Dream Eater Merry is… actually hard to put in a nutshell. It came out in 2011, based on a manga that ran from 2008 all the way to 2020 (so naturally the one season we have will not be covering the whole thing). Its style and aesthetic feels as though it’s in a transitional phase between the heavier shadows of the early 2000’s and the bright colors and high white saturation you’d tend to see later in the 2010’s.
As to its concept, like many good concepts it’s at once wildly original and done to death overdone. On one side, we get the “monster who fights monsters”, and to extent the backbone of the masquerade supernatural battler, the sort of thing that was around long before Shakugan no Shana but that Shana made really popular. On the other hand, dealing with exiles from the world of dreams as they intrude upon, practically invade the physical world, overtaking humans as they do? I have to admit, I haven’t heard that exact pitch before.
Which is kind of interesting. Dreams are a funny thing – though we can put high confidence on the idea that they’re just processions of junk data before the mind’s eye, we can’t really prove or in fact explain much about them, and not for lack of trying. The idea that the sleeping mind connects to something real and beyond common human experience, as well as a mystical significance to dreams, is as old as dirt. The idea of something from the other side bodily crossing over to cause trouble isn’t exactly novel either, but making that the backbone of an action-adventure story? It’s a different sort of action-adventure story.
Let’s not waste any more time, and dig in to Dream Eater Merry.
After some gorgeous desolate shots introducing us in the vaguest sense to the titular Merry, we meet main character Yumeji Fujiwara. We’ll learn in short order that in addition to being your typical high school student and an aspiring author in the literature club, he’s kind of psychic, having the ability to see auras that predict what kind of dream a person is going to have. However, for himself, he’s dealing with something of a recurring nightmare.
After school, he bumps into Merry. Or, rather, she drops out of the sky onto him. The show is a bit restrained on the idea of a panty shot, but this still results in about the third most stereotypical “hello” in anime (after toast collision and boob grab).
Shockingly, this isn’t overplayed and they part very shortly, with Merry getting worked up that she lost her hat somewhere along the way. Later, Yumeji finds the hat on a cat, but after picking up gets transported to his nightmare while still awake. There, a sinister new figure called John Doe arrives and states his intent to take Yumeji’s body as a vessel to enter the real world. Before Doe can enact this, though, Merry arrives, reclaiming her hat and having a conversation with John Doe where we come to understand that Merry – Merry Nightmare – is also some kind of dream entity, that she’s exiled to the physical world with no way home, and that she’s more than willing to fight dream things like Doe if they won’t help her. The seemingly more knowledgeable Doe gets away, and Yumeji returns to reality, only to briefly question what happened before Merry shows back up asking him to call Doe again, since she wasn’t done dealing with his vague talk or, presumably, kicking his ass.
After he poorly expresses his lack of ability to do that, he finds he also can’t ignore cute girl crying, and she passes out which is awkward. Yumeji takes Merry home, which is less awkward than it would seem given that he lives with his childhood friend and her father. Oddly enough, they don’t partner up right away, instead facing two monster-of-the-week Dream Demons, one targeting a little girl in the park that proves Yumeji can detect when they’re going to appear, and one that uses his lit club president as a host (and breaks her heart), in which we find that Yumeji can force the parasites to open up the border-realm that Merry said would become inaccessible once they had a vessel, meaning it should be possible to save people who have been taken.
Over the course of these episodes, Yumeji also proves he’s got something of a hero syndrome (at least when it comes to Merry) and he and Merry bond. She’s a little bit tsundere about matters, but this even sees her take the “Dream Eater” title as she accepts her role cleansing bad dreams.
One thing to be noticed in this span is that the show is absolutely rife with subplots and future characters that haven’t yet crossed paths with our leads, something that seems a bit excessive in a twelve episode anime, but in a manga that ran for twelve years? Obviously there’s a bigger story to tell.
The first of these to step properly in the limelight is a willing and cooperative Dream Demon and Vessel duo. The vessel is a cheerful but somewhat odd girl, while the Dream Demon, Engi Threepiece, is an angelic being dedicated to hunting down all wicked dream demons because her sister crossed over and got killed by her own kind in the past. The idea that some Dream Demons are, more or less, friendly and cooperative with the hosts that let them experience the human world was floated before, and thanks to all those “subplot for the future” flashes this isn’t even the first one we’ve seen, but clearly it seems to be the minority.
