ANNA

My Daemon begins with the introduction of Kento, a little boy who shows off his pet "Daemon" to his grade school class. He grew this creature, Anna, from something called a "Daemonium particle," and he positively loves Anna to pieces. Who wouldn't?! Her design, like a fetal chihuahua made of raw chicken, is easily one of the most pitiful and adorable monsters I have ever in my life seen as the central mascot to a series.

Unfortunately, Kento's entire classroom, even the teacher, are aghast that Kento intentionally nurtured a Daemon without disposing of it; Daemons are common knowledge in his world, but they are not popular, to say the least.

It's a sweet surprise, then, that Kento does not have to hide Anna from his mother. She not only accepts and supports his interests, but even loves and accepts Anna as a member of their little family herself!

This is due in so small part to Anna's unique power; she can flare open her head into a dimensional vortex, instantly store any object in her internal pocket dimension, and recall stored objects in precisely the state she collected them. Kento's mom even uses her to store food, which never spoils or changes temperature while it drifts in stasis! The only things she can't store are living beings, which will be very important later. As a design, Anna is both adorable and very cool looking. As a concept, her power is a lot of fun and a pretty novel gimmick for our "main" monster.

Something especially relatable about Kento is just how much he loves every kind of creature, gushing about the "cuteness" of every single Daemon as well as natural wildlife, like a large centipede. Even in series like Pokemon and Digimon, I feel like we don't see the protagonists comment all that much about how their creature friends actually look, or how they feel about it.

Unfortunately, like we've established, he's mostly alone in these sentiments. There's even an entire religious movement, the "SACRED ORDER OF EARTH PRESERVATION," dedicated to the eradication of Daemons, though the only member we ever encounter is this positively scummy evangelical priestess who tries to take Anna away for disposal and follows Kento home to berate his mother, during which we learn about Kento's medical condition:

The dark red patch on Kento's face, surrounding his eye, is the result of a daemonium particle embedding itself in his brain, resulting in a rare form of cancer that always ends in an early death as a Daemon emerges from the victim's body. The church considers this to be a punishment from god, of course, the unnamed priestess implying that Kento must have done something to deserve it before his mother slams the door in her face. It seems to be one of the reasons Kento has such an affinity for the creatures, and it's also why his mother latches on to anything at all that makes Kento happy for the short time that he'll be alive. More on all this later...

Crustaceoid Daemon

This daemon is just briefly seen by Kento on his walk back from school, fighting with an alley cat before a human chases it off; it's a beautiful blue lobster-like creature, with chunky pincers that can cover up its face like a set of mandibles, another set of claws on its tail, and multiple fleshy stalks that kind of look like earthworms poking up from its shell!

Unnamed News Daemons

During a news report, we see some beautiful painted images of human interaction with other daemons; this toothless creature has a head that kinda reminds me of a soft shelled turtle, but with a pair of snail-like eyestalks at the corners of its mouth and a pair of green tentacle-like tongues. There's also something resembling many tiny eyes in the red flesh within its beak! According to the newscaster, there's something about daemons that "naturally" or "instinctively" disgusts most humans, at least in his clearly stupid opinion.

Another daemon shown looks like nothing but a big, gooey, formless mass of purple tendrils with an eyeless, fanged skull at the center. Both of these designs are extremely cool, but will never be seen again!

Pterosaur Daemon

This poor thing is only introduced to us when Kento spies on a couple of "Daemon Users," because, surprise! This really is a Pokemon kind of thing! It's just that, generally speaking, Daemon Users aren't in it for the love of monsters either. They enslave Daemons with remotely operated shock devices, and utilize their powers primarily in the extermination of other Daemons. Sometimes as a member of a Daemon hunting "Peace Organization," sometimes as independent exterminators-for-hire. There's a background hint, mostly on a couple of televisions, that there are indeed arena battle Daemon tournaments as well, but the series never focuses on these, and it's probably for the best; the genre has already shown us every story beat you can squeeze out of that, hasn't it?

