In the midst of a vicious battle, taking place in what looks to be the back alley of a dingy industrial/modern city, a big lizard man clamps his jaws down over the head of some kind of masked sorcerer. The man in the mystic space inside the lizard guy’s mouth appears before the dazed and confused magic-user and declares, dramatically, “You’re not the one.”
The lizard guy extracts his foe and
asks what the man in his mouth says, which the magician reports.
Since it seems that magician is useless, the lizard guy slices him to
bloody ribbons. The sorcerer’s severed hand shoots a dart of black
smoke which conjures a door through which his partner escapes and we
then follow the lizard guy, Caiman, and his friend and helper in this
endeavor, Nikaido, who appear to be our main characters.
You probably have quite a few questions
at this point. But that’s the very first scene of Dorohedoro, and if
you weren’t already familiar with that fact, I think I’m doing you a
favor by throwing you into the deep end as suddenly as the show.
As a reviewer, though, I feel a greater
need to explain in short order. So, what actually is Dorohedoro? At
its heart, Dorohedoro is a “how did we get here?” mystery, laced
with underworld intrigue and set in an urban fantasy world
(multiverse?). It has a dark industrial/punk style, a love of
visceral violence, and a great sense of fun and humor. That last
part should not be understated.
The basic idea is that Caiman is
looking for the sorcerer who transformed his head into its currently
reptilian state. However, he has amnesia, and thus basically no
leads on the topic, and has thus taken to indiscriminately hunting
down sorcerers to interrogate them about what the man in his mouth
has to say. Don’t feel too bad for them, though: Sorcerers come to
The Hole (the cityscape where Caiman and Nikaido live) primarily in
order to practice their magic, usually by inflicting a variety of
horrific curses on the residents of the Hole, a fairly indiscriminate
reign of terror that Caiman can stand up to because he seems to be
immune to any further magic. No matter what magic the targeted
sorcerers use, it just washes off of Caiman with no effect.
This, naturally, has some of the
sorcerers in their world deeply concerned, what with peers dying and
all. Chief among the sorcerers with something against Caiman is the
boss of Fujita (the one who escaped in the opening scene), a powerful
sorcerer named En. In addition to having an immense volume of potent
magic at his command, En also comes off as quite the mob boss, a
big-timer in a fancy suit who runs a ruthless business in the magic
world. And now he has Caiman in his sights.
These conflicts underscore the vast
majority of the show, but there are a couple things that bear special
mention, related to the sense of fun I mentioned the show having.
First, the show is not afraid to goof around. Every episode does
have a sum of meat that feeds into the continuing plot (though some
are lighter than others) but Dorohedoro saves time in a few places.
The typical long expositions are missing (the show never explains
anything to the audience; you learn by immersion, or get an
explanation when someone in the show encounters an unfamiliar topic),
as are the scenes of brooding that you’d probably expect given the
violence and grungy atmosphere. In the place of that, we get to see
the characters… largely enjoy themselves, really. And these
characters are all eccentric nuts. They’re somewhere between a
little off and a lot off, but they’re largely happy with or able to
find some degree of happiness in their bizarre existences.
There is plenty of humor in Dorohedoro.
Much of it is kind of dark humor, predicated on the fact that the
characters themselves laugh at the horrible situation that is their
daily life. For instance, there’s an episode dedicated to a
situation that arises in the Hole where the dead walk again as
zombies and need to be returned to their graves. The Zombie
Apocalypse is cause for… a wacky sort of charity drive where
collecting enough zombie kills could let Caiman trade in the points
for a new steamer so Nikaido can make even better gyoza. That is
Caiman’s main motivation for the episode, and for fighting hordes of
the living dead storming his home town: a nice steamer. For another
episode, we largely take time off as the hospital that treats magic
practice victims (where Caiman part-times) has a baseball game
against the central hospital filled with more petty cheating than
you’d ever expect, not to mention a variety of “superhuman”
players including Caiman, Fujita (incognito as Central Hospital’s new
pitcher), a Frankenstein’s monster made with the bits of Fujita’s
partner from the opening, a giant indestructible cockroach man called
Johnson… you get the idea.
Similarly, fairly shortly after En gets
the idea that Caiman is a problem, we’re introduced to En’s
enforcers, a pair of hardened thugs who enjoy fighting and comparing
their kill counters when they aren’t being a surprisingly sweet
couple with good chemistry. These two are Shin, a somewhat grumpy
tough guy with stitched up hands and a penchant for wearing his mask
(all the sorcerers wear masks. En in particular could be the mascot
for 2020.) backwards, and Noi, an even bigger and more buff figure,
who’s a fairly peppy young lady. Also in the sorcerer world, we pick
up Ebisu, a sorcerer who has some lizard related magic and is thus a
person of interest in the Caiman case. The only problem is that she
was literally pulled from Caiman’s jaws, which ripped her face off.
