Yurine Hanazono is a college student who summons Jashin-chan, a demon from the underworld. Now they must live together in a run-down apartment in Tokyo’s Jinbōchō district. If Yurine dies, Jashin-chan gets to go back to the underworld, so she constantly plots to kill Yurine. – ANN
Streaming: Amazon Prime
Episodes: TBA
Source: Manga
Episode 1 Summary: Jashin-chan is an evil demon who was unwillingly summoned to Earth by Yurine, a human being with even more terrifying qualities. Jashin-chan wants nothing more than to make her way back home to Hell, a journey which can only occur if she’s released by her master. This means one thing – if she can kill Yurine, she’ll be free to go. Jashin-chan comes up with scheme after hare-brained scheme to take Yurine out of the picture – one time she plots to distract Yurine with a favorite movie and bean her with a crowbar, and a few days later she’s got plans to stun her with a stun gun and then stab her to death. All of Jashin-chan’s plots involve the forced participation of her other demon friends, most of whom are actually pretty nice people and don’t necessarily want to enable her (but who are thus easily-manipulated). Yurine is also constantly one step ahead of Jashin-chan’s plans, and her counterattacks are profoundly brutal.
Impressions: CW: This episode contains extreme violence used for comedic purposes.
I’m not often entirely put off by slapstick comedy; it’s not my favorite and it doesn’t usually tickle me unless combined in some way with other gag styles. What does put me off, however, is extreme violence. Occasionally I’ll find an anime to be so otherwise compelling that I’ll suffer through some blood and guts, but the older I get the less I can tolerate outright brutality for no good reason. This episode is jam-packed with slicing, dicing, blunt force trauma, cannibalism, electrocution… I could go on. The show makes a joke out of the fact that large portions of many scenes are hidden behind a censoring mosaic as Jashin-chan’s body gets repeatedly mangled. If I’m to look past such profound gore and gleeful violence, there has to be something at the heart of a series that would be likely to make the experience worthwhile, because I have physical reactions to body fluids and dismemberment.
Drop Kick on my Devil! is most certainly not a show with any deep moral core or profound message; it’s a gag anime about two very mean-spirited young women doing whatever’s within their own power to make each-other’s lives miserable. It’s like the anime equivalent of putting two angry wasps in a jar, shaking it up, and seeing which one ends up stinging the other to death all for the sake of laffs and yuks. I think there are some people who get a kick out of watching two horrible people duke it out, reveling in the shock value of seeing the characters escalate a feud beyond all boundaries of reason. There is something to be said for being able to witness bad people “getting what they deserve” I think, especially when there are people walking around in our world having done terrible things without being made to take responsibility. For me, though, I’ve started to experience frustration and sadness with this kind of material. I’m perhaps just exhausted from hearing about bad behavior all day on the news and don’t have the energy to deal with a bunch of cartoon characters trying to slice each-other in half with chainsaws.
This first episode introduces a surprising number of questions and variables for how simplistic the premise of the show is. Part of the issue I have is that there’s very little introduction to what’s happening; we don’t know why Yurine summoned Jashin in the first place besides the fact that she’s the type of person that that seems occult-like in anime visual shorthand (you really have to watch out for those gothic lolitas – I know from personal experience). It’s clear that, despite being evil, some demons are quite friendly and accommodating; why Jashin-chan is so foul-tempered and violent as compared to Minos and Medusa, two of her friends(?), is kind of a mystery (though being summoned and bound to someone against your will would likely make you a little bit salty, I suppose). To the same point, why do Minos and Medusa spend any time around Jashin-chan and Yurine? And I’m guessing this is just me, but if I’d summoned forth an evil entity and it became clear that the entity wasn’t happy with the arrangement (to the point that they were reacting with violence), I’d probably just give up and let them go rather than incur their additional wrath. Why Yurine is so incredibly sadistic and cruel, or why her cruelty is supposed to read as funny, is beyond me.
To be honest, I think what tipped the scales for me really has to do with my reading of the nature of the violence. To me, it feels like Jashin and Yurine are locked in a mutually-abusive relationship, with Yurine the one coming across as the worse one of the two of them. It’s not just because of the physical fighting, but more the fact that Yurine is always a step ahead and consciously manipulative towards Jashin, who’s doing what she can to try to leave her situation. There’s a scene late in the episode after Yurine has electrocuted Jashin with a stun-gun and chopped part of her tail off to put in the hot-pot (Jashin-chan has regenerative abilities but this is still squicky to me), that she offers Jashin some food. She then electrocutes her again after offering it. That scene in particular really bothered me – toying with someone who’s already half-destroyed after a particularly painful row seems terribly sinister and cruel to me.
I’m very sad that I don’t have many nicer things to say about the show, because this first episode was otherwise very nice to look at (at least when I could read between the blood streaks). The character designs are pleasantly older-school, especially around the eyes; they read a little bit more like early-2000’s designs which weren’t quite so rounded-off. As a J-fashion enthusiast and hobbyist I also appreciate the fact that Yurine is wearing what I’d classify as a legitimate lolita-fashion outfit (albeit fairly old-school). I get unreasonably frustrated when characters are described as “gothic lolitas” when in fact their costumes just have some extra lace and aren’t shaped or sized correctly. The overall animation quality is very consistent as well.
While I think readers might want me to go off on more of a rant, I think it best to say that I don’t really find this comedy funny and the content just isn’t for me. I think for some viewers the extremeness of the characters’ interactions and the clearly over-the-top violence are just the type of comedic material they enjoy, and I get that; I think that a good portion of comedy, no matter what style, is about laughing at the misfortune of others. When a character relationship seems to have no benefits to those in it and the interactions escalate from “giving each-other crap” to “literally trying to kill one-another,” though, I can no longer sympathize enough to make it worth my while.
Pros: The character designs have a slightly old-school feel and the animation is solid. Yurine is an accurate gothic lolita.
Cons: The comedic elements are incredibly violent and mean-spirited and sometimes come across as abusive. The visuals of blood and such are very extreme.
Grade: D+