Anyway, we see this species a couple times, but it too never gets direct focus, and is never officially named. It's a pale, reptilian flyer with a straight, pointed beak, big pink fishlike eyes, humanlike teeth in the back of its elongated jaws, and beautiful wings more like an insect's, if they were made out of softer tissue. The wings continue in smaller pairs down the long-tailed, otherwise limbless body, and they've got trippy pink rune-like markings in clear membranes that kind of remind me of a soap film. You know like in a bubble wand?

Sorry my screenshots are from a captioned version, so maybe the dialog is confusing at points. That's Anna screaming in terror from off-screen as she watches one of her own kind get electrocuted to death by its human master :( ......this is also sadly the best closeup we ever get of this design while it's still alive.

When the humans have gone, Kento gives this creature a proper burial, along with all the weaker Daemons it was being forced to exterminate.

Frog Daemon

This is what we see in the "pterosaurs" jaws, and Kento finds many of their corpses littering the area. This clearer shot comes many episodes later, so my screencaps are skipping ahead a bit for a moment. This one, too, is killed in front of Kento's eyes, who apologizes to it for the actions of humankind.

At least that gives us another clear close-up, though? Frog Daemons don't look a whole lot like frogs at all; they're more elongated, more salamander-like, complete with tails. Their jaws are still toothless, but with wavy tooth-like edges that are always a fun creature design element. They have multiple legs, a whiplike chin tentacle, and three short, fat eyestalks at the end of the snout. Extremely cute, and seemingly not much of a danger to humans at all.

CASPER

This brings us to episode two, where shit hits the fan and the main events of the series take off. The priestess from earlier, or whatever you'd call her, immediately reported Kento's illegal pet Daemon to the authorities, including the dimensional storage abilities that Kento's mother unfortunately told her all about in Anna's defense. For reasons not revealed just yet, said authorities post an astronomically generous reward for Anna's capture, and the first Daemon hunter to respond is Lori, a sadistic creep in command of the adorable CASPER! Yes, Casper says his own name too. Why they each emit a human name or word, we don't know, but it's often relevant to their powers; Casper can make anything, including itself, invisible!

He has a design with equal cool and cute factor, much like Anna. He's a big, greyish, tentacled mollusk with one gigantic, beautiful blue eye in the middle, and a domed sort of shape that really does evoke a "ghost," kinda. At least, his silhouette would barely change at all if you threw a sheet over him.

Lori meets up with the priestess for a pretty funny interaction between two opposing types of scumbag, and, I'm sorry, yes she is a giant piece of shit, I know, she literally tells a struggling single mom that her son deserves to die from monster cancer and then rats them to the cops to have their dog taken away, but...you know what, she's also adorable, alright? I said this on tumblr before, but I swear I could fix her. Or maybe not. Probably not. I would probably make her barf. But she's cutest of all when she's nauseated, right?? I also say all this just so you'll remember her character, because we're never seeing her again after this episode, but we're eventually going to see one very small, very special callback to her that many viewers might miss, so don't forget the SACRED ORDER OF EARTH PRESERVATION, or the six-pointed star thing she wears, and that she's probably the most remorselessly vile human character we ever see in the show that doesn't personally murder anybody.

The last we do see of her in this episode is when Casper's owner plays this admittedly satisfying prank, demonstrating that the Daemon can even make just a person's clothes and skin invisible. The money this could make in the medical field would surely exceed the money you can make stealing dogs, wouldn't it? The problem is really that this guy wouldn't care either way. Lori not only has a total disregard for either monster or human lives, but seems to have a lot of fun causing misery at any opportunity.

This is in stark contrast to his Daemon, whom we see delicately playing with a butterfly the moment his "boss" isn't ordering him around. This kind of thing is a running theme in the show, too; many of the scariest Daemons consistently show that humans are the only thing making them engage in violence at all.

The moment you know this series isn't screwing around, and wasn't necessarily aimed at young kids, is when Lori attempts to kill Kento, and Anna wields her powers to send the hunter's own knife straight back into his throat for a graphic, bloody and brutal on-screen defeat.

Afterwards, Kento wrenches the control device from Casper, and is just about ready to leave when it unfortunately turns out that Lori isn't dead at all. The bloodied man pulls the knife back out of himself and hurls it straight for Kento once more...only for somebody else to arrive, just in time to save the child's life. Casper, meanwhile, eats Lori alive, so I guess he did have a little violence in him when it matters, but it's too late...

