Think, for a moment, about the concept of Aliens visiting Earth. How is this handled? Well, usually the aliens are depicted as being in at least some ways superior to mankind. After all, they’ve mastered some technique of interstellar travel and we have not. Whether they’re more or less friendly or decidedly hostile, it’s easy to see them negotiating from a position of power.
Some years back, though, there was a film called District 9 that depicts a very different scenario. There, the aliens are shellshocked refugees that largely don’t understand and can’t repair or reproduce the advanced technology that brought them to earth. To make matters worse, they stopped in apartheid South Africa, becoming the subject of all the social stresses of that nation. It’s not pretty, but it’s a very good film that uses a typical tool, the space alien, in a fairly novel way.
Five years before District 9, though, (7 years if you want to count the first release of the manga, rather than the show) there was an anime with a similar take. DearS has a pitch and setup that’s very familiar to District 9: Aliens arrive, but for neither invasion nor uplift as, in fact, they’re stuck with the fact that their space ship has broken down and seemingly can’t be fixed. Some time after first contact, we follow an initially anti-alien fellow as he gets to know one of them and ultimately empathize with the plight of the alien in question, all while some larger conspiracy might be in play. There are, of course, some differences based on the genre and target demographic – in DearS we’re dealing with a high school student and a cute girl in a fairly functional modern Japan, not an office worker and an a creature described as a “Prawn” in the dark underbelly of Africa.
Does DearS manage to do its concepts justice and, like District 9 or not, bring us something of intelligence and value with a rare treatment of aliens, or is there a reason why it’s been largely forgotten?
Well, a best foot is not exactly put forward at the very least, as the most notable elements right from the start are heavy yet awkward fanservice and animation that largely looks both dated and cheap. These instant issues aren’t impossible to come back from, but they do start DearS in the red.
So, right off the bat, let’s have “the talk” about fanservice.
Fanservice is okay. I like fanservice. Some shows I absolutely adore can layer on the fanservice extremely heavily. Trinity Seven is practically drowning in fanservice, and it’s a good show. Vividred Operation had some very troubling fanservice and despite that, was a very solid show. Darling in the Franxx, my overall favorite show, has plenty of fanservice. So does Dusk Maiden of Amnesia, which I rated at A+. There are even some manga, most notably Divine Raiment Magical Girl Howling Moon, which I would love to see brought to screen that get into fanservice intense enough to blur the line between what’s just fanservice and what’s too far.
But, in all those cases, the fanservice is not – I repeat, not – why I want to see them. I like Trinity Seven for its cheeky subversion of a number of expected elements (including how it serves up its fanservice) and surprising depth. I enjoyed Vividred Operation because of its upbeat energy and excellent choreography and cinematography. I love Darling in the Franxx for its sweeping emotions and excellent characters, and rated Dusk Maiden so highly for how well it navigates living a double life as a show. And while Howling Moon has a lot of awkward shots and some gratuitous partial nudity, it also has a vision of magic and magical combat that’s stunning already and could be absolutely incredible if given full color and motion.
Fanservice can add to a show or (all too often) detract from a show, but one thing it absolutely can’t survive is being more than a side dish to the real show. So forgive me if, when the writing is so incredibly contrived as to have a teacher in class in her lingerie acting slutty, I don’t really want to see it. It’s not funny, it’s not charming, it’s just boobs. You know who else can have boobs? Well-written characters. Lilith Asami, Zero Two, Yuuko Kanoe… these ladies have characters as round as their chests. You can enjoy seeing them in fanservice situations because there’s some degree of emotional investment and intelligence there. On the more straight comedy end, Darkness ends up delivering quite a lot of fanservice, and it’s almost all watchable because it’s the side dish to how she’s a crazy masochist taking physical abuse in combat as she waxes poetic about the monsters might do to her (creeping out her allies and sometimes foes) or verbal abuse from Kazuma that she reacts to strangely because, well, it’s her. This works because I know who Darkness is, what she’s like, and am introduced to more than “Here’s tits, do you enjoy them?” I’m not watching a Hentai (or at least, when the scene plays, I hope to Haruhi I’m not watching a mismarketed Hentai), you have to try harder.
If the teacher’s bit was going to work, and that’s a really big if, the comedic buildup and payoff would have to be way stronger than they are. As it is all I can think is that she’d be fired in an instant, possibly arrested because there’s no sense that her nonsense is anything but untoward and reprehensible, as in real life. Boobs are not funny. How you use them can be, but suffice to say that Sexual Harassment Sensei here doesn’t manage to do that. Eventually she gets a little play with her one joke – it’s not really good at any point, but it does become an actual joke when there’s setup. And yet we basically cold open with it, presumably for reasons of “fanservice”.
