After my recent rant on just how awful Made in Abyss really is, morbid curiosity got the better of me and I finished watching it. I suffered this psychic damage so that you all can also suffer it with less effort. To my surprise, seeing the rest of it did change my opinion on it: despite all the odds it turned out I could, in fact, think even less of it than I already did. It is disgusting, vapid, and gratuitous, being awful both in content and in quality. In this piece I will explain what Made in Abyss is for anyone unfamiliar with it, go over how rubbish it is as a story problematic content aside, and tear into how it handles problematic themes in exactly the opposite way that they should be handled.

There will obviously be spoilers, but I feel assured in saying that anyone who wants the plot of fucking Made in Abyss to not be spoiled for them should get fucked. Anyone who wants to avoid psychic damage from learning about it should probably bow out now, however. I’ll dance around the specific details for the sake of decency, of course, and the worst stuff will be spoilered at the end with a reiteration of the CWs, but there’s only so vague I can be before I’m just saying “it’s bad, just trust me.”

To begin, so everyone knows what I’m even talking about here: Made in Abyss is basically a surreal fantasy adventure about a little girl (Riko) and a robot (Reg) trying to descend to the bottom of a 20 kilometer deep magical pit full of stupid bullshit out of what is literally an innate mystical compulsion to do so. On this journey, a key threat is that if you start to ascend bad things happen depending on where you are; in practice this means that the author has a constantly available plot device to make walking up a small hill or sitting up too fast into a deadly threat, except when that would get in the way of the story and so gets handwaved away as not being an issue right there.

The story so far has the pair descending at a breakneck pace through surreal fantasy landscapes, meeting the victim (Nanachi) of a serial killing mad scientist (Bondrewd) who joins up with them, meeting the adopted daughter and grooming victim (Prushka) of said serial killing mad scientist who wants to join up with them (she dies and turns into a magic rock that imprisons her soul instead), then defeat the mad scientist and then let him go before using the magic rock to descend further. At this point they find more surreal fantasy landscapes to gloss over and instead spend the entire second season in a village of babytalking ancap blob monsters who are just the absolute worst, and I am not exaggerating when I say there is literally no point to anything that happens there at all: the place is awful, Riko thinks it’s neat and explicitly endorses it, the show revels in all the gross awful shit they do there, we learn it’s literally built on unfathomable horror and suffering and must end, Riko and Reg try to stop it from being destroyed, the story waffles back and forth a bit, then the village is destroyed and they move on as if none of it had even happened.

Now that we’ve covered what’s going on, let’s really dig into the problems it has that aren’t the extremely revolting ones, which I’ll save for a spoiler at the end with additional CWs as a reminder. Now, the story basically has two modes of pacing: a breakneck sprint past the admittedly somewhat interesting world, and bogging down interminably while basically nothing happens. However, in neither case is there ever meaningful progression and at no point is there character growth. Stuff happens, the party grows and gets new tools now and then, but despite this fundamentally remains static. Despite going through training montages and overcoming obstacles the main characters never grow in any way, they don’t become more competent or powerful and any power boosts are temporary and costly solutions to the author writing them into a corner. Further, despite suffering horrors, serious injury, and in one case literal dismemberment they don’t become diminished either, never being traumatized, becoming jaded, or having their abilities decreased by what they’ve suffered.

The whole experience is that of a sort of cargo cult imitation of a dark fantasy adventure story by someone who is fundamentally vapid and brain poisoned. It’s basically just mimicking genre tropes and trying to bring out emotion through showcasing horrific things, but it fails horribly because to put it bluntly the author is too twisted in his perspective and too aroused by what he wrote to do anything but revel in and whitewash the horror.