The very first antagonist of the very first episode kills Kento's mother, on-screen with a dagger into her sternum, and this sets off the entire central story arc of the series. Kento has heard rumors of a Daemon that can "rewind time," asks Anna to store his mother's dead body, and sets off alone on a quest to bring her back to life.

FINGER

At the very start of the second episode, Kento and Anna are escaping an abandoned building as they're chased by FINGER! A large, roughly egg-shaped mass of peach colors flesh with dozens of giant humanlike fingers around its edge, and even a bunch of fingers for "teeth" within its teardrop-shaped mouth opening. We know its name is finger because it runs around shouting "finger!" by the way. The scene establishes that daemons are everywhere, but even the most unsettling, most aggressive specimens don't shake Kento's fondness; he escapes the counter only in awe of finger's existence, and wonders how finger takes care of all its fingernails.

We don't see finger again, or learn anything else about it, but it's easily one of my favorites.

BARON (BALLOON)

The next new Daemon we meet is a species referred to as "Balloon" Daemons! And of course, they say the word "balloon," but it's pronounced just enough like "Baron" that this particular specimen's controller refers to him as such. Said controller is yet another bounty hunter type, this one with an even edgier design that includes a cybernetic arm! He's kind of a brooding antivillain type, at least at first, who seems to befriend Kento...but of course, he's really after that reward.

"Baron's" design is incredibly menacing, and really looks like something straight out of newer Doom games; a deep red, monstrous head with a lipless mouth full of sharp teeth, four clawed palps surrounding its jaws, needles protruding from its flesh, two branching tentacular arms and a tail like a dangling spinal column. Most importantly, the entire upper half of its huge head is a pink, transparent sac that shows off its brain!

Besides flight, Baron can also fire its needles with extremely deadly force, but of course, it's also just another big sweetheart, and keeps trying to bring its master flowers! That doesn't stop things from ending similarly to the last episode; after an elaborate chase, pretty much everyone ends up dangling over the edge of a cliff, and only Baron can save them.

The Daemon opts to save Kento and Anna first, then seems to take his human master's prosthetic hand...but it either breaks, or Baron deliberately unhooks it. It's just slightly ambiguous, but in either case, Baron chooses not to follow as the guy plummets to his death, even though the Daemon seemingly stays behind in mourning.

Unnamed Quadrupedal Daemons

These are first encountered in the Baron episode; they seem to be pack hunters, run fast, and are the first "wild" Daemons we ever see actively hunting humans! Their hairless, muscular bodies have muscular forearms with unsettlingly human-shaped hands, but the hind legs are more saurian. Their eyeless, armored heads are wedge-shaped with formidable off-human jaws, above which are a couple of armored panels that can open up like a set of chelicerae. Very cool and by far the most aggressive, threatening Daemons we ever see, but according to one moment in the later episodes....that still isn't saying much.

IGISU

Kento's third encounter with a hunter goes quite a bit better, as Kaede ends up siding with him and becomes his best ally for the remainder of the series. She's an accomplished, almost celebrity hunter, a skilled archer and even turns out to be the granddaughter of the hunter corps founder. She also has quite easily one of the coolest Daemon in the show, IGISU, first seen as a collection of five independently floating heads! They're eyeless, metallic triangles with incredibly nasty looking jaws, like a swarm of disembodied shark faces!

There is, however, only one Igisu. When he joins the five pieces, he becomes an armored saucer with a single, entirely different mouth in its center, almost exactly like that of a sea urchin! Where does that actually come from? You can see the space between the heads filled in by fused tissue. I guess it's not even as weird as what Anna can do, really...but wow! What a beautifully abstract being!

Igisu's mistress considers him just a valuable tool, at least at first. It's through her friendship with Kento that she clearly begins to care about the Daemon as an intelligent being, showing much more concern for his well being in later episodes than just something that "useful" to her. We also see that Igisu expresses emotion by glowing different colors! It's just another way in which which these creatures are shown attempting to express themselves in ways too "alien" for humans to easily pick up on, which is already enough of a problem with real animals in our own world, and sometimes, of course, between people of different enough mindsets.

