#Anyway please read Infinite Dendrogram it's super good

[honestlyvan]

What is dendro and who are your blorbos in it? :o

Infinite Dendrogram is a web novel/light novel series written by Sakon Kaidou that began publishing in 2015 that has a 12 episode anime covering the first five volumes and an ongoing manga adaptation by Kami Imai. It takes place inside a virtual MMO of the same name, filled with fully sapient AI NPCs called "tians", and all player characters, "Masters", are equipped with adaptive AI companions called "Embryos" that range from non-sentient weapons to fully sapient partners that are born from a profound desire their Master has, and evolve to fulfill their wishes, justified as them "adapting" to the Master's preferred play style.

It's bonkers good, has extremely tight power scaling and a well thought-out magic system, intriguing lore and absolutely stacks and stacks of the best girls in shonen. I haven't actually ran the numbers but I feel like the supporting cast is majority female and out of all of them only two could reasonably be considered love interests for the protagonist, the major recurring ones being either his peers or his mentors.

It fucking rules, nonny. I am spoiled by this series. I'm never gonna be able to go back to manga. Dendro has so many well-written, strongly characterised female characters who are nothing like one another and in fact occupy a lot of the archetypes male characters would in other stories.

Anyway! Onto the blorbos! Unmarked spoilers for volumes 1-21 and the entire anime from hereon out!!

Ray Starling & Nemesis

"Protagonist-kun? Really, Van?" Yes, really. Listen. Ray fucking rules. As a Maiden's Master, he is mechanically identified as giving way too much of a shit, and a lot of his personality is shaped by his attempts at harnessing the compassion that is too big for his body to good ends. Ray is very clear-headed about his strengths and weaknesses, and yet he still develops into a suicide bomb of a PC because he just really fucking hates people getting hurt.

He's humble and good-natured, engagingly intelligent without dipping over into annoying smart guy territory, and Kaidou's Girl Respecter streak has rubbed off on him a lot because Ray is chill about having female friends in a way that is startlingly grounded. He's a good ridealong character. He's sweet. He is a good lad.

But also! I did say my blorbo was Ray with Nemesis. And that's because Nemesis helps bring out nuance in Ray and also explain the core idea behind Embryo's so strongly I don't think it makes sense to read Ray without the context Nemesis provides for us. While Ray is chill and humble, Nemesis is exuberant and positively radiates self-esteem. While Ray is passionate and driven by his compassion, Nemesis is calculating and goal-oriented.

All of Ray's features that could be a hindrance to his need to do good, to be good to other people, are cleverly externalised in Nemesis, who is reined in by Ray's mastery but also made charming, relatable and loveable through her. She is gluttonous and hungry for praise, but she is also bold-hearted and principled. She's fearless in battle, but she is also very committed to Ray's safety.

The two of them truly do feel like two halves of a complementary whole, like she is a shard of his soul externalised and given a voice of her own -- many features Ray has that he suppresses or doesn't feel comfortable revealing about himself like his need to do things, be involved and take up space are expressed in her, and then given space to breathe through Nemesis' development as a character. She is herself, but she is also Ray -- and through their love and respect of each other, we understand both of them better.

Shu Starling

We very quickly discover that the reason Ray is so relatively hinged is because all the batshit protagonist perks went to his older brother. Shu is introduced as a chill and deeply unserious dude playing in a bear-shaped mascot suit, explained away by him forgetting to change the presents on his PC and thus it making it look just like him -- a real problem for a guy who IRL is both a former child actor and singer, as well as a known junior league martial artist and a genius level intellect whose career was being followed with bated breath during his university years.

To say that it doesn't come as a surprise that Shu is secretly one of Altar's (his and Ray's starting kindgom's) Big Three -- both a holder of a near-mythical Superior Job and a seventh form Superior Embryo -- would be an understatement. Shu Starling is a slacker genius with the power to punch reality so hard it shatters like glass.

