maintained in exciting post-apocalyptic splendor. Players take on the roll of "gears;" genetically engineered supersoldiers who protect the last surviving tribe of humanity from the relentless monsters of the wasteland. Customize your own gear and download yourself into it to experience real world heroics with real world consequences; there are real world civilians who are counting on you!

Remember though, your gear is powerful, but it's still a realspace object. If it gets destroyed, you have to start all over with a new character.

I'm not sure why virtual space looks so Adventure Time, but apparently that's what we were looking at at the end of the pilot.

Hmm. There was mention of them needing to stock up on monster blood and reboot after that last battle. I'm guessing that's part of the game. The gear avatars need fuel just like Truck-Sparta itself does. And, that's also why they have people flying around engaging in personal combat to suck up "blood (ie, the high tech fuel that they stuff the monsters full of before unleashing them);" they're not allowed to steal fuel from the Deca-Dence's own tank, that's cheating, you need to gain XP yourself in battle.

Now, some tankers do insist on coming along for this, no matter how hard the players and managers alike try to discourage them. They get themselves killed pointlessly, in the process of gathering fuel that doesn't actually help anyone with anything. Oh well. The important thing is that the breeding population is maintained; baseline humans are an endangered species after all, and the Solid Quake Corporation might get in trouble if it let their genepool run dry.

That was just a one-time exposition thing, it turns out, because after this we get a more traditional anime intro. It's pretty, and does some cute little visual things with alternating between cartoony virtual versions of the characters and more realistic realspace versions of them, but otherwise nothing to write home about within the milieu of fighty anime openings. The song is servicable, but likewise not all that memorable.

Anyway. Now we know the actual premise of the series, and I'm not sure if I like it better than the one we were initially presented with. "It's all a fake world for a game being played by rich assholes" is a premise that has a lot to talk and feel about, but it's also one that's been used *a lot.* Aside from the creative aesthetics (a civilization-truck fighting kaiju), this seems to be a pretty straightforward repetition.

Well, maybe it'll mix things up somehow, we'll see.

Back in virtual space, Kaburagi trudges through the Solid Quake lobby. Some people come up to him and tell him what a pleasant surprise it was to see him back in action today. He used to be a top-ranked player back in the day, and nobody expected to see him in combat again after all this time, much less with his gear all watered down and baseline human-looking. He doesn't respond.

When Kaburagi then walks away without even bothering to refuel, the others just stare bemusedly after him. We later see Kaburagi reclining in his cyber living room, ignoring the warning on his HUD telling him that he needs to refuel soon or his avatar is going to be scrapped; at his current rate of consumption, it only has 175 years remaining.

Flash back seven years. A group of gears, including a spiky blue haired version of Kaburagi's avatar, are having a discussion about "limiter releasing" as they ride an APC toward the battle site. Not all of them know what limiter releasing is, and even some of the ones who do say that they don't know how to do it. Basically, it's a hack that disables the safeties between your avatar's senses and your own. Doing this allows you to use the gears' speed and reflexes to their full potential, without any of the usual microsecond delays or lags, and it lets you experience sensation in a more visceral way than the safeties normally allow. The downside is that doing this also runs the risk of damaging your true self via psychosomatic backlash, a la The Matrix.

There's talk of how doing it too much can even get you "scrapped." And the way that it's discussed makes it seem like "scrapping" refers to actual death of the virtual consciousness rather than just the destruction of an avatar.

Huh. Kaburagi had a warning about "175 years until scrapping" if he didn't refuel.

Does that mean that the surreal little cartoon robots in their psychedelic cartoon landscape aren't virtual reality? Those are actually physical robot bodies that need fuel?

Weirrrrrrd.

The conversation is interrupted by Commander General Minato, who appears in his true body on all their HUD's to remind them all to stop the hacking talk where the corporate monitors can hear them.

They're about to reach the intercept point. Minato trusts that "his top rankers" will perform well again today.

Hmm. So Minato won his ingame status as Commander-General by being the captain/manager of the top-performing league? It definitely seems to be suggesting that.

They reach the battle-in-progress, and join in the monster hunting. Then, we cut to Kaburagi's true self standing in line at a fuel dispenser, from which he draws a vial and infuses himself when he comes up in queue.