Squirrel Daemons

It turns out there are even little tiny Daemons! These squirrely critters have droopy, fin-like giant "ears" - actually tentacle-like growths joined by webbing - and cute beaklike mouths with teeny, tiny glowing pin-prick eyes. We see a mated pair guarding their babies in an abandoned mall, but so do three rotten little children who opt to kill the whole family, just because you can apparently make a few bucks wiping out even the most harmless of Daemons. Their cruelty, however, does not go unnoticed....

Unnamed Daemons

When the three kids go missing, their town enlists the help of some rogue Daemon Users to go find them, and we see some VERY cool designs here. There's something like a huge, froglike gila monster, a bizarre hammer-headed deerlike animal, something with a cloaklike body and foxlike head, and something resembling three upside-down umbrellas!

The umbrella creature even has a single eye, just like the yokai it brings to mind, and the deer thing is even better from the front; it basically has a wrinkly snail head. I would love to see more of these, and know literally anything about them, but alas, we never do. We never even know what becomes of them at all. We do find out what took the kids, though...

KILL!

This Daemon was apparently once employed by a local business, whose owner gave it a nickname I keep forgetting, because what it constantly SAYS is the word "kill," which is evidently what it's truly best at.

KILL is both a plantlike and insectlike Daemon, sort of like a giant walkingstick; a long, gnarled mass of woody tissue with many branchlike limbs! Its head, almost shaped like an unfinished carving of an ungulate skull, features six wiggly eyestalks to either side of a gaping cavity that houses its proboscis, similar to that of an assassin bug!

Kill likes to kill with whatever objects it can find, wielding all manner of sharp implements in its many limbs. Its power, meanwhile, is that it sprouts additional limbs whenever it sustains any injury, growing deadlier and deadlier the more its victims fight back! Its former master is said to have abused it terribly, and became the first victim of Kill's ongoing homicidal spree, though we've already seen that it keeps to itself in the old mall, and that it only goes after the kids in response to their sadistic treatment of the squirrels. When Kento hears the Daemon's backstory, and realizes how its powers work, it only breaks his heart...

Many, many narratives out there are sympathetic to fairly frightening, dangerous monsters. Technically that's still even the core premise of the aforementioned Pokemon. It hits a little differently, though, in a Pokemon-inspired animated series where the monsters are not only hated, but many of them are actually shown killing people, and there's no secret twist or misunderstanding. They're just living beings surviving as best as they can in a world as confusing and foreign to them as they are to it in turn.

There's a brief moment where Kill seemingly hesitates to attack Kento, noticing that Kento has shielded Anna from harm, but we'll never know where that might have gone, as Kill is ripped apart and eaten by Igisu. That moment of hesitation was certainly no proof that Kill was about to stop doing what it does, of course. It's right in the name! Like a wild animal that's gotten a particular taste for human prey, there was probably no peaceful, happy option in the moment. But of course, we already know Kill's special ability.

The episode ends with a close-up of one tiny, leftover scrap of Kill, twitching as it sprouts one tiny new arm. We never revisit the Daemon; we're simply left with the reassurance that it isn't gone, and I'm glad. Humans have little business poking around in its territory anyway.

SPIDER-O

The second largest Daemon seen in the series, Spider-O (who just says "OHHHH!") is confirmed to be the result of Daemonium mutating a spider, but there's clearly a lot more to it than that, since it also appears to be partially plant based, and most of its body seems to be comprised of metal scraps it's cobbled together with webbing!

 The thing about spider daemons is apparently that they like to collect things, and "O" is extremely particular about how it displays its assembled relics, carefully positioning them when they're even a few inches "off." The episode deals with rescuing a researcher and his daughter who've gotten lost in the monsters territory; an entire city that's been webbed up!

O's design is also just gorgeous; the body and legs are clumps of trash and vine-like biomass, while the face is an enormous, flaring orchid-like flower. One long, vertical petal is covered in teeth, flanked by a pair of jagged-edged petals and a pair of tentacles. Two greenish petals are completely covered in red and yellow eyes, and between these is a strange, humanlike golden "mask." Is that something the creature collected, or a part of its body? Organic growths protrude directly from the mask, so if it wasn't natural physiology before, it's certainly been deeply integrated by now.

