There was something off about W for a decent amount of time for me, and I couldn't quite figure out what it was. It wasn't just that it was a lot less fun to watch than its first season. It wasn't just that the show felt as though it was in a state of constant climax, trying to up the ante and raise the stakes to make everything seem bigger in a way that actually made things matter less. And it's not just because this sequel is the Danball Senki equivalent of Gundam Build Fighters Try. If those were the only problems with it, I likely wouldn't be writing this. It would simply be a disappointing follow-up to a first season that is incredibly fun to watch in a way that made me feel like I was a young kid watching it on TV for the first time. No, it wasn't until over halfway through that it became explicitly clear to me why it is it felt off: this show is right-wing apologia in the form of an anime for kids.

I don't say that lightly. I'm being genuine when I say that Danball Senki W engages with the same kind of right-wing talking points that people use when talking about guns and why capitalism is actually a force for good. I'm almost sure that some of you are reading this and think that I sound like a crazy person, but I want you to stick with me here. There is a persistent narrative thread in W about the dangers of LBXs. It is something that it is constantly referencing throughout its run in such a way that there's no way that Akihiro Hino and the other writers were not aware of it. If, somehow, they weren't, then the level of naivete on display here is absolutely astonishing and the conclusions that they come to are distressing.

With regards to W being less fun to watch, I think that's easier to address and more of a shame than anything else. Atsuhiro Tomioka is no stranger to being involved in good, very entertaining kids anime - this is the point where I say that Battle Spirits is a great watch - and these kinds of big commercials for their products have been Level 5's bread and butter since their pivot to being involved in almost exclusively these kinds of properties when Inazuma Eleven briefly exploded in the late 00s. The problem with Level 5 is that, when they had a hit, they then proceeded to run it into the ground really, really fast by saturating the market. After the success of the first Inazuma game, they for some reason adopted the Pokemon approach of giving the releases two versions on an annual release schedule. This doesn't include the spinoff games or the different anime adaptations for that matter. I recall reading that Go Galaxy was such a disappointment sales wise that it effectively killed the franchise until they tried to revive it.

Danball Senki's time in the spotlight was even more brief and whilst I have no hard evidence to back this up, if I was to hazard a guess I'd say W contributed to that quite a bit. It's apparent that this was made with the intent of capitalising on the sudden success that they had found with the game and model kits, which quickly led to saturation.(The original game having three different versions coming out in quick succession likely didn't help either.) It's more of the same, but less interesting and less good. A lot of the fun that came from watching the first Danball Senki is that it's pure popcorn entertainment. Incredibly engaging with bombastic set pieces that had me on the edge of my seat. It's Gundam Build Fighters on steroids with several times the absurdity. It bears repeating that it made me feel like a little kid, watching this show on cable TV just wowed by everything that was going on. By episode 6 they're talking about a plot to assassinate the Japanese prime minister with a little toy robot. Over halfway through, one of the LBXs is flying into a speeding train with enough force to stop it moving. The final battle takes place in a floating JRPG sky base. There's a consistently thrilling level of escalation to Danball Senki that makes it so much fun. I watched it in a little over two weeks and I think the only reason I didn't watch it faster was because I didn't have the time to. W had a lot to live up to, and it unfortunately wasn't able to. It tries to recapture what made the first season so entertaining by going bigger, but it isn't able to recreate that same magic. The new characters aren't as fun as the cast from season 1, and there's at least one big subplot that's dropped entirely involving the new secondary protagonist, Hiro. (I believe this gets addressed in the sequel novel, but it's a pretty noticeable omission given how much weight is placed on it at the start.) It's a longer show than the first season but I don't think it justifies that length. You could cut out the last arc altogether and nothing of value would really be lost. The comparison to Build Fighters Try feels apt because in a lot of ways, it's quite similar to it; an attempt at being grander in scope with none of the heart that made the first entry work.

That's all speculation on my part. I have no evidence to suggest otherwise but I do think it's fair to say that this is a series that didn't have the staying power of something like Precure or Yu-Gi-Oh! Other series like Cardfight!! Vanguard and later Aikatsu also ended up lasting a lot longer than this did. The rest of it is just how I feel about the show as a sequel, and in the end I think Danball Senki's success was more of a flash in the pan than anything else.

