Dandadan is a lot. Episode one made me nervous. It also caught my attention. I stuck with the show, and now episode seven has made me cry big, heartfelt tears.

This show is not what I expected. It frequently has an extremely middle school-ish feel, yet it has also sent me on an emotional rollercoaster. It’s goofy and weird, with an upbeat and sometimes jarring energy. While it is written about (and presumably for) young teens, it feels less siloed in its gender appeal than many other shows I’ve seen aimed at a similar age range.

This show is definitely not for everyone, but… I really like it. Let me tell you why.

First up: this show’s character depictions & introductions delighted me. They sold me on Dandadan immediately. The main characters are simultaneously sympathetic and abrasive, that spicy and engaging blend that feels appealingly human without being repulsively flawed or antagonistic.

The first few scenes are all about Momo, the show’s central female protagonist. I loved how melodramatic and centered in her over-the-top feels those scenes are. The show gives us permission to both empathize with her (the boy she breaks up with at the very beginning truly is a turd) and also laugh at her reactions. Dandadan’s animators embrace Momo’s melodrama as she rants and moans about how she’ll never get a good boyfriend like the one she’s dreamed of.

When we’re introduced to Ken Takakura / Okarun, the show’s central male protagonist, he’s more of an emotional cipher. He’s significantly less in touch with or slower to understand his own emotional world—but this feels right for him as a young teen boy and a frequently bullied nerd. Regardless, the clash of his nerdy obsessions with Momo’s fuels the low-stakes friendly strife at Dandadan’s core, and serves as perfect plot-driving fodder for the rest of the story.

One more note… I love seeing young female characters who are sympathetic without always being well liked or extremely likable. I think my frame of reference is out of date—I think there are many more of those characters these days, and there’s less of a mandate that sympathetic female characters must be well-liked—but I still see this as a positive development. Momo delivers this duality in spades; she can be outgoing and caring and kind, but she can just as quickly laugh at someone else’s misfortune or yell at someone’s perceived stupidity. She’s kind of immature, which is very appropriate, and she’s human. I love this show for giving us her as a character.

So far, so great.

The middle schoolishness doesn’t stop with the characters though. Much like many young teens, this show thinks that people’s junk is funny. It also relies on us having sufficiently visceral reactions to having someone’s junk threatened to establish the show’s stakes and make us both laugh and cringe. If you’re not willing to laugh at people’s junk, or if talk of genitalia and the threatening of genitalia will ruin your enjoyment of a show, Dandadan isn’t for you—people’s junk will come up again.

Also, uh, about that… here’s a content warning (and *SPOILERS* obviously):

There’s an alien abduction and threatened sexual probing in episode one. It’s portrayed as utterly ridiculous; the goofiness and absurdities of the aliens are played up for comedy’s sake, and (I think) to manage the audience’s tension. That goofiness defuses some of the feeling of threat, but this scene is definitely scary for the character involved. While the scene didn’t feel like fan service to me, it was uncomfortable and left me nervous for the series as a whole. As of episode seven there hasn’t yet been a similar scene, and I’m still glad I kept watching.

*END SPOILERS*

Dandadan also delivers heartbreakingly sad ghosts directly alongside the body-humor and the abrasive yet sympathetic young teens. Dandadan’s ghosts are scary adversaries, nothing to screw around with casually. They’re also trauma and tragedy incarnate, whether as the remnant of a single individual or as some greater spirit. Every so often, we’re given a deeper look at the history that shaped them, and boy howdy do those deeper looks carry weight.

The show’s first look into an angry spirit’s past was tragic and melancholy. I didn’t cry. Its seriousness felt a little shortchanged by the comical and goofy bits around it (remember: middle school humor). I might have cried had that first look been given the same time and treatment as the show’s second look into a spirit’s past. That second look (yes, these are very light spoilers) filled episode seven and left me in big heartfelt tears. I have some guesses as to why it hit me so hard, but I’ll leave those out; I don’t want to spoil the experience for you. Suffice to say this show was willing to punch me right in the feels.

Is it weird having those emotional sucker punches land right alongside body-humor and overwrought middle school emotional struggles? Yes. Does it feel right despite being weird? Yes.

I think we too often forget, as adults talking about art made inside the constraints of the publishing industry, that young teens are caught up in a heady stew of emotional experiences that so often include exquisite wonder alongside crushing social pain and brilliantly stupid humor. That is life. The idea that stories about young teens should hew to a genre that delivers only one or two of those things, or that we have to skew towards singular emotional experiences, is absurd. It’s unrealistic and artificially constrained. Whatever else it’s doing, Dandadan doesn’t limit itself in that way.

Speaking of not limiting itself, Dandadan feels like it’s written for a broader audience than that targeted by similar shows. Specifically, it has both male and female characters who feel like reasonable facsimiles of real humans, characters with believable interiority. That’s a treat. I’m so used to seeing shows for young teens which feel like they’re clearly aligned with only one side of a gender binary. Dandadan hasn’t felt that way to me yet.

A lot of my vibes-based assessment here rests on the ways in which the story gives roughly even weight to the lives and experiences of its two main characters without cramming either character into the painfully tight box of one gender’s wish-fulfillment fantasies. I’ve seen plenty of anime which cater to the desires and experiences of a single gender. These often reduce characters outside that favored gender to skin-deep portrayals, or to dolls perfectly formed to fulfill the catered-to gender’s social or sexual fantasies. Isekai is rife with this, whether in shows like Shield Hero—with its female characters either sneering antagonists or willing harem slaves—or in (the far less toxic but still reductive) My Next Life As A Villainess—with characters of every gender smitten and befriended by the POV character.

Unlike those shows, Dandadan consistently gives enough access to both main characters’ inner worlds to counteract society’s frequent othering of the opposite gender. We’re even treated to comical parallel interior narratives at one point, as our main characters profoundly misunderstand and misinterpret each other while chasing almost exactly the same lines of thought. I found that hilarious. It was also tremendously reassuring; with that exploration of those similarities the writers treated their main characters as humans, as fully fledged people regardless of their gender.

Finally, I mentioned this in passing above, but this show uses goofiness and weirdness to considerable effect. I’m not yet sure whether my sensibilities mesh well with the writers’, but they obviously know what they’re doing. Awkward tension, fear, extreme duress—all of these are broken or alleviated at times by goofiness and stupid humor, letting us laugh or breathe in the middle of an awful scene. I’m reminded of my experience managing the stress of my players in my horror RPGs. Each goofy outburst breaks the emotional intensity and relieves the viewer’s stress, helping the show navigate through moments that might otherwise be unbearable or too one-note.

I think sometimes the show errs on the side of goofiness at the expense of hitting deeper emotional notes. Then again, the writers clobbered me with episode seven—so maybe they were just biding their time. Either way, I’ll keep watching.

I didn’t mean to write an essay in appreciation of this show, but here we are. As of writing this, I’ve only seen the first seven episodes. I strongly recommend the show so far (with the above caveats about potentially confronting content in episode one).

If you aren’t sure whether you want to watch this, watch the beginning of the first episode. While the show certainly gets weird, the beginning of the first episode feels like a pretty solid comparison for the rest of the show so far.