An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Ia Fhtagn – Demonbane Spoiler Review

In the spirit of Mecha March, this week we’re going to take a look at another deep, symbolic, long, twisted, psychological… ha! Just kidding, it’s time for Demonbane.

Demonbane (or, if you prefer, Kishin Houkou Demonbane or Roar of the Machine God Demonbane) is a property that I can only assume is the result of a series of drunken dares culminating in “I bet you can’t write and market something with panty shots of the Necronomicon as a selling point”. Needless to say, they did it, and the anime form of the slice of insanity that resulted is what we’re looking at today.

The show actually starts off slow (for a few minutes), getting us into the life of a PI, Kurou Daijuuju, in the Steampunk/Dieselpunk Arkham City as he’s tasked with locating a Grimoire for a rich girl, Ruri Hado. He encounters a mysterious bookshop run by a woman who introduces herself as Nya (blatantly Nyarlathotep.) I’d let the Crawling Chaos being a busty gothic woman slide, it can appear as whatever it darn well pleases and has something of a sense of humor as we can understand it.

After that encounter bears no immediate fruit on the grimoire search, Kurou looks up to see a small, purple-haired young woman descending on him, jumping into his car. After Kurou recovers from taking the panty shot to the face, the girl is introduced as Al Azif – the legendary Grimoire also known as the Necronomicon. If you took Nyarlathotep in stride and are now wondering why the Necronomicon is a girl… good for you.

It’s a little strange, but I guess the idea is that Al has so much magical power that she’s developed a will of her own and the ability to project a human form. There’s not much time for explanations though, as they’re soon set upon by thugs and a lab-coat wearing 80’s punk rocker who introduces himself as Doctor West (presumably Herbert West) and also the largest of large hams. He busts out his guitar case rocket launcher, but Al does a kiss-sealed contract with Kurou to turn him into the Incredible Wizard Hulk (buff, green, and apparently capable of doing magic) and herself into a flying chibi. West blasts off, but soon emerges again. At the helm of a giant robot crab with drill fists the size of a mountain.

Al laments the fact that she’s both incomplete and lacking her “Deus Machina” (Magical big robot) when she finds another big robot under a rock or something. That would be the titular Demonbane, a Deus Machina made by Ruri Hado’s family/consortium to fight evil. Kurou and Al commandeer it (Al back in normal humanoid form) and beat up West’s robot.

This is basically just the first episode. Are you starting to see how patently insane this show is? Like a number of productions, some better and some worse, Demonbane doesn’t care much for logic or reason and relies on the fact that if it throws enough over-the-top nonsense on screen while shouting at the top of its lungs, you will be entertained.

Embarrassingly, it actually kind of works. Demonbane is without a doubt a bad show, but it’s a Roger Corman sort of bad. You have the feeling that it was never meant to be good, and that it revels in its own cheesy nature. Because seriously, how could anything, any media property, containing Doctor West the ever-shrieking Mad Scientist Rock Star, hope to take itself even the least bit seriously?

As such, you’d think the show would be at its best when it’s just reveling in its batty nature. Kurou’s hunt for the lost pages of the Necronomicon while being continually interrupted by the forces of nebulous evil from the Black Lodge is as excessive as you’d think. It always results in a mecha battle (Though Kurou never catches onto this fact, stammering “D-deus Machina?!” in shock literally every time an enemy one appears, even when he already knows he’s dealing with villains who use them) which involves a lot of shouted catchphrases and attack names and blows up a solid portion of the city. You kind of wonder who’s living in Arkham by the end of this, the place should be 95% crater by volume. And true this is cheesy as hell, but it would also get dull if not for the hilarious times when the show desperately attempts to do serious material or goes beyond the standard yelling and punching to show us something truly absurd.

For instance, a later encounter with Doctor West introduces his new assistant, a robot elf, Elsa, (who ends all her sentences with “robo”) who develops an immediate crush on Kurou, believing them to be a perfect destined couple. Which Elsa retains for the entire remainder of the show. When Kurou and Al sneak into a Deep One temple, they trigger a magical trap, which seems to just have the effect of making Kurou lust for Al. I guess the Deep Ones could use that magic. Later, some of the lieutenants of the Black Lodge leader Master Therion invade Ruri’s compound, running rampant and terrorizing who they find (mostly Ruri). One of them, a miserable undead bag of green rotten strands, even seems to want to self-serve the fanservice (sorry Ruri) only for Kurou to tell him, while jumping in to rescue Ruri, that tentacles are out of fashion. And speaking of Master Therion? After being built up for most of the show’s first arc, he’s fairly unceremoniously dispatched by his lieutenants in his moment of glory. Their reasoning? “We’re evil! Of course we’re not going to be loyal.” It’s so crazy and stupid it actually starts wrapping around to make sense despite being in defiance of anything resembling ‘good’ writing.