Engi ambushes Yumeji and Merry shortly after they meet her vessel, and neither she nor Merry really listen to what the other has to say about not being the bad guy here. Thus, they fight, during which Engi drops that the transition from the dream realm to human world only goes one way, which puts Merry out of sorts. Rejecting this idea and desperate to be the hero, Yumeji intercedes when it seems like Engi has Merry on the ropes.
Contrary to typical for the genre, this doesn’t get Yumeji to unlock some secret power. Instead, he just takes Engi’s sword strike for Merry
Though we previously established that physical damage to humans done in this half-dream realm is at least not reflected 1:1 on their mortal bodies (with Yumeji getting a cut in his first round with Doe that just aches in the real world for no visible reason), this does put both Dream Demons on the field out of sorts; Engi because she didn’t want to harm a human and Merry for the obvious reasons. Merry goes into some super mode where she opens a strange gate and wields rings of keys with the power to shatter the dream realm itself, but doesn’t seem quite herself doing it. Especially not herself considering that once Engi books it and Merry finds herself back in the waking world, she has no clue what happened with that state.
At first, Yumeji plays off like he’s fine IRL, but once he and Merry get home, he pretty much just collapses. Unconscious, he’s confronted once again by John Doe who… proves to be more of a free agent than an actual antagonist. Instead of setting his army of humanoid cats on Yumeji to claim him as a vessel, he summons some fanservice catgirls to heal Yumeji’s mental damage.
I think my mental damage is being healed.
Yumeji is out for a full day real time, during which that childhood friend of his, Isana Tachibana learns about a “strange ailment” that sounds very Dream Demon related, Merry stays at Yumeji’s side the whole time crying, and Yumeji has a fairly nice chat with Doe about the plot.
It seems that the nemesis of Engi, the Dream Demon Heracles Pharos who killed her sister, is a being whose very existence lures in other Dream Demons like a siren’s call, and so if Yumeji wants to stop people from being taken over, Heracles would be a primary target for deportation to his place of origin or the nearest convenient parallel dimension. Further, Doe implies (and Yumeji picks up on this, impressing Doe but less so the audience) that it was Heracles first crossing over that stranded Merry in the mortal world in her own body.
Doe, acting in his words as the “Ally of Truth”, also mentions an equally dangerous dream demon that has crossed over called Mistltein. Well, if Heacles is the final boss who we presumably won’t get to for reason of the manga not ending for almost another decade, this must be the baddie behind at least one of the subplots we’ve been introduced to and a likely climax for the anime, right?
Well, after loads of exposition and a pretty good crying sequence from Merry, rather than finding out, how about we head to the beach? We bring everyone, even subplot #5208, the aloof sourpuss redhead transfer student girl that Isana has been trying to befriend, but I’m not even going to bother to screenshot this one. We just had John Doe’s catgirls, and they were more plot relevant.
Well, I say that, but we do at least get two beats worth mentioning at the beach. In one, completely apart from the main characters, we see Mistltein target a little boy with a Dream Demon companion, drag them into the half-dream realm, and brutally slaughter the companion, which seems to have the side effect of turning the little boy into kind of a soulless husk, so we at least now connect to and understand her evil. The other beat had no real reason to be at the beach, but it is between Merry and Yumeiji, addressing the former’s lack of self esteem after being confronted by Engi, building her back up as a hero. It’s short and comes in right at the end, but it’s sweet and it’s nice that we have a lead character who can feel doubt like that.
Yumeji also sprained his ankle running after Merry, which ends up being a plot hook that re-introduces him to Yui, Engi’s vessel (or partner, as the relationship seems to be very mutually supporting). This allows Engi to take charge of the body briefly, and she has a few things to say.
This leads to a plan for her to meet Merry and them to talk it out, but an insane clown Dream Demon drags everybody into the shadow realm to pitch “Join Team Heracles” to them. This fight gets more fraught when Merry hesitates at the idea she may be flagrantly killing Dream Demons, and Engi is forced to back down when the clown reveals that if you kill a dream demon, you destroy the hopes and dreams of the host, as we’ve been seeing. No one points out that Merry already dealt with the Dream Demon possessing the club leader that one time and nothing bad happened to her.
The clown gets away, and we get more talk between Engi, Merry, Yui, and Yumeji. In addition to a fair amount of strong talk about their feelings, it wanders on to Mistltein, who is now said to also have the power to forcibly implant dream demons into others. Right after we saw something eerie happen around Isana and their teacher/guidance councilor.
