Digging Into Yurei Deco - Episodes 10-12

Hello and welcome back to Ringtail Reviews, where once more, it's Yurei Deco time! I'm excited to return after taking a couple weeks off from these writeups. As it turns out, it's pretty tough to maintain a blog on top of a 40-hour work week, and even moreso when when the day job starts demanding more than 40 hours! I'm sure I could make a comparison to Yurei Deco's techno-dystopia somewhere in this, but I'm just glad to be in a place where I can write about this show again, and also kind of sleepy.

When we last left off, we'd just learned Finn's tragic backstory, and our detective club had been cornered by the impoverished citizens of his hometown and accused of being Phantom Zero. I'm ready to power through the rest of this show and see who the actual Phantom Zero is, and I'm hopeful the show will tie that together with the themes it's been building involving truth, rumors, government censorship, and Berry's coming of age. Let's dig into Yurei Deco one last time!

Episode 10

We open with Finn's former neighbors hunting down our team, led by Finn's brother, who's sporting a whole 31 Love. That's like a sixth of what Hank had several episodes ago. This particular town is really not well off

This leads to a question that's been bugging me for a few episodes—what is Love? Yeah, har har, but seriously, what is its purpose as currency? We know Love can be spent on avatar customization, and we know it's a general status indicator (having no Love is like wearing a scarlet letter), but the show hasn't actually confirmed if it's used for things like food and housing. I think the show's point would be a little better if it canonically broadened its uses beyond "hopping on the latest axolotl craze"

It seems like the townies are literally blaming the Zero Phenomenon on our protagonists, which feels feels like a pretty big logical leap

Finn's brother get a ton of new Love by posting a picture of the "real" Phantom Zero, but then it's shortly after deemed fake by the Customer Center and taken back. The townies have a couple motivations to spread this conspiracy—they want an easy scapegoat to blame their poverty on, but also, the act of causing a stir could get them rich

This really is a dangerous moment for the detective club—Hack and Berry are wanted criminals presumed dead, they're all being framed as Phantom Zero, and now the Customer Center knows their exact location

We see the Customer Center's higher-ups dismissing the fact that this report came from an unofficial district. "If we don't fix this, just regulating the Love will overload us." They care less about actual citizens of this island than they do about their jobs being tough

Berry's parents happily censor this deluge of information for the "good of the city." A ticking time bomb until they see a Berry pic

The Customer Center raids the detective club building on dorky unicycles, but Doggo escapes. You're telling me the robo-dog is gonna be plot relevant now?

The gang splits up, and Berry's crew camouflages themselves to hide from Customer Center goons in plain sight uptown

Lol, Mr. Watson's disguise is suspenders and giant glasses. Smiley's new outfit actually fits her maskless vibe way better than her usual Tim Burton getup

Finn feels guilty about putting everyone at risk and not being able to save his hometown, but Berry and Hack are excited about the chase

And then they all reunite minutes after being split up. Feels a bit pointless, narratively—why split them up in the first place?

The play is to catch Phantom Zero to prove they aren't Phantom Zero. I guess that was their initial plan, but now it's a matter of saving all of them instead of just Berry and Hack

Mark Twain is both where Phantom Zero is said to dwell and also contains data about all the times the Zero Phenomenon happened. So now they need to get into the sky—surely Mr. Watson has catapult functions?

Doggo travels to the nursing home and ejects a data card out of its tail. "You're not very well trained," says Madam 44, who definitely knows what a dog is

Berry and Smiley run around town as a distraction. As everyone takes pics of them, the others hack the spy bots and make it look like there are infinite Hanks and Finns around. As easy as hacking the Customer Center seems to be, you'd think they would've been able to stir up a lot more trouble

Oh no, Mr. Watson gets captured! The scoundrels

During all of this action, Berry gives a big "someone once said" narration about not believing in miracles and instead believing in friends, who will help you no matter what. This "miracles" framing device comes back a couple times later in the episode, even though it's not super clear what it's here for—I think the show's trying to use it to reinforce Berry's friendships, while also using it to highlight her melancholy when things go south later, but it comes across a little weird. Not quite sure what its ultimate intent was

Also, not sure if it's a real quote, but it sure feels like a literary reference they clumsily tried to work in 

Madam 44 is captured, too, but she sends the analyzed data card back to the rest in Doggo's tail. Also Hank's pretending to be a Customer Center guy

The Customer Center higher-ups finally recognize Hack and Berry from before, but they're confused as hell and think they might actually be Phantom Zero. If Phantom Zero truly is a government cover-up, the disinformation comes from the very top. I guess it doesn't matter if everyone downstream knows what's going on if they believe the lies, too. See: most of Trump's direct cronies

