The first episode of the Dandadan anime adapts a scene that nearly put me off the manga entirely.

In it, a teenage girl is abducted by alien perverts who strip her to her underwear, strap her down with limbs spread, and promise to do sex to her with their “banana organs,” which are horrifying mechanized phalluses, bristling with attachments and wider than one of her legs. It’s arguably even more horrifying when converted to motion in the anime.

Sure, the girl — Momo Ayase, our cool girl protagonist who believes that ghosts exist, but not aliens — destroys the aliens with her psychic powers before they can touch her, but I balked. Nearly naked teenage girls in nonconsensual sex situations was not my idea of a good time. I pressed on, out of trust in the people who’d recced the manga to me, and a few issues later — in a scene adapted in this week’s episode 3 of the anime — Dandadan clicked for me.

As a boy — Ken Takakura, our nerd guy co-protagonist who believes that aliens exist, but not ghosts — desperately, hilariously, raced to find somewhere to pee, I thought: Oh, I get it, it’s about how the experience of being a horny teenager is the same as approaching a terrifying and potentially threatening unknown.

[Ed. note: This piece contains some spoilers for the first three episodes of Dan Da Dan.]

Dan Da Dan, now streaming on Crunchyroll and Netflix, is the highly anticipated anime adaptation of the hit manga of the same name (styled there as Dandadan), produced by Science Saru (Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, Devilman........

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