And, to reiterate, the animation’s not even really good. It’s the kind of cheap-looking nonsense where fluid motion is a rarity that you’d see on the TV in a better show these days when the characters are supposed to be watching something, or attached to a mid-2000s tract on why “anime is bad”. On its own that’s not a fatal flaw but it does mean that any intrinsic value to casual fanservice is… diminished.
So, we’re introduced to main character Takeya, an Ordinary Japanese High School Student™ who doesn’t think the seemingly kind alien DearS are on the up-and-up. Aside from that, he’s got the typical “always sleeps in” syndrome from which he’s rescued by the fairly generic childhood friend character (in this case kind of dour, and the daughter of Takeya’s landlord so she has the keys to his place), and has a part time job at a video store, from which he obtains newly released adult videos to lend to his male classmates in exchange for, mostly, food. Isn’t that… um… charming? Seriously, it’s not easy to get a bead on this guy, he has enough going on that he shouldn’t come off as totally generic, and yet in a lot of ways he does. And those in which he doesn’t… we’ll address as they become apparent. On his way home one day he meets a strange girl in a weird brown sackcloth cloak (and nothing else). After revealing she’s a DearS by conjuring space clothes that last for a matter of seconds, she passes out from hunger and Takeya, quite forgetting his reservations about the aliens, hauls her home and feeds her. We get some lame antics while she can’t speak Japanese in which Takeya tries to hide her from his friend while also trying to learn more about her, but soon enough she absorbs the language with her space magic and also encounters the childhood friend character (who of course walks in on several easy misunderstandings, including how the alien, Ren, takes to calling Takeya “master” and herself a slave).
Fairly shortly, Ren ends up causing a massive misunderstanding by visiting school, which gets her treated as a legit DearS transfer student since a different one (Miu) was expected. During this period we come to understand a couple things a little better. DearS seem to be dedicated servitors and at least uncomfortable without orders, both since Ren is very insistent on having a master and following his orders, and because the better-adjusted Miu seems to become somewhat despondent when the old couple she’s staying with don’t want her to do any chores. At the same time, we get more hints of the ‘conspiracy’ when they briefly call Ren a defective product and send the most incompetent possible cat girl alien to go catch her (the cat is distracted by dropped melon bread long enough to entirely forget her mission and go home). Soon enough Miu arrives at school as well, and after a pointless ‘contest’ it’s decided that both of them can stay.
Over the following episodes, we get a more specific idea that rank and file DearS are very clearly servitor products. There seem to be at least a couple high-ups managing the ones crashed on Earth, but ones like Miu and Ren are meant to have masters. Ren, in particular, seems fairly incapable of understanding relationships like love and friendship, instead only comprehending the idea of master and slave, at least in regards to herself.
It’s pretty darn awkward to watch, in the way that you know for certain that someone is extremely turned on by the scenario and got a chance to bring it to the screen. For those of us not aroused by the idea of slavery, it’s just uncomfortable.
In any case, the DearS seem to pride themselves on quality control, which means that Miu wants to teach Ren better (even though Miu herself can be a little out of touch, in part as she’s starved for orders and chores) and the hierarch types want to “recall” Ren. There’s some blather about a ceremony that apparently Ren completed with Takeya that means she’d normally be past recall, but apparently she represents enough of a problem that the bosses don’t care. Of course this still gets delegated to the idiot catgirl, so we don’t really have to see it. These guys make Team Rocket look like professional assassins.
And, all in all, not a lot happens. Miu tries to teach Ren and overdoes it. Takeya’s bratty little stepsister visits, has a fight with him and Ren, and they make up. Okay. And all throughout the show’s lack of progress relies entirely too totally on characters not communicating.