Often with problematic content there is raised the excuse that simply having bad things happen or dealing with dark concepts doesn’t constitute endorsement or exploitative spectacle. Here I say without an ounce of exaggeration that Made in Abyss is not only creating an exploitative spectacle but is, in fact, endorsing the horrible things it involves. Every antagonist of the story is narratively treated softly while being the most evil piece of shit you’ve ever seen, to the point that I can’t even call them “villains” because that implies at least some degree of narrative condemnation that just isn’t present. For one example: Bondrewd, a mass murdering vivisectionist whose entire perspective is “I love doing abjectly evil things for selfish reasons and I will keep doing them forever lmao,” basically gets treated by the narrative as a sort of menacing but very polite guy who’s just doing his thing and who comes to an understanding with the party where he sees them as his equals who he likes, and they decide they understand him and just leave instead of destroying his fucking body stealing relic that he uses to be immortal and unkillable, never to think another ill thought of him again; other characters who know exactly what he was doing describe him as “a bit of a scoundrel” or just shrug and don’t care.

That last bit is a running theme: everything about the institutions in the world is evil and horrible, and the story revels in it and not so much as once tries to make a point that any of the rampant abuse is at all a bad thing. And before anyone thinks “well, can’t a story just have something bad with the understanding that it’s bad, and not need to become some polemic condemnation of it?” rest assured that while I do in fact think authors should actually make overt polemics against the bad things they portray since anything less will go over too many consumers’ heads, Made in Abyss goes the opposite way and simply includes this vile shit as matter of fact details that are narratively treated as nothing to worry about.

[CW abuse, pedo shit, CSA, gross, violence, cannibalism?] Seriously, I’ve said a lot of “trust me, it’s bad” and “I’m not exaggerating even a little bit,” and if you really can’t believe it’s as bad as I’m saying, well here’s an overview of all the very bad shit I’ve been referencing:

Here we get to the elephant in the room: the author of Made in Abyss is a nonce and from the themes of Made in Abyss I’m pretty sure he’s a fascist of some sort as well. As an aside I checked his wikipedia page and found this which is just fucking hilarious:

He cites Norman Rockwell as a person he admires.

He also apparently includes just straight up loli porn in the manga and is way more explicit than the comparatively sanitized anime is, which is itself very very bad. The story is frequently finding ways to undress its underage main characters, having them talk about sexual situations or concepts, and is uncomfortably focused on Riko’s bodily fluids in general. In fact, I’d say the author has a considerable love of bodily fluids in general and never fails to find a way to make something ooze or splatter. The ancap frenworld village is full of that, just gross oozing and shitting blob monsters that are also all pedophiles.

Now as I mentioned earlier, there is an ongoing theme of child abuse running through the world’s institutions, along with the heavy implication that pederasty is normalized. And as always the narrative not only doesn’t condemn it, not only does it not show it as traumatizing and destructive, but instead it treats this all as just normal and unremarkable, with no consequences or problems to it. I can’t stress enough how much that’s a running theme. The author clearly likes the world he’s writing about, especially the disgusting and horrible parts.

Remember those content warnings? Now’s where it really starts getting bad.

And it gets worse. Remember Bondrewd? His whole thing is that he’s trying to conquer the stupid narrative device that stops you from going up, and to do this he runs an operation to take big elevators full of kids from the surface down to his lab where he experiments on them, and later starts vivisecting them so they’ll fit in briefcases to make them into more portable receptacles for the curse. The story positively revels in this and lingers on it, and then actively avoids letting him suffer any sort of consequences at all – not because he is protected by some institutional power or anything, but simply because the protagonists don’t bother to stop him for good after they defeat him.

As for the ancap village, it’s literally the paracausal living body of a horribly mutated child, who was cynically tricked into become it in a sequence that involves her and a bunch of other people getting magical dysentery that also turns them into mottled stone, her being magically warped into a blobby fleshsack that constantly births non-viable little animals, everyone else eating those animals to cure their magical dysentery, and her being used for another paracausal wish for safety which causes her to grow into a massive hollow pillar which they all then live inside as horrible blob monsters. Her literal last coherent wish after that created a being (Faputa) to destroy her and end her constant, unfathomable torment.

That is treated, narratively, as a bad thing that can’t be allowed to happen, because the horrible frenworld blobs believe in things and enjoy being awful, and “it would be wrong to take that away from them.” But it ultimately doesn’t matter, the village gets destroyed despite the party’s actions and her daughter’s change of heart, and then the main characters and Faputa leave just as happy and completely oblivious to what just happened as ever.