However. Just like how Ray manages to be grounded despite being mechanically identified as giving too much of a shit, Shu is very relaxed for someone set apart by his skills from other people. He's not conceited about his own intelligence, but he's also not overly humble about it, and while he does try to keep a low profile and avoid expectations, he's has his own gentle and caring side too. You'd think a guy with narrative weight like him would be an albatross around the plot that would invalidate major parts of it but in practice Shu's power set limits him to circumstances where the power to punch reality so hard it shatters like glass is actually needed. For a guy that can solve almost any problem with his fists, he would really prefer not to.

Shu is mostly utilised as a comic relief -- his overwhelming genius contrasting with how little seems to be going on between his big fluffy ears being played for laughs pretty much constantly -- but as the stakes are raised, Shu reveals himself to be the "reluctantly reliable" sort. He's a piece of shit bear, but heroic kindheartedness runs in the family, and you can really tell where Ray got a lot of his habitual do-gooder streak from.

Xunyu

Speaking of the best girls in the fucking series -- Xunyu is introduced in the first arc as a Superior from the faraway kingdom of Huang He and a real goddamn troll who in her first proper appearance is already picking a fight with Shu even though she's a specially invited guest of the Altean royal family in the Arena in Gideon. Despite her irreverence and mischievousness, Xunyu is quite calculating and farseeing -- a "ludo" player who enjoys Dendro on a primarily mechanical basis, and likes to antagonise her opponents just so she has an easier time pulling off her multi-step, preparation-heavy strategies on them more easily.

Her player character is also a giant fuckoff eight-foot jiangshi while her actual player is a nine-year old girl. She's one of the first "oh Kaidou is a gamer gamer" characters, because her behaviour and mind games while she's in dueling mode are so reminiscent of pro wrestling trash talk, it's super delightful.

Outside of combat, Xunyu is cheerfully mischievous, and loves teasing people, but despite her bluntness she is genuinely very sweet, being both a graceful loser as well as a committed friend. She ends up becoming one of the many mentors for Ray, as well as being good friends with a fair few significant characters -- including many tians, despite her being someone who mostly thinks of Dendro as a game. She's not overly precocious, but being one of the Masters who are less emotionally invested in the world she ends up having a real grounding presence. I love her so much.

Figaro

Kaidou loves doing a thing where a character is introduced in a very sinister way through the rumours being told about them, and then their actual appearance contrasting with that, as you realise that a lot of the gossip is the result of tians not knowing how to read player motivations. Figaro is one of the first examples of this -- we hear that he is the Over Gladiator and one of Altar's Big Three, and that he really left them in a lurch during the war that happened just before Ray started playing because he didn't want to fight beside anyone, making him come across as haughty and blood-crazed. When we finally meet him, he's solo-raiding one of the hardest dungeons in the kingdom.

The reality behind the legends is that Figaro is, in fact, just extremely awkward. He's very sick in real life, and turned to Dendro for some escapism, but it hasn't helped much with his awkwardness because he ended up extremely invested in the mechanics of the game, and loves nothing more than throwing himself at crazy hard challenges to the point where he spends most of his time either dueling people in the arena or raiding hard-ass dungeons solo. He is, despite the intimidating appearance and the occasional blood rage, very kind-hearted and soft-spoken, and his friendship with Shu is genuinely very sweet and humanising for both of them.

(He also gets one of my favourite romances in the genre ever.)

Tsukuyo Fuso

The last of Altar's Big Three, Tsukuyo Fuso fucking sucks<3 She's childish, greedy and manipulative, and the leader of an actual fucking cult called the Lunar Society both inside Dendro and out in the real world. In real life, Fuso is Ray's upperclassman at TokyoU, and while there are some shenanigans to be had there, her influence within Dendro is so large that she kind of stays on the outskirts of the plot, causing problems for everyone. She is awful in every way and I love her.

