God is Dead – The Idaten Deities Know Only Peace

This essay contains plot and thematic spoilers for the entirety of The Idaten Deities Know Only Peace. I would suggest a blanket Content Warning for the series due to its inclusion of violence, religion, rape and pedophilia.

Read my First Impressions HERE

I’m once again at that point where I’m playing clean-up with my anime seasonals in a mad rush as I find myself with a huge new batch of current series I’d like to watch more of. It’s the constant struggle of someone who watches way too much anime. Often when I’m in this hyperdrive mode, I find myself drawn back toward the anime series which I initially had ambivalent feelings about. I’ve always been that kind of person who pushes her favorite foods to the side of her plate in order to enjoy them last, so I suppose that this makes some sort of sense.

The Summer 2021 season had plenty of series that featured intriguing story elements and themes, but which were also hamstrung by some missteps that made them a little harder to love. The most iconic of these, to me, was The Idaten Deities Know Only Peace, an action series with a lot of cool visual style and a total banger OP, but also an off-putting reliance on some particularly violent and grotesque story elements. And yet, as I was settling in to play a little anime catch-up in preparation for letting myself continue some of the entries from Autumn, Idaten was the one series that I couldn’t get off of my mind.

This is the story of the conflict between humans, demons, and gods in a roughly modern alternate Earth-like dimension. The human world is essentially divided in three, with each region beholden to a (corrupt) societal concept. There are areas that reflect the ills of capitalism as well as corruption of self-serving organized religion. However, it’s the Zoble Empire, a bastion of violence and militarism, that features most prominently throughout the series. It’s here that the demon contingent, having reappeared after the majority of their forces were sealed away several centuries prior, have begun to infiltrate some of the highest bureaucratic positions, including military leadership and the positions of emperor/empress of Zoble. The demons themselves are led by a mysterious figure called the Demon Lord whose origins are unknown; he inhabits and artificial body and is responsible for discovering how demons (normally terrifying inhuman monsters) can take human form. Their ultimate goal seems to primarily amount to obtaining the freedom to live openly and without restriction, although the circumstances by which that becomes possible is… complicated.

Enter the Idaten, human-shaped gods who come into existence based around the needs of humans at their most desperate (thus they tend to manifest during times of war, famine, or other crises). Their job is to protect the best interests of humanity, but whereas we as mere mortals may interpret immediate threats as deeply important events, the Idatens’ godhood – namely a near-immortality that allows them the luxury of analyzing and prioritizing their own interests – ensures that their actions are often abstract and detached from moment-to-moment issues befalling the human race.

As the story begins, the Idaten have enjoyed several centuries of quiet. The only one of them alive during the previous time of conflict, Rin, has been tasked with guarding the seal that was used to lock away the demon horde along with most of the previous Idaten. The other Idaten, who manifested later, have all spent years pursuing their own leisurely interests. Isley and Prontea have both made it their mission to grow their own knowledge through various (occasionally ethically-questionable) means, while Paula seems content to lounge around and enjoy the aesthetic beauty of the natural world. Only Hayato seems to have any vague interest in following Rin’s teachings and even that is tenuous – the “training” that the Idaten undergo to strengthen themselves essentially involves Rin beating them bloody until they toughen-up. Perhaps not the most appealing way to spend one’s near-immortal earthly time.

It’s at this point that the Idatens’ conflict with the demons starts to come into focus, and where the series’ examination of moral and ethical cloudiness reveals itself. As the audience I think it’s natural to initially identify with the Idaten, who under typical circumstances would be fighting on the side of the “good guys,” and yet that’s very quickly revealed to be an incorrect assumption. Their goals are said to align with the broader goals of the human race, but what that means in practice is that they’re often cold and pragmatic when it comes to what they in their infinite wisdom perceive as small scale human issues; their goals are more focused on the preservation of the world as a whole rather than the individual suffering of lesser beings. This leads them to commit a lot of truly repulsive acts, including in particular the brainwashing of members of the demon contingent and removing their free will in order to gain an upper hand in the conflict. When a new member of their group is produced from the acute pleas of one desperate soul in particular (and thus retains some of that in her personality), she’s quickly forced to reckon with the clear, calculated apathy of her brethren.

The demons more often than not come across as the more sympathetic faction; power-wise they’re clearly outclassed by the Idaten and they spend much of their screen time fighting for the right to simply exist. More than likely it’s because their existence is so precarious and their hunger for it so relatable that they feel the most human-like. Many of the demons are insufferable in their own special ways, but I did develop a soft spot for Miku, a voluptuous sexual manipulator with a keen perception of her surroundings and an intelligence that offsets her physical weakness. And yet, I can’t even really say I liked her, because its her depravity in the face of the demons’ potential extinction that introduces some of the more vile developments in the latter parts of the series.

