Digging Into Yurei Deco - Episode 9

Hey there, and welcome back to Yurei Deco! After a few weeks of episodic adventures that broadened the show's themes but didn't do much to change the status quo, last episode ended with a big stinger in that the Yurei detective club was officially over, per a decree by club leader Finn himself. I honestly wasn't so hot on that ending—which I wrote about in plenty of detail here—but regardless of the show's execution, Finn's betrayal is still a fairly reasonable story beat. Finn has been a mysterious character throughout, so making his biggest decision so far something that puts him at odds with the rest of the characters opens the door to some meaty drama as we explore his actual motives and resolve tensions within the group. Plus, I'm sure Finn's motives tie in with some other mysteries, and with presumably only three or four episodes left, the show has some major revelations to knock out. 

However that pans out, I also hope that we don't lose focus on the show's big ideas. My biggest fear as Yurei Deco enters its final act is that the show might abandon its thematically dense material in favor of more straightforward plot developments. That's not an uncommon move in anime—just look at Kaiba, a show with which Yurei Deco shares a lot of DNA, and which features an enthralling first half and an absolute flop of a second half. Yurei Deco has so far proven that it's best when drilling into its themes and not so good on the plotty-plot end of things, so whatever it does, I just hope it does it well.

Anyways, that's enough speculation about what might happen—let's see what this new episode's actually brings to the table!

Episode 9

We start by recapping the fable of the giant with a hundred eyes, now with storybook picture drawings and what sounds like Hack's VA narrating. A good time to remind the audience of this narrative framing device from the first episode and give viewers another chance to speculate about how it ties in with what we've learned. My money's on it being an allegory for the revolution that Kearney led

Really great artstyle for this whole section. Screencap city over here

In the storybook drawings, the traitor who the giant catches is explicitly the king of this fictional city. A clear enough parallel to the Customer Center itself being the source of evil

Oh dang, the voiceover was actually Finn as a child reading this book to some other kids, meaning we're diegetically in a flashback

This episode being dedicated to Finn's backstory may be why they decided to play his motives so close to the vest last episode. That being said, this doesn't really change my opinion on Finn's betrayal scene, which felt pretty hamfisted in ways that could've been fixed

Finn grew up in poverty as a Yurei—doesn't seem like he ever lived in the main Tom Sawyer city, as opposed to Berry. But he was a tech expert, fixing other people's Decos even as a kid

I like how bulky this Deco is compared to all the others we've seen. Either this kid has a crappy model due to their circumstances, or technology advances at an incredible rate even in this show

Lovely backgrounds. As usual, the more lived-in aesthetic of the Yurei towns allow for more vibrant and detailed shot compositions than the sterile architecture of the main city

As the kids sort through the dump, Finn asks the other kid if they think there's been more trash nowadays, even though it should be getting processed at the Waste Management Facility. Leave it to the Customer Center to illegally dump in areas where they can get away with it 

"Who cares? Let's find those parts for the Deco. Once it's working, I won't have to look at all this trash." Oof. What a biting offhanded line—while the middle/upper class in the inner city is using Decos to glitz up their boring, squeaky-clean lives, the impoverished are using the tech to escape the reality of their living situation. Sorting through trash to escape from the trash

Finn's dad made gapao rice with cilantro. So Finn's been cooking old family recipes for the detective club. Maybe he cares about them more than he let on

Finn's feeling bad with Deco-sickness well after fixing the other kid's Deco. Seems really debilitating for him

His brother comes in after visiting the city and has gained five Love by nabbing an unclaimed vending machine prize

Everyone in the house is wearing Deco glasses, even though they're not in the city—I don't think we've seen that in a Yurei town yet. Also, one of Finn's sisters has a peacock shirt. I'm curious what the relationship between Customer Center and Yurei is here, but it can't be good

The brother got a pair of bottlecap Deco glasses for Finn that help with Deco-sickness but make him look like a stereotypical anime nerd. So they do have some workarounds

Finn is excited about the possibility of using a Deco and going into Hyperverses, but his grandfather gets angry. "Let the folks in the city living under the Customer Center's thumb obsess over Love. We live how we want in these parts because we have real freedom." 