So yes, those silly, impractical, slow-moving robot forms ARE actual physical bodies. For some reason.

I wonder where this place is, geographically? Within the Eurasian containment dome? Somewhere nearby? Hmm.

The other little robot in the green hat that we saw Kaburagi shrugging off seven years from now approaches him, and they strike up a friendly conversation. Greenhat is named Max, apparently. They chat about the game, about various fuel grades and permutations, and then go to "share some beams" together, with Kaburagi treating Max. It turns out that sharing some beams means falling into an infinite pit full of rainbows while laughing hysterically.

There's a special building where you go to do this. Apparently.

After the beam-riding WTFery, there's a bit of a montage about Kaburagi's pro gaming career. Apparently, despite his incredible speed and agility, the spectators have started to bore of him. He's been a league mainstay for a long time, and aside from raw skill he's just sort of static and uncharismatic. Meanwhile, new League member Mikey is the new hotness, and his popularity AND score ranking are rapidly climbing. Some people are starting to think the league should drop Kaburagi and give Mikey his place on their lineup.

One day, Mikey comes up to Kaburagi out of game and asks him for advice on how to advance further, since his rise through the rankings has stalled. Which is an incredibly stupid thing to ask for, because he's stalled RIGHT BEHIND KABURAGI. Like, literally one ranking below him. Lol. While Kaburagi tries to shake the moron off as politely as he can manage, Mikey happens to get a look at the monitor Kaburagi had been reading off of.

At first it seems like Mikey might be about to tattle on Kaburagi to clear the way for his own advancement, but that's not what he does. Instead, he demands to be taught how to do it himself. Sure, there's an unspoken threat of reporting Kaburagi to the authorities if he doesn't teach him how to do it himself, but it's left unspoken. What Mikey does speak out loud is how - until he became a professional Deca-Dence player - he never realized there was a possible existence other than being a disposable, interchangeable cog in the machine. Assembled as corporate property. Working all his life for the corporation. Being scrapped when he can no longer perform his function and afford maintenance. Now that he's a celebrity, he realizes he was never free until he got famous, and he's desperately afraid of losing that status and sinking back into slavery again.

Kaburagi relents. After warning Mikey of the risks, both physical and legal, he tells him that he'll teach him how to hack the limiters. He has to promise, though, to never reduce their functionality by more than 20%. That 20% margin is kinda-sorta just a safety buffer; you can still have negative effects if your avatar gets totalled, potentially, but most damage isn't going to have noticeable effects on your true body. Turn it down any lower than that though, and things get both riskier to your health and more obvious to the referees. Mikey thanks him profusely, and vows to never take unnecessary risks with this as long as he's secure in his pro-gamer status.

Mikey then proceeds to take unnecessary risks, dramatically flaunt his avatar's newfound reflexes like a total idiot, and get caught.

They take cheating really, really, really seriously.

The top-rankers start accusing each other of teaching the obviously reckless and foolish Mikey how to cheat. From the tone of the accusations, it seems like quite a few of them were doing it themselves, or at least quite a few suspect each other of doing it themselves. Kaburagi is just staring at the dead body of Mikey after his public execution, not responding to anything else going on around him. As a fight starts to break out, a hulking box-shaped police creature named Hugin rolls up and stuns them all for arrest.

When Kaburagi wakes up, he's being restrained in Hugin's office. Hugin seems to be more than just a cop; it seems like he's sort of an avatar of the Solid Quake Corporation itself. There might be several of him, he kinda seems like he's in multiple places at once. Anyway, Hugin announces that their league has been disbanded, and multiple former members of it sent to prison. When asked why the hell it's the whole team's fault if somebody cheated, Hugin replays him that conversation that they stupidly had in that APC via their gears.

Woops.

Organized leagues and teams are henceforth banned among professional Deca-Dence players. And, Hugin says, Kaburagi will now be offered the same choice that each of his teammates (beside the executed one) were offered. Either accept a dangerous undercover job within Deca-Dence that has nothing to do with the game itself, or be sent to the corporate jail along with the others.