But again, if those were the only issues with it, I likely wouldn't be writing this. If it was just the case that it was a sequel that wasn't as good as the original, then that would be fine! I would much prefer that, honestly! No, the reason why I think this show is something that needs to be taken to task is because of the elephant in the room that is the gross talking points that it brings up.

One of the things you have to accept about Danball Senki if you're going to enjoy it in any real capacity is the utter absurdity of its premise. You have to accept that, were it not for the invention of the special cardboard that is used in the arenas that the LBXs fight in, that this is a series that wouldn't be able to function at all. This gets brought up actually. LBXs were initially banned due to how dangerous they are and it's only because of this specialised cardboard that doesn't get destroyed when the LBXs fire live ammo that they're no longer banned. In season 1 it's very easy to roll with this. What's happening is so entertaining and engaging that it becomes easy to enough to accept it and just revel in how much fun the whole show is.

If you've never seen Danball Senki before or aren't really familiar with it, the little toy robots firing live ammo might be something that sticks out to you, and rightly so. For whatever reason, Dr Yamano, the creator of the LBXs in addition to being the protagonist's dad, made these little toy robots capable of firing live ammo. And lasers. This is one of the big differences between it and Gundam Build Fighters, which manages to avoid all the issues that the LBXs run into by virtue of only allowing them to function in specialised arenas that generate the special particle they need. The LBXs don't work like that. They work outside of the arenas and are used for things they really shouldn't be. (The aforementioned assassination plot being one of them.)

This is something that W attempts to interrogate as well as the thing that sets it apart, and this is the point that the show goes from being a disappointing sequel into something far more gross and malicious. The show is acutely aware that, by design, the LBXs are dangerous. They're something that no one, kids or adults, really should be anywhere near as long as they're functionally indistinguishable from deadly weapons. It is brought up constantly that LBXs need to be brought "back to the arenas", that they need to be used in the right environments, that they need to stop the wrong people from using them, that at the end of the day, it's not the LBXs that are the issue here, it's the fault of the people abusing them. People will insist in the show that it's not the LBXs that are the problem. They will insist that LBXs are fun, that they're actually not that dangerous and were it not for these bad eggs who are causing problems for everyone else and stopping them from using their little death robots, that everything would be absolutely fine.

I want you to do me a favour here. I want you to go back through that last paragraph and replace every time I said "LBXs" with guns instead. If you did and suddenly the LBXs sound terrifying then I think I've made my point clear. These are the same talking points that people who are against regulating guns will bring up constantly as to why this shouldn't happen. And these are the talking points that W engages with constantly. It is genuinely a miracle within the setting of Danball Senki that no one has ended up dead as a result of misuse of these things. There's a point later on in the show when Dr Yamano expresses regret over having created the LBXs due to how they're being used for things he never intended. All he wanted to do was create a fun toy for his son. Here's the thing, he didn't have to make them fire live ammo and yet for some reason he did.

W can't bring itself to actually condemn LBXs, however, as that would be a problem. This was a show marketed at kids with the intention of selling a game and model kits. Coming out and explicitly stating that actually these things are really dangerous is not the message you want to send to the demographic you are trying to sell these to, so the show skirts around it instead. It offers no real solutions other than that the people using them have to be better than the ones who are abusing them. (Battle Spirits Brave, which Tomioka was also involved in also presents a similar idea about the card game but the conclusion it comes to is very different than this.)

The worst part is that the show itself makes it explicitly clear why it is that these are things that need to be regulated or, in this case, outright banned. The first thing that happens in W is the mass hijacking of hundreds of LBXs around the world to cause havoc. There are security measures in place to prevent this from happening, but these measures are so easily circumvented by the hacker responsible that it bring up so many questions about how easy they are to exploit. In the first episode of season 1, Ban himself nearly dies because he's attacked by LBXs in his own home and they wreck a good part of the room he's in for good measure. Enough LBXs banding together are able to manage to disrupt a shuttle bound for space flight. It's no wonder, then, that later on in the show that people in-universe are scared of LBXs, and they have every right to be! These things are terrifying! Yet the show insists that it's not the LBXs that are the problem, because it can't. It's unable to commit to that. The main cast refuse to see that the LBXs are capable of being exploited like this and they're presented as the reasonable ones because of it. They continue to insist that LBXs are nothing more than fun toys for kids and that people just need to use them correctly.

