"Love-y!"
Yurei Deco (ユーレイデコ) is an original anime series distributed by Science Saru and premiered in July 2022.Set in a data metropolis called Tom Sawyer Island, protagonist Berry is a typical girl who gets involved in the "socially dead" investigative group the Ghost Detectives Club led by the seemingly boyish tomboy Hack.
In the city, civilians use devices called "decos" (decoration customizers) whenever they interact with the virtual world dubbed the Ultra Reproductive Space. When an elusive figure known as Phantom ZERO arrives and has the ability to antagonize the city, Berry and Hack team up and start unraveling the dark secrets behind their civilization.
This anime has examples of:
- Ambiguous Gender: It's not immediately clear whether Hack is a boy or a girl, although most characters (including Berry) don't seem to consider it to be all that important anyway.
- Augmented Reality: Tom Sawyer Island is built with one that overlaps the entire island. Every citizen has to have either implants, or glasses, that allow them to access it.
- Beneath Notice: Ghosts who lack AR access depend on this to stay hidden — being flesh and blood, they're quite visible, and simply hide out in areas of town normal people don't frequent and pretend like they have an AR connection.
- Big Damn Reunion: The anime ends with one of these between Berry and Hack.
- Broken Pedestal: Berry loses a lot of respect for her father when she discovers his job involves censoring the Hypernet.
- Buffy Speak: Hack. She replaces names with rhyming words that describe the person instead (Berry is "Nerdy-Birdy", Phantom Zero is "Glitchy-Witchy", and so on), and frequently speaks in rhyme or by listing off SI unit prefixes.
- Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Hack is a brilliant hacker and otherwise a Cloudcuckoolander. The rest of the Ghost Detectives Club are marginally more well-adjusted but all dress extremely flamboyantly even outside their avatars.
- Catchphrase:
- "I. Love. Ai!" for Hack.
- "Love-y!" for Berry.
- Cheshire Cat Grin: Hack when she's happy.
- Cyberpunk: beneath the bright colors Tom Sawyer Island is a totalitarian police state with ubiquitous surveillance leaving no privacy, disinformation and misinformation via censorship, and a forgotten underclass (the Yurei).
- Downer Ending:
- Episode 5 ends with the Yurei failing their job. The Nue that the professor liked so much needs to be deleted due to not existing and museum policy and he painfully does so, in the process also giving up the idea of bringing other cryptids he thought might exist to life out of fear of having to delete something else he loves in the future. The Decopedia article and the Nue popularity vanish, making it disappear from public knowledge.
- Episode 9 ends with Finn not only having revealed to the Club his true intentions, but his plans crumbling to dust as his former friend and neighbors riot against the group for trying to help. To make matters worse, Customer Service find out that Hack and Berry are not dead and the club as a whole is hunted down while Berry's parents are arrested for covering up their daughter's supposed death.
- Dude Looks Like a Lady: Finn, to the point that Berry is initially confused upon meeting him.
- Electronic Eyes: Downplayed example: Most citizens have electronic implants in their eyes in order to interact with the Hypernet, but they do not seem to be particularly deeply implanted and having one replaced is no more difficult than a quick trip to the optometrist.
- Eyes Out of Sight: Hack, whose eyes are either covered by her glasses or her forelocks 90% of the times.
- Face of a Thug: Smiley with her mask off, complete with having The Un-Smile. Berry finds it unsettling to look at.
- Faking the Dead: Berry and Hack pull this off in episode 3 when escaping from the law, who were more than willing to execute them on the spot had the girls not pretended to be blown up. Unfortunately, the people running the Ultra Reproductive Space eventually catch on and start actively hunting them and the rest of the Detective Club down.
- Funny Afro: Hank has one. Phantom ZERO has an afro too, but it's definitively not funny.
- Fictional Currency: "Love" is the numerical currency within the world of Tom Sawyer Island often earned by seeking others' approval.
- Glitch Entity: Phantom ZERO, which resets all Love in an area of town when it manifests. It looks like a featureless lady in a cloak to those who encounter it directly.
- Information Broker: Madam 44, aka "Gossip Queen". The Ghost Detectives depend on her as someone who knows almost everything happening around town.
- Kid Detective: Basically what Berry becomes after joining the "ghosts."
- Magic Eye: Berry's right eye is a downplayed example: The implant is simply glitchy, but the glitch allows her to see Hack's creations and other things covered up by hackers and the moderation team.
- Non-Human Head: Mister Watson wears a moustachioed Maneki Neko head as his avatar.
- Ethereal White Dress: Phantom Zero's true form is a woman in a long white dress and a floaty, grey-ish afro with a glitch in front of her eyes hiding half of her face, making her look ghostly and witchy.
- Our Cryptids Are More Mysterious: Episode 05 reveals that the setting is so far into the future (or that Tom Sawyer is so isolated), books have mostly vanished and accounts about myth and folklore have been mixed with historical texts. The Island residents actually believed that the Nue, a monster from Japanese folklore, was actually a real, once existing creature, and treated it as such. The professor at the zoological museum actually also believes in the Loch Ness Monster and the Yeti, and planned to recreate them up until this reveal.
- Off the Grid: The 'ghosts' live off the grid by default, having no Decos and therefore no access to the Hypernet.
- Perception Filter: Hack can turn invisible by using a program that makes the AR override her area with whatever she's standing in front of. Any Citizen could see her simply by turning their AR connection off, but because of the culture and laws of Tom Sawyer Island it would never occur to them to do so.
- Post-Apocalyptic Gas Mask: Smiley's avatar wears one to go with her Sailor Fuku.
- Power Glows: Berry's clothing is luminescent and gives off a pink glow when seen in AR. It extends to all of her when she's fully online.
- Propaganda Machine: Tom Sawyer City's moderation team are incredibly effective at banning posts that contain undesirable content. Berry's father works in it, and actively participates in the cover-up. It's later revealed that he and Berry's mother actively covered up Berry's deah from their bosses and nearly face harsh punishment for it.
- The Reveal: Finn had his own agenda he was working on so he made the Ghost Detectives Club and recruited the others. He never cared about trying to find Phantom Zero but led the others along until he got what he was really after.
- Samus Is a Girl: Phantom Zero is publicly portrayed as a wolf man in a white suit (a video game character they're named after). When Berry and Hack first meet her, she is actually a woman in a white dress.
- Shout-Out: The show has more than a few shout-outs to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, not in the least through the island being called 'Tom Sawyer Island' and three members of the Yurei Detective Club being called 'Hack', 'Berry' and 'Finn'.
- Tomboy: Hack is a very abrasive girl who is initially hostile when first meeting Berry.
- Troll: Hack uses her invisibility to screw around with people such as eating someone's food with them not being the wiser.
- The Unintelligible: Pup, Hack's robot, speaks using emoticons and robot noises. True to form, other members of the Ghost Detectives Club understand the noises perfectly.
- The Voiceless: Mister Watson doesn't speak.
- What the Hell, Hero?: When Berry lets slip that she looked at Hack's background file in episode 6, everyone gives her the riot act for it and Hack gets genuinely pissed off over her privacy being invaded. She gets back at Berry later by digging up embarrassing incidents from her past and reading them aloud.
