My Two Cents

 We are not all equally strong. Some of us are not capable of defeating our own monsters — we only learn to walk alongside them. (Zerocalcare) 

There is a moment in Due Spicci where Zero's mother — with her particular gift for framing impossible requests in the tone of someone asking you to pass the salt — orders him to be happy. Zero responds, in his usual low voice and with the look of someone who has already mapped every exit, that happiness is perhaps the most ambitious and most failed project in the entire human story: the horizon every civilisation has marched toward since the dawn of time without ever truly arriving. It is one of those moments where Zerocalcare stops being a Roman cartoonist talking about himself and becomes something else — a phenomenologist of the everyday, almost against his will. 

Which makes it all the more unfortunate that these flashes of existential clarity coexist, often uneasily, with a narrative universe showing signs of fatigue — despite Secco, Sarah's determination, Zero's inner conflict, Smeralda's self-destructive unpredictability, Armadillo's petulance, Paturnia's idiotic phallic violence, Giulio Montini's resentment, Cinghiale's family, Rebibbia's Rome, and the general absurdity of the human condition. 

The series tackles non-trivial themes with a sure hand: bullying as sediment that doesn't dissolve in adulthood but merely changes shape; violence against women, told without captions or rhetoric, left to work beneath the surface like a noise that won't leave you. Smeralda and Sarah are neither sidekicks nor romantic props — they carry a narrative autonomy that Zerocalcare's writing handles with more care than one might expect from an author who built his style on masculine self-deprecation. 

Among the series' high points is undoubtedly the Three Little Pigs fairy tale told to the children, which becomes a grotesque parable about Roman real estate speculation — those buildings constructed on nothing, sold to people who can't afford them, bought by people who will never live in them. The metaphor holds precisely because it refuses to become one: it stays concrete, angry, funny. 
Then there is the hostage scene: Zero offering to leave his "member" as a pledge, proof that the thing matters to him less than everyone else seems to believe. It is the gesture of the reluctant romantic, the millennial nerd who, while his peers catalogue sexual conquests like Panini stickers, finds himself wondering why nobody talks about anything else — not out of prudishness, but because he operates on a different emotional frequency, one where feeling is a rare and almost unbearable event. 

Zero is, at heart, a born loser romantic ante litteram: arrived too late or too early for an era that has turned desire into performance and vulnerability into content. 

The problem is that we already know all of this. The Armadillo — his crude, liberating, instinct-driven alter ego — was brilliant in the early seasons because he embodied the voice Zero forbade himself. Now he has become a running gag: predictable in timing, mechanical in excess, emptied of his disruptive function. Repetition turns the uncanny into the picturesque. 

And this is the knottiest problem with the Zerocalcare-Netflix project: an operation born as an anomaly in Italian animation — underground breaking through the mainstream without being absorbed by it — now shows the signs of someone who found a formula and, understandably, held on tight. The series' length doesn't help: certain episodes seem to dilute what in shorter form would have been electrifying. The system Zerocalcare has always regarded with suspicion ends up shaping the very structure of the story — not in its content, but in its rhythm, in the obligation to fill a space that perhaps didn't need to be filled all the way. 

Due Spicci is not a disappointing work — it is a work that half-convinces, like a promise that only remembers itself in patches. There is enough intelligence, humanity and originality in it to justify watching. But it lacks the tension that makes a work necessary, that sensation of watching something that couldn't exist anywhere else, in any other form. And that, for an author who has always presented himself as unassimilable, is perhaps the subtlest criticism of all: not that he has gotten worse, but that he is slowly becoming predictable — even to himself. 

That's just how life is. You struggle, you trudge, you swallow a lot of shit just to see how it ends. (Zerocalcare)