Darwin Jihen

Saw alot of negative reviews for this anime but personally i found it pretty enjoyable the premise is interesting and the way they handle veganism and subtly go into the philosophy behind animal morality i think is cool because most anime only handle a handful of topics so its kinda nice to see an anime about different ideas and set in a differnt place with more modern takes of characters i guess. I also just find the action pretty good and the way the main character charlie uses his surroundings is also fun to watch and less predictable

With that being said tho the ... dialouge is pretty on the nose at times and the plot moves kinda fast where certain things seem to just get explained to us with pretty lazy setup.

I like everything about this anime except for the fact that it tries to emulate western culture in a realistic way, but fails miserably at it. So it looks like a parody of itself. It seems to me that the author of the manga thinks Twitter is what western culture looks like, so in the anime we have a lot of preaching, basic phylosophical arguments that a 5 year old could have, virtue signaling, and characters acting and speaking in very unnatural ways overall. The protagonist is always spewing some basic phrases, for example I just watched episode 5 and she says stuff like "I'm ... a strong independant woman" or "They are so conservative!", or "They call me a lesbian...not that there's anything wrong with being a lesbian", and then later in the episode we have the obligatory vegan debate but with the most basic arguments you can imagine. it's just a regurgitation of mainstream talking points, catchphrases and virtue signaling but the show expects you to take them seriously somehow. Every conversation they have feels like a Twitter comment section from 10 years ago, in that aspect it's really offputting.

As I mentioned, that's the only part I don't enjoy about this anime, which is important, but there aspects I enjoy, for example, the concept is really interesting and pretty unique for an anime, the pacing is okay, it doesn't really bore me, the artstyle is pretty faithful to the manga and the animation is good as well. So overall I thinks it's a good anime for now.

I'd say give it a try but prepare for the dialogues being pretty cringey.

Darwin Jihad's cover looks like a political shitpost cooked up by 4chan, with Handmaid Lucy and her 4-foot-nothing vegetarian hobbit boyfriend (or girlfriend because of the neotenous look and female voice actress) against the world, and the seinentard realism of the series progresses with the same ridiculous edge. The series reminds me of those female monster romance novels, where she is repulsed by the monster but comes to love him. The spurned men who are cast-aside in favor of the physical prowess and inner beauty of the monster then gather with torches and pitchforks to separate the two mismatched lovers (like when the jock shows ... irritation and tsks at those girls who were saying positive things about humanzee or the histrionic head-bobbing and screeching of Lucy's single mother). But humanzee is waaaaaaaay too short for this to be a female fantasy. The author is male, so the bone is thrown elsewhere, and he's more concerned with some nasty moral or philosophical points about evolution and the "animal/human condition."

Charlie is what is referred to as a "humanzee." Speculation as to whether hybridization between humans and other apes is possible (or once was) goes back to the medieval period and probably even to the ancients, if we look to mythology. Chimpanzees appear to be the animal that is most similar to humans, and the Soviet biologist Ilya Ivanov attempted to create human-ape hybrids, or humanzees, in the 1920s. Artificial insemination of human sperm was used in an attempt to fertilize female chimpanzees. These experiments were, needless to say, failures. What was not tried, as far as the reports go, was the other way around: ape sperm being used to inseminate a human female. The word wasn't coined yet, but what Ivanov was attempting to do was create a furry, and he could be seen as the grandfather of the sub-discipline of furry zoology. The anti-furry ideology of the Soviets put a stop to his degeneracy by slashing funding, and Ivanov died soon after of a broken heart because he couldn't create a furry waifu. Now, I'm sure many people will think this is really gross, and the author of Darwin Jihad must have realized that because the guy who knocked-up the chimp in this anime was none other than Dr. Grossman (before that, his colleagues joked about the two being in love)!

Charlie makes his big high school debut like the cool kid in a Disney show, with everyone checking him out as he heads to his locker, but he's literally an ape. Jock: Monkey boy can't beat my bench press record. Nerd: Ackshually, his grip strength is over 600 pounds. Girls: Uwaaah, he's way cuter than a monkey! Charlie is presented as the fount of reason when butting heads with the nerd and jock archetypes, who are caricatured into the anime-equivalent of Beavis and Butthead, their points nothing but strawmen for Charlie to dismantle, which usually leads to some "shocking" punchline. Why is Charlie even going to a school in a podunk town in the first place, given his vast importance as the first ever humanzee? Lucy (a nod to Australopithecus), the love interest, not only bemoans her "small-minded midwestern town" that she wants to leave, but is shown wearing a Pornhub hoodie in chapter 2 of the manga (cut out of the anime), which is maybe the most glaring indicator of a female being an outsider in fiction and a hint for what's to come. Part of the series is a sexual tension-filled, evolutionary-centered spin on the boy meets girl plot, and this one doesn't slow down for long with a "will they, won't they" scenario. What is probably most telling of all is seeing Charlie's "mother" blush when he mentions having a female Homo sapiens friend. Dr. Grossman would approve, especially if the anime adapts chapter 26.

