0004 - Heavenly Delusion a Review

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of Oven and Echoes. I am your host, Renee Brooks and today we are going to be talking about an anime that I binge-watched yesterday called "Heavenly Delusion".

And this anime in its first season has 13 episodes. There are talks about a second season but I'm not sure it's fully confirmed yet. But this anime came out in 2023 and I genuinely wished that I would have watched it sooner but I didn't have access to Hulu back then.

So now though I had to chains to watch it and OH MY GOSH is this going into my S-Tier category? It is! I love it! It's so good I love how visually compelling this anime is. It's so good! And there's so much to uncover in this so let's kind of - dive right in.

So this anime is very much along the post-apocalyptic sci-fi kind of genre. It just doesn't lean too heavy into the sci-fi like as far as like sci-fi concepts: Like there's futuristic AI systems, there's guns that are far beyond even what I know guns can do nowadays that can shoot like very high density lasers out of a very small package so that's kind of where the Sci-Fi aspect comes from.

But the post-apocalyptic aspect is very intense in the whole show from beginning to end and if I had to describe this anime in like 10 words I would say, "Calamity Occurs! Man eating monsters roam free! Can humanity survive?" So imagine this right so this is a semi-futuristic society that we find ourselves in, It's pretty much Earth but maybe like in the 2050 maybe 2100 year...right? So just a little bit further than we are now and some weird anomalous world ending calamity has occurred and just large swaths of society have completely collapsed.

And there are these man-eating creatures and they're just everywhere. Just all over the country. All over the world...and we are specifically seeing what it's like in Japan.

Well you know pretty much any island would have a very difficult time in some sort of calamity like this just for the sheer fact that they have no easy access to other goods. They are pretty much stuck with whatever they have at their disposal with no help from outside communities.

So like places like China and other areas like that - it's all very much landlocked and they could actually they could probably collaborate together and fight better. But in...in the terms of Japan they're kind of off on their own and we get to see these different pockets of humanity trying to survive with these man-eaters just roaming about...

It's intense like we'll just we'll just use that as a one-word descriptor...it's intense.

So in this anime, we end up following like two core groups of characters. The first group is with Maru, who's 15 years old and Kiriko who's like 18 to 20 years old right?

And the other group of characters is pretty much like a collection of kids and adult caretakers in a futureristic orphanage/school facility that they have called like "Heaven" like quote unquote...and this facility has everything! It's got ample food, it's got ample water, it's got an AI security system, it's got an AI educational system, it's got doctors and scientists and like just resources abound and best of all it is completely secure like it's got walls. It's very SAFE right?

And this anime really jumps back and forth between these kids inside of this safe environment versus like Maru & Kiriko who were just out in Japan trying to survive. Not only against these man-eating monsters but then also against like fellow humans. Which is good and bad you know? You'll you'll have that in a lot of post-apocalyptic stuff because like humans have a dark side so that's just another part of this anime that I genuinely genuinely appreciate.

But like the one thing that got me interested in this anime was a TikTok that I saw. So I'm just gonna try and paint a picture of it because it really drove home how dark this is and I'm just gonna say ahead of time that there will be body horror in this description it will be dark it's kind of unsettling so I'm just gonna kind of warn you of that.

This this anime itself is also very unsettling. So if you're not into that kind of thing this review probably will not be for you but...imagine this scene:

Right? So imagine that there is a boy with like brown, like darker hair, and they have a pocket knife in their right hand and they are staring down -this_ pretty much like Chevy Silverado sized tardigrade creature...

And I'm gonna take another aside and say tardigrades are really cool! If you've never seen a tardigrade before you should Google it because like from if you look at them from a microscopic standpoint and you just kind of see them like two-dimensionally as they're Boot Scootin around in like I guess like the fluid that they live in they are microscopic creatures and it's pretty much like a bear shaped creature with six legs and like little tendrils on their finge rs and they have like a little probuscus kind of thing that they used to eat like little micro things like...

They are microorganisms and they eat even smaller things than them, but these creatures are insane...right? Tardigrades can survive in the vacuum of space, they can survive really dark ERRR really cold temperatures, really warm temperatures. They are like the World Championships Survivors of Apocalypses and just world ending calamities. They're amazing...