And I get it, some degree of poor communication is a fictional staple: if everyone said everything that needed to be said, a whole lot of drama wouldn’t happen. But there’s a distinct difference between “This could have been avoided if the characters were prescient about what information needed to be shared and did so without regard to other factors”, “This could have been avoided if the characters talked things over like adults”, and “This could have been avoided if, one time out of many possible times, someone finished their sentence.” DearS falls in the latter category. Childhood Friend Neneko clearly intuits much of what Takeya is far too thick to but stops herself from saying it, Miu clearly knows and wants to tell more about the DearS but stops herself, and Takeya clearly wants to ask more questions but gets trivially dissuaded. Over the first half of the show, Takeya doesn’t seem to really wrap his head around Ren’s servile nature, much less the often-alluded-to special ceremonial bond that she’s set to him, and it all could have been disambiguated if he didn’t stop himself from talking to anyone but Ren or if Miu or Neneko didn’t stop themselves from talking to him. The fact that they stop is bizarre and unnatural; Miu in particular realizes that Takeya is ignorant of the significance of his masterhood over Ren and then, despite wanting that to work out, just keeps it to herself for no good reason.
The communication in this is almost as bad as the flagrant poor fanservice and weird pro-slavery fetish material.
Bizarrely, there is one element that’s done alright, and it’s Miu’s character. Compared to Ren, who emerged and bonded to Takeya as a blank slate, Miu is revealed to have a past, having served a family when she was a child pre-crash (poorly, at the time) only to have her kind master murdered and be unable to protect or save him, even with her healing abilities. There’s actually a decent amount of pathos that her perfectionism has roots in such trauma, while her restlessness on earthly life and jealousy of Ren aren’t just the product of some hard biological programming, but rather result from the fact that she had a happy life one way and struggles to recapture that. We also get a little more insight into the culture of DearS and their natural masters, with Miu suggesting that no one is coming to pick up the crash survivors simply because they aren’t valuable enough to bother with. Takeya ends up, intentionally or not, kind of taking responsibility for her, which seems to end her run as anything remotely antagonistic.
Of course, for every good element there has to be another drag. If Miu’s backstory was weirdly compelling, Takeya’s (in the following episode) is overwhelmingly lame. His entire dislike and distrust for aliens stems from being shown scary scifi movies when he stayed over with Neneko.
He’s also… kind of reprehensible. We’re kind of used to male MCs being kind of gormless because, hey, there are problems when relationships go too far too fast, as they naturally would with some leading ladies, but Takeya is downright nasty. It takes a special kind of inconsiderate to be confused as to why a normal human girl might be offended when you insult her appearance right to her face, repeatedly and emphatically. Even aside from particular incidents, he spends most of his time snapping at people, yelling, or otherwise making an ass of himself. It’s often for good reasons (after all, Ren is fairly out of control) but it still doesn’t give a good picture of him. I think Kazuma had more sweet, soft, or genuine moments, and he was pretty darn shrill.
We get a canned hot springs episode after patching that over, in which Ren shows off that she’s still terrible at picking up on human mores and customs. For that matter, for a designer servitor-being, she’s pretty bad at following orders. She causes another stink by saying that Takeya is her master and she his slave, which she’s been told, directly and emphatically, to not say about a million times by both Miu (who has some understanding of human propriety) and Takeya. But, of course, she blurts out nonsense anyway because while DearS (the beings) may live for orders from their master, DearS (the show) lives on stupidity. She’s a better character than Nyu because she can at least form cogent sentences and once in a blue moon she’ll say something with weight, but she’s closer than any character should be.
Meanwhile, I mentioned the villains who send one staggeringly incompetent catgirl to capture Ren, as is a priority for them and kind of a big deal from their perspective? They’re still relying on the one catgirl who still couldn’t pose a credible or even noticeable threat if her life depended on it. You’d think at some point the mastermind would actually follow up on questioning what her underlings are doing and send something with two brain cells to rub together to any of the zillion places where Ren can normally be found, but that’s apparently beyond this show’s tolerance.
Eventually the DearS leadership acts in a vaguely sensible way, sending a negotiator to ask for Ren’s return as well as a more experienced and capable enforcer to snag her if negotiations break down or if Ren tries to bolt. You know, if they tried that about ten episodes earlier, it probably would have gone off without a hitch. As it is, the straightforward plan works fairly well. Because Ren won’t speak for herself and they were having a fight anyway, Takeya ultimately goes along with the offer to recall her. It’s clear he’s not totally comfortable with her being taken away, but at the same time he doesn’t have a reason to object when he tells her to do what she wants and she just sort of stands there in confusion.
