Reviewing the GADOLL (and setting) From The Weird Anime Series DECA-DENCE

Deca-Dence is a single season, 2020 anime that might look a little generic at first glance; the title refers to a gigantic, mobile fortress housing the last of humankind in a post-apocalyptic future overrun with mutant monsters known as Gadoll. Battling these monsters are an elite class of genetically enhanced fighters, the Gears, armed with personal anti-gravity bubbles and grappling weapons in order to not only defend their tank-like city from these weird kaiju, but hunt them for food, skins and other vital resources.

Our main character is Natsume, a young girl who lost her arm and her father to a Gadoll and now works as part of the Deca-Dence maintenance crew, but of course, she dreams of overcoming her physical limitations to fight Gadoll as a Gear.

Natsume's boss, Kaburagi, was actually once a Gear himself before he was "retired" to supervise the maintenance crew, and he may seem like a hardass on the outside, but of course, his cold exterior begins to crack as his relationship with Natsume evolves from one of supervisor and subordinate to what quickly borders on a found father/daughter dynamic.

The characters sound like you've seen them in a hundred other anime, and the setting sounds like you've seen it in a hundred video games, but there's a reason for that, in a massive twist that's revealed, most surprisingly of all, at the start of the very second episode. The first shows us the world from the perspective of Deca-dence's naive human inhabitants, but the second immediately turns the cliche'd setup on its head with a reveal just unusual enough that even some major anime websites misunderstood what was going on well after it was explained.

Does something count as a severe spoiler if only the second episode exposes it? I'd usually say no, but it's so much fun to find this one out for yourself, I'll still be putting the twist under a fair warning, after we look at those weird, giant monsters we mentioned!

AVISPINE

The Avispine is the first Gadoll we ever see, and it's gorgeous! This is not a wasteland of grey and brown mutants. The thin, hunch-backed creature actually looks remarkably like some kind of seahorse or a pipefish crossed with a dinosaur; its head, body and tail have the shape of a leafy sea dragon, if you replace the real animal's false leaves with a mix of short, tubular spikes and a row of four extremely long, thin quills, then change the tubular mouth into a bird's beak. In fact, its face is almost a perfect middle ground between seahorse and some kind of albatross. It stands on two spindly legs, bent almost like an insect's, its gangly humanoid arms dangle to the ground and it has two tails. Most of it is blue, but its underside and part of the face - the upper beak and a "mask" around the eyes - are yellow, and the limbs fade to a lovely coral pink before they hit the yellow fingers and toes.

Avispine seems to be the most "average" Gadoll, sort of their basic "ground unit." Besides its speed and strength, it can also fire needles from its back!

PIPE

This is the second Gadoll we're properly introduced to, but it's not like the rest; Pipe is a tiny, harmless Gadoll with the intelligence and personality of a friendly dog, kept as an unauthorized pet by Kaburagi. As far as know, Pipe is a unique aberration, but maybe he represents what some other Gadoll species looks like in its earliest developmental stages? His design is like beluga whale crammed into the shape and size of a tiny pug with big, bugged-out eyeballs, and his legs kind of make him look like a tardigrade.

WHIPCORD

The smallest and weakest (as far as we know) fully mature Gadoll is the Whipcord, which exists more to be a food supply to other creatures than a fully functioning battler. It looks like a fat, shiny grub with earthworm-like pinkish segmentation, it has a pair of tough pincers on its tail end, its head is just a simple point with a four-pronged mouth and its legs are fleshy balls with tiny, three-toed feet protruding from them, once again very tardigrade-shaped.

PITTOW

The common, basic aerial Gadoll is a simple and truly perfect design; a dull lavender colored stingray-like animal with a tubular front, ending in a perfectly circular mouth with six triangular teeth. It's a bit stretchy, too, as the art demonstrates!

NEMOLLIS

This one resembles a seafoam-colored nudibranch, usually reared up in an S-shape. There are bumps all over its back that would look almost like eyeballs if the "whites" weren't the same color as the rest of its skin, though perhaps their black centers are in fact additional eyes, since they match the black tips of the short eye-stalks surrounding its head, which is otherwise a simple ball that splits open into four petals. The Nemollis seems slow, but it can produce copious amounts of mucus and it can swing its stretchy body like a whip!