The Customer Center finds their temporary hideout and fries Pup. Smiley stays back to be a hero. The team's dropping one by one

Okay, finally back to the parents, who come across pictures of Berry running around town. As they pause in shock, they're called out by a supervisor saying "I don't see any movement." The inhumanity of this government extends to the actual day-to-day treatment of the people working for it

We enter a flashback to Berry's first lie as a child. She got in a fight and her Deco glasses broke, but she told her parents her friend tripped and fell on her. Even though her parents realized she was lying, they didn't get mad. "I lied because I was scared they would get mad." Her dad's response: "A classmate is a friend, right? So it can't be helped."

"Diary, I'm a liar. We're all liars. Because there's not gonna be any miracles. But we're doing this to protect our friends." Still struggling to see what the show is aiming for with this narration. Berry rationalizing the deceit and distractions her team is using to escape the Customer Center? Guilt over not telling her parents she's alive? Simple doom-and-gloom over her team's losses and thinking she'll be caught?

Berry's mom and dad start approving posts featuring Berry and editing them to say she's in a different district. They're now using the Customer Center's own tricks to subvert the system

A valid tactic in this situation, but not a thing that maps onto a broader thematic point, outside of "evil defeats itself." The long-term solution to information manipulation is not more information manipulation

I was about to say it seemed a little too easy for her parents to be manipulating all these posts, and then they get arrested

"Well, diary, that miracle? It actually happened!" Okay, so I guess this narration was all building up to her parents' sacrifice—the real miracle is that sometimes the universe throws you a lucky break, too. And as another layer, the miracle was her parents' doing, even if Berry doesn't realize it. Still a little muddled, but I see where they were trying to go with it

Oh hey, Berry and co. go back to the zoo from the Nue episode to use the Hyperverse for data analysis. The professor is still on his "inaccurate information is evil" tear

Really nice animation as Hack zoots around inside the Hyperverse

In jail, Hank is planning a prison break involving Madam's bed robo. Meanwhile, Watson is printing paper out of his mouth and making origami 

"Do you understand, Hack?" "I. Love. Ai!" I am not confident that Hack understands

Hack, Berry, and Finn get to the top of a Customer Center tower in the middle of town just in time for Doron's harem to swing by. They ride the drones up to that city in the sky

This was quite the action-packed episode! I was a little surprised that the show immediately pivoted away from the conflict in Finn's town, but in retrospect, I can understand why—we have a slim three (now two) episodes to wrap up this story, and in order to do that, we need to get to the bottom of these mysteries. That meant a lot of moving characters around and not much juicy thematic stuff, but either way, it was a good time. Onto the next one!

Episode 11

The gang puts their lives into the hands of Doron's polycule, the characters in this show I'd trust the least to support my body weight

They reach the sky city of Mark Twain, which is unsurprisingly candy-colored, just like everything else in this show

Some great shots and ambitious animation even in this introduction. Maybe it goes without saying on the penultimate episode, but I love how colorful and well-constructed so many shots are in this show

Boxy (but colorful) architecture up here with the Customer Center's peacock symbol above the entrance. Doesn't look like it was designed by or for humans 

Finn gets them in using the Angel Fish Club card. His plan is to have Hack and Berry scour the backup data here (which has special admin privileges) to prove the gang's innocence. Even if this worked, wouldn't the Customer Center still throw them in jail for breaking all these laws?

But whatever, he gets a character-development fistbump with Hack, which is clearly the higher priority

In the Hyperverse, massive yellow towers of data erupt from an unsettling purple grid around Hack and Berry. This episode is doing a good job at feeling climactic—a very "final dungeon of a JRPG" aesthetic

This episode has lots of good animation in general, even for incidental moments like Hack and Berry sorting through data. Seems like they got allocated some extra resources or a team of ambitious animators for this one

"So the urban legends were true. Mark Twain exists in Heaven and contains God's powers." Oh, anime. Never change

Finn is presuming that, in the same way Analytica was tasked with building this floating data center, Phantom Zero was created to serve some specific purpose. Getting closer to the government, or whoever created this world, being the ultimate villain

Berry and Hack are trying their best to sort through mountains of data that has no apparent organizational structure. This would take weeks

Berry asks what Hack would want to look up among all these records—their family history, surely? But Hack doesn't know their family and doesn't care. Same as ever, and I kind of hope the show keeps it that way 

Ah, here we go. Berry finds a video of her parents approving posts and causing diversions last episode, which leads into new footage of them grieving over her. Devastating isolated shots of her parents breaking down in her empty bedroom. This show doesn't often get me emotional, but this is powerful stuff