This extends beyond the abhorrent gun apologism and into how the solution when capitalism is failing and not doing the job properly is to just implement better capitalism. This is another thread that the show brings up constantly and it was the thing that made me start to feel that something was off about W before it decided that guns are totally fine and don't need regulation. Time and again, the show will make mention of how the institutions that are currently in place are failing. It manages to accurately point out how capitalism functions during a crisis, which is to act as though there is no problem and to just keep trucking along. If there is an issue that's getting in the way of the perpetual growth that capitalism demands then the show decides it's not an issue with the system itself, it's the fault of the people currently in charge of that system. They need to be replaced by people better suited to bring about changes that will still allow for constant growth whilst papering over some of the more glaring faults.

I'll give you an example. Takuya is one of the most prominent adult figures in the show. He's been around since season 1 and by W he's the CEO of Tiny Orbit, the biggest manufacturer of LBXs in the world. We know he's meant to be a good person because in the first season he was involved in an underground group that was trying to stop the antagonists from assassinating the Japanese Prime Minister. All the kids like him because he's shown to be trustworthy and cares a lot about LBXs as a hobby. Within the logic of the show he's one of the characters that can always be trusted to make the right decision and would never do anything wrong by them. He wants to stop the antagonists of W as much as the kids do because - on top of them being a global threat - it means they can bring LBXS "back to the arenas", where they belong. On the surface this all sounds fine, but let's look a little deeper. He's the CEO of the biggest LBX manufacturer. LBXs are explicitly stated to be the single most popular hobby in the world and there's a lot of money riding on them. It's incredible how much his noble motivation ends up being muddied when you consider that he has other interests in mind here. The negative press that the LBXs are receiving as a result of the Detectors actions are causing the stocks of Tiny Orbit to plummet. Takuya himself might be a good person but he's definitely not doing this for the ideologically pure reasons the show wants you to think he is.

The show is also clearly aware of this, as it goes out of its way to replace Takuya as CEO with an obviously bad, slimy old man who is clearly only interested in the profits that LBXs can bring him. He's what the show clearly wants the audience to see as a bad capitalist. The ones who can't be trusted. Whenever there's a legitimate issue, it tries to hand wave it away with "Well, wouldn't the children be sad?" or "The issue here is clearly the one in charge, not the system that allowed this". When things eventually return to normal, Takuya assumes his position of CEO with absolutely no problem and quickly reverts things back to the status quo. There's a lot of these capitalist realism arguments throughout the show because it's never actually the system that's the problem here.

These are the kinds of messages that W is sending out constantly. It frequently engages in disgusting right-wing apologia. It will bring up legitimate talking points, even indicate the very real flaws that exist with them, but never have a better solution for them because it can't commit to actually acknowledging that these are problems that require a structural upheaval as it clearly doesn't want to. It has other priorities, which mostly come down to "buy our model kits and trust in our institutions". I watched Danball Senki Wars immediately after W and any shred of doubt that I had in my mind that the talking points it brings up here aren't deliberate vanished when that show presented a system which is effectively a neoliberalist ideal. It knows what it's doing and there's no way it doesn't. I hope I've made that clear with what I've written here because the arguments that this show is presenting are vile.This is the reason why Danball Senki W is a show that is worth taking to task and why it's not just a mediocre sequel. What's being said by the show are the kinds of things that aren't worth properly engaging with because they all come from a place of bad faith, predicated on beliefs that don't hold up under scrutiny and only serve to hurt people. Art doesn't exist in a vacuum and neither does this. I've seen kids anime with great messages about life, about values that are worth believing in, about having goals that are worth aspiring for. I've seen kids anime that don't really try to be anything other than silly cartoon fun. Danball Senki W is neither of those and the agenda it's pushing is one that I want nothing to do with.