Don’t Leave Me Alone, Daisy starts out as a perverse little number, and it just keeps getting weirder. In the initial episode we’re introduced to just about all the major players throughout the series and see them doing pretty much all they will in all the shows. Techno is weird, Hitomi is at turns nonplussed and pissed off, the mannish Sayori is thwarting Techno and Yamakawa X is being unfairly beaten down. All the elements are here from the start.
Also in this episode, right smack dab in the beginning, is the indication that Don’t Leave Me Alone, Daisy has some specific and serious intent that will no doubt be hammered home with the subtlety of a fuel-air bomb. In the first scenes when we’re learning that Techno is a wacko-paranoiac, he lists off the dangers to mankind: technology kills us, war kills us, nuclear bombs kill us – mankind is shortly to be annihilated! All very typical pacifistic anime stuff.
Luckily, Don’t Leave Me Alone, Daisy leaves backstory where it belongs: in the background. The whole first episode deals with Techno’s attempts to woo Hitomi, which are all astoundingly perverse and unwittingly antisocial. In this episode alone, Techno tries to non-euphemistically pickle Hitomi, declares ownership of her, changes her name to Daisy (since pet owners and bug collectors get to name their finds, Techno explains) and bolts his desk to her own so that he can keep an eye on her. He also arbitrarily determines that classmate Yamakawa X is a threat, and so he tortures him with an electrocuting device.
Techno is perverse, there’s no escaping that. But when he’s thwarted he doesn’t reply with violence or anger he just doesn’t understand others’ opposition to his completely whacked-out behavior. He’s not malicious – he’s just so inward and antisocial he doesn’t relate to other people. He doesn’t even attempt a decent conversation with Hitomi, and when she talks to him he only hears what he wants to. That’s an element which keeps the show from being offensive (for the most part), and which makes all this perversity so funny.
Rating :B
