Deaimon: Recipe for Happiness

[Kraco]

This OP is my favourite this season.

I don't watch that many shows, so it doesn't mean much, but the OP of this series is the only one I don't automatically skip. I listen to it every time.

Watched the 6 episodes out in two days. I like the laid-backness of it, but there's also one big thing I absolutely hate about this series, and I think the word to describe this is "saccharine". It's way to saccharine, and I'm not talking about their sweets shop. Everyone is so happy, even the workers are happy all the time, even Nagumo who's a failure by any traditional measure is happy. And everybody is kind to each other. T

That makes everything feel fake to me.

Also, what is it with anime and these 100% unrelatable family situations? So the mother gives up her child just because Itasuka likes it there? Ah, yes, that's how parenting goes, when your child likes it somewhere else, you just step back-HAS NEVER HAPPENED IRL EVER.

And this last episode also had the most unnatural, unbelievable line ever: "It's work that that's going with you, not Itsuka, mama". What barely-beyond-toddler-age child would say that? lol

Of course this is unrealistic. You have to bend reality somewhat to create the setting for the story to exist. That's just how it goes. In fact that's how it goes in most fictional series of any kind, and some not-fictional (biographies, etc) as well, just to drive a point by simplifying or exaggerating things.

I have met saccharine people in RL, and that's saying something seeing how I'm from Finland, a taciturn country where people were annoyed when the Covid instructions said you gotta keep a distance of 2m from other people - because folks were used to keeping a much longer distance in normal times. Happy-go-lucky dudes like the MC do exist. If he's like that, he got the genes from somewhere. The employees would likely filter out to be like that to remain working there, in such a traditional, close-knit small shop. It would have an atmosphere of its own. Then just exaggerate it a little, like I said earlier.

You could view the "you are taking your work with you" scene as the mother's memory of what happened. Itsuka could have said the same thing in more childish terms in reality, but it just left an impression like that.

"Giving" Itsuka there would be unrealistic nowadays, but go back a century and it wouldn't be strange, go back two and it would be a run-of-the-mill situation. While I also think it's just convenience for the story to go on, at least there were some circumstances, like the mom having been away for many years, with no contact. She also genuinely seemed to want Itsuka to be happy and to be doing what she loves to do. She was afraid her own ability to make Itsuka happy is lacking, so it would have been quite an awful first step to take Itsuka away from the things she really loves. At this point the mother is basically nothing but a biological mother on paper, after the long separation. It's the dad Itsuka is missing, since it's he under whose care she was growing up, quite happily in fact, until he suddenly hit the road.