"O" doesn't seem to have any interest in harming people - it's just protective of the buildings and objects it has webbed up. Unfortunately, it poses enough of a threat that it's ultimately destroyed.

ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS

The wackiest Daemon users we ever see, these three are hired for the rescue mission in the spider's city, each nicknamed after their thematic Daemon:

ROCK is an adorably pudgy, stony-skinned reptiloid, a little like a cross between a toad, a bulldog and a pangolin, which is capable of spitting explosive boulders from its mouth.

Paper, definitely my favorite of the three, is a stingray-like mass of thin sheetlike material with a veiny, pinkish mollusk-like head, a pair of adorable doll-like googly eyes on its little rubbery stalks!

Paper is also capable of re-folding into various shapes; we see it in a butterfly-like configuration that seemingly flies a lot faster, and in the shape of a sword!

Scissors, finally, might be the oddest Daemon in the series, since it's absolutely the only one resembling a man-made object this directly. No part of it even looks organic, save for the single eye where a pair of scissors would have the bolt holding them together. The rest of it is JUST metallic looking scissors, with a single equally metallic looking leg! Can Daemonium really work on an inanimate item? Or is it an organic Daemon that can take control of and transform an object?

You also have to wonder how the trio actually met up. Did they happen to have these three Daemons and join forces when they realized what an elegant theme they had? Or did they decide to be Rock, Paper and Scissors first for some reason, already knowing there were appropriate Daemons to train?

EVOLVED ANNA

When Kento is nearly killed by Spider-O, Anna is suddenly bathed in light, and abruptly grows much, much larger. Her evolved form is highly elongated and a positively gorgeous design, a stretched out foxlike creature with a menacing elegance that likely also appeals to an entirely different set of tastes than my usual, but retains the gooey, meaty mutant quality I love so much. Her mouth even extends all the way down a long neck, she's covered in blue eyeballs and her limbs look boneless!

In this form, Anna is able to generate singularities powerful enough that a large, spherical chunk of the city vanishes into her, along with enough of Spider-O that the Daemon is probably dead.

By this point in the series, we've begun to learn that an entire island and all of its inhabitants once vanished this way, and Anna is suspected of being the same species of Daemon. Among those lost in this disaster were none other than the mother of Kento's friend Kaede (Igisu's human!), and therefore the daughter of her Daemon-hating grandfather.

Kento is unconscious for Anna's first transformation, and she changes back to normal after expending enough energy. He gets to see her evolve again much later, but only after she herself has learned why she's being hunted, and she chooses to run away for Kento's safety. More on that soon.

HUPY

HUPY is a Daemon controlled by Kouya, one of the most serious and highest ranking Daemon hunters. He aids in the successful capture and containment of Anna not long after the spider incident, though he never achieves full blown villain status; he's just an emotionally detached, uptight "everything by the book" type who puts the safety of the general public first and foremost. He still displays a little kindness towards Daemons himself, at least. It's another "they're valuable tools" outlook, but one that acknowledges they're also living things deserving of proper care.

So what the heck is HUPY? Another really strange one, very different from other Daemons; a giant, ghostly koi fish, elongated like an eel or like one of those goldfish windsocks, with bones and organs visible through large patches of either missing or invisible flesh. Hupy can pass through walls freely, and sheds tiny, glittering dust-like scales that can put any living thing to sleep! A spectral sleep-dust goldfish is an original combination for any series, and its whole style stands out really uniquely among the Daemons.

Lab Specimen Daemons

  We get to see a LOT of bonus Daemon species at once when Kento and Kaede come to rescue Anna from containment; here we have a flying ray-like creature, a cool looking starfish with a tiny red eye in its center, a mass of twisting tentacles with a lamprey-like mouth, something a little like a nudibranch just to its right, the skeleton of a mutated boardlike animal, and some kind of shaggy, eyeless kaiju-shaped creature with a doglike or batlike head, and hairless arms with gliding membranes.

In another shot, we can see a specimen of the pterosaur, another of that hammerheaded snail-deer from earlier, a black and yellow creature resembling a sort of sea cucumber with salamander legs, and remarkably enough, a much larger and scalier version of the "squirrels" from the mall! I guess other Daemons can evolve much like Anna can. Some of these appear to be corpses, others models or statues, and some are live Daemons held in some sort of stasis.