We’re even given a scene of Mistltein using this power to get the student who got guidance just before Isana possessed. She immediately kills the demon she used, because all she wants is to bring ruin to people. You know, sometimes it’s nice to have a villain who’s just unabashedly evil. No worry about liking them or some tragic background, they just enjoy tying puppies to railroad tracks. That’s Mistltein.
We also see that the teacher is indeed her host when he shows up to… kick the now hopeless and dreamless girl who wanted to be a vet, possibly to death. We get blood spatter, at least. You know, just for fun. He calls out the taciturn redhead for spying on the event, names her as a demon host herself, and declares that Isana is going to be the next victim, which since they spent the B plot of most of this show bonding, Taciturn Girl doesn’t seem to like. On Yumeji’s side, he catches on that Isana has been targeted, thanks to his little dream-seeing trick and a leading conversation. Given what happened with the clown, this is to Merry and Yumeji’s extreme horror.
They find out that Isana’s new dream demon is a harmless little Black Mage Fish, but thanks to the taciturn girl who seems to be defrosting for Isana, that Isana is the target for Mistltein. There’s an abortive first fight with her (and the teacher, who it seems is a willing accomplice in her sadism, or even driving it forward), scheduling the real final showdown for after the semester ends.
Thus, after an episode drawing everyone together to protect Isana, we get that very showdown. To be fair, we are informed of a trump card: taciturn girl’s dream demon has a gun that can kill Mistltein and a grudge against her, but the bullets for it are only formed of the dregs of broken dreamers and slain demons, and one more sacrifice is needed for a shot. Taciturn girl and her partner heavily imply that they’ll sacrifice themselves for vengeance and salvation, since the gun will work for anyone. So, on with the fight.
Round one, the obvious final boss no-sells all attacks, stabs Engi good, and beats Merry senseless. Then Yumeji goes ahead and takes up Engi’s fallen sword. This works out poorly for him, so it’s time for the redhead and her demon to step up. They successfully pull off the sacrifice play, having the demon battle Mistltein so she kills him, and the girl fire the gun that uses her heart and soul as ammo to… knock off Mistltein’s first health bar. She’s got more where that came from, and the gun team does not.
Merry gets thrown into a despair realm by Mistltein (manifested as a flower that eats her), but Yumeji remembers something John Doe told him about how one’s strength in the dream world is the strength of their feelings (including, it seems, conviction and willpower) and guess who has chronic hero syndrome to start no selling all damage! While he tanks Mistltein, Yui gets to contribute by cracking into Merry’s prison. Engi also walks off her former stabbing.
Mistltein starts to panic and swallows Isana’s demon whole as a hostage, but Merry is able to exploit the invisible damage done by that gun to rip Mistltein a new one, pull it out, and return it peacefully to the dream realm (where it wanted to go in the first place). Mistltein demands to know who the hell she’s facing, Merry gives her title dropping catchphrase intro and slugs her, and Engi finishes off the boss with a big slash. Thus, our heroes (and damsels in distress) return to the real world in the instant they left as is the way with all these dream realm excursions. This seems to delete the sadist teacher from reality as well. I guess with the tightness of their bond and the dream sex he was having with Mistltein, there wasn’t much of him left that wasn’t bound up in her.
Taciturn girl still seems to have lost her soul, but Isana at least is fine. And trying to befriend her again, which since she evidently recovered from a non-supernatural version of this before due to her tragic backstory, might actually work out.
And that is the end of Dream Eater Merry.
Now, one thing that you can notice watching this is that the obvious main plot of Heracles Pharos is just sort of hijacked by Mistltein, and a lot of mystical stuff that’s hinted at or even used never really pays off. It’s not terrible, and we’re kind of used to and forgiving of these little adaptations that know they aren’t going to finish everything and thus just try to do justice to an arc. Mistltein was a fine final boss fight and even though we never got a second helping of scary “Key and the Gate” Merry or any real development on the actual antagonist of the bigger picture, we did do more than enough that was compelling and actually had shockingly many effective emotional beats with the characters.
I did some digging, though, and apparently the entire Mistltein plot is actually anime original, explaining why it sometimes feel tacked on (the most notable moment being that, while John Doe is being helpful and mostly building up Heracles Pharos he just sort of throws in “Oh and there’s Mistltein, she’s powerful and bad news too.” at the end after what felt like the sendoff line). She, her vessel, the gun duo, and Isana’s dream demon don’t appear in the manga at all, so it makes sense that four out of five are outright written out and while the fifth is given a mildly hopeful closure she’s also left off like she could disappear without upsetting the status quo too much.
