Dandadan Season 3: How Horny Aliens Became the UN of Late-Stage Capitalism

Dandadan Season 3: When the World’s Idols Unite to Fight Alien STDs and Catholic Guilt—A Global Dispatch

By the time the third season of Dandadan dropped, the planet had already survived two pandemics, three near-misses with nuclear winter, and one regrettable summer when everyone tried to make NFTs happen. Against that backdrop, a Japanese streaming series about turbo-charged psychic teenagers battling both horny extraterrestrials and vengeful yokai feels almost … quaint? Yet here we are, watching global audiences latch onto Momo Ayase and Ken “Okarun” Takakura as if they hold the secret to geopolitical sanity. Spoiler: they don’t, but the illusion is cheaper than therapy.

The numbers are vulgar. Within 72 hours of release, Netflix reported 41 million “first-week completions,” a metric that sounds suspiciously like a Tinder date gone wrong. The show topped trending lists from Lagos to Lima, displacing the usual diet of true-crime docs and Korean mafia melodramas. In France, cultural mandarins at Le Monde hailed Dandadan as “l’apothéose post-structuraliste,” which roughly translates to “we finally found something more confusing than our pension reform.” Meanwhile, American TikTokkers reduced the entire plot to a ten-second dance challenge involving cursed sneakers. Civilizational decline rarely comes with such a catchy hook.

What makes Season 3 resonate worldwide isn’t the turbo-incestuous alien royal family (though that helps). It’s the way the series weaponizes folklore as geopolitical metaphor. Serpoians—those smug, tentacled ambassadors from Planet Horny—arrive preaching galactic unity while secretly weaponizing cultural taboos. Swap the tentacles for trade agreements and you’ve got the WTO in a latex bodysuit. Viewers in debt-saddled Argentina clock the allegory immediately; Japanese salarymen see their own corporate senpai in Serpoian middle management. We’re all being colonized by something, the show shrugs; at least these invaders offer free Wi-Fi.

Perhaps the darkest laugh comes from the Vatican subplot, in which a rogue cardinal weaponizes latent Catholic guilt to create a kaiju-sized manifestation of repressed desire. Rome issued a diplomatic eye-roll (“We do not comment on streaming fan-fiction”), but ticket sales for exorcisms in Naples spiked 400%. Somewhere in Manila, a Jesuit priest is quietly adding “Turbo Granny” to the list of banned apparitions. Organized religion, like everything else, is learning that if you can’t beat pop culture, you monetize it.

The economics are equally surreal. Crunchyroll’s servers crashed in São Paulo, an outage that briefly tanked Brazil’s Bovespa index because half the trading floor was streaming on mute. In South Korea, where the government already subsidizes manhwa exports, parliament held emergency hearings on “soft-power leakage” to Japan. The irony—Seoul worrying about Tokyo’s cultural ascendancy—is richer than the katsu curry Momo’s grandma slings at 3 a.m. While diplomats bicker, bootleg merch floods Nairobi’s Kangemi market: unlicensed Okarun dakimakura pillows stitched in Chinese factories, retailed at 800 Kenyan shillings a pop. Globalization, ladies and gentlemen: the same supply chain that brings you microplastics now delivers psychic alien romance by Tuesday.

And let’s not overlook the soft-power scoreboard. After Season 3’s climactic episode—featuring a city-leveling kaiju duel scored by a shamisen remix of Beethoven’s Ninth—Japan’s tourism bureau reported a 17% uptick in inbound otaku pilgrimages. The yen may be in freefall, but at least Akihabara’s pachinko parlors are thriving. Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department quietly added “anime diplomacy” to its strategic communications budget, proving that Washington will weaponize literally anything except gun control.

Final observation: For all its phantasmagoric bravado, Dandadan Season 3 is ultimately a coping mechanism. The world burns, democracies teeter, and the oceans are seasoning themselves with microplastics, yet we gather at 2 a.m. to watch teenagers punch libidinous aliens in the face. It’s not hope, exactly; more like a shared delusion sturdy enough to carry us to the next catastrophe. And honestly? Given the alternatives—another election cycle, another climate summit—that’s a bargain. Pass the wasabi popcorn; the apocalypse can wait for the post-credits scene.