Column Anime Spotlight Dorohedoro: The Unlikely Joys of a Fetid Wonderland We celebrate the return of this bizarre masterpiece now that Season 2 is finally here. By Leah Thomas | Published on April 9, 2026 Credit: MAPPA Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: MAPPA A man wearing a disturbing heart-shaped mask stops to reminisce in a filthy alleyway. “This place hasn’t changed since I was a kid,” he says. It is either nostalgia or a condemnation. He and his companions pause to observe what appears to be a zombie devouring a fresh corpse in the alley. The man, Shin, embraces the role of a tour guide. He explains that all the magical fallout from the world of sorcerers alters the slum-realm known as Hole: “It’s like a town of fantasies,” he concludes, not without pride. Shin is far from a protagonist, but he’s certainly a Dorohedoro fan-favorite. He and his partner, Noi, a handsome, hulking woman clad in an Eastern European tracksuit, are sorcerers who work as cleaners for a wealthy weirdo named En. Shin’s magic allows him to dismember people without killing them—uncomfortable for his victims but fantastic for interrogations. Noi is a healer, and En can transform anything into mushrooms… only mushrooms. They are all members of an elite social class of magic-users who experiment on the downtrodden humans of Hole for shits and giggles. Apparently, all sorcerers are objectively horrible creatures that are kept alive by tiny devil tumors that dwell behind their eyeballs. So, why do I enjoy them all so much? En makes me laugh when he describes a grieving underling’s candy-cane elf shoes as funeral garb, and when he feeds guests mushrooms that used to be people because it’s wrong to waste food. Shin makes me laugh when he scolds Noi for throwing a fork instead of a knife when assassinating someone. Noi makes me laugh when she confronts one of our actual protagonists, a badass gyoza-chef named Nikaido, gets kicked so hard her organs burst, and responds with a joyful, genuine, “I like you! Let’s be friends!”  Everything in this imagined universe is despicable, sure. But it is also tons of demented fun. Credit: MAPPA Dorohedoro’s strangely playful spirit is only one aspect of the series that sets it apart. The imagination on display is incomparable, if deeply weird and sometimes unsettling. Does any other show feature a lizard-headed hero who shoves the heads of his opponents down his throat so that the man—yes, some actual guy—who lives inside him can get a good look at them? Does any other show depict magic as toxic condensation that fucks with another civilization to such an extent that radioactive fallout seems pleasant by comparison? The wonders never cease: a turkey-headed man makes life-sized human dolls from duck meat; En hosts an annual feast during which rotting corpses are hung from the ceiling, waiting to be magicked back to life; a sentient gyoza fairy is a recurring character; multiple severed heads remain self-aware despite their disembodied status, and often for totally different reasons that make sense in-universe; a baseball field decorated with sorcerers on pikes also boasts a bottomless pit between second and third base that players must remember to hop over. A single episode of Dorohedoro contains enough bizarre creativity to power an entire franchise. Mangaka Q Hayashida garnered a significant cult following during the manga’s lengthy run (1999-2018), thanks in part to her sludgy, intricate art style, but mostly because her mind is just… singular. It’s difficult to express how much her work inspires me, not because I could or would write anything like it. But Q Hayashida has created a fetid world populated by unspeakable monstrosities and foul magic that somehow all comes together to feel like Wonderland.  And then, almost as impossibly, MAPPA finally animated her psychopathic saga and managed to do it justice in both a cinematic and dramatic sense. The first season of Dorohedoro aired on Netflix in 2020. Understandably, a lot of folks were not super inclined to laugh at gore during the pandemic, and its meticulous but unconventional animation—which incorporates exceptionally good hybrid 2D/3D elements—may have put off traditionalists.  But miracle of miracles: Dorohedoro’s second season began airing this month. Finally, I’ve been given the perfect excuse to wax poetical about this gross, nihilistic, overcomplicated delight of a nightmare story. So let’s open the floodgates on Dorohedoro, an anime set in the most rotted universe I’ve ever had the pleasure to behold while being grateful it doesn’t exist. Head Like a Hole Credit: MAPPA Let’s start with Hole. Not Courtney Love’s band, but heck, this show really does feel like an embellished embodiment of grunge. I want to make AMVs of it using all of The Downward Spiral. I want to wear t-shirts of every character’s face under a tattered flannel. It’s absolutely the correct vibe. What we see of Hole are mostly the places where our leads, Caiman and Nikaido, make their living. A soiled city populated by bedraggled and/or mutated human beings, Hole is also a functional metropolis. It has actual public transportation, at least two hospitals, an established nightlife scene, and that one baseball field with the bottomless pit. There’s also the Hungry Bug, Nikaido’s gyoza restaurant. Because Hole exists as a dumping ground for the excess magic of entitled sorcerers, the quality of life in Hole is far from ideal. Nothing is clean, and the infrastructure is wobbly at best. Bored sorcerers frequently open portals into Hole to engage in debauchery or practice their rotted magic on unwilling guinea pigs.  