The Serpo (セルポ星人) arrive in the first episode of Dandadan and never really leave: secondary antagonists of the Turbo Granny arc, principals of the Serpo arc, and a recurring presence for the rest of the series. Their premise is played for comedy and is, underneath, entirely serious. They are an exclusively male species from Planet Serpo in Zeta Reticuli. With no natural reproduction they turned to cloning, and cloning left them evolutionarily stalled, because identical beings cannot evolve. Their solution is to abduct humans from Earth and take their reproductive organs. They prefer to abduct women. They are forceful and violent when they do it, and—this is the detail that matters—they are oblivious to this, believing their actions to be peaceful. For critical criminology, that sentence is the whole discipline in one line.
// The theoryWho gets to define crime
Critical criminology—consolidated in The New Criminology (1973) by Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young, and continued in the work of Steven Box, Frank Pearce and the Zemiology tradition— begins by refusing the question it was handed. Mainstream criminology asks why individuals break the law. Critical criminology asks the prior question: who writes the law, whose harms does it name, and whose does it leave unnamed? The empirical basis is older than the label. Edwin Sutherland, coining white-collar crime in 1939, showed that the largest and most costly offenses were committed by respectable people in the course of their occupations, and were handled by regulators rather than courts. From there the tradition builds a consistent picture: the criminal justice system is highly selective; it is calibrated for harms with a visible author, an identifiable victim and a discrete moment; and organisational harm—which is diffuse, documentary, spread across thousands of people and committed by nobody in particular—slips through the mesh almost entirely. The result is not a conspiracy. It is a design consequence. A system built to catch a man with a knife will not catch a supply chain.
Harm without an offender
What makes organisational harm so resistant to the criminal law is that it arrives without an offender in the shape the law expects. Every element the system needs is dispersed. The decision is made by a committee, or by a policy nobody remembers writing. The act is performed by employees following instructions, each of whom does a fragment small enough to be unremarkable. The victims are numerous, distant, and often never learn what happened to them. And the harm is a side effect of a legitimate-sounding goal, which supplies everyone involved with a sentence that ends the conversation: we are solving a problem. The Serpo have the full set. Their goal—species survival—is genuinely existential. Their method is industrial: standardized disguises, standardized ships, a procedure. Their victims are a planet full of strangers whose objections read, from inside the organization, as barbarism. No individual Serpo has to be cruel for the operation to be atrocious, and that is precisely the point: the cruelty has been moved out of the individual and into the process, where no criminal law is looking for it.
// The subjectA corporation with a spaceship
Read them as an organization and the Serpo snap into focus. They wear identical gray humanoid disguises with identical white button-up shirts and gray trousers—a uniform, and a corporate one. Their abduction program is not rage, it is procurement: they need a biological input their own supply chain cannot produce, and Earth has it. Their contempt is reserved not for their victims but for uncooperative ones; a human who fights back is not a person defending themselves but an irregularity in the process. And they treat their workforce exactly as the literature predicts. They hire outside contractors for the dangerous work and are, in the wiki's own summary, brusque and cold towards them, with no concern for their wellbeing, viewing them as cheap and easily replaceable. When the Mantisian—a subcontracted fighter taking lethal jobs to pay for his son's blood transfusions—performs poorly, the Serpo respond by docking his salary and injecting him with a mutagenic fluid over his explicit objections. That is not a sci-fi flourish. That is an employer disciplining a precarious worker and administering an unconsented substance to raise his output, and it is the single most recognizable thing the Serpo do. Later they develop an interest in the spiritual powers of humans, because those powers exceed their own technology. The goal changes; the method never does. Whatever the Serpo want, the answer is to take it out of a body.
The Serpoians
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// The crackStructure is not an alibi either
Critical criminology has its own characteristic failure, and it is the mirror image of the one it diagnoses. If all harm is structural, nobody did anything. Decisions dissolve into systems, systems into history, and the account ends with a shrug in which there is no one left to hold responsible. That is unusable, and it is not what the tradition actually claims. Organisations are made of people who sign things, and the Serpo are individuals who strap humans to tables. Their obliviousness is a fact about them, not a defense: a person who has arranged never to notice the screaming is not thereby innocent of it, and criminal law has understood this for a long time under the headings of willful blindness and recklessness. The useful version of the critique is more precise. It does not say no one is guilty. It says the guilt is distributed differently from where we habitually look for it — and that our instinct to search for a monster is itself part of why the organization is never caught.
There is a second crack, and Dandadan walks right up to it. Sympathy is easy to extend to the Serpo, because their motive is survival and their tone is bureaucratic rather than sadistic. That sympathy is exactly the mechanism under examination. We find their goal reasonable and therefore find their method negotiable, which is the same move that lets every extractive enterprise in history describe itself as development. Understanding why a stalled species would industrialize abduction tells us how the harm became routine, and that knowledge is worth having precisely because it is the harm that never gets prosecuted. The women they prefer to abduct do not become less harmed by the existence of a good reason. If anything, the good reason is what made the harm sustainable for as long as it has been.
The crimes nobody calls crime
The Serpo matter because the shape of their offending is the shape of the harms that actually dominate the twenty-first century and barely appear in crime statistics: industrial pollution, workplace deaths written off as accidents, financial products sold to people who could not repay them, extraction economies that treat a population as a resource. Criminology has a name for the gap—the difference between crime, which is whatever the law has named, and harm, which is what people actually suffer— and closing it is the tradition's whole project. The test critical criminology proposes is disarmingly simple, and the Serpo fail it completely: count the damage, then ask who is being prosecuted for it. In Dandadan the answer is nobody, because no institution on Earth has jurisdiction over a species that considers itself peaceful. On Earth as it is, the answer is usually not much better, and for the same structural reason.
Three key ideas
- Critical criminology (Taylor, Walton and Young; with roots in Sutherland's white-collar crime) asks who writes the law and whose harms it leaves unnamed. The system is calibrated for a visible author, a discrete victim and a single moment—and organisational harm has none of those.
- The Serpo are an organization, not a monster: standardized disguises, an industrial abduction program, precarious subcontractors whose pay is docked and who are injected with a mutagenic fluid against their objections, and a sincere belief that the operation is peaceful.
- The crack: structure is not an alibi. Obliviousness organized in advance is not innocence, and finding their survival motive reasonable is the same move that lets every extractive enterprise call itself development.
Sources · further reading
- Taylor, I., Walton, P. & Young, J. (1973). The New Criminology: For a Social Theory of Deviance. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
- Sutherland, E. H. (1949). White Collar Crime. Dryden Press.
- Box, S. (1983). Power, Crime and Mystification. Tavistock.
- Hillyard, P. & Tombs, S. (2004). "Beyond Criminology?", en Beyond Criminology: Taking Harm Seriously. Pluto Press.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who are Los Serpo?
Los Serpo are villains from Dandadan, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. They do not see themselves as criminals.
Why do The Serpoians become villains?
The Serpo and critical criminology: a civilization that abducts humans to harvest their reproductive organs, subcontracts the violence, and describes itself as a peaceful mission. The largest harms are almost never called crime.
Which criminological theory explains Los Serpo?
Los Serpo's case is analysed through Critical criminology. Critical criminology asks not only why people offend, but who decides what counts as crime and who gets pursued for it. The Serpo of Dandadan are that question taken into space: a cloned, evolutionarily stalled civilization that abducts humans en masse to harvest their reproductive organs, treats its suppliers as fungible stock, and defines itself as peaceful. There is no villain to arrest: there is an organization whose harm is routine, distributed and perfectly invisible from the inside.
