Digging Into Yurei Deco - Episode 5

Hey there, and welcome back to Ringtail Reviews! I hope you're excited for more Yurei Deco, because I certainly am. Last episode represented a turn for the show as we were introduced to Berry's new life as a Yurei, and it also presented an important discussion of augmented-reality-enhanced gender presentation through the character of Mitsumame. I love that the show broached this subject in the first place, even though I thought its treatment was a little surface level—it wasn't outwardly judgmental towards Mitsumame or anything, but it seemed reluctant to directly label the character as queer or transgender, and never deepened the discussion past "This masculine person uses Decos to present as a cute girl." But still, given the current state of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric in the world at large, I'm happy for as many pieces of media as possible to bring up these subjects. Even if Yurei Deco isn't screaming TRANS RIGHTS in the way that Stars Align did, it's still broaching the conversation and treating queer-coded characters with respect, which is a net good.

Either way, as of last episode, it seems any subject's on the table for this show. Let's see what its fifth one has in store!

Episode 5

Our hook this episode is "Weird robot pigeon with a message embedded in its back asks the detective club to save something called a nue." Hack and Berry are also confused

We see a commercial for the Neo Animal Museum, where meeting and touching "real" animals (including dinosaurs) is a sincere hook. In a world where augmented reality is central, few things are tangible, meaning the ability to touch something lends that thing extra authenticity and excitement

Finn explains that most animals on the island are robots done up with Deco skins. Wait, so did the professor guy on the commercial make an full-ass Mechagodzilla for the t-rex? That can't be safe

Hank prefers Doggo, who is clearly not a real dog, to the souped-up Deco animals. Gesturing again towards the authenticity vs. glitzed up uncanny valley stuff—Doggo is cute because he's weird and boxy, and making him look more like a real dog would diminish that 

Mister Watson is the name of the large cat man. Hack calls him Mister Snuggly-wuggly, which is clearly the better name

Hack's robot Pup (not to be confused with Doggo) has strong opinions about the museum—"It's like a failed freak show." Strong words coming from a traffic bollard

Gas Mask Girl helpfully pulls up Decopedia, which defines a nue as "A type of bird whose cry is 'nue nue.'" Possibly a Crunchyroll translation error, since the picture is a chimera with a monkey face, cat body, and snake tail

Berry of course thinks this abomination is cute, but I just know that thing would try to suck your toes in the middle of the night

Gas Mask Girl calls Berry basic and then drinks tea out of a tube attached to her mask. Okay

Great, ambitious animation cuts of Berry and Hack walking through an alleyway, then sneaking into a vent and on/off a cargo truck. Love the character acting details with Hack elegantly flipping everywhere while Berry is much less steady

We get a long pan of Hack and Berry riding through the Yurei shantytown. It seems like this area is used for a lot of cargo transport, and we also see lots of smokestacks going, either a sign of wood-burning stoves or perhaps factory pollution. The glamorous main city of Tom Sawyer Island is surrounded by incredibly high walls that keep the rabble out and out of sight from the general populace

Not only does the Customer Center seem to be exploiting the Yurei for their resources and labor, but they're actively separating them from the rest of the island. There is a profit incentive for the upper class to maintain an separate, oppressed lower class to do their labor

Hack is way better at parkour than Berry. Seems like this episode may be leaning into their mutual rivalry

They arrive at the zoo. Berry is just a couple steps away from walking up to every individual animal to say she loves it, but she starts to notice major holes in the Hyperverse background. I think we're meant to take it as the museum is having maintenance trouble, and perhaps financial difficulties, rather than Berry's bad eye going ballistic

The professor (who has wild long hair and the mechanical pigeon nesting on his head) comes up to give an introduction. He's their mystery client and has built every single animal here personally, even the dinosaurs

Hack sniffs a dinosaur's butthole, which causes it to freak out and knock the professor down. The professor is pleased by this

The professor says his greatest creation is the nue. Unlike the picture they saw earlier, this one has a horrible little yokai face. Hack is thrilled

The crux of this case is that the nue's Decopedia picture is inaccurate, causing museum guests to treat the professor's prized creation like "an imposter" and get upset. Their job is to update the Decopedia entry. So now we're diving directly into the information manipulation sub-theme. A compelling next step for the show!

"Is Decopedia ever wrong, though? It's moderated by the Customer Center." Oh Berry you sweet summer child

This actually feels like a very important distinction to point out. While Decopedia is controlled by the Customer Center, AKA the government, its real-life analogue of Wikipedia is publicly editable by anyone. That's not to say information on Wiki can't be wrong or manipulated (it's arguably more susceptible to vandalism by virtue of being public, especially for small pages without eyes on them), but the end result is that a third-party organization that values objectivity is curating this information, which is very different than a website that acts as an arm of an authoritarian state

"Inaccurate information is evil. The way my beloved nue gets treated like a lie due to false information is more than I can bear." Followed by pics of incredibly cutesy mascot characters. A believable mutation of the internet, making a weird and potentially dangerous creature into a kiddified mascot

Madame 44 sends Gas Mask Girl (who we find out is named Smiley) on a mission to find something

