I have seen Dan Da Dan manga all over social media/the internet, so when I saw volume 1 at the library I picked it up out of curiosity. The premise is interesting: two high school outsiders, one obsessed with aliens, the other believes in spirits, dare each other to prove the other person’s belief is invalid by sending each other to the most likely haunted/abduction sites in the area, per the web. Guess what happens next?
One thing I hadn’t noticed initially was that there is in fact a tiny little content warning on the lower front cover. The final line of the back cover blurb, “What unfolds next is a beautiful story of young love…and oddly horny aliens and spirits?” is, as it turns out, both totally ironic snark (the first half) and disturbingly accurate (the second part). Momo, the spirit believer, is abducted and nearly sexually assaulted by aliens who resemble incels (Serpoians apparently can only reproduce by cloning and are thus obsessed with human sexual reproduction), and Okarun, the alien believer, is assaulted and cursed by an old lady demonic thingy who’s major threat is “I’ll let you suck my teats if I can gobble your shlong”. This really sets the tone for the story, and it’s mostly gross-out horror/comedy.
There is some interesting character stuff being set up; Momo’s grandmother for example being a famous spirit medium, Momo herself, and Okarun’s possessed demon form all have some intriguing potential, almost enough that they are endearing, but that content warning needed to be a lot bigger, and there really should have been a CW specifying the nature of what’s in this thing. It’s no wonder it wasn’t shelved with the rest of the manga, next to the YA books. Yikes. I don’t think I really need to pick up the next volume because I can guess the rest of the series in various adventure shenanigans, growing personal awareness and connections, probably some powers being discovered and developed (there’s some bits about this here in vol. 1), and so on and so forth. I’m also not sure I can really stomach more of this if the tone is the same as this first volume, and I’ve no reason to believe that it is not.