Either fearing the company more than his teammates, feeling like he needs to make amends to SOMEONE for what he set into motion, or just not wanting to face his friends again after what he and Mikey caused to happen to them, Kaburagi accepts the offer whereas the others all refused it.

Hugin kinda looks like Megatron with dopey sunglasses and a giant nose, I just realized.​

Some humans, Hugin informs Kaburagi, insist on being troublemakers. Either disrupting the controllable, game-conducive society of the tankers, or persistently asking too many questions and poking around in too many little nooks and crannies. In short, bugs in the system. Just like the bugs in the player-facing side of Deca-Dence that cause some gears to overperform. Just liked the bugs that leak company secrets, or cause company property to be misused. The system must purge itself of bugs. All bugs must be eliminated.

He makes Kaburagi repeat that line several times, on pain of being diagnosed as bugged himself.

So, Kaburagi's gear was altered to look like a tanker, and he's been implanting and removing tracking chips in tankers suspected of being "bugs" ever since. It's not specified if he's also responsible for fixing the bugs once they've been identified, but it's sort of implied that he is.

...

I'm not sure why the company needs to twist a disgraced ex-gaming star's arm to police the tankers. You'd think they'd just have normal employees to do this, no? It's not like this part of the operation is that much more blatantly atrocious than the entire rest of it. It's also clearly not a fulltime commitment a la exile, since we're seeing Kaburagi spend time in his cartoon robot body and talk (morosely, but still) to his cartoon robot friends in the present day. So yeah, not sure.

...

Cut back to the present. Kaburagi is in his apartment, staring at a bottle of fuel. He reads the warnings on his HUD, and then tosses the bottle aside and declares that he will be deciding when his life ends, not the company.

Okay, I think I misunderstood this when we were shown it before. He's scheduled to live for another 175 years WITH PROPER MAINTENANCE unless the company decides he's earned the right to live longer or he isn't profitable enough and should live shorter. By not taking his fuel infusions, he can shorten his lifespan to much less than that. He's committing slow suicide as I surmised, but it's multiple orders of magnitude less slow than I thought. I don't know how long he can last without refuelling, but it's probably much closer to two months than two centuries.

Back in the dome-world of Deca-Dence, Natsume (remember her? I thought she was our protagonist a while ago. Maybe she still is, idk) is begging Kaburagi to teach her how to fight. He tells her that she must be even dumber than he thought if she still wants to join the Power. Instead, she should be like Fennel, the other civilian who fell off the edge with them. He's been too scared to even go outside ever since that incident, to the point that they've been force to reassign him to some other bottom-rung maintenance job inside the vehicle. See? That's the SENSIBLE way to react.

In desperation, Natsume tries to blackmail Kaburagi, showing him a photograph she took of his secret pet gadoll and threatening to show it to the authorities.

Hah. History (sort of) repeats itself. Mikey didn't make the blackmail explicit, just implicit.

Also, with what we now know, Pipe is probably a gadoll who malfunctioned and isn't having his aggressive behavior triggered by human presence. Hugin and Co may or may not care about Kaburagi making a pet of this little fleshrobot instead of killing it, as long as he's keeping it out of the way of the game.

Kaburagi asks her if she's really trying to threaten him. She throws his own line from the previous episode back at him, and says that those are his words, not hers, but if that's how he wants to see it then yes.

Hah. That's damned gutsy, which I suppose is a required trait for someone who wants to fight kaiju for a living.

Natsume is surprised when Kaburagi just shrugs and tells her to go ahead and do that, if it's what she wants to do. He doesn't care. His time is almost up anyway. A POV shot lets us see his HUD again, and he's being warned that he's about to die unless he refuels and reboots very soon.

There's no telling if that's twenty minutes, twenty hours, or twenty days, but in any case it's not very much time.

Natsume hastily apologizes and assures him that that was a bluff; she could never do that to him, much less to innocent little abomination Pipe. Kaburagi's response is, essentially, "whatever."

Fastforward to that evening. After trying to buy dinner and grimacing at the rising costs of food, Natsume notices Kaburagi slipping out of the tanker marketplace and tiptoeing off down a shadowy corridor. She follows, and finds him kneeling over the unconscious body of a (to her) random citizen, in the process of implanting or extracting something from his neck.