There are other things I’ve left out, but I honestly just don’t have the will to make an exhaustive list. It’s just tons of shit like this, though those two things are probably the most extreme examples. I have a strong stomach and even I’m feeling a bit sick after having dredged enough of this filth up to write all this out. I hope this psychic damage was worth it.

.

Fuck, why did I think this was a good idea? I’ve gone and written two thousand words about a horrible anime series that makes me angry and nauseous just thinking about it, and there’s not even any catharsis to this. I watched it in the first place because I couldn’t imagine it was really as bad as everyone said only to realize it was even worse, and I kept watching just so I could authoritatively write all this down. Now that this polemic against Made in Abyss is written I can’t say it was worth it.

Well, if I dissuade anyone from going and watching it themselves maybe it was, but I can’t help but think some of you will go “oh well that sounds so ridiculous, surely something as awful as this couldn’t get published and become so popular! I must confirm it for myself!” And to that I can only say: enjoy your psychic damage, you’ll have earned it just like I did.

  • flan [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    I read part of the manga after the first season of the anime came out a bunch of years ago. I think I must have read one or two volumes past the end of the first seasons of the anime because they had gotten a little deeper.

    Initially I found the setting kind of interesting but beyond the troubling themes you mentioned it’s just incredibly repetitive and kind of farcical in the way it deals with body horror. It’s almost like everything is actually just a balloon animal? idk how to describe it.

    Anyway land of the lustrous is cooler.

  • aaro [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    thank you so much for this

    I went into the show blind besides knowing that it was supposed to be pretty gruesome. It started alright with several yellow flags and the admittedly kind of interesting world had me hooked for a bit, but the problems you describe [ESPECIALLY the weird excrement shit] just kept getting more and more egregious until I absolutely had to quit. It’s not dark and deep, it’s fucked up for the sake of being fucked up to the point of being gaudy, and the ideology just fucking REEKS. Amazing analysis, I’m gonna share it whenever I get in conversations about this fucking trash heap show

    AND MAL HAS IT IN THE TOP 100 SHOWS OF ALL TIME https://myanimelist.net/anime/34599/Made_in_Abyss/ INCLUDING THE EXTRA ESPECIALLY DOUBLY SHITTY DOG SHIT SECOND SEASON https://myanimelist.net/anime/41084/Made_in_Abyss__Retsujitsu_no_Ougonkyou for FUCK’S sake

    • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.netOP
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      1 year ago

      Thanks. I also went in blind not knowing anything beyond the vague and rather tame things people usually say about it, like oh it’s dark, it’s sad, it’s gory, that sort of thing and any harsh words they had weren’t any more than what some people say about other, much less problematic works.

      It’s almost funny that they were wrong by being too soft on it, because it really is just so much worse than anyone ever says. The fact that it’s apparently so popular is genuinely troubling.

  • Gosplan14_the_Third [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    It’s rated 8,77/10 (Manga) and 8,66 (Anime) respectively what-the-hell

    I had a similar morbid curiosity “how bad can it get?” binge with Oreimo

    (Spoilers, CW - Pedo Shit, Incest)

    It mixes a libertarian Otaku manifesto of the anything goes kind with a fucked up romance plot.

    One of the main characters is a initially 14 years old loathsome person to who’s obsessed with incest themed visual novels and forces his 18 year old brother to play them too and otherwise experience the “joys” of Otaku consoomerism.

    Though this, he meets a bunch of more and less problematic people, such as a tropey yandere who loves to kick him and threaten with a knife, the chuunni who views herself as a dark being, and the like.

    The show has you think he heads towards a relationship with one of these people, but in Season 2 things take a further sharp turn towards the yikes as he starts alienating all his friends one by one (even to the point of an actual fistfight between his sister and childhood friend), even breaking up with one, just to pursue his fucking underage sister. And when he inevitably does, and the even get fake-married… the show pulls a masterpiece of an ending by having them go “Let’s end the relationship after the summer holidays and return to being normal siblings” - pulling all that awful shit in the storytelling just to chicken out at the last moment michael-laugh

    The show’s either awful or a masterpiece if you have brainworms of the bad Media enjoyer kind.