Though her injury can be healed, her brain remains rather broken
thereafter and Fujita is charged with taking care of her.
At that point, we have the three main
duos of Dorohedoro. Caiman and Nikaido are a pair with a strong
bond, but also a lot of secrets between them, both ones they’re
keeping and ones that are a secret to everybody. They’re the crux of
the plot and mystery but there’s also a lot of uncertainty. Shin and
Noi have a different kind of uncertainty. They’ve been working
together for some time, and have strong feelings for each other as
partners that might (they’re awkward about it) lean towards the
romantic in the end. They’re a functional pair that support each
other and are absolutely stronger together than they are apart.
Finally, Fujita and Ebisu are a comedy duo. Fujita is terminally
unlucky: anything he tries, you know something bad is going to happen
to him, and in a broad cast of characters that enjoy even the stuff
that seems dark to us outsiders, Fujita is the one character who is
actually made miserable. Ebisu, meanwhile, in her insane state is a
chaotic imp, often provoking or causing Fujita’s suffering even as he
never wavers in trying to do well at taking care of her. They’re
both more comedic-pathetic characters but in different ways, and in a
meta-sense they work best because they’re together. Because Fujita’s
a downer, he’d get dull fast if he wasn’t given some lighthearted
insanity to work off of, and because Ebisu is a loon whose actions
make little sense and who has trouble stringing together a full
sentence, often going through scenes as or nearly as a mime, she’d be
very hard to watch without a straight-man to suffer for her insanity.
This underscores one of the big themes
that repeats throughout Dorohedoro, but we’ll get to that in good
time.
On the plot, Caiman and Nikaido follow
a couple false leads towards the mystery of Caiman’s identity,
encountering a variety of punks and sorcerers while Fujita, Shin, and
Noi try to unravel the mystery their way at En’s behest and do a very
good job at their attempt to kill Caiman, taking his head off (he
grows another one. It’s lizardy too.) On the sorcerer side, the man
in Caiman’s mouth is identified as a member of the rival-to-En “Cross
Eyes” gang (notable for the tattoos of red crosses over their eyes,
a trait Caiman’s lizard head shares). There’s a rub though: that man
is dead; the sorcerers find only a severed head for their only lead.
In the Hole, the audience and some of the side characters learn
something darkly important before Caiman does: Nikaido, it seems, is
actually a sorcerer herself. Shortly after, we get a new turn when a
crazy doctor is able to offer Caiman (and Nikaido) a door to the
Sorcerer world, so they can pursue the mystery personally rather than
relying on the declining number of sorcerers coming to the Hole.
The Sorcerer world is very stylish.
Before we actually visit we mostly glimpse it in interiors that
aren’t necessarily representative. In its full glory, it’s just as
much gritty punk as the Hole, but trades the Hole’s industrial vibe
for Gothic sensibilities in both its décor and architecture.
In the Sorcerer world, En and his team
get the severed head resurrected (the source of the resurrection
magic turning out to be a cat-like creature that En takes in after
killing the charlatan sorcerer who controlled it before). The guy
that results, Risu, proves to be fairly unhelpful; he has no idea
about Caiman, anyone by Caiman’s description, or even who killed him.
However, Risu becomes the lead that Caiman and Nikaido are able to
follow, as Caiman remembers the name. The two of them split up to a
degree, with Caiman doing some general (not terribly competent)
sleuthing while Nikado, who knows something of the ways of the
sorcerer world, goes about things her own way. She gets the money
she needs by robbing a shop where sorcerers can sell their smoke
(which contains their magic), where we learn that her magic is
apparently priceless and mythically rare. She uses that money to get
a meeting with “The devil,” specifically a devil (there is more
than one) who seems to be an old friend of hers and who can reveal
Risu’s location, creating a magic door to En’s mansion for Nikaido to
use. Her attempt to storm the mansion and grab Risu is foiled
though, both when she ends up in combat with Noi and when En gets
involved. She’s clipped by his smoke and manages to stagger home
with a mushroom growing from her back, which can be surgically
removed and necessitates, due to a sorry state, their return to the
Hole.