But Hole is also among the most sumptuously realized cities I’ve seen in anime. When Caiman wakes in his shitty apartment, you can smell the stale beer cans. The grime on pipes and windowsills feels tangible. The toxic, magical fog that infects the denizens seems to permeate the screen. The backdrops are immersive and lushly detailed. Hole is the last place anyone wants to live, but the people there have made the most of a bad situation. Just as the world became accustomed to the pandemic, these people are accustomed to very unique environmental horrors. Being unfairly dismembered is a daily possibility. But people carry on living. The tenacity of Hole’s population probably shouldn’t inspire me, but it does. Because the place feels real, much like the slums in District 9 or Final Fantasy, the people feel a little admirable. So what if this guy got his head turned into a cephalopod, so now he drools into beers when he serves them? Damned if he’s gonna stop running his bar. If Hole’s people lack basic morality, that’s just another survival mechanism. Rather than wallowing in the hideous state of their lives, these people throw festivals to commemorate the nights the dead rise. Might as well have fun with it, right? Credit: MAPPA Take Caiman. He believes he lost his memories when he lost his human head, and sure, he expends most of his time and energy in the feckless pursuit of the sorcerer who cursed him—after all, killing a sorcerer is the easiest way to undo their magic. And if he sometimes goes overboard, he has no qualms about biting through the necks of any other sorcerer who gets within grabbing range. But when he isn’t biting faces off, Caiman’s a decent guy. He assists his doctor friend at the hospital, where they mostly have to help or dispose of the failed experiments of errant magicians (sucks to be given mandibles for no reason). He enjoys his free time primarily with his best friend Nikaido, devouring gyoza at her restaurant. Sure, Caiman is somewhat tormented by his own fucked-up existence, but point me to any interesting person who isn’t, in Hole or anywhere else. Caiman amuses me in part because he’s not particularly deep. While he does indulge in rare moments of mortified introspection, when he wonders who or what he really is, or why a man is living inside him, and whether he was ever human to begin with, these moments are fleeting. He’s gonna eat gyoza, bite sorcerers, and hang out with Nikaido. Simple is best. Nikaido has her share of secrets and conceals far deeper depths than Caiman, but it’s apparent that she doesn’t see life in Hole as a bad thing at all. She is a cheerful cook with a devastating kick and deep affection for her weirdo community. Like Noi, Nikaido is drawn by someone who appreciates rather than objectifies women. Honestly, the way Q Hayashida draws all of her characters is so refreshing that it almost negates the rampant violence in the series.  It’s funny how, the longer you watch the series, the less you hold the jagged, filthy edges of the Hole residents against them. They are a product of an impossible environment, only as bad as anyone would be, and a lot funnier. Ugly Magic Credit: MAPPA When I first watched Dorohedoro, I anticipated it would follow the classic dystopia vs. utopia playbook when distinguishing its two settings. Black towers vs. bright skies; ragged peasants vs. the fashionable elite; dirt vs. bleach. To some extent, there are elements of this on show. En lives in an immense mansion. The air in the realm of sorcerers is less polluted. People use magic to travel, and tourists can admire elaborate architecture. There are magic carpets, gourmet restaurants, and galas. But in reality? The world of sorcerers is not always distinguishable from Hole. This feels intentional rather than incidental. The sorcerers view humans as garbage, but live in squalorous homes themselves. We soon learn that the rain in Hole is unbearable to sorcerers. There are deeper, plot-related reasons for this, but the symbolism alone strikes me. Rain is one of the few “natural” things in the entire anime, and it makes them physically ill.  En’s mansion is covered in fungus, and under the fungus the place is downright gaudy. Sorcerers can and do have whatever they want, but still choose to surround themselves with ugliness and death. Sorcerers, like the scary fae of Scandinavian folklore, can’t help but revel in wickedness. Because sorcerers have created a society wherein power is more or less determined by one’s ability to inflict deforming curses on others, is it any surprise that the fashion has evolved to include masks of skin and body horror decor gruesome enough to make Ed Gein envious? Rich people lack taste, or so we poor people like to tell ourselves. Likewise, the sorcerers fall prey to excess and indulgence. They snort black-magic drugs and consider surgeries that will remedy their magical dysfunction. It’s a pissing contest with amputation thrown in.  