Humanity Has Declined Episode 2--Geoff Did it

If you're not watching this show yet, you need to do so right now even if it may be the strangest thing you've ever seen in your life.




I'm going to join the small army of people blogging this show to try and make some sense out of it as well as throw my own interpretations out there. If anything's for sure at this point, it's that Humanity Has Declined is a dense show, and there are many ways to unpack it. If you had told me that I'd be utterly fascinated by a show where skinned chickens decide to take over the world via a fairy factory, I wouldn't have believed you. But here we are.

And as blatantly strange as the majority of the show is, that's also a lot of its charm. It the surface level of "what the heck is going on, what kind of apocalypse show is this" that gets you interested, and when all the implications start rolling in is when it gets truly engaging. The fairies are the best example at this point; at the moment I'm viewing them as a comparison to how we are as a society today, since the fairies have replaced humans as the dominant species in this show. They only do what they feel like, when they feel like, particularly when there's a reward involved. Otherwise they only want to be entertained. I'd be a liar if I said I didn't see myself in the fairies.

It gets even more interesting when you consider their slight creepiness, although it wasn't as prominent in this episode since the chickens covered the weird factor. And even though the chickens are played as the villains, it's really the fairies (who don't even remember what they started) that are really the ones at fault. Their attitudes are underscored by their strange hiring practices, choosing two guys who don't ask questions and honestly don't really care about what's going on as long as they get regular promotions with new hollow titles to brag about. On being told that he's made CEO, which means nothing in this world, one character goes off on a long background rant about how he'll use his new power to control the world. But it's all in his head. The ones with the real power, the fairies, don't care.




And then there's Watashi, who never seems to be rattled by anything, just exasperated. Her take on the world provides most of the humor, with her sharp interior monologue and simply deciding on the best course of action. She more concerned with the clarity on her translator glasses than with what's actually being said. She pulls a knife on the chickens without any change in her expression. She almost meets her death but never changes her tone. Watashi is pretty formidable, a lot more so than most of the humans we've seen in this series so far, with perhaps the exception of Assistant, who showed a far darker side through storytelling in this episode.

Those are the main points I wanted to bring up, but even this early on in the show, I think that this is something that has to be experienced, not just read about. I get the feeling that I'm only brushing the tip of the iceberg here, and I'm really interested in how this world will continue to be built through this crazy style of storytelling. Crunchyroll also deserves big props on the translation for this episode, turning the Japanese puns into something that was equally hilarious in English.

This show really deserves that kind of care, since while all I've mentioned above is interesting, it's really the laughs that get you through the show. Assistant's messed up children's story, the translation glasses, the birds from God... It's hard to pin down what exactly makes this show good, since so far it's a combination of many elements. A recurring complaint in the anime community is that shows are just a cycling of cliches and that nothing "original" gets made. Well, here it is. It's a really strange show, almost amazingly so, but that's not the only thing it has going for it. And so far, that's what makes it great.

Images from Crunchyroll.com.