OCTHULHU

This feels like one of the more "iconic" Gadoll; if Deca-Dence were an online game I imagine Octhulhu might have become a popular mascot, the kind of thing they give you a little baby companion version of for preordering. It's a purple octopus with only three tentacles, but the font two are almost as chunky as gorilla arms, with dark suckers all over their outer, rather than inner surface, and the third tentacle, lined with suckers in the more normal place, flares into what evokes a "torso" before curling into a "tail." The face is just two orange octopus eyes with horizonal pupils and two large siphons, gas-mask-like, while the bulbous head sac is almost as big as the rest of the body, with two huge, simple orange eyespots. I've honestly never seen a cephalopod with this "arms and body" kind of arrangement formed from tentacles alone; it's so simple and straightforward, but it's ingenious and visually SO effective.

LUMINESCREW

One of the more abstract looking Gadoll. It's roughly football-shaped, but made out of six flaring segments that are actually detached from each other, inexplicably holding their formation in the air no matter what. Each dull blue and green segment is ringed with small knobby spikes ending in tiny, luminous blue nodules, with the final little segment's spikes extending into four long, trailing tails. The tiny, bullet-shaped front segment lacks spines, but its entire tip glows. The whole creature also lights up as it charges for its electrical attacks!

BURRN

Another really beautiful one, the Burrn is nothing but a rough globe with needle-sharp spines and a cluster of short, black tentacles on its underside, surrounding a mouth that can stretch to swallow prey whole. Despite an ungainly appearance, it can actually run fast and can spin itself like a top! It's the color patterning that really makes it stick out most of all; a dark, dull blue fading to more intense pinkish purple, and the base of every spine is surrounded by a patch of lighter blue with a dark outline. Similar patches, even with the thin outlines like a drawing, are found on a few marine organisms, and by now I'm sure you noticed that every single Gadoll resembles some sort of sea creature.

DARUMOSS

One of my favorites, Darumoss is a big hulking icy blue brute with a hunched posture, a large neckless head, a gaping red mouth with big walrus-like tusks, four long arms ending in slothlike hooked talons and relatively dinky legs. Its most visually interesting feature is also its combat strategy; stylistically it kind of looks like its humped back and bulging forearms are coated in chunky, blue-grey ice or snow, but there's a lot of scraggly looking dark hairs sticking out of it, and officially all that icy looking stuff is just fur as tough as metal wire. It's highly effective, insulating armor, and I'm sure it also hurts like hell to be hit with. The final visual effect of this thing is like a scraggly dust mite, a walrus and a yeti, which is a truly beautiful and wonderful combination of things.

I did think for the longest time that it was totally eyeless, but it actually has very pale green eyes with no pupils or outlines, as vestigial looking as those of a hagfish and half covered by the wiry fur.

FOG GADOLL

I guess this doesn't have a "proper" name, but is simply referred to as the fog gadoll because it's a one-off the humans have never encountered before. Foggy has the distinct head and teeth of a Dunkleosteus, but with webbed claws on the ends of its large, paddle-like, spike-lined arms, a whiplike tail ending in even more spikes, sharp looking ribs that protruding from its skin and thin, bony legs ending in clawed feet. Every single angle of it can stab you, except for its back, where it has two rows of large, cup-like growths, like gigantic octopus suckers, able to spew a thick mist. A Dunkleosteus with legs is already one of the most threatening animals you could invent, but it also generates its own blinding fog. SICK.

SELHAMMER

Love this one! It's a pastel pink isopod or amphipod based creature with a shape slightly closer to their mammalian imitator, the armadillo. It runs on two vivid blue legs with six little dangling blue bug-limbs, two long dark antennae and no other external features save for two dark, wooden-looking hammer-shaped horns on its head. Basically take a pair of regular, conical horns, saw them off, attach them like mallets to short sticks and attach those sticks back onto a creature's head. When the Selhammer curls into a wheel, it rolls with enough velocity that the hammers can mess up anything in its path. Not terribly efficient, but it's fun, and that's the whole point! That's the whole point more than you might know!

SELDURUM

Seldurum looks like a sandy-colored, warty crab, but beneath its armored plating is a body "as soft as an anemone" according to official materials. I like that you can see this in its unprotected legs and feet, which aren't arthropod-like at all, but are definitely more squishy looking, tubular limbs that end in flaring pads, with gaudy orange and green striping for good measure.

