This Week in Anime

Are Love After World Domination's Desumi and Fudo the Perfect Couple?

Jean-Karlo
AAAH! After ten thousand years, I'm free! It's time to write This Week In Anime!

Folks around here know the one thing I love more than sprinkling in references to my fave VTuber is tokusatsu—and we've been pretty lucky lately because after the surprise chortle that was Miss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development Department, we have another toku-flavored comedy, and this time it's a romcom! Of course, it falls to me to be That Guy because I'm the only degenerate who's actually watched Super Sentai. So here's Love After World Domination!

This is something of an old yarn for toku-shows, especially Super Sentai/Power Rangers; among the Power Rangers: Lost Galaxy cast, the actors for Lost Galaxy Green and villainess Trakeena got married after the show wrapped (congrats to Damon Henderson and Amy Miller-Rolle!). And it's likewise happened in Super Sentai, like in Carranger (the Japanese source behind Power Rangers: Turbo) where Red Racer and Beauty Zonnette fell into a forbidden romance. It's also inspired plenty of manga, like Superwomen In Love (available now from Seven Seas!). It's a tale as old as time, and it never really starts getting old. But hey, this is what happens when you cast a bombshell gravure model as your villainess: your steadfast hero/ine is gonna catch feelings.

I wanna say that that's a bit more skin than you'd see on actual Super Sentai, but Beauty Zonnette always looked about a few centimeters away from falling out of her corset so yeah. Grown-ups in spandex!

The story goes that a war wages on between two groups in Japan. On the heroic side you have the Freezing Taskforce Gelato 5, ice-cream flavored heroes complete with color-coded costumes and weapons. Opposing them are the Secret Society Gekko, an evil organization bent on global domination.

While the Reaper Princess is a powerful combatant for Gekko, rumored to drink boar blood and eat raw bears and known for swinging a mean flail, outside of her leather corset she's just Desumi, a young woman who loves pasta, Pilates, and her fat tabby cat, and worries about her horoscope. Fudo actually internet-stalks her a bit before working up the courage to ask her out... and she actually says "yes" because hey, gotta give a guy some credit when he goes on a limb like that.

To wit: these two idiots start dating and they don't even exchange phone numbers until several weeks in. Holy crap, you two, get your stuff in order.

It leads to stuff like Fudo and Desumi not seeing each other for several weeks all because Gekko hasn't planned an attack for a while. So Fudo infiltrates the Gekko base under the pretense of sabotaging one of their new secret weapons—in reality, he and Desumi just play Uno.

Also, there are shenanigans aplenty like Desumi having to sit on Fudo to hide him from the enemy combatants (who uses "Eee!" to communicate – I cannot stress how vital that is for a proper combatant grunt in tokusatsu). Or hiding in Desumi's lingerie locker.

I wanna point out something that bugs me: Culverin Bear and the other monster generals have moving mouths! This is bad and wrong! Last year's Miss Kuroitsu had all the weird monsters speak without moving their mouths, because realistically the suits for those monsters in actual tokusatsu have limited facial expressions. Most you can get is, like, a lower lip twitching for closeups. We know this is supposed to be a cyborg bear-man, but this is tokusatsu—respect the rules. We're here to see grownups in spandex fight people in unwieldly animal masks! Our inner child knows "bear-man," only the superficial adult says "guy in suit!" It's the imagination that matters!

For sure, one thing LAWD has over Miss Kuroitsu you'll notice if you don't get distracted by Desumi's cake: way better animation. Miss Kuroitsu was extremely workmanlike, to its detriment. There's a lot of fun flourish for Love After World Domination. It's not exactly Mononoke or anything, but there is a ton of charm and character pumped into these characters. Desumi's skull mask having fun face game is only part of it. There is also a ton of fun toku-fanservice for folks like me who have been around the block: the narrator for the show is Fumihiko Tachiki, best known as Gendo Ikari from Neon Genesis Evangelion, but he's also done a ton of narration work for Kamen Rider shows in the past. The voice of Gelato 5's morphers is Subaru Kimura, who on top of voicing the Seiza Blasters from Kyūranger is also the voice actor for the demon Vice in Kamen Rider Re/Vice. Culverin Bear is voiced by Hiroki Yasumoto, who similarly has a ton of toku-casting in his past, and Hellko is voiced by M.A.O, best known as GokaiYellow/Luka Milfy from Gokaiger (and was also the voice actress for Lady Akashic in Miss Kuroitsu). There's a lot of fun stuff!

I will say that outside of the toku-fanservice, much of the humor in Love After World Domination is from Desumi and Fudo not knowing how dating works. Like Desumi trying to call Fudo... and getting his mom because Fudo doesn't have a smartphone, which he's too much of a musclehead to know how to use.

