Dead Account

Episode 11

For this week's episode of Dead Account, I decided to do something different by having somebody suffer with me. And that someone was none other than my friend Joe. I absolutely had to. Why not? Joe is the perfect person to watch this type of bad anime with. Because here's the thing: Joe loves anime, but he's not exactly an otaku. He doesn't watch seasonals. He's only been to a handful of conventions. To this day, he's still convinced that, just based on the visuals alone, Sound! Euphonium is a magical girl show, which is something that I have never bothered to correct. Trust me, it's funnier that way. Especially when you both end up referring to Eupho as “Magical Tuba Girls” instead.

But Joe loves all of the classics; he loved Promare when he saw it in theaters, he's got a library of retro JRPGs that is beyond impressive, and he not only watched Card Captor Sakura as a child, but he even has a Clow Card book. He makes me look like a fake fan by comparison; I didn't watch Card Captor Sakura until quarantine. Also, Joe has been to Japan. I have not. He's the best kind of normie you'll ever meet. The Toshio Okada of casuals, even Joe might not get anime, but he gets anime.

SO ANYWAY, Joe and I have watched a ton of bad movies together (hello, 1987's The Barbarians!), but hardly a single bad episode of anime. This had to change. Joe came into the anime blind, and obviously, I wasn't going to waste his time forcing the previous ten episodes down his throat. I explained the gist of it for context, and when I explained that the main character's basically shonen Logan Paul, AND now he's fighting a dude whose Instagram got blocked from posting too many lewd photos, Joe's reaction was priceless. “Oh, so this is what .hack would be like if it were woke?” he joked. “Because these guys definitely wouldn't get cancelled if this were .hack. You can do anything in that world, apparently.”

And so a great viewing of some terrible anime commenced, and that alone made this week's episode of Dead Account worth it. We riffed our way through the entire episode, and God, there were just so many bangers to be had. The guy who's cool enough to wear Beats by Dre but not cool enough to listen to the best Nirvana album. The ice dude is basically being Arnold Schwarzenegger from the cinematic opus Batman & Robin. The one dude's feather attack's name that was stolen from that song by The Sword. Why do they make it look like his crotch is made of tiny icicles, but his ass is just so big and out there, and more importantly, why am I looking at this? What even is this Kill la Kill bullshit? However, the moment I lost it involved a short still that imagines Soji and Naruhiko getting stabbed in the head with icicles, and Joe's reaction of “Oh no” had all of the melancholy and shock of someone who just dropped their ice cream. I howled with laughter for a solid minute. Watching Joe work was like if Stephen Wright MST3K'd a terrible shonen. Pure poetry in motion.

Which, of course, is more than I can say about this week's episode of Dead Account.

Dead Account's eleventh stretch has all the same bad features as the other few episodes that preceded it. It all feels like a lazier copy and paste than the simulacra'd town they are in (which is still one of the nonsensical plot points I've seen in a mighty long time). Soji has to fight a giant ice dude who's now a ghost account because he formed a bond with Sad Boy K. And because this ice guy is a relatively new character, of course, he has to have boring flashbacks to pad out the fight sequences that all feel as frozen as his attacks. It's the usual case of something that could have been summed up in five minutes, but is so drawn out that the fight doesn't even finish by the episode's finale.

We get into the origin of the ice dude's story, the appropriately named Ban Ashina. We see him take selfie after selfie of his beautiful self, and as his online engagement reaches its peak, he flies too close to the sun by posting some saucy NSFW pics. This gets Ban Ashina, well, banned again and again, which more than dents his ego. That is, until Sad Boy K follows him. Apparently, Ashina was feeling insecure about himself, and what really cheered him up was not getting all of those followers, but rather one lone account that decided to give him attention for once. It's a classic case of Dead Account needing to give the bad guy reasons behind his villainy instead of just letting him be a bad guy. There's also a melodrama needed that's just so freaking unnecessary, and it only succeeds in making Ban Ashina seem even more pathetic. The only good (read: laughable) thing about this is that they flashback to a fight that happened at yet another Best Buy, which...lol. Move over, Waffle House, because Best Buy has you cornered on the “random-ass places to fight people” market. We also get some insight on Naruhiko's past, and it's revealed that he had dead parents too because, well, this is Dead Account and that's just how things roll around here.

I can't believe I'm about to say this, but I will. This episode's fight scene was so bad that I actually found myself fondly reminiscing on Solo Leveling. I still stand by every negative thing I've ever said about that show, but I also stand by the one good thing, too: that polar bear fight at the beginning of season two was heavy metal as Hell. The violence was super stylized and flashy, the animation was flowing, and every moment was exciting despite it being fought by such a nothing protagonist. And people and things actually moved! People actually went from one side of the battlefield to another because, get this, they were engaged in combat and thus had to move around to dodge attacks. Crazy! Insane! Who'd-a-thunk! It's like cats and dogs living together, absolute hysteria! And this just does NOT happen with Dead Account's fights!

Because Ashina is a ghost account now, he's like his liege, Sad Boy K, before him. He stands there, non-menacingly, in a very sterile, extremely static fight scene. Soji's classmates leave the battlefield to recharge their batteries, and when they come back, they don't think to immediately surround the Ashina at all and pummel him with attacks. That's just taking the easy way out, and such cheap trickery is for suckers, right? So the squad huddles inside a barrier that Naruhiko's iPod put up, and the episode just ends right there, with everything so static in place. Again, at least remember Solo Levelling's polar bear fight. I doubt I will remember a single thing from this show's one bad fight.

It's all a boring yawn of a watch. But at least I had a friend to watch it with this time. And if there was anything that Fairy Tale, I mean Bleach, I mean Gurren Lagann, I mean My Little Pony, I mean episode eleven of Dead Account teaches us, it's that anything is possible through the power of friendship.

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Dead Account is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.