Finn gets Berry and Hack into the Decopedia index, which is represented as a big weird library that they have to sort through by hand, lest the Customer Center catch on

Even in this world, I have trouble believing programmers would spend time making a Wiki database function like a physical library, but I really like how it shows the scale of all the information available. The section on animals is a small mountain

Berry throws a book at Hack when they fall asleep, and that book coincidentally contains the nue's data. The two of them try to mold the representation of a nue like clay, but they start fighting and wind up with an abstract little bird tiger, which gains sentience and runs away 

VERY Yuasa/Science Saru animation as Berry and Hack chase this fucked up creature through stacks of books. The mixed-media collage of detailed 3D backgrounds juxtaposed against this creature's glowing, fluid 2D character animation (likely animated on the 1s) gives it an otherworldly feel that I've seen from maybe only Kaiba

Their shitty nue escapes into a portal and is distributed as the new, official picture of a nue

The nue starts hijacking everyone's Decos, but it turns out that people love this and start a nue craze. Of course, this backfires on our protagonists since the public only hates the "real" nue at the museum even more. Something here about the simulacrum becoming more real to people than the real thing (not to mention that the nue is already a fake animal) 

The professor is getting harassment from more and more people about his museum's nue... but in the same breath, he says, "This museum only displays animals based on scientifically accurate information." Nues aren't real, bro. He's clearly being duplicitous about the situation

Smiley comes back to the detective club with a real-ass book that Madame 44 requested. They find out that the nue never existed and was actually just a creature from Japanese folklore. So the professor is just trying to get his weirdo conspiracy theory accepted as truth for his own purposes? 

"The best way to get someone to believe a lie is to wrap it up in an obvious truth." This is the way so many far-right conspiracies get spread—find something with a kernel of truth (parts of America are becoming more diverse) and use that to deliver the lies (education about diversity is dangerous/threatening jobs/corrupting America's inherent white Christianity)

Of course, the other way to get conservatives to believe a lie is to just say something wholly untrue and watch them spread it to own the libs. The absolute state of our real world is already worse than dystopian sci-fi

Hack doesn't give a rat's ass about the lie being spread, but Berry is very concerned. Good character writing—Berry is here only because she found out the truth after being lied to constantly

Whoa, Hack is furious that Berry tried to look into their past. Berry doesn't see the problem because both of them were reported as dead. Hack retorts, "You're alive! Data says you're dead, but I see you living right now!" What's listed in the register doesn't matter at all to Hack, who has no reason to trust the Customer Center—it's the day-to-day experiential truth Hack cares about

Berry says "There there are some truths you can't see for yourself!"

Berry feels weird and bad after that argument and goes to tell the professor the truth about the nue. Of course, the professor already knew no such thing ever existed

The professor erases the nue because false information can't be tolerated. Some rather upsetting animation as its Deco body is erased, leaving behind the dead robot husk

The professor's right, though, at least in a sense—fake information needs to be stamped out, because people can run crazy with it otherwise. I'm sure plenty of people have edited lies into Wikipedia articles for funsies thinking it was harmless, only to find the public believing it wholesale, leading to things like harassment and lost information based on a mistruth you fabricated

There's also a strong parallel with how the internet will take a thing away from its creator, mutate it for people's own purposes, and then leave it behind. The first analogue to the nue I can think of is Pepe the Frog—a perfectly innocent comic character that got coopted by the alt right in a campaign to elect an autocrat, and there was nothing the creator or anyone else could do to stop it

The Decopedia listing gets erased some time afterward, and the Nue craze gets replaced by an... axolotl craze? Sure, that tracks. But it really does speak to the speed of the internet. Fads come and go, and fake information just blends into the rest of the noise without anyone telling the difference. Thinking of all the false Covid claims and folk remedies that went around and were then abandoned

Berry is sad about it all—sad the nue's gone, sad that she caused a fake craze to spread around like that, sad she fought with Hack

She goes to apologize to Hack at Finn's behest, but Hack has looked up her school data to taunt her with. A fitting punishment

The professor had designs to make Nessie and the Yeti next for his museum, but he chooses not to make them. "I'd hate to have to get rid of something I love." The only solution he comes to that he can't take risks that the public will misinterpret. A very sobering ending; he's traded his creative dreams for the responsibility of a public that's done nothing for him

Post-episode thoughts

Well damn. Yurei Deco usually gives us a hefty meal, but this wound up being one of the show's heaviest and most focused episodes so far, really leaning into the complexity of how truth and fiction can so easily intertwine in the internet age. In a move that feels very similar to Kino's Journey or Mushishi, there wasn't a clear moral lesson at the end of this vignette—the dissemination of fake information doesn't have an easy solution without requiring lots and lots of moderation, and we've already seen how that level of moderation (at least from the government) can be weaponized in the other direction to censor things. But even though the professor's decision to give up his fake nue was right, it also felt like a sad choice, and one that is increasingly feeling like the only choice for many online creators—you either watch the public run away with your words and ideas, or you walk away from it entirely.

Despite the gloomy subject matter, I'm thrilled to pieces that Yurei Deco was capable of pulling off such a thoughtful episode, and I'm all the more excited to see what else it's got in store. Until next time!