Goumon Baito-kun no Nichijou is one of those cutesy slice of life series about people with unusual jobs, only in this case the job is torturer?
This is a world where killing and torture are legalized. Sero, a part-time worker at a torture company, enjoys torturing people every day with his senior colleague, Siu. With the addition of new part-timers Mike and Hugh, fun torture life continues!
One of those days when you truly believe anime was a mistake. I went in blind with this one, but once it became clear what it was about and how it presented itself, I noped out quickly. This is pure fascism:
I do understand that the incongruity is the point and, to many people, the appeal. Still, I just can’t find it in me to chuckle as Cero thinks in the opening sketch about what a waste of his time it’ll end up being if the guy he’s tormenting doesn’t actually have the information he’s seeking out. I grimaced at the posters promoting torture as a way of helping keep the world clean and safe, and the assurance that the men strapped to their chairs are all confirmed villains, so it’s totally okay.
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What’s most baffling about this anime, however, is how it attempts to make our heroes seem not just “normal” but “good.” In this world, a torturer is apparently a legal job. All the people sent to them are guilty of something—even if it’s not the crime they’re being tortured for. So it’s totally okay that they’re being crippled and/or disfigured, right? Well, the show sure seems to think so.
Caitlin Moore and Richard Eisenbeis there nailing exactly why it is. It’s that whitewashing of what torture is, that insistence that everybody being tortured deserves it, that it’s good as long as it only happens to bad people, that makes it fascist. Because if you insist only bad people get tortured, the opposite is true as well: getting tortured means you’re a bad person. Some people are inherently bad and lose their human rights so can be tortured. How more fascist can you make it. It’s the same thinking behind Guantanamo and the idea of “illegal combatants”, people arbitrarily put outside the protections of the Geneva conventions so you could waterboard them.
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