The Summer 2021 Preview Guide

The Idaten Deities Know Only Peace

Gods appeared when humanity was on the verge of destruction due to the work of demons. Deities called "Idaten" fought and sealed away the demons 800 years ago. Nowadays, the Idaten have no fighting experience and they live peaceful lives. But now the demons are reviving, and the battle between gods, humans, and demons is about to begin.

The Idaten Deities Know Only Peace is based on the manga by Coolkyoushinja and Amahara and streams on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:

Here's the TL;DR of my preview right up front: these first two episodes of The Idaten Deities Know Only Peace left me bored to tears throughout. You see, there is one glaring problem in this anime that taints everything else it does: there's not a single character for the viewer to empathize with.

In the vast majority of stories, there would be at least one character for the audience to connect with. Sometimes it is your typical audience proxy—a person from our world with our core values thrown into a fantastical situation. Other times, it could be someone with a tragedy in their past, something common to the human experience that we have all encountered directly or indirectly in our normal lives. However, in The Idaten Deities Know Only Peace, every character, be they god or demon, is basically an uncaring asshole.

The Idaten, while brought into existence by human prayers for salvation, don't care about humans at all—even their accidental killing of one is treated as nothing more than an “oopsie” moment. The demons, on the other hand, are driven by their very nature to destroy all life. And the humans of the story? They are almost exclusively Nazi-analogues doing horrible things. Sure, I feel bad for the people that the Nazi-analogues are raping/murdering, but they are more tools to demonstrate the villainy of the Nazi-analogues or the indifference of the gods than they are “characters.” With no one to relate to or sympathize with, there is no reason to be invested in the story beyond “if the demons win all life is doomed.” And frankly, that's not enough to keep my interest.

So what else does the series have to offer? There is the attempt at comedy, which largely amounts to watching these gods get the crap beaten out of each other in graphic ways. However, this shock comedy didn't even manage to pull a chuckle out of me.

On the other hand, the visuals are incredible, to say the least. The anime uses a non-standard color pallette and two-tone shading in a way that gives everything a unique feel. This is especially true when it comes to the gods themselves, whether it is their standard vibrant, otherworldly colors or the muted pastels they become in the icy wasteland in the first episode. The background music in the series is likewise excellent, though it can at times be a bit too epic for the show we are watching.

Yet, in the end, a creative art style and some rocking tunes do little to offset a boring story populated with unsympathetic characters. Or to put it another way, I doubt I'll ever think about this series again after this review.

Man, I wanted to love this one. I'm not familiar with the manga at all; the preview material I saw for Idaten Deities highlighted its gonzo action and its use of bold, beautiful colors to accentuate it's very stylized look. I was on board for the majority of the premiere, too. Sure, I wasn't exactly sold on the writing, since far too much of the dialogue between Rin, Hayato, Ysley, and Paula consisted of clichés and clunky exposition. Still, the premise of Idaten Deities essentially boils down to a massive brawl between ancient kaiju and functionally immortal gods, and if I can deal with hamfisted writing in Godzilla vs. Kong, then I can deal with it here, too. Plus, the show is just so fun to look at – it's basically what would happen if the cartoonishly violent anime fantasies from some sugar-addled 12- year-old got brought to life in all of their ridiculous Day-Glo glory.

Then the rape scene happened, and my hype train for Idaten Deities came to a screeching halt. I will never understand why Idaten Deities chose to end its premiere by cutting to a nun that we do not know, who is praying for mercy while her city is ruined by war, only to have a gang of soldiers violently assault her. The show even tries to get all artsy with it's framing, and the whole experience is just so tacky and tonally out-of-whack that it ends up playing as an exceptionally cruel farce. I'm pretty sure that wasn't the intended effect.

Given all of the information we get in the second episode – which is when the show turns the Exposition Dial up to 11 – I think the intent of the scene is to contrast the Idaten Deities' whimsical attitude toward their mission of protecting the Earth with all of the human suffering that they cannot even empathize with, considering that getting their organs turned into soup is little more than an inconvenience for them. It's just like it says on the tin: The Idaten know only “peace”, because the demons they have been charged with defending humanity from haven't been seen in over 800 years, though that doesn't mean that the world has actually been all that peaceful. That's a fairly rote bit of fantasy storytelling, but it works well enough to establish the friction between the world of the gods and the world of humans…but good Lord, Idaten Deities doesn't seem like it has the maturity or depth of nuance to include rape as a tool for getting its points across.