But don't let this give you the impression that Fuso is a villain, though -- she is also a Maiden's Master like Ray, mechanically identified as giving way too much of a shit, she does authentically want good for her people and everyone else (which, y'know, she thinks would be easier if they just joined Lunar Society! :D) and her machiavellianism... well, I can't say it's exactly reined in by her better angels, but she does also do a lot of good in her own deranged way. She's both an antagonist and an ally, and she's not above getting in the line of fire if it accomplishes a greater good. We love a good morally gray girlboss in this household.

Kaga Jubei

Jubei is much less significant than almost any other character on this list, but she gets to be here because she is the platonic ideal of a blood knight. She fully gives Figaro a run for his money, and I cannot tell you how much I love that that particular archetype of a blood-fevered warrior went to a female character. She is the principle antagonist of volume 17, hailing from the kingdom of Tenchi, and over the course of the volume she keeps challenging Ray and his team because she's his biggest fan, and fucking loves the idea of the two of them physically tearing each other to pieces, to be challenged and to defeat or be defeated by someone she considers an inspiration. She just really wants to have fun, and has a powerful competitive streak that is fed by the fact that inside Dendro, Masters are functionally immortal, allowing her to throw herself with violence at problems to force them into giving her what she wants with her bare hands.

Outside of a blood rage, Jubei actually has a quite mellow, calm personality, but while this gives her a bit of a calculating streak, as far as the physical fighters in the series goes, she's one of the more instinctive and unfettered ones. She's also extremely remorseless and willing to play dirty with people who won't give her a honest fight, and will only resort to using her words where she doesn't think her swords can get the message through on their own.

On top of me just really, really loving a violent fight baka character, and thinking that this series is good at writing fight baka characters (there's also B3 who just barely missed out on being on this list), I love that the most fight-baka of them all in the series so far is a girl, and I love that she gets to be almost a dark mirror of Ray. I can't wait her to show up more in the next big arc. Teenage girls should be allowed to cut things with their swords just because they want to, forever and ever.

Sechs Würfel

Last but very much not the least, Sechs is a major antagonist and Shu's main rival, and he makes me lose my goddamn mind. We hear repeatedly about both his criminal escapades and the legendary duel that finally sent the worst criminal in all seven kingdoms into the gaol, and then when he finally appears in the plot, Sechs turns out to be the platonic ideal of just some guy, to the point where near damn everyone makes the mistake of assuming his soft-spokenness and aversion to conflict make him harmless. Even his allies are a little bit disturbed by how comfortable and proficient at violence Sechs is, in contrast to his unassuming personality.

This is because Sechs' whole deal can be most easily explained as him being an extreme hardcore never-drop-character roleplayer who just happens to be playing a villain. His way of embracing the infinite possibility of Dendro is to take it upon himself to deliberately break every rule and do every bad thing enabled by the mechanics, a task which is greatly eased by his Embryo making him into a slime monster polymorph that renders him functionally immortal and gives him extensive shapeshifting powers. His system of ethics is effectively upside down as applied to himself, which creates the absolute funniest contrast with the way he remains polite and accommodating towards other people, and commands a surprising amount of both loyalty and admiration from the people of Illegal Frontier, his guild made up exclusively of criminal Masters.

As befitting of a shapeshifter and a guy living and dying by his own bit, Sechs' sense of identity is actually extremely fractured, which is the driving force between his rivalry with Shu. Sechs does, after all, spend the majority of the time defining himself through violating the rules made by other people, whereas Shu will do no less than what he wants to, ever. The way their IRL circumstances -- fate's favourite little guy and the Unfavourite of his whole bloodline -- contrast giving them common ground and the way the roles they choose to inhabit in Dendro clash makes for excellent drama. The Weird Friendship between Shu the player and Sechs the player in contrast to the bitter rivalry between the King of Destruction and the King of Crime is genuinely my favourite feature of the ongoing myth arc, and I can't wait to see where it goes in the future.