Anime: SSSS.Dynazenon 656v3r

Some time ago, when an anime called Gridman came out every sellout was hyping it as something worth checking out. Long pretentious essay videos were made about directing, cinematography, thriller-like atmosphere, and a very deep message at the finale. By the end of the season very few gave a damn, because the show was more preoccupied with zooming the camera on the girls’ thighs than telling a decent plot. Fast forward to Dynazenon, the second season, where nobody was hyping it. It lost most of its potential audience during the first season, and seeing how the pretentious sellouts couldn’t milk it for all it’s worth they moved to pretending other shows were deep.

The most obvious reason is because giant monster shows haven’t been trending in decades. Now it’s all about harem isekai and videogame-like fantasy worlds. Even for old-school anime fans like me, the action of the SSSS moniker wasn’t elaborate or even lasts enough to have an impact. The sellouts kept talking about the aesthetic of having the monsters moving like people with rubber suits being the thing that makes the show to stand out from all the others, but, really, who gives a damn about that? It doesn’t make the action cool and it sure as heck doesn’t add realism to the physics or gravity to the situations.

Dynazenon was more like a teen drama than a kaiju series, as every character spent most of his time in dealing with every day psychological problems that with saving the world. And even then it wasn’t doing an amazing job, since the tone of the series was very somber for the type of plot it was going for. The people in the setting didn’t give a damn about giant monsters attacking and destroying entire city blocks every week. The heroes were not trying to capture the bad guys behind the monster attacks even though they were in front of them all the time. And the bad guys were not serious about their objectives either, as they constantly found enough free time to go have fun at places with the very humans they hated so much.

As a result, nothing in this show has much of an impact on the viewer. The action is too short, nobody is worried regarding the monster attacks that kill thousands of people every week, both good guys and bad guys are slacking around to the most part, and in general the anime is not committed to what it’s going for. There are many interesting themes regarding the social pressure and alienation young people are facing in contemporary societies, but the plot doesn’t go beyond mentioning them and then letting them not matter in the background.

There are also several plot twists that are supposed to change the way you view the setting and certain characters, but because of the carefree way they are handled, they don’t feel nearly as significant as they should. Half of the series comes off as slice of nothing happens, so when the other half comes up and you are supposed to care, you don’t. If the characters don’t care or they don’t take what they are doing seriously, then why should the viewer give a damn?

Thus we get another example for why modern anime are crap. They don’t have the guts to be serious or depressing despite constantly tackling serious and depressing issues. Retro anime weren’t afraid to be all that, they knew what they were and kept true to it. A school drama would be a school drama and an action mecha would be an action mecha. Dynazenon is all over the place because it tries to be a jack of all trades and ends up being a master of none.