SPOONWORMER

My personal favorite, if you didn't know at a glance! Spoonwormer has a marveously novel body plan that can scrunch down into a shape like a spiky, spiral seashell with little crablike legs, but the whole "shell" and its "spikes" are all soft pinkish worm-flesh, like the Whipcord earlier, and there's a gnashing toothy circular mouth on the bottom. When it needs to fight, the bug legs are retracted and the "shell" stretches out like an accordian into what looks more like a pudgy maggot with a big head, antennas, "tusks" and blind little lumps for eyes, all still just that pinkish flesh. This all teeters comically atop a pair of chunky little legs, and it has a big, fat tail like an insect abdomen ending in pincers. Actually exactly like a "more mature" Whipcord! It's also named after a real group of animals, that spoon worms, though they sometimes go by a ruder name, just because some of them look like big fat pale hot dogs with a knob on the end,

GILAND

Almost as big as the entire Deca-Dence, you might think the Giland is a final boss kind of encounter the series would build to, but it's actually part of the first major battle. Its design is that of a baleen whale with dinosaur-like legs instead of flippers, dragging a body that flares more like a stingray before tapering into a cool, segmented tail like a fleshy crustacean. The whole thing is in dark, grey and brown earthy colors, and its back is thickly armored with growths resembling giant, fossilized seashells! I'm sure this design wasn't just to look cool, but to evoke the general concept of extinction.

STARGATE

Cute reference! Stargate is only ever seen in an incomplete and rotting state, but it has a compact, intensely blue crustacean body with patches of white towards the top, almost making you think of snow-capped mountains. Its small, thin legs end in starfish-shaped feet, but the decomposition reveals that the entire thing does have a vertebrate-like skeleton. It looks like it was meant to have a lobster-like tail, but the tail is soft, white and tattered, dragging gruesomely behind it. Psychedelically colored internal tissues also bulge in bubbly clusters from under the rotten eoskeleton of the body, some of which forms the shape of what were presumably going to be more legs. The fluids spurting from its decaying tissues can be deadly, but that may not have been a "natural" characteristic. Its core gimmick and namesake is the head, which just resembles a small blue starfish tacked to the front of the whole titanic heap, and the center of this can unleash a massive energy beam.

OMEGA GADOLL

We don't get many good lucks at this Gadoll's initial form until it "dies;" it's soft and mostly white, like Pipe, and with similar little tardigrade-style legs on its fat body, but that's where the resemblance ends. The rest of it is more like a baby seahorse, having a single fin on its back, a knobbly tail, and a head that tapers into an adorable little snoot. It also has huge, dark almond-shaped eyes, when they're open at least, and two long rubbery feelers on its head that are, surprisingly, strong enough to stab through flesh. It seems to die immediately after using these, but all it really did was implant its next body, as near as I can tell, since the poor asshole who gets "stung" eventually dies hacking up blood, and we later see a blood-streaked Omega begin feasting on human (sort of) corpses.

Little baby seahorse Omega is one of my favorite designs in the series, but what it matures into is quite a bit different; a formidable kaiju-size Gadoll resembling a deep-sea isopod with a gaping maw full of hooked teeth, a body that tapers into a curly, sucker-liked seahorse tail, two huge arms like the claws of a coconut crab, luminous purple fins, lots of little purple crustacean legs and many long tendrils dangling from its face, a chimera of elements from across the various Gadoll and a number of famous sea creatures. Not to mention, the rubble of entire buildings is incorporated into its exoskeleton! It evidently collected a lot of surrounding material in order to grow so fast.

Omega is the last new Gadoll in the series, the final big boss event, which means we've finished looking at the series organic creatures. Now's your chance to go watch it wherever you can, if you haven't before, because next comes:

THE BIG TWIST (SPOILERS!)

Like I said, the first episode of Deca-Dence is played perfectly straight as a run-of-the-mill, post-apocalyptic survival setting, save for those "Gears" we mentioned. The Gears are pretty suspect. They're like an upper class of superheroes who get their own, private level of Deca Dence, complete with Gear-only social venues, entertainment, and shops where they can buy everything from weapon upgrades to new skin colors with a monetary system based entirely on a fluid collected from dead Gadoll. I know what you might be thinking this big twist entails, but I might have mentioned that some major anime reviewers got it entirely wrong. What some of them interpreted was, unfortunately, that the entire world of Deca Dence is a virtual reality simulation, a futuristic video game whose "human" inhabitants are self-aware pre-programmed NPC's. This is half right, but the situation is both more dystopian than that and much, much more absurd.