And, for some reason, instead of running away or trying to recover evidence from the crime scene or something, she follows after Kaburagi and confronts him. Alone. In a dark corridor with no witnesses. Knowing that he has higher social status than her, and also that he's incredibly strong and fast.

Why does she do this? I really wish I had any idea. "More heart than brains" is a pretty flimsy justification for this, but it's the only one I've got.

She demands that he stop what he's doing at once. He looks at her even more miserably than usual, and tells her that it's ironic, but perhaps kind of fitting, that her own tracking chip would have to be the last one he collects for review.

Natsume has no fucking idea what he's talking about, of course, but she gets the sinister undertones. However, for some damned reason, she's still just standing there interrogating him instead of trying to run the fuck away. The two face each other, on a walkway over a trench of garbage-filled fuel outflow. Visual symbolism. Garbage on its way out after having been used and consumed by the system. Wasted energy flowing out along with the muck. Etc.

Then, Natsume tells him that robbing unconscious people should be far, far beneath him. If he's so desperate from money then here, she'll lend him her pathetic life savings, it's not like it's enough to even make a difference between "something" and "nothing" for her anyway.

Ah. She didn't actually see what he was doing, there. She just saw him putting something back into his pocket and getting back up from where he'd been crouching over the unconscious person.

Okay, that does make her bravado a little bit easier to understand, if she thought he was just doing opportunistic petty robbery to some passed out drunks. Even still, though, he's a big guy with a bad attitude. This seems...hmm. I'll get into this at the end, I think, because it's kind of a longrunning problem throughout the two episodes I've reviewed.

Anyway, he chuckles when he realizes the misunderstanding, and she gets mad when she thinks he's laughing at her. Then, we cut to the remote "cockpit" for Kaburagi's gear, and see him analyze some sensor readings while his avatar does its idle animation. There's something weird going on with Natsume's tracking chip.

Specifically, he isn't detecting a chip in her at all.

He quickly runs a facial search to see if she's anywhere in the system, and it takes a moment for a match to be found. When it is, Kaburagi realizes what must have happened.

She was killed in that childhood gadoll attack. The tanker field medics were able to resuscitate her in that ambulance-vehicle, but for some reason her chip didn't recognize the renewed biosigns and come back online along with her. Most likely it took some damage itself in the attack, and thus wasn't able to come back on again when it was supposed to. And, the company just wasn't paying enough attention to this one tanker girl to catch the oversight until right now. As far as the game's monitoring systems know, she hasn't existed, and her activities haven't been logged or tracked, for the past several years.

From an administrative perspective, her still being around is a bug in the system.

Kaburagi stares into his gear's visual input. On the cockpit floor behind him is yet another fuel canister that he decided not to ingest. His operational limit, his HUD informs him, is fast approaching.

Cut to Natsume and Kaburagi riding an elevator up to the higher levels of Deca-Dence. Natsume is ecstatically asking Kaburagi what convinced him to change his mind and agree to teach her how to fight. He tells her that he wants to see if it's possible for a bug to live in the world on its own terms.

She asks him what the hell that's supposed to mean, and he quickly invents a metaphor about how she's small and weak like an insect, but he's decided her determination and courage might give her the potential to grow beyond that. If she turns out to NOT actually have the potential he thinks she might, though, then she'll have to either go back to being an armor-scrubber, or she'll end up dead very young and very ignobly. She says that she's not giving up no matter how little potential he decides she has. She's not exactly flattered at being compared to a bug, but he's giving her what she wants so she rolls with it.

They emerge from the elevator into a gear-only section of the Deca-Dence. It looks completely different from everything else in Natsume's world. And not at all like something designed by a war-weary military as a last ditch defense to reclaim Earth from monsters.

Kaburagi has to quickly pull her away from stores selling "custom skins for your gear" and distract her from asking questions about it and other things like it.

I'm surprised he still has access to these areas himself, honestly. Wonder if he used some kind of whacky back route?

...also, can Hugin and the other administrator figures not see what he's doing? They have live feed from HIS gear, certainly, since it's been customized for this sensitive undercover purpose and put in the hands of a (highly) probational employee?

