This Week in Anime

What the Heck is Going On in Yurei Deco?

Chris
Nicky, I feel like I've been easing in just fine to my new role here on This Week In Anime, you've all been wonderfully welcoming to me. And I think I can make a suggestion for how we could improve the process for this cute little column of ours. It's a brave new digital age after all, so this only makes sense: How about we move all recording for TWIA into the Metaverse?!

What could possibly go wrong?

Well then, in place of utilizing VR ourselves, we can assess the experience through Yurei Deco, this season's entry from distinguished studio Science Saru.

As indicated by my opening Metaverse allusion, we're already seeing attempts to integrate social media engagement and activities into capitalist pursuits. Yurei Deco just takes that a half-step further to its logical extreme: What if being Always Online wasn't simply a feature you could utilize to interact with some aspects of the world, but was required to even perceive and participate in that society?


I know if my economic value was genuinely tied to how many Likes I got, I'd be even lower-class than I already am.

I think my favorite thing about the aesthetic, especially in the opening episodes where the action is contained to the main augmented-reality city, is how clearly artificial its presence is. The riotous colorful holograms are overlaid as a pointed distraction from the dull, grey utilitarian architecture underneath. It's a neat illustration of Yurei Deco's overall tone, its candy-coated aesthetic superficially masking a clearly dire dystopia.

It makes it that much more striking once the action moves to the 'outskirts' of the island's civilization, and these 'slums' are more richly-designed and genuinely colorful than the interior of the city.

Yeah, and while we're only partway through Yurei Deco, there's a lot of uncertainty in this one as well in terms of where Sato's ultimately going to go with his explorations and messaging on technology, the internet, and social media . As I mentioned with the setting, from the word "go" the story seems to be taking a very cynical view of tech's impact on society: The world the characters see is an over-commercialized, artificial hellscape. Our lead viewpoint character Berry is only able to peek at the 'real' world because one of her legally-mandated AR contact lenses is glitching out. Social media content moderation has grown to such a degree to be likened to actual government censorship, that sort of thing.

This series is nominally themed after The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and other Mark Twain works, but there's also a lot of the baseline societal cautions made popular by 1984 coming through as well. Or maybe the Laughing Man episodes of GITS: SAC if they were run through a Lisa Frank filter.

It's notable then that Hack doesn't totally eschew technology; they still operate using the social-media currency others do (though by scamming others out of it, in their case), and traverse the virtual-reality 'Hyperverse' of this setting for work and/or mischief. The writing seems to acknowledge those online elements as useful, as well as visually interesting and cool, parts of the conceptual composition. And on some level I can get behind that: I can kill a lot of time on my Twitter feed, but I'd probably like it less if I was required by law to be plugged into it at all times. And I'd like it a lot less if any crimes I was accused of had to have their trials livestreamed through it.

But as much as I enjoy the visual execution of the contrast between the 'virtual' inner city and its 'real' outskirts, I can also see it as heavy-handed when the show preaches about the inherent superiority of physical information and experiences.


Even then I am also taking notice of the series demonstrating a little more nuance to those topics as it's moved the action to that setting in the last couple episodes.

It's an idea the series has been consistent about playing with all the way through: What counts as the 'truth', whether it's as simple as what our eyes show us, or if there's a deeper understanding needed to validate it, and how that might vary per person. Heck, Berry's 'death', which is achieved by hacking and falsifying online records, is a fake occurrence that nonetheless allows her to start living in the 'true' world. And much like Tom and Huck's false-pretense funeral allowing them to hear what others truly thought of them, this fake event provides an opportunity for Berry to hear some genuine sentiments from her parents, even as information-oppression is literally their job.

Like I said, nuance.

It's why I think the show has worked better after those initial setup episodes, loaded down as they were with (admittedly necessary) world-building infodumps and "These kids these days with their phones" grumbling.

And because the shift to one-off detective adventures has let the plots stretch their legs a little more.

Just think, they could have sold us so much more effectively on unique NFT avatars had they just made them cute anime girls and not gnarly apes.

Seriously though, there's definitely a point to the idea that Berry, the one in the gang with the most recent connection to Tom Sawyer Island's capitalist cyber-cornucopia, was the only one who saw value in searching for the avatar even as everyone else blew off the job. But it pays off for the group in the long run because this guy's story actually happens to intersect with some nuggets of information that are valuable to their overall Zero Phenomenon quest. That's a thesis that's only just started emerging in Yurei Deco: Yeah, monetizing your social media feed to pay for microtransactions is stupid, but the collaborative efforts of so many people's stories being able to connect is a generally worthwhile resource.

It's akin to the hard truth those of us living in the modern world have already had to accept: Birds Aren't Real.

It's interesting in how it comes off like Yurei Deco challenging that previous easy espousal of the 'real', provable world. The Nue was never 'real' in a literal, physical sense. It was a mythological creature passed down by oral tradition whose descriptions necessarily varied and changed across that intergenerational game of telephone. But those stories of it still mattered and affected the people whose lives it came into.

Instead of pushing for the idea that 'truth' must always be asserted in all cases, the writing instead posits that jumping into people's mentions to pedantically correct stories that might offer them comfort, even as they aren't even hurting anyone else, might not be the best choice for anybody. It's a bittersweet lesson Berry learns just a couple seconds too late.

I felt so bad for this poor cuddly cryptid and the scientist who loved its made-up ass at the end here.

Right, it's the difference between taking moderated information provided from on-high at face value, versus listening to the accounts of your peers and collating that in-context. In that respect I can see that being an ultimate point Sato might be going for here: That a rigid, corporate-controlled information superhighway is so much more depressing and less valuable than an open, collaborative effort.

Particularly since its leads joined the Yurei Detective Club, the series has had that component of showing the ways the modern world can connect people from all walks of life. One of my favorite cast members I sadly didn't get to mention thus far is the constantly-telecommuting gossiping grandma, after all— The show recognizes the value of electronic extensions to other people, alongside those we connect with in meatspace.

And since it's not even halfway in yet, I am curious as to where else Yurei Deco will go with its explorations of these ideas. There are definitely going to be some words to be said about the potential for more malicious individuals to spread misinformation online. And given this latest episode's brief visitation on meme culture, and Sato's previous work on the aforementioned GITS: SAC, there's the question of how he might work in theories about the collective unconscious.

But those are possibilities for another time.

Just the fact that we could put together this many paragraphs on these first five episodes, I think, demonstrates how appreciably meaty the show's concepts have gotten, even in the parts where I'm not entirely on the same page with how it regards the values of the World Wide Web. Science Saru's best shows are as rewarding to chew on as they are unique visual showcases to take in. And Yurei Deco, for as trite as its "This says a lot about our society" opening volleys on the internet are, has proved it can branch out. I can't be certain I'll agree with all its takes as it goes on, but even in those dalliances I suspect it will at least be interesting to argue with.

And it's nice to know I'll have a social media feed of anime-loving pals I've connected with to comment on it alongside.