Dandadan Episode 7 Discussion

Heres comes the crybait.

The worst influence Kimetsu had on the manga industry was making authors believe cramping some hyper melodramatic backstory to a side villain from absolutely nowhere was good writing. Nevermind the worst thing is that they are absolutely right and people will eat that up completely without even considering it.
For sure I'm really buying this sudden surge of extreme violence with the murder of a poor woman and the kidnapping of her kid for a bit of money from 2 completely unnamed dudes with not even their faces shown. Did she fucked over the yakuzas? Did she had debt so insane someone threaten to take her child if she didn't paid? That's what I choose to believe because for all we know this is the most brutal and uncalled for payoff with a total absence of setup.
Obviously the emotion conveyed here is "look how unlucky she is, she didn't deserve any of this", but I don't think fictionnal characters as people, they are merely writing devices, and in this case putting such an amount of brutality just for the sake of making the audience cry without any justification is quite frankly, pretty cliche and cheap.
However what I will not deny is that beautiful directing and that magnificent piano track, didn't expect less from Kensuke Ushio, composer of Ping Pong's ost, one of the greatest soundtrack of all time, but still top notch.

My biggest concern for sure is this will be praised so highly that even people saying it's the best episode ever created wouldn't even be hyperbolic. Unfortunately for me, I have grown up of only having emotional response towards art and media and I can only conclude this was wildly incoherent tone shift for an action/romance shonen to switch from fighting wacky ghosts/aliens and finding the main dude's balls to the painful life of a single mom trying to raise her child while crippling in debt.
You could just write one shots if you want to do this kind of tragic silent short movies with overlaying music, insert them in a shonen which will switch to crude comedy next episode feels more of a petty attempt to catch an unsuspecting audience than anything else. But what do I now anyway, this episode will make the show go from 8.60 to 9.05 I guess lmao.

@James-LastOmnic I pretty much agree with you, I can't understand what was so good in this episode that made people praise it to high heavens, I thought people made fun of things like Kimetsu no Yaiba when they give a sad backstory to the villain of the week. I don't mind when villain get a backstory and I actually welcome it, but I hope it isn't some kind of one-off villain that we will probably never see again, like, I don't think we even know which was Acro Silky's name before turning into that. Actually, I'm not surprised about this kind of writing, and I wouldn't totally blame Kimetsu no Yaiba for it, that series didn't invent sudden sad backstories, but the problem is that the author was Tatsuki Fujimoto's assistant, and if you have watched or read Fujimoto's work you'll see he likes to add things to just shock the viewers, you can see something like the recently released Look Back for example, but Fujimoto tends to be even more vapid than just saying "please cry". I know I don't control people's emotions, so it's fine if they cried and that made the episode their best episode of 2024, but this episode wasn't particularly special even between battle shonen's emotional episodes.

@Captainjeddy Wait, "next week"? You mean another episode like that???

@EzioMorte no I was quoting a post I made last week in anticipation for this episode. We aren't getting another episode like this for a little bit.

That could have been a 10/10 episode!
The execution is perfect, no doubt about that. I'm just not a big fun of the content itself.
It feels a bit cheap to me that Acro-Silky confused Aira for her daughter. Maybe it would have been better if Aira was actually her daughter? idk.
Also I don't get how Aira was able to see her in the first place if she was dead. (And it's not good if the most important scene doesn't make sense.)
Overall, (Controversial Opinion Alert!) Episode 5 is still my favorite!

That could have been a 10/10 episode!
The execution is perfect, no doubt about that. I'm just not a big fun of the content itself.
It feels a bit cheap to me that Acro-Silky confused Aira for her daughter. Maybe it would have been better if Aira was actually her daughter? idk.
Also I don't get how Aira was able to see her in the first place if she was dead. (And it's not good if the most important scene doesn't make sense.)
Overall, (Controversial Opinion Alert!) Episode 5 is still my favorite!

Holy,they cooked so damn hard. Thought it was a pretty nice tragic backstory in the manga, here I was left speechless. Science SARU elevating the emotional highs to another level altogether. This may be the adaptation that will bring them universal recognition within the anime community.




Here's the ballet scene from the manga. Anime was quite a bit subtler about it's implication (and the prostitution as well)

Don't wanna be a jerk here, but I thought that I watch wacky shounen about stolen balls and meme fights with ghosts & aliens, not random forced drama with characters who had like 20 minutes of screentime.

It's really well directed, but made me bored cause it's just so unneseccary in a show like this.

What happened to the child?

That could have been a 10/10 episode!
The execution is perfect, no doubt about that. I'm just not a big fun of the content itself.
It feels a bit cheap to me that Acro-Silky confused Aira for her daughter. Maybe it would have been better if Aira was actually her daughter? idk.
Also I don't get how Aira was able to see her in the first place if she was dead. (And it's not good if the most important scene doesn't make sense.)
Overall, (Controversial Opinion Alert!) Episode 5 is still my favorite!