This is just an academic note, and can’t really reflect on the quality of the show (except in how it’s woven, which is usually pretty well) but it’s an interesting question. Most anime adaptations are… pretty faithful, or they cut things down for the running time with as much respect as is possible. But then there are the cases like Claymore fabricating a quick ending, the 2003 Fullmetal Alchemist going off the rails when it overtook the manga, or Dream Eater Merry here giving us a TV-sized subplot that’s fabricated wholecloth and integrated with the material. On one side, this is sure to annoy the purist fans, who already enjoy the thing and want to see it come to life with motion, voice, and color, which is probably why it’s not done much anymore. On the other side, for the anime-only crowd, the presumably wider audience for whom this is their first introduction to the material, it’s meant to create a stronger experience than having Claymore or FMA just stop or Merry… I don’t know since I’m not familiar with where the source goes, but I’m guessing there wasn’t a satisfying arc conclusion in sight if they did this, so call it stop short as well – having that happen would be less engrossing than getting something with a real climax.
So what do you prioritize? Getting right what’s presumably already good if you’ve optioned it for adaptation, or embellishing where you can to adapt to the new medium, audience, and running time?
I think I’m more in favor of faithful takes, but seeing a loose construction version that works well, as it does here, always makes me wonder if maybe more creators, at least the skilled ones, shouldn’t do as much.
Because, when you get down to it, the anime of Dream Eater Merry did its job for me. It made me interested enough in its characters, setting, and story to look up the manga, and if there were an English print edition there’d probably be a volume or two on my holiday wish list. And it did that with its cheat, by showing me not twelve episodes of the intro and tutorial of Merry, but a realized vision of what Merry could and presumably would become when it got going.
Maybe the best option would be to give an adaptation enough space to hit a natural climax. If Merry starts slow with a lot of monsters of the week so you’d need twelve episodes to really get your feet under you, then book her for twenty four and show us something cool. This is sort of how I feel Dark Gathering went; by twelve episodes it hadn’t really gotten into its core loop nor had it introduced all its important concepts, but by the time twenty four was over, it was there, and we could end an arc on a high note with the adventure continuing.
Adapting as much as you have to is the best of both worlds… but of course, that’s coming from the land of theory, and my position as an armchair reviewer. I suspect the economic realities of these things mean that sizing the adaptation to the source rather than cutting or stitching the material to fit the time slot isn’t always or even often going to be viable, and we’ll see many more shows that stop arbitrarily, fail to get to “the good stuff”, or, like Merry, make stuff up so they can be better shows at the cost of being worse adaptations.
All of this sort of adds up to the fact that, all things considered, I think Dream Eater Merry is a fairly good show. It isn’t the best at anything it does, but it ranges from adequacy up to legitimate strength. I like that it can mix a darker and more artistic style with a light, colorful, and approachable one. It results in the world feeling like it has a lot of texture to it, with the creative dream realms of the various demons, and a reality that’s pretty, but also able to be gray where it needs to be, worn in places, or sometimes even kind of polluted, the blemishes held over from the earlier 2000’s (or even late 90’s) styles making everything seem more alive.
And, critically for the billionth supernatural battler, I liked the characters in this. They had their clear notes, but also enough subtle ones that I believe you could keep coming back to them more than to, say, anyone from Kemono Jihen. Merry is fun. She’s a little naive about the real world, and has a childish sense of wonder, but she also bears the deep scars of isolation from humanity and self-doubt. Engi starts off as this vengeful paladin type and that’s mostly how she operates, but the material doesn’t forget the good side of the equation, and how her (in essence) humanity tempers that evil-smiting will. The humans, okay, skew a little less interesting, with Yui not getting a lot of time to juggle her will to support Engi with the fact that she’s otherwise this very harmless bit of fluff and Yumeji leaning pretty heavily on his chronic hero syndrome, but they’re still flavors with at least a little complexity and their arcs are flagrantly unfinished.
All in all, I’ll give Dream Eater Merry a B+. It’s one I’d really be interested in seeing the “Brotherhood” version of, now that the manga has ended. It’s basic, but it’s a strong basic that holds up from multiple angles, and I’d pretty freely recommend it.