Finally, the weight of Berry's choices hit her—she's been out here playing detective, oblivious to the weight of her family thinking she's gone. And then, just as crucially, she realizes they were looking for her the whole time—that they didn't fully believe the death reports and never lost hope that she was out there, despite everything. She realizes simultaneously that she made a mistake and that she has a place to return to

This is a very intentional contrast to Hack, who has no immediate family that we've seen. I hope this doesn't lead into a twist like "Phantom Zero was actually Hack's mom!" Found family is just as important of a connection in this show, and I'd hate for that thematic point to get undercut

And now Berry sees her parents being interrogated because they covered her tracks last episode. Yeah, I'd cry too

When Berry tells Hack her parents are in trouble because of her, Hack says, "Why not just delete all the trouble?" Berry resists deleting her own data at first. "That'd mean there'd be no record of me being their kid..." 

But this is just setup for a perfect pivot from Hack. "Your brain works weird sometimes. Data's just data. If you see your mom and dad with your eyes and they see you with theirs, then, that's the truth, and that's all that matters." 

This may be the show's ultimate thesis—that all of the glitz and glam of technology, and even what's preserved as data, is meaningless to the human experience because it isn't human experience

Finn discovers that admin controls of Mark Twain belong to someone named "Injunction Jo," which is a reference to the racistly-named villain from Huckleberry Finn. That is certainly a choice the writers of this show made

And then Finn trips the alarms and makes Berry pull out right before she deletes all of her own data from the system. This feels unsatisfying—the choice about deleting the data was taken out of Berry's hands before she could make it, which gives her an easy out. The show stopped mid-swing

"What about the surveillance cameras?" "All still cats, sir." From dystopia to utopia in one simple step

The government is totally useless at solving an issue caused by the detective club's real-world devices. Too ingrained in their digital ways to solve an analogue problem

Berry's old school friends are still trying to find Phantom Zero's identity to get clout. We'll see if Berry, Prometheus-style, brings back knowledge from the heavens

Pup falls from the sky and fills the others in. Hank seems to be devising a crackpot plan involving a paper airplane and peacock feather. I do not trust this plan

Back on Mark Twain, Phantom Zero surprise-attacks Hack specifically

Phantom Zero can now neutralize Hack's paper airplanes after stealing their data last time, but Hack gets crafty and hits her with a surprise attack. Very satisfying headshot animation

The big Phantom Zero face reveal is that... she's an older woman with blue lipstick who we've never seen before. Okay

Injunction Jo is the one who dragged Hack in, and the one who created Phantom Zero

Finn has Berry go into the Hyperverse but stays behind to rescue them, despite a lot of physical exertion

"You two are my family." Aw. But this obviously also relates back to the theme of family we've been exploring this whole time—Berry's family and the detective club found family are both equally valid because of the experiences and relationships they've developed

This was a really good episode overall—dare I say it, one of the show's best! Exciting developments delivered with a lot of visual flare and great animation, but with plenty thematic meat on the bone, especially during Berry's big, emotional centerpiece. Here's hoping the show will wrap the rest up on an equally high note!

Episode 12

We start with a first-person shot in an ornate, fully-rendered 3D bedroom. In a Hyperverse?

The person getting out of bed is a young kid with long blonde hair, blue eyes, and a little yellow nightgown. I guess we're getting Hack's backstory after all? Please please please show, do not use this episode to try to "reveal" that Hack is a girl, just leave the pronouns ambiguous, pleaaaaaaaase

Striking earth tones in this barren, ritzy house. There isn't any Deco art to speak of

We see Hack's parents, but not their eyes

"You were just saying hi to the Angel Fish Club, weren't you?" Okay, so either Phantom Zero is directly connected to Hack's backstory, or this is a dream

Hack follows a peacock around in the backyard

These flatly shaded 2D characters moving around a detailed CG backdrop creates a very unsettling effect, much akin to Kizumonogatari, and the show is leaning into that with a lot of intentional pans that highlight the CG-ness. Very effective for this scene 

"The girl had a pet peacock named Sam," says the narrator, who Hack also hears. What

This show is making a bunch of wild-ass moves with this narrator in the span of a few seconds, so let's unpack it. We have a narrator (perhaps the peacock itself) prescribing Hack's gender via voiceover to the audience, in the first instance that anyone has gendered Hack this entire series, at least in Crunchyroll's translation. But then, Hack also hears the narration, doesn't know what it is, and calls attention to it, highlighting its artifice. This move means the audience knows to treat the narration itself as a character in the story, meaning unlike normal narration, it is no more authoritative than any other character

Optimistically, I think this might be the show's way of intentionally talking around Hack's gender—girlhood is something that other people are putting onto Hack in this fantasy world, but it's not necessarily how Hack defines themself. An incredibly interesting maneuver (that I wish the rest of the episode spent more time digging into) 

Either way, Hack really is a pretty adorable kid

Hack eats a heart cake. Nothing symbolic about that

"Everything was real in this place. A world without Decos or Yurei." As the peacock watches Hack sleep. Uh huh

"And they all lived happily ever after. The end."