Unnamed Reptilian Daemon

We also see a closeup of the "gila monster" looking Daemon from the Kill episode. It's got a really cute little face from the front, with large saclike jowls.

HAIR DAEMON

Whatever this one's name is, it only says "AH." From what we see, it consists entirely of this cracked, wooden looking face mask and a huge mass of black hair, but a scuzzy scientist mentions that he "peeled her scalp" while researching nothing but a hair growth formula. Maybe this implies that there's normally flesh on its face?

The laboratory rescue mission hits a snag when the hair demon breaks free from stasis, intent on revenge against humans in general, and at first slithers around as only a shapeless heap of black hair...

....But by knitting its hair together, it can form an incredibly tall, menacing humanoid form. With big breasts, yes, so there's your Gardevoir, "vp," quit asking, but either way everything about this design rules. It's the scariest looking Daemon in the series with its long, spider-thin limbs. Being made of pure hair, it seems like almost nothing can harm this Daemon, and it can lash out with tentacles

Kento gets the chance to reason with "Ah," demonstrating that his tumor seems to give him a special level of understanding with Daemons that goes beyond his underlying affection for them, reassuring her that Kaede and her friend aren't the creature's enemies.

He is not, however, around to help when Ah manages to catch her old tormentor, and I'm not sure Kento would bother to interfere with this unless he knew it would keep the Daemon itself safe. We hear later that Ah was recontained, and we see the scientist still alive, but we can assume he got pretty roughed up.

City "Pest" Daemons

It's after she's freed from the labs that Anna runs from Kento, afraid that her own powers might kill him or that she keeps putting him in danger. Back in her smaller form, she befriends a pack of tiny "urban pest" daemons lead by the adorable MAOW; an almost spherical rodent with a big, smiling toothy mouth and no other facial features. Most of the rest of the pack consists of Daemons resembling one-eyed rats, but there are two other unique members, too:

A little Daemon that says "Mah Mah!" kind of looks like a dirty grey, flattened badger with a broad, doglike head, beady eyes, a big koala-like nose, buck teeth, and six fat little legs that give it kind of a tardigrade-like appearance:

"Mah" is also always hanging out with a Daemon that says "POPO," and Popo might really be the setting's cutest design, but maybe I'm biased. It's the very tiniest Daemon we ever see, and seems to be a cross between a rodent and a fly! The result is something resembling a pale green,bristly frog with giant pink eyeballs, a pointed little snout, long limbs, whiskers, and a pair of membranous wings for "ears!"


Seriously, LOOK how small. Popo is barely bigger than an actual fly! None of these are much bigger than rats and mice! Together they help Anna survive the city streets, and when Anna finds that Kento is being kept under the organization's watch to come hunting for her, her little friends demonstrate far more capability than you would expect as they work together to not only rescue him, but hijack a truck.

KARARA

While Anna was busy befriending all those Rattata however, Kento was placed under the direct care of Kouya, and kept under a sort of weird house arrest by another of Kouya's Daemons, Karara. This Daemon is an armored, spiny barnacle-esque shell with three cutely cartoonish eyeballs and two long, flat, segmented limbs that can join in a circle. Wrapping around a human or animal's neck, Karara can keep the subject under control with electrical shocks, or maybe the same device that controls Karara simply shocks them both? In any case, I feel like this is the most unethical use of a Daemon in the whole series. Who in the world puts a shock collar on a human child for any imaginable reason, other than some kind of sicko freak, let alone a shock collar that's also one of the wildly controversial and dangerous monsters your own organization is trying to eradicate?

It doesn't last, though; Kento almost immediately bonds with Karara, who willingly lets him go. Interestingly, Karara's eyes not only extend on long stalks, but they're shown looking at one another as though "conferring" before making this decision. Does each represent a different little brain? Is it a Daemon with multiple simultaneous personalities, or some kind of "colony?"

To his credit, Kouya seems to have seen the betrayal coming, lets Kento get a head start, and even tells Karara that he'll let its disobedience slide.

