Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show – Episode 1

Content Warning: brief flashing (opening), hanging imagery

What’s it about? Kuroneko Miko runs a tiny gaming channel as “Necronomico,” but things haven’t been going well since her co-streamer Mayu fell into a mysterious coma. The apparent answer to Miko’s money woes appears as an offer to playtest a new VR game for a massive cash prize, but she and her fellow players quickly find the stakes are higher than they bargained for.

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If you were on social media yesterday, you’ve probably already heard the deserved firestorm going on around this show—specifically, its subtitles. The English subs are a near unreadable wreck, with dialogue assigned to the wrong speaker, nonsensical sentence constructions, inconsistently translated puns, missing dialogue, even simple (albeit hilarious) spellcheck errors. It’s a hot mess of absent quality control, made worse by the apparent confirmation that the German version was spit out at least in part by ChatGPT. Both Chiaki and outside translators have found whole segments that misunderstand dialogue at a foundational level.

The current speculation, though Crunchyroll has not put out an official statement, is that the subtitles were provided by license-holder CyGames, possibly with minimal turnaround before the episode was due to air. This alarming lack of quality control and crunch on day-to-day employees is an egregious but sadly predictable outcome of both the race to the bottom in translator pay rates and Sonyroll’s monopolistic grip on the industry. The ultimate result is an episode of television that’s hard to review. Its subtitles are such incomprehensible hash that I was taken back to the bootleg Yu-Gi-Oh! DVDs I bought on eBay at 14. Trying to write this review feels a little bit like trying to file taxes using only my annual horoscope.

And that is a damned shame, because I think there might be a really kick-ass show in here. CyGames has been knocking it out of the park with its original anime for the past several years, from ZOMBIE LAND SAGA to Brave Bang Bravern! and Apocalypse Hotel, and Necronomico has a comparable level of visual polish right out of the gate. Its 2D sections make fantastic use of color, from cool-colored neon to dystopian techno reds and sickly yellows. The VR sections, meanwhile, are set in a Fall Guys-like 3D environment that renders the deceptively minimalized designs with incredible smoothness and composites well when the traditionally animated world intrudes. Its monster designs are also fantastic. I’m a big fan of cosmic horror, and the character designer is clearly having a lot of fun throwing tentacles and eyeballs onto things like it’s Bloodborne-o-clock. It does fall a bit into the dichotomy of making female monsters more humanoid so we can be sure they’re sexy boob-havers while masculine monsters get to have chicken heads and frills, but there’s still enough flare and enough restraint on things like boob-jiggle that I wasn’t too stuck on it.

I’m also pretty sure I like Miko (who I had to check the wiki and ANN to confirm WAS called Miko; the subs call her Mako at least twice) a hell of a lot. She’s not as much of a shambling disaster human as failgirl queen Masakichi, but there’s an edge of desperation around her nonchalance that explodes to the fore in interesting ways—particularly in regards to the comatose Mayu. I’m a little bit hesitant to call them “girlfriends” at this stage (word hash, remember), but they are living together alongside some pretty romantic imagery, and Mayu’s illness seems to be the entire reason Miko wants to stay around for the plot. And if you look at the titles I listed above, you’ll know CyGames has a higher-than-average record for letting queerness into its titles.

I’m not 100% sure how confident I am about series composer Uezu Makoto, whose CV includes a pretty huge spectrum of titles from KONOSUBA to Yuki Yuna is a Hero to the first two cour of Space Brothers. His most relevant previous title might be Assassination Classroom, since Necronomico introduces an apparent death game element to tis proceedings—though it also leaves room to subvert that expectation, which I would count as a point in its favor. Despite my sometime fondness for the genre, it’s one that traditionally engenders disinterest in the cast in the same way as a Jason film. That’s really not going to work for the plot hook Necronomico has set up (I think), in which we’re asked to care a lot about this girl and the other girl she’s fighting for, not to mention the “let’s band together for the sake of the planet” element.

But even if it does decide to start cutting its cast down, I must give it credit for lacking the common misogynistic shorthand of death games. There’s no fan service (an inadvertent panty shot is referred to, but we don’t relive it), there’s no threat of sexual violence, and nobody is throwing out false rape accusations to martyr a male protagonist. The female characters are in the spotlight, and I’m of the general impression that I’d probably like them if I had a concrete idea of what they were saying.

The state of the anime industry is an absolute shambles, particularly in the world of English-language licensing. Everyone reading at home is pretty aware of that, I think, and Necronomico has ended up a particularly egregious example to throw onto the pile. My biggest hope is that the massive outcry will be enough to cause a reverse in course and a retranslation. Not only does the show itself deserve it, but so do the hundreds of people laboring in the trenches of daily streaming who end up getting thrown under the bus by the callous calculations of the executive class. If we don’t dig our heels in, you can bet we’ll be talking about this problem again next season.