And pretty much at the same time Doctor West decides to switch sides because their bio-horror Cthulhu aesthetic is tacky and he thinks his robots are much better. When Al gets killed (however obviously temporarily) West upgrades Demonbane, tying up its usual mechanic to do so, and lends Kurou Elsa to pilot with. We get another round of repetitive but still at least somewhat dynamic mecha fights before hurrying to an endgame where one of the two remaining villains backstabs the other, only to be backstabbed by the true villain… a random catgirl loli who was in one episode around the halfway mark and appeared to die in said episode. And then the catgirl loli, talked down, is dispatched by the reborn Master Therion, who is apparently her son. All these final backstabs happen in pretty much one episode worth of material. The number of villains in this show who go out like chumps to other villains is pretty funny in its own regard.

The final battle is between Kuro and Al in Demonbane and Therion and his Grimoire (who also takes on a girl’s form) in theirs, outside time and space, seemingly eternally except Nyarlathotep tries to make them cross the streams in their attacks and make the stars right or some last minute crap where somehow reality is kinda sorta rewritten by the end of this.

Good grief, this was stupid. Fun, but stupid.

Oh, also there was a nun character. I mention her offhand at the end like I forgot about her because really you could forget all about her and lose nothing. But she’s technically something of a main character in that in addition to Ruri and Al (the latter of whom is the love interest in the show), she was one of the heroines in the VN. I have no idea why you’d ever be interested in the boring lady and no one who’s played the VN seems to know what the point of her was either. So why not Nyarlathotep? Or a joke route with Elsa? Ah, but that’s not really within the scope of the review. I’ve acknowledged that she exists and is about as engaging as watching green paint dry on a patch of slowly growing grass, so I can move on.

So, Demonbane is overall silly, stupid, B-Movie fun. It’s got loads of shouting and over-the-top fighting, it’s got big robots, it’s got panty shots of the Necronomicon as a flat-chested purple-haired tsundere, but does it actually have anything of substance or value?

Well, a couple of the characters are nice. As large hams go, Doctor West is among the largest and hammiest you’ll ever see, and always gets a smile when he’s on screen. Ruri and Al, meanwhile, both feel like legitimately fleshed-out heroines, or at least heroines who could have been fleshed out if there was more time for doing so. They’re not amazing characters but they are good characters, and what we see of their thoughts and feelings is good material.

That, and the Lovecraft references are bizarrely on-point.

I am not even joking. Demonbane, the “Lovecraft” themed show where Giant Robot Fights level Arkham on a near daily basis and the Necronomicon is introduced panties-first (no I am NOT letting that go), gets an absolutely freakish amount of Lovecraftian lore absolutely right, or enough in the right spectrum that it seems to fit together. Demonbane even nails details that most pop-culture Lovecraft takes either ignore or get dead wrong. I’d almost say that Demonbane is to Lovecraft what the venerable Monty Python and the Holy Grail is to the Arthur myth – a comedic farce that, because some creator along the line cared a whole awful lot, ends up being more true to the spirit and details of its source than it has any right to be. The difference of course is that Holy Grail is legitimately good and intentionally funny.

For the sake of argument, I’ll log some of the Lovecraftian details that I think are worthy of analysis. If Lovecraft isn’t your scene, prepare to be educated. Or skip to my final conclusion, that works too.

Point 1: Nyarlathotep as a busty woman. Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, is a Mythos entity that is known for taking many forms. It is said to have “A thousand masks”, or possibly the ability to shapeshift at will. It’s been gods and monsters, the Pharaoh of Egypt that one time, a devilish tempter… just about anything. So why not Nya? They even give her a lot of shots where she’s wearing an inhuman mask, tying into Nyarlathotep’s themes and presenting a monstrous visage to to the world. This one isn’t so much “right” as it is “not as wrong as you’d think”

Point 2: The Necronomicon is a good guy. Pop Culture Lovecraft would have you believe that the Necronomicon, the tome penned by the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, is a dangerous book of evil, liable to drive anyone who reads it stark raving mad or otherwise do naughty things to them. This… is not what Lovecraft depicts. First of all, the vast majority of Lovecraft’s scholarly protagonists (all the Miskatonic University sorts in stories like The Dunwich Horror and At the Mountains of Madness) have read the Necronomicon. Some might become disturbed on discovering that it’s all real, but reading the book brought them no great harm. Further, the way passages were referred to suggest that Alhazred had no great love for the dark forces that he wrote about. He might have seen them as inevitable or unbeatable and been aware of their true nature more than anyone should have, but his great work leaves behind a means to understand and combat them as much or more than it does a way to serve them. In Mountains of Madness, the narrator remarked that Alhazred was horrified by the idea that there might be Shoggoths on earth somewhere. In Dunwich Horror, the antagonist Wilbur Whateley wants to obtain a copy of the Necronomicon in order to practice spellcraft, but the book is also used by Professor Armitage to fight the titular horror, since it contains the recipe for the Powder of Ibn-Ghazi. In Demonbane, we even see Kurou make Powder of Ibn-Ghazi in order to give his bullets an extra supernatural kick, which seems about right. In short, the Necronomicon is knowledge and knowledge is power, but if it were to be a tool for good or a tool for evil, it would be more true to the source to call it a tool for good.