Case in point: While disguised, Caiman and Nikaido visit a restaurant in the realm of sorcerers. The waiter informs them that the establishment is known for its fire-flushing toilet. Soon after eating, Caiman feels ill. He runs to the bathroom to vomit, but hellfire spews from the porcelain throne, almost scorching his scales off. Only then does he squint to read a wall placard that describes how fire-flushing works. The placard brags that guests can even enjoy the sounds of real screams from hell for a minute after flushing. “Sorcerers are a bunch of weirdos,” Caiman declares. He’s so right. Replace “sorcerers” with any reigning class, and I think we’ve uncovered the point that a smirking Q Hayashida most enjoys making. The sorcerers may believe they have discarded their worst pollutants in Hole, but they’re mistaken. After all, they themselves are not in Hole. Is there redemption? Of course there is, but only after a Dorohedoro fashion. Sometimes being a sorcerer is complicated. There are many reasons to love the dynamic that plays out between contract killers/cleaners Shin and Noi. They care for each other genuinely, just as Caiman and Nikaido do. Shin has a rebellious streak that stems from being raised in Hole by his human father before his magical blood betrayed him. He wears his mask backwards—it’s an anatomical heart, by the way—and enjoys a real bloodbath. Noi is a chipper, sometimes dopey murderer with a hidden intellectual streak. Watching them banter is just as fun as watching them fight. It can’t really be said that they are good people, but then again, who in Dorohedoro could ever be? Playful Violence Credit: MAPPA There’s no denying that Dorohedoro is extremely violent. Characters are frequently diced, skinned, and decapitated. Ebisu, a young sorceress with all the heft of a sapling, gets her face degloved in the pilot episode, and though she’s soon healed, repeated injury becomes a running gag. Severed limbs are thrown through the air on multiple occasions, and mushrooms sprout from eyesockets, and hearts are punched right through chests and squeezed.  How do I put this, though? I don’t dislike the gore in Dorohedoro. It is creative gore, playful gore, in the spirit of Evil Dead or, my personal guilty pleasure, Peter Jackson’s Braindead. This gore is nondiscriminatory, non-sexualized, and downright inventive. This is what happens when monstrous magic meets brute force and sharp teeth. It is visceral and often amusing, and body horror is a functional aspect of Q Hayashida’s storytelling. The more of Dorohedoro you read or watch, the less the gore chafes (with one exception: the repeated mistreatment of Ebisu, who is a child, is a joke that rarely lands). You’re dropped in the deep end from the very first scene and told to swim, and it turns out you can. I will not say that Dorohedoro is a healthy or positive series. But I will say that it offers a uniquely optimistic response to the concept of desensitization to violence. Because all this gore would be hard to stomach if the show were at all self-serious. This is a series known for chiseling humor from scenes of decadent violence—a difficult balancing act if ever there was one. Berserk comes to mind as another work that indulges in violence to a controversial extent. But the difference—and it’s a big difference—is that there is little to no levity in Berserk.That’s fine, because fans of Kentaro Miura will point out that Beserk is a legendary grimdark fantasy. But Q Hayashida attempted something different in Dorohedoro, and with a few caveats, succeeded. The world she submerged us in is only as gory as it is ludicrous, so much so that it embodies an almost Halloween-esque streak of festivity.  Dorohedoro shows us what is horrible, and then allows us to laugh in its face. If grimdark stories wear on the soul, what do, um…grimlight stories do? Is it so wrong to approach exaggerated violence with a sense of humor? Perhaps, perhaps not. It helps, however, that Dorohedoro never indulges in sexual violence. It also helps that characters who die hardly ever stay dead, given the rampant, messed-up magic of it all, and that those who do are slightly worse people than our would-be protagonist. Caiman only wants a few things out of life. He wants to know who cursed him and who he used to be. And he wants to know who the man living inside him is. (Again, this is not figurative, but literal. Ain’t nobody got time for being figurative in Hole.) Just as anyone else faced with a corrupted society and toxic government, Caiman focuses on the immediate. He takes it one step at a time. He bites through his problems, devours some gyoza, brushes his teeth, and goes to bed. Sometimes, it’s the best you can do to just keep going.[end-mark] The post <i>Dorohedoro</i>: The Unlikely Joys of a Fetid Wonderland appeared first on Reactor.