Berry comes in like an Elden Ring invader and tries to snap Hack out of it

And then, after a minute of arguing, Berry makes Hack say their "I Love Ai" catchphrase... and Hack wakes up immediately. I feel like that dream sequence would have been much more effective if it gave Hack an actual choice to stay in this fake, comfy childhood. Much like how Finn's emergency prevented Berry from pushing the data-erasing button last episode, Berry just showed up and fixed things for Hack this time. This show likes to take the easy road out a little too often

Anyways, the peacock was Phantom Zero, and now it's creepy. I like

Finn gets taken down, and the security robots carry Hack and Berry's bodies to a central chamber, where they wake up

Phantom Zero's true form is... kinda hot. Oh no

"I'd intended to integrate you into the algorithm, but seeing you work together made something clear."

Her name is Injunction Jo, she leads the Customer Center here from Mark Twain, and she is definitely Phantom Zero. The government villain route was the winner after all

She's looking to pass along the role of Phantom Zero to the kids and is tempting them with the offer of infinite knowledge via surveillance of Tom Sawyer Island. And once they know everything, they'll be able to decide for the public what's truth and what's fiction

"Human lives are dictated by algorithms. What we think of as 'hearts' are nothing more than automated formulas reacting to a spectrum of stimuli." The villain of this show's defining evil characteristic is mapping social media concepts to all human behavior, and using that to try controlling people

"That mind of yours and the way it reacts is decided by the cumulative response to a massive store of backed-up data. Nothing people do is ever truly from out of the blue."

Berry doesn't love this algorithm talk, but, like, Jo isn't completely wrong. Emotions are created by definable physiological processes, and determinism is a thing. But the idea of gaining precise knowledge of these things and using that to manipulate human behavior is obviously the unethical part

Jo seems to think the system prevents humans from needing to pass judgment on each other and even purges the sin from their hearts. I... don't know how Decos accomplish that in any way, aside from enabling widespread suppression of information. If anything, this social media system makes humans more sinful and more judgmental as they chase clout and try to frame each other for literal currency

"The very concepts of 'truth' and 'fiction' require external context. And if you remove that context? The distinction goes with it." Blatantly dystopian. We're only a couple degrees away from doublethink

Berry's experiences lead her to believe that the truth can't be truly repressed and effectively rejects Jo's offer

Jo then reveals that she herself isn't in full control. She's providing a bit of "play" and humanity to the system. There's maybe an important point here about how these sorts of oppressive systems take on lives of their own and self-perpetuate, reeling people in through their desires for power and convincing them to keep the gears turning indefinitely

But Jo wants to be free now. She's tired. She wanted to find someone to replace her and chose two people, Hack and Berry, instead. Because of the power of friendship, they could vet each other and make better decisions

Hack reaffirms their "truth is what you see with your own eyes" belief and... decides to take Jo up on her offer. What? Why does Hack have any motivation to do this? What happened to Jo wanting both of them?

Jo offers to show them the "real" Phantom Zero, and then transports Finn and Berry back down to the city. At the end of the day, Jo's just cyberpunk Willy Wonka

Right, the rest of the detective club was throwing paper airplanes everywhere all throughout Jo's monologues, which set up their master plan of turning everyone's heads into furries I mean Phantom Zero as a distraction. I dig Hank's gray afro

Hack apparently stays behind on Mark Twain to craft the world in their image. This character choice makes zero sense to me. Why would Hack give a shit about all of this Love and content moderation business? Also, why did Jo decide that Hack, the person who can barely string together a coherent sentence, was the best fit to run a government?

