I’ve just been out of touch with things for a while. A lot of things happening in the world that depress me while my granddaughter keeps me from folding my tent and going catatonic.

I might possibly get some hate for this but I feel that this season’s anime are really boring. (“Spy Family” is a bright exception.) Most of my watching has been old stuff. Stuff that I missed along the way that might be interesting. One that I’m watching is “The Devil Lady” by Go Nagai. It is a part of the Devilman universe but I’m not sure how it fits in. The only place I could find it was Amazon. Amazon doesn’t care about my prime membership. There will be $$$$ to pay if I want to watch without ads. These are commercials that I can’t skip or FFWD thru. Heavy sigh.

Some of the commercial breaks are a full 90 seconds.

So I tried to mute them. When I mute the audio during the commercials, the commercials pause. They want to force me to watch and listen to the damn thing even if I have no interest. But I can mute them thru the speakers. Or turn the volume almost all the way down and do something on another browser tab until the show starts again. It is an acceptable workaround.

Sadly, It appears Retro Crush doesn’t have it anymore.

Nobody in the regular world knows this but there are beasts among us. These are people who have evolved into monstrous creatures called “devil beasts.” (The condition even has a name, “devil beast syndrome.”) Throughout the series, these beasts keep saying that humanity must evolve or die. Unfortunately, these creatures have lost their soul and no longer have a human conscience and appear to want to accelerate the extinction of nonevolved folks. But alas! It seems that there are nonevolved humans who have lost theirs as well

Jun, dressed for a photoshoot

Jun is a mild-mannered high fashion model. She has this unfortunate trait of having some demon genetics. There are people dedicated to fighting the monsters among us who can tell that just from how a camera flash reflects in one’s eyes. Lan Asuka is one of them. She heads up a unit whose purpose is to hunt down and destroy the raging monsters among us. Jun appears to be one of the few who can transform into demon mode and still maintain their humanity. They are called “devil people” (as opposed to devil beasts.)

Lan is quite the bossy bitch and allows Jun no free will at all. OTOH, Jun allows Lan to allow her no free will at all.

Lan “recruits” her. It is brutal. Jun does not know she’s a half-devil. She is locked in a room with a werewolf-type creature. The man transforms in from of her into a gigantic wolfman creature and without a heads-up, Jun is forced to feel her inner beast or die. When she transforms, she is naked – or at least as naked as mainstream anime from the 90s gets. In her devil form, she easily destroys the werebeast. Against her will, she is coerced and manipulated into working under Lan.

Don’t relax Jun. It’s not dead yet. And you aren’t fully hulked out yet, either.
Powered down. Jun does not want to be a Devil Lady. Why is werewolf blood purple?

Lan is not a good person. She is callous and cares not at all about Jun the human and ruthlessly uses Jan the Devil lady.

Kaoru is written for moe.
But we have some fan service as well.

There is a third character who is important from the very beginning, Kaoru Shimamura. She is a kind and good teenage girl who longs to become an adult so she can start doing high-end modeling instead of teen gigs. Kaoru looks upon Jun as a mentor and kind of a big sister. Jun reciprocates the positive relationship. But having seen the devil inside her, Jun decides to cut off her relationship for the safety of Kaoru.

Take this and add in some existential terror or primordial anger…
…and you get this.

We all know that’s not going to work.

The anime moves on from there. More characters are introduced as well as more devil people.

There are some similarities to “Devilman Crybaby,” the Netflix product. The Devilman story involves several different mangas that are loosely connected. Kaoru is inspired by Miki Makimura of the Devilman manga. “The Devil Lady” is supposedly a sequel the the Devilman story. In one of the manga, Akira from Devilman meets up with her in hell and they have wild aerial sex.

I’m not going to worry about all that. My philosophy is that if you had to read the manga to figure out what is happening in the anime, the anime has failed. Most viewers in the west will never see the manga. Anime needs to stand on its own.