This is immediately followed by a coughing fit. His grandfather seems to have made an intentional choice to take poverty over the CC's totalitarian rule, but being excluded from modernity means being excluded from modern healthcare

The grandfather likes plants. Seems the Finn of the present took a lot of cues from him, both in terms of plantlife and general philosophy

The brother character parrots the Customer Center's own talking points about how Love is a measure of one's true value, to which the grandfather says you should grow cilantro, plant the seeds, and grow more—then you'll have more to eat. Like Hack, the only things with real value for this ojisan are tangible

Finn likes his grandpa's philosophizing but still likes his gift glasses. Torn between the two worlds

The brother mentions Phantom Zero showing up. Finn is obsessed with this in a very little-kid way because PZ resets everything to zero—interesting how PZ mutates into kind of an antihero figure for the lower class, rather than just a gamified AR mystery

Finn plays in the dump as if Phantom Zero were a super sentai hero. Cute

The waste management plant he stumbles into is totally overgrown and abandoned. The purification system isn't working

Finn analyzes the friggin' water and tries to tell his brother about how increasing pollution may be causing Deco-sickness, but his bro just brags about getting another Love and yawns. The social media grind is distracting the most disenfranchised members of society from the real problems affecting them

This show's relationship to social media has been accused of being "Old Man Yells At Cloud," which I can't really dispute, but I don't think that invalidates its points. Real-life social media platforms might not be attached to a totalitarian state like the Customer Center (at least in the U.S.), but they are making people complacent about real issues, and they do try to make people think online clout is a substitute for real social connection. I think we could all do with more legitimate skepticism about the Twitters and TikToks of the world 

Finn goes into a Hyperverse to try reporting the water issues to the Customer Center, but because he's a Yurei without an ID, the bot flags him as unauthorized and ignores his data. A stark demonstration that the Yurei truly are oppressed and ignored 

Finn's Deco-sickness and his grandpa's cough seem to be caused by the same pollution

The Customer Center's "Loss Management Service" pulls up to investigate Finn's unauthorized Deco usage. Finn's family reacts like they're getting raided, and they're probably not wrong to

Finn admits to using the program to report the water purification issue out of a naïve hope that the officer will listen, but he just finds out the data was deleted

Not only did the Customer Center take his family's Deco glasses and his brother's Love, but now there are rumors that Finn sold out his town in exchange for more Love, and the apartment gets vandalized. Kid can't catch a break

Some time later, Grandpa has to leave town to go to a hospital and gives Finn the cilantro plant. Adult Finn's plants have taken on a compelling new meaning now—not only representative of his grandfather's "use that cilantro to grow more cilantro" ideology, but a direct reminder of the Customer Center's failures that led to his grandfather leaving

"If they'd just fixed the system, Grandpa could've stayed with us." Finn correctly identifies the real problem and says he's going to try reporting it again, to which his brother responds by smashing his glasses and saying, "The truth doesn't matter." His brother's allied with his own oppressors, because even though they can unfairly take away his Love at any time and for any reason, he's too bought into their ideology to see that  

While his brother is complacent and has accepted that things are the way they are, Finn has already seen through everything. The issues affecting them are systemic, and without high-level change, they'll keep happening. That sort of change is worth fighting for, despite the ground-level inconvenience of losing Love and clout

But the threat of loss is how these sorts of horrible societal systems perpetuate themselves—they teach their participants, even the ones who are hurting the most, to hammer down any raised nails. The Customer Center themselves doesn't need to do much to Finn, because his neighbors and relatives are doing the work for them. Think all of the indigent people who celebrated Trump's tax breaks for millionaires—U.S. capitalism has misled millions into believing that anyone can get rich or that the rich will share their wealth, and so people actively vote against their best interests on the off chance that they strike gold