In the Hole, the doctors, operating on
Nikaido, confirm what they already thought they saw, that she is a
Sorcerer. After some smaller events (including one that adds
Johnson, the indestructible roach man-monster, to the doctors’ party)
Caiman decides to head to the sorcerer world alone, not wanting to
get Nikaido hurt again. He ends up taking a part time job at a meat
pie restaurant while sticking his nose into things. The Sorcerer
world, however, is going through a major event: Blue Night, a
festival of sorts where Sorcerers attempt to find partners for then
next four years. This is why I mentioned the pairs being a theme:
groups of two are critically important for the Sorcerers, and they’re
important for how Dorohedoro and its characters are structured.
Everyone either has or wants a special counterpart, someone or
something that completes them as a person, and the “partner”
idea, compared and contrasted with the earnest relationships between
the various pairs of characters, taps deeply into that.
Like most things in Dorohedoro, for
Blue Night, killing is on the table as a means of conflict resolution
with relatively no repercussions, and in particular it seems like
consent is not required to have the Devils establish the partner
contract. This becomes particularly relevant when En’s investigation
into his mysterious intruder reveals that it’s Nikaido, who also
killed the smoke shop owner (not having noticed and dealt with a
camera recording her robbery), and whose smoke, traces of which were
found on the shop’s analysis machine, mark her as a sorcerer with the
magic to control time – the one sorcerer power that En had desired
in a partner. He uses his impressive mushroom control magic to
sprout a monster from the scars on Nikado’s back in the hole, and
even when she kills it, its pooling blood forms a portal to the
sorcerer world, dragging the home team (Caiman’s doctor boss, the
doctor who made the door, Nikaido, and Johnson) to En’s lair. The
others are thrown into prison while Nikaido is forced into a contract
with En, which as partners gives him some pretty harsh mind control
influence over her, presumably because of the coercion (since we see
no such traits in the partnership of Shin and Noi which is renewed at
Blue Night after some attempts to kidnap and/or murder them).
While we get a lot more details about
the past in relevant flashbacks throughout the second half of the
show (Including Shin’s background as a halfblood in the hole who was
hunted by its sadistic ‘defenders’ before his magic was properly
unlocked by the doctor who went on to make Caiman’s door, clearly
already something of a mad scientist back then; Shin and Noi’s
background including how Noi was training to become a devil but lost
her chance to save Shin; En’s history as an orphan, slave, survivor
in the fires of hell, and finally mob boss pushing the supremacy of
magical power against those who abused him, and even some of Risu’s
history with an old friend called Aikawa who never quite pays off in
the season) the present tense comes to a head just after Blue Night,
with a contest of pie-sellers at En’s mansion that ultimately sees
Caiman face off with Nikaido. Caiman finds it hard to let go of how
she’s a sorcerer and, perhaps more than that, lied to him…
especially seeing as she’s going all out fighting him while under the
influence of her contract with En. Nikaido’s friendly devil manages
to intervene, both urging reconciliation from Caiman and ultimately
disabling – though not truly nullifying – the contract. He
covers their tracks, but can only really offer them a head start on a
getaway into the far corners of the sorcerer world. If En catches up
with them before something changes their situation, Nikaido will fall
under the spell again. But first he’ll have to see through the
trickery to realize the real Nikaido is gone and catch them. The
rest of the Hole team escapes from the dungeon, and is let out of
En’s lair by Shin, who recognizes the doctor who saved him, and they
drive on to an uncertain future.
Everything else remains, as the show
might say, shrouded in chaos.
So, I know the plot summary I’ve just
been through is a little scattered and a little long, but believe me,
the extra connective tissue would take far too long to display in
detail. On one hand, the story is simple. Caiman wants to get fixed
so kills sorcerers, sorcerers get grumpy, and both try to track down
what’s going on with him, ultimately resulting in Nikiado needing to
be rescued from En. On the other hand, the presentation is so
labyrinthine that telling it in shorter form that the show itself is
hard. And that labyrinthine nature is a big part of Dorohedoro’s
beauty. Like the visuals, it’s dark, twisted, and cloudy… but also
like the visuals it paints a hugely compelling picture. The
characters are deeply memorable and complex as well, and that’s while
being very fun to follow.
All things considered, I strongly recommend Dorohedoro, to the point of feeling it deserves an A. It’s dark and bloody, but also lighthearted and fun. It’s compelling with deep characters who can have intense and serious feelings, but it’s also got a lot of goofball comedy with the same characters. Everything and everyone in this show is some brand or other of insane, and I for one enjoyed pretty much every minute of it. The worst thing I can say is that like Made in Abyss they had to settle for an arc end that doesn’t really conclude anything meaty about the plot… and when that’s my biggest problem, that there’s not more of this thing, I’m absolutely looking at something good.