Point 3: The Necronomicon goes by “Al”. While the Necronomicon is most known as such, it shouldn’t be difficult to guess that’s not the original name. After all, it was written by the “Mad Arab” so the title should be in Arabic. It is, and that lost untranslated version is “Kitab Al-Azif”, Kitab meaning book and Azif referring to the sound of wind across the sand at night taken in folklore to be the whispers of demons. In Demonbane, Al not only uses the name (appropriate as the is the “original”) but references that very specific etymology.

Point 4: Geez, there are a lot of tomes in this. Al isn’t the only grimoire, all the villains have their own as well, and all of those are culled if not from tomes that Lovecraft himself invented, then from a prestigious pedigree of Lovecraft’s circle and early contributors to the Mythos. The Pnakotic Manuscripts, the Celaeno Fragments, Des Vermis Mysteriis… they’re all in-character sources on the Mythos and Mythos-related topics

Point 5: Cthulhu. The big guy himself never does show in Demonbane, at least not in all his squid-faced, dragon-winged glory, but he is referred to: The big plan of the villains that gets hijacked so many times is “Plan C”. C for Cthulhu. However, it seems that Cthulhu is not an ends but a means, a disposable conduit to reach Mythos divinity. Pop Culture would typically have you believe that Cthulhu is a heavy hitter – after all, it’s often called the “Cthulhu Mythos”. The thing is, though, while Cthulhu is pretty far beyond humans, he really isn’t that impressive by the standards of gods and monsters. Some sources even refer to Cthulhu as the High Priest of the Great Old Ones – essentially a conduit between the mortal realms he inhabits and that of the divine. So having Cthulhu leaped over on the scale of powerful foes, somewhere above the Deus Machina but well below the true Mythos gods, is oddly truer to Cthulhu’s role and power than most interpretations.

Point 6: Yog-Sothoth is the top of the Food Chain. Yog-Sothoth is one of the Mythos deities who probably gets overlooked. Nyarlathotep appears plenty, along with such figures as Shub-Niggurath and maybe Azathoth. And while Azathoth is arguably the true top of the Mythos food chain, Yog-Sothoth is also a solid contender, being the incarnation of Time and Space. This was also the entity Lovecraft seemed to favor as the central inhuman figure, referring the the nascent Mythos as “Yog-Sothothery”. So, as a fan of the Mythos, it’s nice to see Yog-Sothoth take a moment in the high seat.

Point 7: When Yog-Sothoth is summoned, there are these soap bubbles... Actually, that’s Yog-Sothoth itself! One of Yog-Sothoth’s manifestations is described as a collection of iridescent spheres, making the momentary depiction fairly accurate.

Point 8: Master Therion is Yog-Sothoth’s Son. Again, on pop-culture notes, this would at first sound pretty wrong. A Great Old One reproducing with a human (or catgirl in this case) to spawn demigod offspring like old Zeus? Doesn’t seem quite right. But this is very strongly grounded in Lovecraft’s own writing, particularly the story The Dunwich Horror. In Dunwich Horror, there are two children of Lavinia Whateley and an initially unknown father. The first child, Wilbur, who the story concerns for much of its length, can be made to appear normal, but at his death is revealed to be hideously deformed. The other is the titular Horror, a giant invisible monster who at the end is said to “have taken more after the father”. The father, as the creature cries out in its dying moments, is none other than Yog-Sothoth. And it’s strongly suggested that Wilbur Whateley was angling to permit Yog-Sothoth entry to remake the world, just as Master Therion does in Demonbane. The biggest difference between the two of them is that Therion can show off his abs.

That’s eight points, and I could probably dredge up more minor ones (like Cthugha and Ithaqua properly matching their elements), that Demonbane gets right where others get it wrong, or where I would expect something at Demonbane’s level to get aggressively wrong. As a huge fan of the works of HP Lovecraft, there was an extra layer of entertainment in Demonbane’s run, playing “catch the reference”. In addition to these well-crafted major points, there are tons of little references to details of the Mythos, enough that I’m not even sure I noted every last one, and I’m still flabbergasted it’s like this. How does Demonbane, where everything else is an excuse for shouting and robot punching, represent the Mythos so shockingly well in its precise and broad details?

Really, I guess the writers just actually knew their stuff, and to not fall prey to the popular modern perception of the material.

But does that make Demonbane a good show? Hell no. It’s still stupid. In a sense, I think it may be the very definition of “So Bad It’s Good”, which is not a reaction I have often. But it’s true here. You don’t watch Demonbane for anything it does right, you watch it to see how it does everything enjoyably wrong, with the fascination of observing a train wreck that only gets bigger and more tangled over time.

This is a weird one. I rate Demonbane at a C-, which usually means “watchable, but only barely”… but I also highly recommend it, especially if you’re already a fan of Lovecraft, so you can laugh at what they mangle and appreciate what they oddly don’t mangle.