After townies throw a rock through their window, the brother uses Finn's exact words from last episode's betrayal scene to say they're not a family and to tell him to leave. Oof. This really resonates—Finn internalized all this cruelty from his childhood and parroted it right back at the detective club, continuing a cycle of hurt he may not even realize he's caught in. This episode has turned him from an enigma into a pretty rich character

Finn walks along the streets of the Yurei town with only his grandpa's cilantro plant

Oh shit. The weird device he looked at last episode was actually one lens of the Deco glasses his bro got him

At this point, the puzzle pieces are all in place—Finn himself is the giant with a hundred eyes from the opening fable. He catches the Customer Center doing something awful in his hometown and is metaphorically killed by the people who supposedly loved him. Hopefully that means it's now time for the second half of the fable, where the people of the land later grow to appreciate the giant and he can finally rest

Not that this similarity prevents the fable from potentially reflecting other stuff in the narrative (like Kearney's revolution). Good symbolism often has many layers!

We zoom out to see Berry and Hack watching this memory from the outside. So they were snoopin'

A somewhat jarring transition—we're suddenly now in the present-day detective club as Berry and Hack tell the others what they found out. We also discover Finn is absent. This second half could really slow down to explain what happened after last episode—Did Finn just leave in the night? How were they spying on him like that in the first place? 

Finn walks to the city he grew up in, which now has Deco AR constructs everywhere covering up piles of trash. It's only gotten worse since he left

Mr. Watson looks for Finn by holding up a sign printed with his exact likeness. I love this cat man. Everyone else is in Cyberpunk 2077 while Mr. Watson's in Looney Tunes

Our team confronts Finn in the water purification plant. "It's an invasion of privacy to pry into someone's past." Yeah, actually—why did Hack of all people agree to do that?

Finn says this is his own problem that doesn't involve the rest, but Hack gets mad and throws plants him. "Life has 'involved' you a lot for a long time now!" The exact opposite of what his brother told him years ago

Finn laughs and it feels earned. Good stuff

These story beats are a little broad and resolving quickly, but they're effective. Of course Finn didn't trust any of them with this information last episode, because his childhood family turned on him ages ago for the same thing. But Hack believes in day-to-day experience over anything else and knows they've become a family from the way they help each other

They work together to clean up the plant and reset the purification system, a thing Finn couldn't do alone. Social change is often about grassroots organizing and community building to tackle these kinds of problems from a local level, rather than trying to do it solo or rely on slow-moving and unfeeling government mechanisms. When this show gets it, it gets it

As they eat some street food, Hank explains that the purification system can be reset, but it'll also reset all of the Love in this town. Some locals overhear and get angry about losing their Love. Finn tries to explain, but the townies still don't care when you can cover up the trash with Deco usage

And then his bro shows up. Of course

A legit cliffhanger for once as the townies surround Finn's group and accuse them of being no better than Phantom Zero. "Down with the Zero Phenomenon!" shout all of these people who collectively have less Love than Berry did in the city

Post-episode thoughts

Hot damn! I was honestly worried about Yurei Deco's trajectory after last episode, but this one turned it around in excellent fashion. Most crucially, the show managed to pull off something it hasn't up until now: compelling, multifaceted character writing, and an actual character arc for Finn. His aloof nature and desire to do things alone make total sense now, and while it does feel like his deep-seated personal problems got resolved a little too quickly, his backstory was one of the most compelling parts of the show to date. Just an elegantly realized episode all around.

With a legitimate threat on our hands and a town to save, I'm excited to see where things go from here. Will our detective club unite the town against the Customer Center and make the Deco-shaped scales fall from their eyes, or will the show take a more cynical route and require them to make the ethical choice without the town's approval? Either way, next episode will certainly be interesting, and I can't wait to see how it resolves. Until next time!