Yes, the Gears are actually gamers. Yes, the entire setting is the game they're playing. No, it is not virtual, and yes, the humans living in it, oblivious to this truth, are really, actually the last living humans in existence.

.....Who, then, or what, are the players?

If you don't already know, I'm not sure I can really prepare you for what you're about to look at:

This is another thing that frustratingly confused some media websites back in 2020; a few thought Deca-dence took place some time after alien invaders conquered the world, or even that the humans were some sort of captive zoo colony taken to an alien planet. But no, this IS still Earth (or, at least, the Amazing World of Gumball, which was also presumably Earth), and the only thing that conquered it was good old fashioned capitalism.

The exact timeline of events is left ambiguous, but at some point in Earth's history, virtually all technology came to be under the control of a single almighty megaconglomerate, Solid Quake, including artificial cybernetic lifeforms with humanlike technorganic minds. No two cyborgs we ever see are quite the same, but they're as colorful, whimsical and marketable as any Sanrio mascots or pocket monsters, and it's unsurprising that, once humans were presumably accustomed to artificial intelligence, Solid Quake's endearing little creations must have spread quickly through our society. Again, we don't know all the details, but what we do know is that as the Anthropocene plugged along, these cyborgs actually came to outnumber any natural animal biomass left on our world, including humans by a wide, wide margin.

This meant that, eventually, the dominant intelligent beings on Earth were something manufactured, owned and controlled by a brand, which would have already long become more powerful than all remaining man-made governments combined, and somewhere along the way, there wasn't even a single one of our species left in charge of the company itself. There never needed to be any violent robot uprising; we simply did nothing to stop the march of technological progress from rendering us slowly and impersonally obsolete.

This means that this isn't actually even a post-apocalyptic setting, because there wasn't any apocalypse. No nuclear strike or pandemic or meteor impact ever saw us off; we were phased out of "relevance" by the "market" no differently or any more dramatically than when we moved on from the VHS to the DVD.

One of the few specifics we're given is that, by the late 2400's, Solid Quake "acquired the management rights" to the remaining human population. They don't elaborate on this, but as dystopian a statement as it already is, it also implies that either the global corporate government was still letting someone else legally own the last of humanity up to that point, we gave up on taking care of ourselves and signed our lives over, or we had our own independent leadership that literally sold us out.

Solid Quake would set us up with a massive, protective dome and even populate this nature preserve with genetically engineered wildlife to help sustain us, but capitalists are going to capitalize, apparently even in a world where there's nothing they don't already own. We don't know when humans forgot - or were made to forget - where they really came from or what really happened to the world, but generations later, the nature preserve would come to be exploited as cyborg society's most popular source of entertainment, the now pretty aptly named Deca-Dence, a high-tech LARPing theme park in which cyborg players can remotely take control of artificially engineered human bodies, the avatars known as the Gear, to "protect" those rare, endangered humans from their fellow high-quality Solid Quake product line, the Gadoll.

If you feel like I've surely spoiled all the intrigue of this series, remember that everything I just told you is exposed by only the very second of twelve episodes. Everything you just learned is the setup of the story. We get to learn the truth nearly up front, and are left guessing as to just how the lid is going to get blown off this whole insane operation, and I won't spoil any more, but episode two also sets us up with another grave story hook:

For a final refresher on our two main characters, Natsume is a teenage girl whose father was killed by Gadoll, and now idolizes her job manager, Kaburagi, who begins to teach her the ins and outs of being a Gear. There are actually a number of real humans who operate as Gears - something intended to enhance the game's immersion - but Kaburagi isn't one of them. As even the series intro sequence reveals, Kaburagi is this:

Not only is Natsume's surrogate father figure just the puppet of a runaway Kirby enemy, but his position as "maintenance job is a cover for his true, far darker task of identifying and eradicating "bugs" in the game. This is Solid Quake's PR-friendly term for "game characters" that display any unintended inconsistencies or otherwise break the confines of its tightly controlled system, and one day, Kaburagi's scanners identify one such bug his supervisors would demand he terminate at all costs: a single human the system expected to die in one particular, fateful Gadoll attack.

WHAT HAPPENS from there?! I guess you'll just have to find it! If you don't have a subscription to something like crunchyroll, and I sure don't, remember that the internet offers myriad alternatives I just can't really get away with linking you to!