This is also a good time to point out who rounds out the ranks of Gelato 5, because they do tend to have quite a bit to do with matters. And I think Gelato Yellow is a good place to start! An older "onee-san"-type who likes her liquor, Misaki watches over the other members of Gelato 5 while giving them all really bad advice. I figured she'd be a romantic competitor for Desumi, but interestingly that never happened. Possibly because she's drinking age and Fudo and Desumi are 17.

Haru up there with Misaki did turn out to be a romantic competitor. As Gelato Pink, she's the newest (and youngest) member of the team. She's also got a crush on Fudo, which did lead to some conflict between her and Desumi.

There's a very heartwarming episode where Haru confronts Desumi over their mutual feelings for Fudo, but Haru relents in a very heart-wrenching scene. From there on she serves as a secret-keeper for the two, helping them have their dalliances while Gekko and Gelato 5 fight. Also, Desumi makes a new friend in Haru, which a girl always needs. I'd have liked more scenes of Desumi and Haru hanging out and doing girl stuff, honestly.

It's a good way to lean in on the kind of Darwinist philosophy members of a society like Gekko would have, but also, it's just cute seeing girls be friends with each other instead of being at each other's throats for the same potato.

That there is Hayato, Gelato Blue. And he has zero game. He peppers his dialogue with random English and I think the most cheek-pounding he gets is when women slap him in his smarmy face.

He doesn't really do anything or get involved with much because he's chasing girls. But Daigo? Yeah, he's no fuckboy. He's just traumatized.

As it turns out, Daigo trained Desumi as a child, and she's always been freakishly strong. He never had the spine to admit she outclassed him, so when she clobbered the owner of their dojo (who promptly retired from shame), Daigo kept training Desumi. Credit to his fragile, fragile ego (and Desumi approaching Fudo's level of knuckle-headedness from the other side), Desumi is convinced he's going easy on her.

Daigo doesn't know Desumi is Reaper Princess, he just knows that she and Fudo make for a terrifying, terrifying couple.

Meanwhile, Desumi has her friends at Gekko: Beast Princess and Steel Princess. They're generals, like her (and apparently they're all high schoolers too, which makes Beast Princess's outfit and Desumi's lingerie iffy in retrospect), but Desumi is just so freakishly strong that she far outpaces them in performance in every monthly report.

See, I was thinking Steel Princess would turn out to have a thing for Beast Princess, but then she goes up to the bear and I have to cope that we have another "hamster eating a banana" situation on our hands. There is some girl's love teasing in here, but it comes from another source: Hojo, a classmate of the three princesses and—get this—a gyaru.

Not only is Fudo impossible to dominate (because he only really cares about Desumi's wellbeing), Hojo doesn't really have it in her to dominate anyone. She's apparently too subby. So the whole thing just dies on the vine before it begins. Hojo really does crush hard on Desumi (it's the old "everyone thinks the gyaru is easy, Desumi really likes her nails), and apparently she gets to creep on Desumi at Gekko...as Heat Princess. Unbeknownst to absolutely everyone. Heat Princess even appears earlier in the show, in an excellent bit of foreshadowing.

Both of these dunderheads are guaranteed to have Desumi dakis, calling it now. They have matching shirts for the Reaper Princess fan club.

What drama shows up seems to have more to do with Desumi's allegiance to Gekko than anything else. As it turns out, Desumi comes from a family of Gekko combatmen, with her father and mother both being retired Gekko footsoldiers and her little siblings being raised to join the organization once they're of age. Desumi was signed up by her parents, and only now is she really thinking if it's what she wants. The thing keeping her from leaving Gekko and joining Gelato 5 is that Gelato 5 has rules against dating in the workplace. She's happy with Gekko, to an extent, but she isn't sure if it's what she wants to do for the rest of her life.

Part of it was that her boss wanted to combine her with a gorilla, because "primates." I'd personally hand in a letter of resignation if I was slated to be fused with a gorilla.

This is what really makes Love After World Domination work for me. The toku flavoring is nice, but the romantic writing is legit. Miss Kuroitsu was also fun but the dry animation was a bit of a turnoff. Love After World Domination has a wildly amazing cast with bright, charming personalities and fantastic characterful animation. Also, the toku-references are fun for a dweebus like me, and it's used to great effect: it's not just window dressing, it's used as a platform for really good character moments.

It shouldn't be as hard as it is to find a couple you want to root for. Thankfully, that's not an issue with Desumi and Fudo. The show is only eight episodes in, it'll be interesting to see how it wraps up this season. And if you want more, the manga is available in the U.S. from Kodansha! It's definitely worth a read!