The Evil Eye (邪視, Jashi) first appears in a flashback in episode 11 of Dandadan, and the flashback is the whole case. He was a boy in the village of Byakuja, chosen by the Kito family as an offering to the Tsuchinoko so that the volcano would not erupt. He was kept in a cage. He was deprived of food and water until he was emaciated. From that cage he could see other children playing outside, and what he wanted, up to the moment he died, was to go out and play with them once. Then he was sacrificed. He came back years later as a spirit in the same place, now rebuilt as a sacrificial house, and he watched the Kito family prepare another boy—whose parents had hanged themselves—for the same death. He tried to free him, and could not, because he had no body. That is the point at which the character stops being a victim and becomes an antagonist: he swore vengeance on the Kito family, and as the sacrifices continued over the years, his hatred spread from them to humanity as a whole. Robert Agnew named every stage of that sequence.
// The theoryNot only blocked goals
Classical strain theory, from Robert K. Merton, explained crime as the gap between culturally prescribed goals and the legitimate means available to reach them: want what everyone is told to want, be denied the route, and innovate illegitimately. It was powerful and it was narrow—it explained acquisitive crime and struggled badly with rage. In 1992 Robert Agnew rebuilt it as general strain theory, widening the source of pressure from one to three. Strain arises from the failure to achieve positively valued goals, as Merton had it; but also from the removal of positively valued stimuli (losing a parent, a home, a relationship, a future); and from the presentation of noxious stimuli—abuse, humiliation, violence, confinement. Agnew's decisive move was to put an emotional step between the pressure and the act. Strain does not cause crime directly. It generates negative emotions, and the one that matters most is anger, because anger uniquely lowers inhibition, raises the sense of injury, and creates a felt entitlement to retaliate. Whether that anger becomes offending depends on what else is available: coping resources, supports, legitimate outlets, people who intervene. Agnew also specified which strains are most criminogenic—those seen as unjust, those that are high in magnitude, those associated with low social control, and those that create pressure or incentive for criminal coping. A child caged and starved to death by the adults responsible for him scores at the maximum on all four.
Displaced aggression
The step that makes the Evil Eye a case rather than a tragedy is the one Agnew treats explicitly and that most accounts of revenge skip: displaced aggression. Anger seeks a target, but the correct target is frequently unavailable—too powerful, too distant, already dead, or protected by the very arrangement that produced the harm. When it is, the aggression does not dissipate. It relocates, onto targets that are accessible instead of responsible. The experimental literature on this is old and consistent, and the field evidence is worse: people who cannot retaliate against those who harmed them retaliate against whoever is nearest, which is generally someone with even less power than they have. Watch the Evil Eye's target expand in stages. First the Kito family, who did it—a precise and comprehensible grievance. Then, as the sacrifices continue and he cannot stop any of them, the category widens to every human being. Nothing new is done to him at that point. The expansion is driven by impotence, not by fresh injury: the strain has no legitimate outlet, no one intervenes, and rage that cannot reach its author will take a category instead of a name. By the time Momo and Okarun meet him, the specific crime has been generalized into a species.
// The subjectThe child who thinks killing is playing
Agnew's three strains are all present, in their most extreme forms and simultaneously. Noxious stimuli: confinement, starvation, and finally being killed by the adults charged with his community's welfare. Removal of positively valued stimuli: he lost his childhood, his freedom, his family and his life, and the series makes the loss precise rather than abstract—what was taken was the ability to go outside and play. Blocked goals: the one thing he wanted was never achievable from inside a cage. Every criminogenic feature Agnew specifies is at maximum: the injustice is total, the magnitude is total, social control is absent because the institution that should have protected him is the perpetrator, and there is no coping resource of any kind. And then the series does something that lifts him above a revenge plot. Okarun, after the fight, reframes him: the Evil Eye behaves like a newborn who only wants to play, and his desire to play has fused with the only human conduct he ever experienced, which was being hurt. He kills believing it is a game, and he genuinely does not know it is not. That is the second injury underneath the first—not only was he harmed, he was never given a moral education at all, because the community that should have provided one spent his entire life planning his death. His arc afterwards is consistent with the theory in a way that is almost too neat: when Jiji and Okarun give him fights he is allowed to have, a schedule, names to remember and people who expect him back, the killing stops. The rage was never the whole of him. It was the only channel he had.