Timeskip! Berry has a fresh new haircut

In this bold new future, everyone's... still using Decos

Berry's happily back with her family and makes gapao rice with her dad. I wish we'd gotten to see their reunion 

Through some rather stilted dialogue, Berry's parents reveal that one of Hack's big changes to the world is—wait for it—that more things can be considered for Love now

Also, content moderators now allow all posts but will flag things to let people know what's bad. This is... better than pure censorship, I guess, but it does not fix this system's primary issue—that a central government body controls the distribution of information and communication, and could at any point flip the switch the other way and go back to authoritarianism. I suppose this conclusion puts it in line with real-life social media platforms that will (sometimes) call out, say, anti-vax misinfo, but it's not the systematic change this world needs

Hack is the Joe Biden of Tom Sawyer Island

We get our epilogues. The Detective Club is closed, Hank is still salvaging sea junk, Watson took over the mystery ramen cart, Madam and Smiley are just chilling. For a show about found family, no one seems to be talking to each other now

Then we get to Finn's epilogue, which is is legit awful. He returned home (and was apparently accepted by everyone who chased him off), and then we find out the citizens are cleaning up the garbage around town in exchange for earning "legitimate" Love. Out of everything the show's done so far, this is the most insulting. The people of Finn's hometown were not responsible for the Customer Center dumping trash on them for years, and now, instead of the government (which Hack is in charge of) fixing the base issue, the citizens are being manipulated into cleaning up the mess. And this is presented by the show as a net good

I know they're trying to paint it as "everyone's gainfully employed and does hard work for money," but unwillingness to do hard work is not what keeps people trapped in poverty. Making these people clean up trash they didn't create feels barely removed from prison labor. We don't even find out if the purification plant got fixed! It's a poorly thought-out conclusion that places the responsibility for systematic problems on the victims of those problems, and it goes against practically everything the show's been saying this whole time

Jo rides a blimp out of the narrative. She's fucking done with this city, lol

Hack is up in the sky being a shadow centrist, so no one's seen them for a while. But they come down to visit occasionally, I guess?

A cute, well-animated finale with a swelling insert song where Berry runs to meet Hack. This part, at least, I can get behind 

Post-episode(s) thoughts

That was... certainly an ending! The series ended. It is now over, and the plot has stopped happening.

Sigh. Let's not beat around the bush here—that ending was a rushed half-measure that contradicted most of the thematic and character work the show had been building to. Hack, a character whose defining characteristic is "rejects the system," voluntarily took control of the system and made changes that amounted to "flagging posts that are bad" and "poor people can work too." Much like Deca-Dence a couple years back, this is a show that felt extremely angry about late capitalism for much of its run, but then fell short of doing the necessary work to tear down its own system. The ending presents a very liberal fantasy—instead of abolishing the system, just putting a band-aid over the most obvious symptoms means everything's fixed forever.

God, just to tie a bow on how weird this finale is—we start the episode with Injunction Jo forcing Hack into a dream-world where they're directly (incorrectly?) gendered and live in a prototypical nuclear family, the opposite of their core found-family refrain. This is presented as something Hack needs to escape. Yet mere minutes later, we end with Hack taking Jo's place as the effective dictator of Tom Sawyer Island and forcing everyone else to keep living in a system with no choice, accountability, or elected leader. By the show's own logic, Hack literally becomes the villain. 

That's to say nothing of the other dropped threads and structural problems in the show's latter portion. Hack and Berry went through a major journey to find Glitchy-Witchy, only for the outcome of that encounter to be pre-determined and to not involve Berry at all. Time and time again in the back third, big choices were presented to the protagonists—fixing the waste treatment plant at the cost of the town's Love; Berry deleting her data to free her parents; Hack's opportunity to stay in the dream world—and then those choices were taken away by the narrative before the characters could commit, rendering the characters' impact on the plot little more than pieces being moved around a game board. And besides that, the ending was rushed—reunions and goodbyes were dropped in favor of post-timeskip exposition, neutering the emotional impact of this found-family narrative. It's hard to say if this was a case of Dai Sato and the team not having a good ending in mind, or if there were rewrites that muddied the original vision, or if an episode got cut during production and forced the team to re-adjust, or whatever. But the end result feels rushed, muddled, and contradictory, and it's far from where it should have landed.

So where does that leave us? Despite all of my critiques here, I still have a lot of affection for Yurei Deco—it's a show with a wildly creative premise, a unique visual style, and a bunch of incredibly interesting worldbuilding ideas and thoughts on social media. I wouldn't have written up every episode if I didn't think there was plenty to talk about! The show was consistently messy, and the finale undercuts its thematic bite, but I still think there was a lot to take away from its best moments, like the ambiguous Nue episode or the anger of Finn's backstory. I'll always take an interesting mess over bland, corporate churn. 

There's been nothing else quite as dense and intriguing this year as Yurei Deco, and while it isn't the most perfect show of summer 2022, there's a specific passion from the creators that still shines through. At the end of the day, I'm glad to have had it around.