    But the problem is that such media is allowed to exist and in fact thrives, from either genuinely brainwormed people or morbid curiosity prone people, likely the same in Japan as here.

    Normalizing pedophilic content, Incest, etc. That’s really not a good thing, to say the least.

  • PrincessCharlotte [she/her, he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    I decided I was going to read the manga. Like get caught up on the whole thing. I dropped it 5 chapters in because apparently it’s so important for the like 12 year old main character to be naked that they just had to do it twice in 5 chapters. Cool to know I’m not actually missing out on anything.

  • Infamousblt [any]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Meanwhile I’m over here just finished The Witch from Mercury and I’m like wow anime is still good.

    And then there’s this to remind me it’s really not, and sometimes we just get lucky.

  • pooh [they/them, any]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    I think I like it for the same reason I like Chainsaw Man, which is the progression of dealing with something terrible and overcoming it to move forward. There’s sort of a weird sense of comfort that comes from this related to being anxious about the future. Also it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever seen, so maybe I already have too much psychic damage to be bothered too much by it.

  • bumpusoot [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    I can’t speak to the manga, but I watched the anime and enjoyed it. I hear you for the reasons you disliked it, but I disagree with the majority of it.

    I disagree with the claim Bondrewd was treated as not-overwhelmingly-evil - He is so obviously and face-slappingly the narrative villain and I don’t understand how it didn’t feel that way to you - was kidnapping and torturing orphans not clear enough??? Claiming that there is any kind of ‘endorsement’ of the horrors within the show is a take I find absolutely wild and borderline makes me question the sincerity of this as I have literally no idea how you’d come to that conclusion.

    I agree the protagonists’ failure to become lastingly traumatised is a little unbelievable, but honestly we see enough trauma in the show that I don’t mind the main characters being oddly impervious vessels for we the audience to just go continue the story. Again, though there could be better played growth, I disagree with the idea that there’s none at all. We see them grow smarter about the use of Reg’s powers and learn more about the world around them and use that to their advantage.

    I agree there are problematic aspects in the show and author, the show is undeniably gross for some spectacle and that the story is weak in a number of ways. I 100% get that it’s not a show for everyone, but I feel the show has other strengths that make it enjoyable and worthwhile for me.

    • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.netOP
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      1 year ago

      I disagree with the claim Bondrewd was treated as not-overwhelmingly-evil - He is so obviously and face-slappingly the narrative villain and I don’t understand how it didn’t feel that way to you - was kidnapping and torturing orphans not clear enough?

      The problem is you’re looking at his actions instead of looking at the narrative around him: the narrative that has his peers just shrug with the harshest words any of them have for him being to call him a scoundrel while grinning, that positively exalts the will to trample over others to reach one’s goal by having it pop up again and again as the lesson, that revels in his crimes, that has the protagonists just let him go once he stops being a threat to them, and that has him constantly being polite and praising the protagonists.

      At the very least problematic he’s an example of a sort of cargo cult imitation of a certain villain trope, where the author’s twisted perspective renders him incapable of making the characterization land and fails to have the narrative treat him appropriately (if his peers accept his actions that should lead to a condemnation of them as well; if the world’s institutions support and protect him that should be a scathing condemnation of them as well). However I can’t help but see him as an author-insert character, and that all narrative problems around him stem from the author being a pedophile who’s extremely aroused while writing about what Bondrewd was doing.

      If Bondrewd were to be looked at in isolation maybe these problems could just be brushed off as bad writing, but in the context of a story that’s just constantly doing this sort of shit it creates a clear pattern of doing apologetics for the horror and treating it as part of the wonder of the pit. The author just has a completely alien moral perspective that revolves around his pedophilia and seeming fascist tendencies, and that fundamentally shapes Made in Abyss.