Evil Eye
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// The crackThe strain explains the anger, not the choice of target
This is the case in the batch where explaining is most likely to slide into excusing, so the line has to be drawn precisely. What he suffered is among the worst things the series depicts, and it was done to a child by adults, deliberately, over a long period. None of that transfers to the people he later kills. The villagers he cursed into suicide across the centuries were not the Kito family; some of them were the descendants of people who had no idea, and some of them were children of exactly the kind he had been. General strain theory explains the presence and the intensity of the anger, and it explains statistically why displacement happens—but it does not select the target, and the target is where responsibility lives. Agnew was careful about this: most people under severe strain do not offend, which is why his theory spends as much space on conditioning factors as on strain itself. The Evil Eye is not an inevitability. He is one outcome among several, and the others were foreclosed by the fact that nobody came.
The second edge runs towards the audience, because this is the most seductive figure of the six. A murdered child taking revenge on his murderers is the oldest sympathetic premise there is, and it does real work on the viewer: it invites us to sign off on the killing while we are still thinking about the cage. The series is more honest than that. It gives us the flashback and then makes us watch him try to kill Momo, who was not born when any of it happened. That order matters. The point of understanding the pressure is not to license what came out of it, but to see how completely avoidable it was—one adult, at any moment across two hundred years, refusing the word offering. Understanding it means refusing to treat the outcome as a mystery, so that the next cage is noticed while there is still a child in it.
What we do with the ones we have already failed
The Evil Eye matters because general strain theory is the best-supported account of the pathway from victimization to violence, and that pathway is the one criminology keeps finding in real files. Severe childhood adversity—abuse, neglect, institutional confinement, the loss of a caregiver—predicts later offending robustly, and the mediating variable is consistently the emotional one Agnew identified: chronic anger and the absence of anywhere to put it. The practical value of the theory lies in the conditioning factors, because those are the parts that can be changed. Strain is often already in the past by the time anyone is looking; coping resources, supervision, a legitimate outlet, one adult who shows up, are all still available in the present. That is precisely what Dandadan gives him in the end, and it is the reason the character stops killing: not punishment, not exorcism, but a place, a schedule and people who expect him. The uncomfortable question the Evil Eye leaves is not what to do with monsters. It is what we owe the people we have already failed, before the anger finds a target we cannot argue with.
Three key ideas
- Agnew's general strain theory widens Merton's: strain comes from blocked goals, from the removal of what we value and from noxious stimuli, and it causes crime indirectly, through negative emotion—above all anger. The Evil Eye has all three at maximum, simultaneously.
- The key mechanism is displaced aggression: when anger cannot reach those responsible, it relocates onto whoever is accessible. His target widens from the Kito family to all of humanity without any new injury—the driver is impotence, not fresh harm.
- The crack: the strain explains the anger, not the choice of victim, and the villagers he cursed were not his killers. Most people under severe strain never offend, which is why Agnew spends as much time on coping resources—and why giving him a place and people stops him.
Sources · further reading
- Agnew, R. (1992). "Foundation for a General Strain Theory of Crime and Delinquency". Criminology, 30(1), 47-88.
- Agnew, R. (2006). Pressured Into Crime: An Overview of General Strain Theory. Roxbury.
- Agnew, R. (2001). "Building on the Foundation of General Strain Theory". Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 38(4), 319-361.
- Merton, R. K. (1938). "Social Structure and Anomie". American Sociological Review, 3(5), 672-682.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Mal de Ojo?
Mal de Ojo (“Jashi”) is a villain from Dandadan, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. His last wish, before starving to death in the cage, was to go out and play just once with the children at the window.
Why does Evil Eye (Jashi) become a villain?
The Evil Eye and Agnew's general strain theory: a sacrificed child who returns as a spirit, fails to save the next one, and decides to hate the entire species. The anger that overflows from the guilty onto anyone.
Which criminological theory explains Mal de Ojo?
Mal de Ojo's case is analysed through General strain. Robert Agnew reformulated strain theory: we do not offend only when goals are blocked, but when life imposes noxious stimuli and removes what we value, generating negative emotions—anger above all—that demand an outlet. Dandadan's Evil Eye runs that circuit to the end. Caged, starved and sacrificed by the Kito family, he returns as a spirit, watches another child handed over, fails to stop it, and his hatred overflows from the specific culprits onto humanity entire. That overflow is the mechanism, not an excess of it.
