Let’s get crackin’
This week, Momo’s weirdly young-looking and punkish grandma shows up to lay down the law on Turbo-granny.
This gets our first major point of the episode: dealing with the cliffhanger from last time. Grandma delivers quite the mystical (and baseball-bat) smackdown to Turbo Granny/Possessed Okarun, establishing that she’s a force to be reckoned with.
We then cut to Momo waking up from her passing out incident, and grandma trolls her. We as the audience know that, as much as it was framed like she would, Grandma was not going to kill Okarun. That’s plot armor, folks! But Momo doesn’t know that, and grandma strings her along as much as humanly possible to make Momo think the guy who got cursed because he just wanted a friend is dead.
And I’ll take this moment to relate a comparison with the manga. Yeah, DanDaDan is known to me, and while I try to avoid direct “but in the other version” notes, there are times when it highlights something interesting.
In this case, I’d say the anime is turning on the potential romance aspect rather strong. Or, at least, it’s communicating the emotional setup better with its tools than the manga was able to do with the tools of that medium. Momo being trolled by her grandma mostly involves grandma being irreverant and Momo being angry, and when she goes to see what’s in the main shrine and finds Okarun okay, she turns very quickly to yelling at him again. With still panels, this is very easy to read as the relationship being primarily vitriolic with only a little of Momo feeling responsible. In animation, though, where we can see a lot more cuts of Momo’s expressions, she’s softened quite a bit. Grandma teases her about liking Okarun and she denies it. I read that straight my first time through the manga (like nothing had developed yet) but here she comes off as more tsundere. Still at the infant stage of any sort of feelings developing, but already to tsundere.
In that respect, I’m already able to say with confidence that DanDaDan is on track to be a good, even great adaptation. Whether it will manage to keep on its present course, and whether or not you think the material could make for a good or great anime, it manages to do exactly what an adaptation wants and needs to do: be faithful to the spirit of the original while taking advantage of a new medium to bring something more to it, some unique strength that only this version can have.
In any case, after that resolves and we get some more comedic bandying about, it’s decided that the way to break Turbo Granny’s curse will be to defeat her in a game of tag. There’s even a way to win, if they can get her outside the region where her fusion with a site-bound spirit makes her unreasonably strong. However, Turbo Granny cuts the training arc short, manifesting in a more full form to let Momo know that if they don’t have their contest that very night, she’s going to start cursing people to death, potentially beginning with Momo’s grandmother. Thus, with the challenge set, grandma gives the two what gear they can have and they set off for Turbo Granny’s lair to challenge her. Thus ends episode 3, with next week promising quite the overwrought game of tag.