Anime Spotlight #7: Decadent Listeners

 AniMonday is here again, and it's gonna be big!
That's because, as I told you last Monday, this week's two Anime in the Spotlight are about giant monsters and giant robots, respectively. And like last week's first two selections, one is great, and one could have been, but wasn't.

The great anime is DECA~DENCE, a series about a girl named Natsume who, by virtue of a near-fatal accident she suffered as a child, becomes an unregistered citizen of the titular mobile fortress-city, and her underdog hero's journey to become a warrior and fight giant, abstract-looking monsters called Gadoll, which were responsible for her father's death and the loss of her arm. But because of the natural order, the beginning of Captain America: The First Avenger, and the first few episodes of Attack On Titan, she is judged to be unfit and assigned to work under Kaburagi, a former Gadoll fighter turned "armor detailer" (scraping monster gore off of the outside walls of Decadence).
Through much annoying persistence, Natsume finally gets Kaburagi to train her how to fight the Gadoll, and her eyes are opened to the true nature of their desolate, Mortal Engines-meets-Darling In the FRANXX (but actually competently executed) world. The majority of the enjoyment of the series comes from going "WTF?" at the end of every episode as we precede Natsume on her worldview-shattering journey of discovery, so I won't say too much more about the plot here.
Animation studio NUT follows the "simple but smooth" principle with this series, making for some dizzyingly spectacular, gravity-defying fight choreography and borrowing design sensibilities from Studio Trigger (like the oversized, angular sunglasses you'd see in Gurren Lagan and SSSS: Gridman) for the more bizarre-looking character models. Also, the world-building is pretty impressive and competent for a one-season anime. So if you like dystopian sci-fi, frantic human-on-kaiju battles, and having your brain explode every half hour, indulge in some DECA~DENCE.

The same cannot be said of Listeners, a series about a young scrapyard worker (with a lot of spirit despite the crushing weight of the natural order, looking to the heavens in search of "more") who finds a beautiful girl with amnesia while hunting through his local landfill for speaker parts. As it turns out, the girl is an unregistered "Player," one of a number of humans who grow audio jacks in their spines because techno-magic and anime willpower, giving them the ability to plug into specially built speakers, which transforms the speakers into giant, bad-CGI robots that use sound-lasers to fight deaf shadow-kaiju called the "Earless." Throw in some exaggerated angles, the occasional vivid colors, and a few suggestive-but-flamboyant character designs, and it basically starts the same way as Gurren Lagan (which I had a hard time watching after the time skip, but that's a review for another day that won't happen). As done-to-death as the "underdog in wasteland building/doing stuff to be great and/or fix the world with My Little Pony-powered robots" premise is, I still wanted to see where the story would go. Unfortunately, so much priority was placed on being an overly "clever" JoJo's Bizarre Adventure when it came to shoving music references down our throats (every episode title is a song lyric, one character looks like The Anime Character Formerly Known As Prince, and an entire episode is focused on a blonde guy who uses psychotropic drugs to brainwash his Player girlfriend into committing murder while she rattles off Nirvana lyrics, to name a few examples) that there was little room left for a story, let alone for it to have any kind of direction. There is an attempt at explaining what the Earless are (your typical Soylent-flavored origin, of course), and the girl's amnesia is given a half-hearted discovery arc, but the episodes are mostly incongruous to one another, sometimes feeling as if the series was aired out of order. For these reasons, I stopped caring (and watching) at one point, and from what I've heard of other critical voices who review anime, I should have stopped caring, watching, and Listening sooner.

As of this writing (on January 29th), the last English dub episode of I'm Standing On A Million Lives Season One was just released on Crunchyroll and VRV, so that will be next week's selection for the Anime Spotlight.

Leave a like and comment below, and seek an affordable subscription from the list below if you want to get caught up on any of these series.

As always, here's the list of links:

* VRV (Crunchyroll, HiDIVE, and Rooster Teeth)
* Funimation
* Netflix
* Amazon Prime
* Hulu 👀

And here's my list of anime that I'm watching and/or plan to review in the future, which I am including mostly for my own benefit, but it also gives you all something to look forward to:
* Tower Of God, God Of High School, and Noblesse

                        (Anime-BAW, WebToon/Crunchyroll Originals)

* Saga Of Tanya the Evil, Overlord, Konosuba, Re:ZERO, Rising Of the Shield Hero

                        (Isekai "Quartet" Spotlight)
* DanMachi/Is It Wrong To Try To Pick Up Girls In A Dungeon? franchise (Anime Spotlight)

* Single-entry (maybe)  Anime Spotlight reviews:

   - Akudama Drive

   - Jujutsu Kaisen

   - Black Clover

   - The Day I Became A God

   - Yashahime: Half-Demon Princess

   - Wandering Witch: The Journey Of Elaina

   - Gleipnir

   - Fire Force

In addition to the weekly AniMonday stuff I do, I'd like to start covering WandaVision on a weekly basis by turning Stay Tuned into Streaming Saturday, and there are a couple of movies that caught my attention this week that you might think are Just the Ticket.

Ani~Meister,

out!