This is the type of series where it’s difficult to really root for anyone, and in fact that might actually be the point.

One of the things I’ve been wrestling with in my media-focused life has been the idea of purposely including deeply flawed characters and actions within stories that are not meant to uphold some sort of moral ideal, but instead perhaps directly rebel against that concept. I think it’s very easy for me to state “characters don’t need to be moral paragons” and believe it in the abstract. Yet in practice I find that a frustrating lack of nuance in characterization is what usually sits lurking behind exclamations of this kind. Sure, sometimes it’s interesting to try to get into the head of someone who’s not redeemable, due to the simple fact that people who do terrible things are still human. They likely didn’t burst from the womb as a fully-formed sociopath and in understanding who they are we might also understand more about the broad range of our own potential to do both great and terrible things in this world. But exploring a complicated character’s psyche in an interesting way is very different from creating a character who does bad things simply because they aren’t socially acceptable, and then expecting us to applaud their edginess for its sake alone.

Idaten toes this line over and over again, allowing its gods to both seem like funny goofballs as they’re being thoroughly whooped on by their ruthless master and then like horrific, calculating overlords as they commit mental and physical crimes against their demon adversaries. Its demon characters are sympathetic in their will to survive even while their actions in service of that goal are unforgiveable. Everyone is just terrible.

I’m reminded a little bit of Shiki, in which a small, isolated Japanese town is slowly taken over by vampires. The vampires need to feed on human beings in order to sustain themselves, but this act eventually kills those same humans, some of whom revive to join with their attackers as newly-minted vampires. The situation is obviously unsustainable; eventually the vampires will run out of new victims, while the humans obviously aren’t willing to submit to becoming what are essentially livestock. This battle between two intelligent species eventually reaches an incredibly violent stalemate that consumes the lives of most of the characters. The series does an incredibly good job of making both sides, or at least their needs, seem sympathetic. It also balances its large roster of characters by including some vampires whose particular situations are easier to empathize with as well as some humans who are just as equally unsympathetic in their behavior. It’s a very nuanced story that belies its very strange character designs. I feel like Idaten really wants to have that effect on people, and it tries very hard to provide that kind of balance between its various factions. But rather than spending time teasing out the injustices of its central conflict or honing the development of its characters, it seems rather content to simply have them all be awful in each-other’s direction. Rather than cultivate an appropriate sense of horror, it seems content to leave off at cynicism and call it a day.

As the series comes to a close, it becomes clear that it’s not interested in tying up all its loose plot threads into a neat bow. But in spite of that I think it does land in terms of expressing its thematic arc, which is appropriately dark but in a way feels darkly just. Isley and Paula are captured by a group of the escaped demons, who use the Idatens’ physical immortality to commit some especially upsetting and repeated physical torture against them. As they’re held in an underground dungeon the two are beaten and dismembered, allowed to heal, and then the process is repeated. It’s a grotesque situation that’s difficult to watch and doesn’t really inspire one to want to think about it too much, and yet… I think the point of the entire ordeal is that the Idatens’ hubris has brought them low; they who claim to be on the side of good and yet have little actual sympathy for those who are legitimately suffering, now get to enjoy the fruits of their own manipulations deep in a basement like common mortal criminals. And they still managed to seem surprised by it all.

There are people in the world who have the luxury of never considering the needs of the “little guys.” Their existences are distant from reality; they live in huge mansions, spend their time supplementing their own means by “creating wealth” from absolutely nothing and oppressing the people whose actual measurable work makes the world go around. The Idaten feel like these people to me. They believe they’re doing the world a favor by existing, and yet the prayers of the people asking for help are like white noise or an irritating inconvenience that doesn’t mesh well with their ideas about their “big picture” concerns. Eventually this entitlement curses them with the type of tunnel vision that results in their defeat. As Rin races across the world to find her lost brethren, not realizing that they’re literally below ground beneath her hurried feet, I wonder if she wishes that, in addition to teaching her pupils martial arts, she should also have taught them the ability to care for other people?

The Idaten Deities Know Only Peace was a very tough watch for me. I can’t really say that I enjoyed it, and I definitely wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else. But I also can’t claim that it was time wasted either. It simply represents a sort of flawed, messy experience that can be valuable every once-in-a-while; one which both makes one regret things that could have been done better while also providing fodder for some deep thoughts on the purpose and meaning of the stories we choose to tell one-another.