Karara is simultaneously one of the coolest looking and cutest Daemons, but its purpose is also the most disquieting. In any case, if My Daemon only had a huge and thriving fandom, I feel like we would see a lot of charmingly edgy OC's who wear one on purpose.

PARASA

Another prominent member of the Peace Organization is Yagira, who we never learn all that much about, except that he's the young, brash, kind of dumb one of his peers and likes to show off to the public, seeing himself as something like a super-powered hero. That's because his Daemon can morph into a mantis-like exosuit!

Its name is Parasa, explicitly introduced as a parasite, which implies that it has to be feeding on something from its host's body. Is it sucking the guy's blood the entire time he's wearing it? Sick! When it's not a tokusatsu costume, Parasa is a cute little green isopod-like creature clinging to its host like a backpack. How many other symbiotic and "wearable" Daemons might be out there?

Giant Manta Daemon

  After Kento and Anna escape the Peace Organization, they board a train that temporarily passes underwater. There, we get to see that the Daemonium-infected ocean teems with tiny bioluminescent fish, and a massive whale-sized manta ray that glows neon pink from within.

I love this moment that exists only to show off Daemons as something beautiful and awe-inspiring, despite the irreparable change they've made to the global biosphere and the damage they brought to civilization. Humans are trying hard to get rid of them, but the endeavor is beyond hopeless at this point. Daemons are here to stay, and now it's up to humans to adapt to their presence just as much as the reverse.

DOOR

In the train episode, a hunter named Azuma is sent after Anna, and she's the most lovable we probably ever see; she proudly sports an overdone artificial tan (ganguro fashion) likes dressing in blinding colors (even the first gay pride badge I've seen in an anime) and just wants to earn enough money to keep having fun in life, one of those "no hard feelings!" kind of foes. Her Daemon, DOOR, is a little bat-winged, eyeless and legless gargoyle with a large doorknocker-like ring or handle held in its blocky-toothed jaws. It would be menacing if not for the fact that it's the size of a pigeon and it exclaims its name with a toddler-like voice.

DOOR! Has the power to open portals, and the choreography of this episode's action sequences is enormous fun as Azuma wields her portals for creative, fast-paced teleportation and trickery.

Thankfully, the writers didn't have the heart to leave Azuma and Door "villainous" for long. When Kento saves her from falling, this "no hard feelings!" antagonist becomes one of those "siggh, fine, just get outta here before I change my mind!" kind of antagonists, which is even better, and uses her portals one last time to help Kento and Anna escape unnoticed.

KIRIKO

The biggest spoilers await, because this is THE guy. This is the third-to-last final new Daemon introduced, and the Daemon Kento has been searching for the entire series; the one that's believed to "turn back time," though that's actually not what this one does at all.

The mouthless, gigeresque, mewtwo-looking entity can restore any object to its complete, original state, in a manner that does kind of work like turning back the clock, but also kind of works like infinitely regenerating any type of matter. If that sounds overpowered, it is indeed; Kiriko's go-to attack strategy is to carry around a supply of tiny metal scraps, throw them at enemies, and restore them to the original metal objects so quickly that the victims are impaled to death. Can he limitlessly replicate anything at all, then? Where is the material coming from?

Unfortunately, though he can restore a damaged or decayed body to pristine physical condition, this does not bring the dead back to life. When Kento meets Kiriko, the Daemon has been occupying the dead body of a human teenager, living among mankind and learning their ways. Convinced that humans are irredeemably cruel, he seeks to exterminate them all, and he hopes both Kento and Anna will help him or at least not interfere. I won't spoil every detail, but by now, you've guessed that Kento does not get his mother back.

PANDAEMONIUM

A rather funny little pun name for something so devastating, Pandaemonium was evidently one of the first of the Daemons to ever emerge from the original nuclear disaster, and remains the largest, deadliest Daemon ever discovered. All that remained of it was a single scrap preserved at a Peace Organization museum, which Kiriko of course manages to acquire with Anna's unwilling help.

Able to fire Godzilla-esque energy beams, Pandaemonium is devastating enough that the Peace Organization intends to resort to a nuclear assault, which will only take out a huge swathe of the surrounding city and bring more devastation to the world - with little guarantee of truly stopping Kiriko, who has fused himself inside his kaiju-size cousin.

