Dead Account – Episode 1

Content Warning: Blood, Photosensitive imagery

What’s it about? If you die on social media, you die in real life…or do you? That’s not always the case for those who haunt the world as digital specters, born from cat videos, mukbangs, and that one King trapped in a brick oven above water and coal puzzle video.. Soji Enishiro is about to come face to face with the students who delve into cyberspace to keep the thin, digitized veil between the online afterlife and our IRL existence together, lest it come apart.

Episode 1 introduces online troll and caring big brother Soji, a trickster who uses social media to gather money to keep paying his sister’s medical bills. For the most part, he’s satisfied gaining views and pocketing the profits that he earns from his fists and flaming….that is, until life comes at him fast. You see, Soji lives for one person and one person only: his younger sister Akari, who loves sweets and currently resides in a hospital. It’s his reason for whipping up chaos online.

So when Akari dies, Soji is left aimless.. His yearning tethers her to reality, splitting the divide between life and death down the middle in his subconsciously desperate attempts to keep his sister alive. Just like the yokai of yore, she becomes a shattered spirit, forever changing Soji’s life path for better…or worse.

In many ways, you could say this is a think piece about how social media hollows us out, forming the foundation of the loss of what it means to be human. No longer do we worship gods of supernaturally natural forces. We don’t call to the Moon or the Westward wind. Our gods come in plastic, backlit with soft-edged applications that devour what once would have been done by candlelight in the company of others. In this essay, I will—

Nah, it’s actually an action shonen that has what I call the La Croix effect: it’s got hints of other, much more fascinating anime but doesn’t have much of its own to hold up its unique-hair-colored cast. In this case, this has the zest of Devil Survivor: Overclocked, Tokyo Xanadu EX, Seraph of the End, and Dan Da Dan, but none of the charm. Why? 

Well, because simply put, Dead Account just isn’t compelling, even with the really fascinating concept of the internet haunting us offline and into death (hey wait!). It’s a genuinely fascinating element in a show that’s so miltosque that I caught myself yawning, and it’ll always be a shame that Dead Account premiered like this because there’s actual, compelling twists in this premiere that turn it from completely boring to actually engaging. But then it goes right back to being just like anything else, even when its main character is grieving and kicks off the plot.

You know, every season there’s a show that feels a bit like hot pot in a bad way, an amalgamation of “What’s hot and trending” in anime. Unfortunately, I’ve found the show, and it’s like the superwholock of shonen. Call it Demonbluedan (That is, Demon Slayer, Blue Exocist, and Dan Da Dan because there’s so many anime this is trying to be but categorically isn’t) and you’ve got yourself one of the most c-tier premieres that’s offensive primarily for its quality and not even anything with its actual plot.

I’m sure one of us (cough cough Peter cough) will keep up with this, but unless Dead Account does something more to stake its claims as being actually interesting, then it’ll be considered dead on arrival.