But imagine that this very young boy is staring down this creature that is roughly the size of a truck and and it does it kind of looks like a tardigrade. I think in the show it has like eight legs instead of six but it still looks very much like a tardigrade and all of a sudden this boy charges at the tardigrade with the knife in hand leaps and like stabs the tardigrade in the face and the like tardigrade is like taken aback. Like it has taken some damage. It's hurting...but quickly the situation here devolves for the worst.

Right? So these creatures are other worldly or maybe this might be another aspect where the sci-fi stuff comes into play because the face of this creature begins to like unravel into these white strands or these white bits that just immediately affix themselves to this boy's arm and hand and the boy and I mean immediately starts to panic because these things are man-eaters.

Right? Like you don't just give something a name just because you think it sounds cool...right? Like they're...I recently went to the doctors and like they told me about a new variant of Covid that has come out called Razor-Throat Covid and there's not a single part of me that wants Razor-Throat Covid. Like mainly because I can imagine that they called it Razor-Throat Covid because it makes your throat feel like it's got razors in it like it feels painful?! like...so...when...

When you hear the descriptor, "man-eater" like it's not "boy-eater" it's "man-eater" like a full-size man-eating thing that should be terrifying!

That should give you pause and understanding and like, "no you shouldn't attack this", "no you shouldn't do this alone" - like you know! Herd mentality! Fight it as a group...SOMETHING! I'm not sure but whatever happened here is not what should have happened...

And this boy is trying so hard to get their right arm free and then like as they used their legs and their other arm for like leverage to try and get away...pretty much anywhere that a human comes in contact with these creatures their skin can morph around it to just start eating...people.

Right? This is just what they do. They are the new apex predator kind of deal and they just eat people.

And this boy immediately goes from having three...three appendages free to no appendages free and then then the next scene you just see this boy hanging unconscious pretty much like from mid chest up to head just that's all that you can see and like otherwise they're just...eaten...gone...like and that is that whole TikTok that like I saw that I'm like:

"I have to see that!"

"I want to see what's going on here!"

So that is definitely a a core part of the show that ends up being pretty pretty intense
but this show really dives into so many different aspects that I just absolutely love right?

There's great pacing in this show. It really makes you want to watch like episode to episode as soon as you get done with one, you want to jump into the next one. I love that!

The mystery of the show gets unraveled at a very nice pace. Like you don't get bombarded with a bunch of stuff...you do get a lot of world building as each episode progresses like it is very is very linear and how much you learn about the world it's not like it's not like a freaking like a horrible bell curve or something it's very gradual and I like that.

And the animation that they have is just stellar. I love this!

But then the two main parts that make this show really stand out for me...one of them is just their great balance between how serious the world can be and the small-peppered amount of comedy that they bring into the like into the story.

Which is just so it's so valid right? Like when you have such a dystopian world or such a dystopian situation like you need to find like a silver lining in it. Otherwise like humanity cannot survive in just like a no-win scenario.

Like I guess technically you can but it's it's really hard and so having some sort of comedy is great but the way that they made this show is so special to me because they made the small amount of comedy not feel overwhelming and there was still just this this overtone or like I guess some that's probably not the word right word there's just this overall tone of somberness, darkness, hopelessness there's there's a lot of different things and the comedy never really took away from it so I genuinely appreciated that.

The other thing that I genuinely loved about this show is it actually deep dives into some different gender issues. That resonates with me a lot as a person just for the fact that gender is a complex thing - when you're dealing with it - because in like some people who are Cis they're not gonna have that level of issue in in themselves as people.

But when you have somebody who IS dealing with some sort of gender dysphoria or just any anything about where like when they don't feel like they are who they are. Having any kind of representation is is very valuable so I appreciate in how they added that into the story but I'm not gonna give that away.

It's such it's such a good such a good story!

I'm just gonna kind of have to leave that where it is.

Like I know I probably didn't describe that show too much but I I loved everything about this show!

They...the way that they animated it. The way that they revealed the story over time the just watching the humanity struggle in the way that it does in this show is just...it's art.

I love how they portrayed this and I really hope that there is a second season like because I totally I totally would watch that but I'm gonna have to read the manga like there's no other way.

But that's pretty much all I have for this episode I hope you all have a lovely day and I hope this might have inspired you to you know watch the show because I totally think it's worth a watch but until next time guys you all have a lovely day! BYE