Kiriko also monologues about the "true origin" of Daemons, dropping the fairly wild bombshell that the nuclear disaster breached the boundary between Earth and hell, which spread "hell-tained grains of sand" around the world. Is he being figurative, or is it really literally HELL hell? Which culture's hell, exactly? One of the ones that contains actual pure evil where human souls are tortured forever or one of the ones that's just sort of a dark "netherworld" where spirits reside??

It's difficult to really pin down this Pandaemonium's design; a humanoid torso is the center of it all, but with many sets of different membranous, fleshy wings, long arms that end in more wings, jointed tentacles, antler-like horns and some sort of huge, insectile abdomen or lower body that drags behind it, largely obscured by dust. The head is kind of fungus-like, an asymmetrical mass of upturned roots or horns with a mouthless, noseless chin and just a single pale blue eye, situated on the left side.

Overall, exactly the sort of epic, alien "fallen angel" sort of aesthetic you expect from a proper final boss.

"FULLY" EVOLVED ANNA

Faced with the deadliest enemy she may ever encounter and a threat to the entire world she's come to love, Anna evolves even further, now into a much larger, angelic looking, six-legged blue and white meat-fox with multiple thick, fleshy flaps and papillae that evoke the appearance of jagged fur and many more eyes, including a huge vertical one in the middle of her forehead.

It remains both a beautiful and wickedly cool design, retaining that cool fleshy texture and a uniformly wispy, curvy, organic design like a piece of ornately carved driftwood. In this form, Anna can draw anything at all into her pocket dimension, living or otherwise, and that even includes herself. She brings both Pandaemonium and the nuclear missiles in with her for a suitably dazzling final battle, during which we catch glimpse of what else but the missing island adrift in her inner void, among countless other things the creature never actually destroyed, but is technically keeping perfectly safe. Could all the island's inhabitants be alive and well in this paradimensional space, or maybe sleeping in stasis?

We don't know, because Anna seems to expend a great deal of her power containing Pandaemonium and the nuclear explosion before ejecting Kento back into the real world and vanishing without a trace....but the series isn't quite over yet.

CHU-MI

Before Pandemonium's awakening, I skipped over a very important moment that results in the generation of our very last Daemon to review, and the ultimate spoilers of all "My Daemon" spoilers, so this is your fair and final warning.

Chu-mi, sometimes referred to as simply the Plant Daemon, is an absolutely DARLING little blob of purple flesh with wormy tentacles, tooth-filled flowers sprouting out of its head, a suckerlike maw behind a vertical set of lips, and mis-matched eyeballs in sockets that look like they're melting off its face. It's a collection of characteristics intended to be gross, creepy and unpleasant in countless creature designs across popular culture, but you and I know this thing is as cute as a button, and so does the narrative.

...Chu-mi is Kento's Daemon. The Daemon destined to develop from the boy's Daemonic cancer all along, and it actually bursts from his head in a shockingly bloody scene that Kiriko uses to his advantage, forcing Anna to help him access the Pandaemonium fragment in exchange for healing Kento's wounds and preventing his actual moment of death. This makes Kento the only human to survive this affliction, as far as we know, and of course, his mental connection to Chu-Mi is stronger than it is with any other Daemon.

So, rewinding back before the final battle, hundreds of humans are attempting to flee from Pandaemonium over the city's only remaining bridge, which of course also begins to crumble. But just as it seems countless innocent lives are about to fall to their death, Chu-Mi wails in panic and emits some sort of massive, expanding energy pulse. And suddenly...

......Hordes of Daemons, including specific individuals we already encountered, arrive together to rescue and protect every last human. It seems that Chu-Mi can communicate with Daemons en masse, or perhaps emits a wave of psychic empathy. While never fully explained, there's a clear implication that by developing from Kento's brain, Chu-Mi inherited pure compassion as its power.

Following Pandemonium's defeat and Anna's disappearance, we're treated to a heartwarming montage of the Peace Organization being dismantled and rethought, scenes of Daemons working together with humans world wide, and an absolutely touching speech from Kento that sums up the intended message of the whole series: