Whenever an anime protagonist gets taken out by a Japanese cold, the resulting episode tends to be lower-key than normal, and that’s exactly what happened in “What Is This Thumping Heart?” Yomogi wasn’t taken out of commission entirely, but he spent the bulk of his screen time either zoned out in public, recuperating in bed, or coughing during his last-minute contribution to the fight against Majima. That didn’t stop his preoccupation with Yume from being a central point this week, though, nor did it prevent several other characters from stepping into the space he had vacated. The most notable riser was Chise, who took advantage of his illness to claim the position of Dyna Rex pilot, though she needed to be bailed out during her fight kaiju battle. If she’s indeed more sinister than she lets on, as I (and surely others) am predicting, then she’s adept at playing the long game – the question is, what is she waiting for?
But I’m getting ahead of myself. For now, Chise functions largely as the tsukkome to Koyomi’s boke-NEET ass; if anybody is definitively playing the long game, it’s SSSS.Dynazenon itself. The plot threads about Kano and Inamoto were hardly unspooled this week, but I think the show is absolutely right not to overload us with information in either case. Better to let the web form slowly, so that characters like Inamoto can keep generating intrigue for as long as possible. Her links to both Yomogi and Koyomi are slowly trickling into their personal lives – she’s started nudging the former boy toward Yume, while Koyomi is likely hoping she’ll nudge herself in his direction. Her encouragement of Yomogi spurred him to get more involved in Yume’s quest for details about his sister, too, so she’s far more significant to the story than she appears at first glance. I speculated last time that she might turn into a kaiju at some point, but after hearing from Sizumu this week, it’s more likely that one will be “grown by her will.”
How many anime series have turned their antagonists into transfer students and used them to feed information to their new classmates? The number must be close to a hundred, so Dynazenon doesn’t win a lot of points for giving Sizumu the same treatment, but his enrollment in Yomogi and Yume’s school did lead to a few hints regarding the show’s philosophy. The idea that kaiju are born from people’s wills isn’t new (Alexis Kerib hijacked Akane’s negative emotions to create them in Gridman), but Sizumu’s desire to “create a world where kaiju are necessary” is intriguing. If kaiju are products of ill will, why would he and the Eugenicists want to ensure their continued existence? I think the answer lies in Sizumu’s assertion that kaiju are the keys to freedom – freedom, most likely, from conformity and repression. A world where suppressed feelings have no outlet would likely end in catastrophe, which is a future I’m guessing the Eugenicists are working to avoid, no matter what collateral damage their mission causes.
If we accept the premise that the Eugenicists are working to save the world, then Yomogi and company are unwittingly working to destroy it by eliminating the manifestation of people’s emotions. Is that too big a reach? Maybe, but we’re almost certainly dealing with a digital realm here, as in Gridman, so it could very well operate on that sort of logic. I’ve even seen some screencap comparisons online showing that backgrounds from the prequel series are being reused in Dynazenon, so we could be in Akane’s world right now. Perhaps Gridman (the character) overcorrected for her murderous intent and eliminated the possibility of emotional expression altogether, creating a future where kaiju are the only release valves for people’s fear and loneliness. That sort of scenario would make our “heroes” the antagonists of the story – not an impossibility, since the Eugenicists are a team of their own, rather than a single crazed villain. At the rate Dynazenon is moving, it’ll be a while before the endgame is revealed, so even if all my theories are of the crackpot variety, you’ll be stuck reading about them for a while yet.
Yeah, I’m with you that Chise is the new Akane – sorta weird though, since Akane was pretty central and Chise doesn’t seem to be.
I am still having my doubts about this series, but maybe they are just successfully tricking me.
For once: why does nobody talk about the 1000+ people that should have been killed by now? Even when the first buildings were suddenly flying through the sky everybody reacted calmly to this, as if it was a normal thing to happen.
We have also never seen or heard of a single victim so far, despite that the kaiju are flattening whole city districts. And Yomogi didn’t give “protecting people” as the very obious answer as to why they were fighting kaiju, which was what I assumed to be the obvious reason from the start.
Another thing I wonder about is if the dead sister was the woman Gauma is searching for. They lived 5000 years ago like the early dynastic period of the Egyptians, the sister was holding an ankh when she died and the first episode implies she might be the one that killed herself due to bullying because of her belief in supernatural things (like reincarnation?). But that is so obvious due to the constant focus on the sister that I am actually starting to suspect a red herring here and it might actually be Chise or Inamoto and that both of them have some kind of own secret goal anyway. But who knows?
I think that unlike with Gridman that I enjoyed from the start (or at least since episode 2) the question on whether this show will win or sink for me will depend on the explanations they give and the twists that will surely happen sooner or later.
Nice connection between the Kano’s twin ankhs and Gauma’s potential Egyptian ancestry. His shirt even looks sort of like a mummy’s wrappings!
I haven’t been bothered by the lack of attention to people’s deaths, probably because Gridman conditioned me to accept widespread destruction as a fact of the franchise. There were structural resets in that series, though, which Dynazenon doesn’t have (I think). If we’re still in Akane’s world, then everything we’re seeing was rewritten by Gridman when he used his Fixer Beam – he may have altered the world’s “code” to limit things like sadness and grief. In any case, I’ll keep an ear out for TV/radio reports of deaths in future episodes.
Yeah I like your theory a lot. Makes a lot of sense and would be a nice connection to Gridman, without being too direct. I was almost sure that the bus Yomogi was driving with in this episode was the same one we have seen Akane and Rikka in, so the theory seems to be correct. It might also explain why deaths aren’t even mentioned and why the Kaiju powers feel like bugs in a game (floating buildings, flat images and so on).