Heavenly Delusion

Episodes 1-4

Heavenly Delusion is weird as hell, and that's a good thing. Given some of the promotional imagery and the head-scratching licensing by Disney, you would be forgiven for assuming this is a standard romp through the urban decay and frayed morality of the post-apocalypse—The Last of Us, but anime. However, with these four episodes down, it's clear that this series has a wide swathe of ideas about what it wants to explore in this setting, which includes monstrosity, humanity, gender, incest, community, rebellion, love, and survival. It's a thematic mélange seasoned by a large cast of likable characters and an irreverent bite to its tone.

Much of that bite can be attributed to manga creator Masakazu Ishiguro, who is probably otherwise best known for the maid café comedy And Yet the Town Moves. While I haven't read the manga, the first episode of its anime (check it out on HIDIVE if you want to see Shaft at the height of its powers) reveals a gently acerbic sense of offbeat humor that transposes well onto Heavenly Delusion's setting. This isn't a comedy by any means, but there's a playful wickedness holding back the dourness that infects a lot of this genre.

I should mention that I'm up to date with the volumes of Heavenly Delusion's manga that have been localized so far. It's worth reading alongside the anime, but I won't intentionally discuss any future plot beats. I have to stress “intentionally” because Heavenly Delusion's plotting begs for speculation, and it's hard not to theorize while you read/watch it. Ishiguro strings the audience along with a concatenation of mysteries in a way that reminds me of how Naoki Urusawa writes his sprawling epic page-turners. It's a difficult manga to put down, and as an anime the intervening weeks feel a little longer than they should be.

To that end, the most powerful tool in Heavenly Delusion's box is the connective tissue between the two parallel narratives: our two protagonists with identical faces, Maru and Tokio. This allows the series to indulge in two wildly different sci-fi settings without feeling too disjointed. The sterility of the facility that Tokio seeks to investigate and escape contrasts with the dirt and decay of the outside world through which Kiruko escorts Maru. Different shades of paranoia permeate both, with the electronic surveillance monitoring the children, while the travelers contend with bandits and man-eating monsters. As an audience, we also anticipate the moment when these two storylines will finally intersect, and we scour them both for clues in the meantime.

As a sci-fi thriller/mystery, Heavenly Delusion has been pretty smart about doling out its breadcrumbs conservatively, but it's not so stingy as to become frustrating. Some of the hints are downright devious, like throwaway lines and jokes from Kiruko in episode one (“I'm 18, wait, 20,” and “I'm a boy too!”) that foreshadow the big flashback in episode three. The bird symbol on their Kiru-Beam drives them forward to “Heaven,” just as the unexplained text message drives Tokio to investigate the “outside of the outside.” It's also worth paying attention to how and when the series overlaps these narratives. It's particularly blatant in episode four, with the frog-like kuku climbing up the walls while Maru and Kiruko fight a giant fish that slithers around the ship with a similar technique. Given the appearance of the “babies” alongside the facility children's various superhuman powers, a connection between them and the Man-Eaters cannot be denied.

I have a bunch of theories about the story that I could get into, but I think the more interesting and more controversial facets of Heavenly Delusion are thematic in nature. And the big one is gender. Hoo boy, the whole series positively smacks of gender right now. There are relatively subtle details, like the students in Tokio's “school” having gender-neutral uniforms and no sexual education—deliberately so, given the comments by the scientists this week. Nevertheless, these efforts have not staved off the onset of puberty, as we see sexual attraction, same-sex and heterosexual, grip Tokio's class. Given the sterility of their environment, the persistence of both love and lust can be seen as a natural refutation of whatever experiment the directors are trying to carry out. There's also the matter of Mina, the facility's AI, whose chassis is gendered brazenly as a pregnant woman, suggesting even harder that the scientists are playing with the fundamentals of life.

The gendered elephant in the room, though, is Kiruko, the result of younger brother Haruki's brain being transplanted into the body of his older sister Kiriko. Also, he was (and still is) in love with her. To put it mildly, there's a lot going on there! In the most abstracted sense, Kiruko's experience resembles that of a transgender man (the old “man's brain in a woman's body” simplification). Given their thorny (and horny) extenuating circumstances, there's room to be justifiably offended by Kiruko. Ishiguro is, by all accounts, a cis author venturing outside of his lane. However, I'd make the argument that Heavenly Delusion, as a piece of science fiction, isn't using Kiruko to comment on the lived experience of trans men, but rather as means of interrogating and playing with rigid gender constructs in a more generalized sense. Gender affects all of us, across the entire spectrum of identity and presentation, so thinking about gender critically and flexibly is an important thing to do.

My primary defense of Kiruko comes down to this: I like them a lot! They're a fun character with a strong personality, they have hilarious chemistry with Maru, and they do their best to push forward despite their flaws and weaknesses. They're a rich and complicated co-protagonist first and foremost, and I think having those storytelling fundamentals gives Heavenly Delusion leeway to be messy with its gender stuff. Gender is inherently messy! It's amorphous yet overpowering. It can be confusing and euphoric in the same turn. Kiruko calls themself a man, but doesn't mind Maru calling them “Sis.” This could be because they have other things to worry about in this environment (like not being absorbed into a giant monster), but it's also worth considering that their gender identity is now inexorably entangled with Haruki's feelings for his sister. The camera lingers on their body only when Kiruko themself does so. The incestuous angle might just be sensationalism for the sake of it, but I don't mind that extra splash of taboo when the full picture is this interesting.

Speaking of the full picture, the anime has gone above and beyond crafting an adaptation that's lovely to look at. The backgrounds provide gorgeous vistas of crumbling infrastructure. The battle scenes look cinematic, and both the horror and sci-fi elements get their due. Storyboarding choices are smart, like the voyeuristic eye through which we see many of the school scenes, putting us in the seat of the scientists in charge. The OP is a tremendous achievement by renowned animator Weilin Zhang. My main complaint is that they're really zipping through the material, at a clip of about half a volume per episode. It's not that the anime feels rushed, per se—it keeps things exciting!—but I wouldn't mind a little more breathing room. Kiruko's backstory, for instance, slowed down to let the adaptation indulge in more abstract imagery that helped the tragedy hit that much harder.

Overall, however, Heavenly Delusion is one of my favorite series airing this season. Its blend of post-apocalyptic horror, conspiracy, and human tenacity provides plenty to chew on, provided you don't mind biting through some bone and gristle as well.

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Heavenly Delusion is currently streaming on Hulu as Tengoku Daimakyo.

Steve is on Twitter while it lasts. He wants to try Kiruko's cooking. You can also catch him chatting about trash and treasure alike on This Week in Anime.