Not sure.

Anyway, we rewind a few hours to Kaburagi's true body back in the cockpit. After his conversation with Natsume down in the tunnels and walking his avatar back to its apartment, he disengages from the control system and picks up the fuel canister he'd been ignoring. Thinking of Mikey, he inserts it into his refuelling port and reboots his cyberbrain, taking his vital systems back out of the red. He's decided to live, for her. End episode.

This show has a really bizarre fluctuation in weirdness levels. It seemed moderately weird at the start of the pilot, got intensely weird at the end of the pilot and beginning of the second episode, and then eased up to...really just slightly weird by the end of ep 2. Really, the reveal of "evil game that uses people as props for the entertainment of a privileged upper class" took a lot of the WTF value away from the story, since that's such a familiar plot by now.

That said, what the premise gave up in uniqueness, it gained in nuance. We don't know who or what the real "privileged" class in this transhuman nightmare dystopia looks like, or even if there is one at all. The game seems to be mostly a spectator sport that the bulk of the transhumans watch on TV rather than actively participate in, with corporate meddling in the lineup of pro players that's more reminiscent of the WWE than any actual competitive game, complete with the popularity of a given player's style and personality taking precedence over genuine skill. The lives of the transhuman players aren't really all that much better than those of the human NPC's, when they're not currently playing the game, and once you rank high enough to count as a pro the company starts taking an interest in you, and things arguably get worse for you rather than better.

I do wonder. The city or whatever place Kaburagi and Co seem to live in seems to basically be a company town where the Solid Quake Corp owns everything including the people. For the company to actually be working as a capitalist entity, though, it needs to have some kind of consumer base outside of its own complete ownership. If it grew to the point where it owns literally everyone and everything, I think it would drop the corporate trappings really fast and just present itself as your more classic flavor of totalitarian regime. So, I think there's a much, much bigger transhuman society out there, with Solid Quake just being one of several megacorps. It's just that the entire story takes place on and amongst this one company's property, which happens to include the last surviving population of baseline humans.

In terms of distinctiveness, I am a bit amused at the little reversal this series pulls. Hapless human NPC's being lorded over by paying customer AI player characters. It's basically Reverse Westworld.

Kaburagi is an interesting character, and his quest for redemption a compelling one. I appreciate that his speech about the futility of trying to change anything or hope for anything better seemed like it was referring to Natsume's world, but really was him talking about his own. Which, to be fair, hers is sort of a direct reflection of his. The company may not have meant to create the game world in its own image, but it sort of did.

All that said though...I think I might still have preferred a show about Truck Sparta. Like I said, I've just seen the "Westworld" premise one too many times.

My two biggest criticisms besides that are of some odd plot contrivances (the company seeming to be simultaneously omniscient and unbelievably blind at the same time; they can watch random conversations between players, but DON'T make constant recordings of what Kaburagi is doing?), and moreso of how Natsume was handled. She's an easy character to like and root for, but I feel like she kind of got hijacked by the needs of the plot, and (more tiresomely) the needs of Kaburagi's arc. Why is she lavishing so much attention on her sourpuss boss who's shown no interest in or affection for her besides what she could forcefully wring out of him? She clearly doesn't do that to everyone, just to Kaburagi for some reason. She's following him everywhere. Offering to loan him her only few coins. Insisting on dinners with him. As if she's in love with him, but it doesn't seem like she is, or like she would be. Why?

I was reluctant to call it a manic pixie dreamgirl setup, since part of the problem with MPD's is that we never get to see the story from their own perspectives rather than those of their male beneficiaries. The pilot was from Natsume's perspective, so it was harder to recognize. By the end of episode two though, with both her devotion increasing to more ludicrous levels and Kaburagi becoming the primary POV character...yeah, she's pretty much a textbook MPD.

Those flaws aside, this is definitely a well made series. I'd be interested to continue it.

Or, I was when I wrote this review. My partner thought this show looked interesting, so we watched ahead together. It falls apart pretty thoroughly after another half dozen episodes, on account of the writers not understanding how capitalism works, how game design works, or how spectator sports work.

Oh well.