Of course, because it was smooth negotiations, the DearS authorities make the critical mistake of giving Ren a day to say goodbye to everyone in school, which results in her bolting at the last minute. This is bad because technically if she went quietly she’d be in for re-education that would allow her to join the proper ranks of the DearS, but since she tries to run, the side of the authority that seems to have a personal grudge against her has an excuse to put her down for indefinite-duration cryogenic freezing instead. This results in a lame chase where Ren is fleeing from the lead slave-catcher and everyone else is, in multiple groups, trying to chase after her. Eventually everyone collides at the pier and Takeya, struggling to reclaim Ren (with the blessing of the nice negotiator DearS and the support of Miu, as well as most of the school and shopping district), ends up in the water. Ren dives in, saves him, and he’s able to declare his master-hood and rescind the leave to take her when he comes up for air. And, since all the humans heard it, there’s no denying it for the authority-aligned DearS nor, thereafter, for Takeya.
Finally, we get a long tail where Takeya gets used to having an alien slave properly, which those around them are shockingly okay with (to be fair, probably because they all know it saved her from some serious trouble with her own). Miu and Neneko, significantly better characters that they are, keep watching with far better emotional interplay, and the villainous interim DearS leader fumes over a defective product being in the wild, right before her boss wakes up from cryo-sleep for the thank Haruhi nonexistent continuation.
DearS is an awful show… but it does have some saving graces. There’s a lot of anti-humor here, places where characters just say or do stuff and you’re not sure why it’s supposed to be funny despite the feeling that it is, but at other times there are actual jokes. Once every several episodes one might even get a bit of a chuckle, like Miu absolutely loving Ren’s toxic hell cooking, or some of the antics with the little sister and stepmom characters, brief as their appearances are, like how little sis is a shrill tomboy and clearly it’s inherited because her mom just suplexes her when she’s acting out.
The real redeeming factors, though, are named Miu and Neneko. Those two are legitimately well-written characters. They’re not amazing by any stretch, but when Ren’s a lobotomized moron, Takeya is a shouting jerk, and most of the rest of the accessory cast is over the top unfunny repeated jokes, they stand head and shoulders above the rest of the show. For Miu, her home-stay is with an old couple who, while very private about it, clearly see her as the daughter they never had. Their care is hard for her to accept at first, since she wants to be actively of help, but by the end, when contemplating how Ren is going to be taken away, she asks how they’d feel if she were to go and, on seeing their reaction, is subtly hinted to feel an actual sense of belonging, seeing her value in terms of human bonds rather than just deeds. It’s meaningful progress that’s just loud enough to be heard. Similarly, her regard for Takeya, when it doesn’t degenerate into so-mild-it-might-as-well-be-homeopathic tsundere behavior, seems to be an oddly genuine admiration for what he’s capable of. Which is fair – at least in the course of the show itself, it’s Miu who has at least a few genuine conversations with Takeya and is privileged to see the better side he normally does a great job of hiding.
For Neneko… I always have a soft spot for Childhood Friend characters, but she’s one of the better ones at actually evoking the archetype and bond. All too often, poorly written childhood friends (like the normal girl in Omamori Himari) have nothing to support their interest or bond other than a repeated declaration of childhood friend hood and an unwillingness to leave when they’re unwanted. Neneko actually seems to know Takeya and his family pretty well, is able to intuit his thoughts and feelings like he’s someone she’s extremely familiar with, and doesn’t lean overly heavily on an intense romance. She’s clearly interested, especially in the latter half of the show, but she’s also her own person and a close friend, not just a lady throwing her romantic hat in the ring. I actually enjoy the dynamic where, even though she’s jealous of how Ren might be a rival in romance, she likes Ren as a person enough to continually stick up for Ren when Takeya’s mad for the eleven-thousandth time and hurting his slave alien’s feelings. She’s caring, supportive, and all around decent.
Again, neither of these characters, nor their portrayals, would be notable or even necessarily par in a good show. At best, Miu can lift the weight a support character should lift and Neneko almost as much. But with everyone else incapable here, the show is squarely on their shoulders. Do they save it?
In my mind… yes and no. There’s no reason to watch DearS. Watch something else. If you want a show about a weirdo moving in to serve a normal person, you should probably watch Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, since it does all the comfy aspects better. If you want to watch a show that addresses the relationship between humans and beings that exist to serve, including having a ‘normal’ boy spontaneously end up with a super girl technically at his beck and call, Beatless is great, and more germane because that’s actually an issue worth talking about in the context of robotics and AI. And if you want to see stranded alien menials, well… I can’t point you to another anime for that, but I guess we’re bringing it back to District 9.
All the same, I think that the good elements do save this show from a strict Fail. There were points where I thought I was being made dumber for watching this thing, but also points that brought it back and for a minute or so could have me engaged and entertained. I’d recommend against watching DearS on the whole, but I guess I can offer it a D- for its trouble.