This is, after all, the same show that has Piscalat's army troops from Zoble shout about how much they want to rape little girls, and shotas, and old men, and it's played as a sophomoric joke. Imagine if, smack in the middle of Godzilla vs. Kong, the movie tried to play a mean-spirited and psychedelic rape scene as a genuine commentary on people's capacity for cruelty to one another, or whatever. It probably doesn't matter how much you liked the other 95% of the movie, because that one catastrophically tone-deaf sequence would have you wondering whether anyone involved in making it knew what the hell they were doing.

I didn't hate Idaten Deities, though it's stiff writing and amateurish worldbuilding would have underwhelmed me even if it weren't for that other WTF moment. Truth be told, I could still see myself enjoying this show a lot. It looks great, it has a diverse cast of heroes and villains, and it'll probably be fun to watch everything go to hell when the gods and monsters restart their millennia-long cage match.

It might also be too stupid and edgy for its own good, and I don't think you will miss out on much if that alone convinces you to give Idaten Deities a pass.

I'll admit, I wasn't really looking forward to this show when I first looked into it. This is an adaptation of a manga collaboration between Amahara, creator of Interspecies Reviewers, and Coolkyoushinja, creator of Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid. Both of those are comedies I found decidedly dull and repetitive rather than funny, and while Idaten sounded like an interesting premise, I made sure to set my expectations for its execution pretty low before watching these first two episodes. Thankfully, a lot of the comedy and character antics of these first two episodes were actually very enjoyable. Unthankfully, this premiere found a very different way to disappoint.

Let's start with the good. While the first episode has a bit of a reliance on bloody slapstick as a comedic crutch, it mostly works thanks to its high concept, sharp action, and the anime's striking visuals. The show loves to invert colors, incorporating unnatural and flat coloration to draw the eye or shift atmosphere in a way highly reminiscent of the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure anime, Part 4 in particular. Combined with the simple and animation-friendly designs and you have a recipe for some really unique action sequences. It can get a bit much at points, and I'm not fond of the shade of yellow they use for much of episode one, but in a season with so many dull-looking premieres, I'll take overdoing it any day. The characters are largely simple, but they work well with the over-the-top and admittedly silly premise, and gags like the evil doctor actually being a robot help set the tone of a somewhat cynical, but still enjoyable comedy.

And then episode one ends with a rape scene.

It's a jarring, tone-deaf scene if ever I've seen one. While not visually explicit, the show overcorrects by directing this jarring, unprecedentedly dark scene like something out of Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. But because this is coming at the end of a farcical action comedy and not in the midst of a psychological horror story, it falls flat on its ass. The generous part of me wants to think this is meant to be a sudden twist that shows the audience this will be a darker and more serious show than the preceding 20 minutes would suggest. But considering it's immediately followed up by a bright and shiny ED sequence, and episode two opens with the same goofy slapstick as before, it doesn't work to that purpose at all. It just turns this premiere into a shit sandwich that would have put me off watching another episode if it weren't included with this launch.

In that respect, I do appreciate there being a second episode, if only so that it confirms I don't want to see any more of this show. After a lengthy bit of comedy about the Idaten characters, we're introduced to a villainous military where soldiers comically declare their intention to rape the women, virgins, and “shotas” of the country they're invading. This is paired with one of our Idaten characters contemplating how Gods don't actually intervene in human affairs because to them it makes all the difference of having trees in a forest vs trees in a park. While some of that pontificating is maybe interesting in theory, the total fumble of tone and a lack of any real characters to grasp onto made the whole thing feel tiresome.

So yeah, this feels like a wash. While my worries of a dull and monotonous comedy were quashed, the idea of watching an inconsistent and charmless attempt at heavier storytelling at the margins of a comedy is even less appealing. There are ways to walk the strange tonal tightrope this one has decided to venture, but for my money it's already crashed and burned.