If the art and characters looked more like K-On! or some moe show, then it could at least function as a dry comedy piss take with some much-needed levity and contrast. The hideousness of the art is why you'd think they'd have the sense to refrain from throwing in a fetishy foot shot from Lucy at the end of the ED, like this is some Kyoani moeblob drool fest. Although it's a script/theme-focused series and doesn't need lavish production values, the direction doesn't standout and everything about this westaboo porn is functional at best. The realistic Urusawa-esque art is barely animated mouth-flapping, unless there is some throw-away sakuga moment to show off Charlie's hybrid vigor--speaking of which, if Charlie could beat half-a-dozen cops at once when he was 5 years old, what made a couple of bozo villains think that they could beat Charlie barehanded just because they're buff military veterans? This seems impossible without either way more men or tranquilizer darts. I can't suspend disbelief with villains this incompetent.

This is another one of those ridiculous seinentard series that is ultra-serious, superficial, and riddled with on-the-nose social commentary to the point of pretentiousness (see Monster, Orb, Pluto, Vinland Saga). These kind of shallow political/philosophical shows usually have to spell everything out so there is no subtext. For instance, Lucy references Thomas Nagel's essay on consciousness, which speculates on what it would be like to be a bat. The relationship here is clear: Charlie, being half-chimp, doesn't fully understand what it means to be human (resembles autism, lol); similarly, the humans don't understand what it means to be a non-human animal or half-chimp. Since Charlie is uniquely half-and-half, maybe the two can come to understand each other better. In a following episode, Lucy references this essay again, referring to Charlie as her "bat." Yes, we all understood this unsubtle relationship in episode 1, so there is no need to spell it out again in episode 2, especially when this aspect of consciousness could better be explored through meaningful dialogue between the characters. The dinner table debate on veganism and all of the school yard hazing are also fine examples of bad dialogue and clumsy exploration of themes.

The other part of the story involves an absurd vegan terrorist group called the Animal Liberation Alliance (they seem to be based on the Animal Liberation Front, which never killed anyone but was notorious for arson), which has claimed responsibility for numerous bombings of meat-serving restaurants and the deaths of many humans. The ALA wants to employ Charlie as a mascot because he is half-human and half-chimp, a valuable cultural icon, and maintains a vegan diet passed on to him from his adoptive vegan parents (the "good" kind, as opposed to the "bad" terrorists). The "empathetic" spider and butterfly moment, meant to show Charlie's nuanced emotions after having said something "psychopathic," is a common enough symbol in fiction, but it takes on a different angle because of the veganism woven into the story. I almost feel like Darwin Jihad is going to put bears (mixed diet and often minimal meat so not as evil) and wolves (very evil dastardly villains) in prison by the end. The main antagonist, Rivera, often has a "Mwhahahaha, I'm a crazy villain" expression, amplifying the cheesy goofball nature of the terrorist group and the cheap black-and-white moralizing this series plays with; in a series that tries to be oh-so-serious, this is a misstep on par with the mature™ Urusawa school of dramatic fiction. Make it believable that this man is a sane person guided by an extreme vision (you're going to have to be sane and intelligent to lead a successful outfit like this), or just go full shitpost. Which way seinentard man?

The political climate heats up quickly (you can also catch a glimpse of an "Animal Lives Matter" poster in the OP), and lines are drawn between the vegan minority and omnivore majority: "And right now people are being vilified online just for being vegan." "Vegans like you killed a child because of their beliefs." "Me, I think this terrorist attack came from too much pandering to minorities. We're so scared of offending other religious groups that we can't even say 'Merry Christmas' anymore. Next they'll be telling us we can't even eat turkey anymore." The intention is to conflate paranoia about post-9/11 Muslims and potential for terrorism with a similar contrast of non-violent vegans and terrorist vegans. So the author basically just rewrote that bit of history into his vegan jihad plot. I wonder if the author is vegan? As Lucy ponders, veganism is "about doing the right thing... that's why that kind of terrorist organization was created. Right?" This aspect of the story also bears an uncanny resemblance to the much better Parasyte. A competition between humanity and parasitic organisms is a fine hook, but it's preposterous when your counterpoint is vegan terrorism!