There’s a concept that comes up in fiction that I have my doubts about: the idea that you can just “rewrite” a memory by doing the exact same thing with a different person or intention. Most often it seems to pop up in romance, where a character thinks that a bad romantic or sexual experience … Read more
It’s so easy to blame ourselves for things we have no control over. Maybe it’s a way of claiming a little power anyway, albeit in a fairly negative sense. I caught myself doing that yesterday, when my twenty-year-old cat Fiona had to be put down: logically, I knew that she was just really old; emotionally … Read more
As a rule, I don’t tend to like Christmas episodes, so if one works for me, it must be pretty special. That feels like the case with this one – while it doesn’t veer too far out of the schmaltzy feel-good norm for Christmas-themed stories, it still plays with that enough to make it Deaimon‘s … Read more
Maybe I’m missing something or just being an unreasonable pain-in-the-ass about this, but I’m having trouble seeing how Nagomu and Kanoko broke up over a “misunderstanding.” Even with this week’s flashback to give us more context, it feels less like Kanoko didn’t understand what Nagomu was asking and more was giving him some sort of … Read more
Seen from the outside, Nagomu is a disaster. Or at least, that’s how he appears to Hiiro, the new apprentice. She’s very much caught up in her own idea of what it means to be “perfect,” and we seasoned anime viewers know that that’s more a recipe for disaster than for anything else. Just why … Read more
Now this is more the show I thought we’d be getting. With its sixth episode, Deiamon returns to the family theme with something of a vengeance, also giving us an episode that’s much more cohesive than the previous two. Although it still is clearly divided into two sections, they complement each other better than the … Read more
I know that it’s a difficult, thankless job to get subtitles done for a simulcast, so I do feel badly wondering why a couple of terms were left untranslated in this episode. Would “floor cushion” and “Shinto shrine” have been so terrible in terms of relaying the full context of the scenes? The answer may … Read more
Deaimon gives us one big question this week: is Nagomu’s friend who taught him how to play the guitar also Itsuka’s missing dad? It would make a certain amount of sense; after all, he brought Itsuka to Nagomu’s house knowing it was a place where she would be taken care of, and how else would … Read more
There’s a Yiddish expression that, abbreviated, amounts to “worries go down better with soup.” Soup may not be the food featured in Deaimon, but the sentiment seems to be present nonetheless – there’s something comforting about eating a soothing food when the world feels like it’s turned upside down. That has most certainly happened for … Read more
What You Need to Know: ICYMI, it was announced that Maaya Sakamoto will be singing theme songs for two TV anime starting in April in Japan. The first is the opening theme for Deaimon, a story set in an old confectionery store in Kyoto. The title is “Sumire.” The lyrics were written by Sakamoto herself, … Read more
