History Manga / MadeInAbyss

Also has a SpinOff {{Anthology}} series featuring shorter works by various creators, ''Made in Abyss: Official Anthology''.

* DoItYourselfThemeTune: The opening of the anime is sung by Miyu Tomita and Creator/MariyaIse, who voice Riko and Reg. Nanachi's voice actor, Shiori Izawa, joins them for the ending tune.

* DaylightHorror: The Abyss, contrary to the implications of its name, is a brightly-lit place, with sunlight slipping past the Curse's barrier and washing the scenery in gorgeous lighting. That means little to the dangers lurking within. In fact, [[spoiler:since the Curse of the Abyss both pulls light down from the surface and attracts more dangerous creatures,]] brighter areas tend to be more dangerous.

* VillainsOutShopping: Tepasté and Cravali spot a group of off-duty Umbra Hands hanging out at the Plummet Pub, a popular tavern for Cave Raiders.

* ChekhovsGag: Nat tries to scare Reg with a story about a spooky magical disease that kills you if you look into a mirror on your birthday. Many episodes later, it turns out he wasn't making much of that up--there really is a mysterious deadly illness going around that seems to strike on the victim's birthday. [[spoiler:Kiyui catches it, but suddenly and inexplicably recovers when he's taken to a boat off the shore of the island... implying that the illness comes from the Abyss, and isn't a disease in the usual sense.]]

* JustBeforeTheEnd: [[spoiler:It's revealed that the "praying skeletons" have been found in batches in various layers of the Abyss coinciding with 2,000-year cycles. The implication is that every civilization that lives near the Abyss suffers some sort of catastrophe every 2,000 years. It's no coincidence that the next 2,000-year cycle is about to hit and many people in Orth are starting to die of mysterious causes right before their birthdays.]]

[[caption-width-right:350:[[CoversAlwaydLie Seems like a happy story, right?...]] '''[[CoversAlwaysLie RIGHT?!]]''']]

[[caption-width-right:350:[[BlatantLies Seems like a happy story, right?...]] '''[[BlatantLies RIGHT?!]]''']]

* DisguisedHorrorStory: ''Don't'' let the puni-blush art style trick you for a second -- it's that sort of story where BodyHorror and gory mutilations are displayed in full glory. Your first wake-up call is when Riko gets hit by the Curse of the Abyss in Chapter 19 and bleeds out from every orfice of her body, and it just gets worse from there.

* JustifiedTitle: "Made in Abyss" applies to multiple things within this work:
** The Abyss is home to many artifacts that are valued on the surface world.
** Reg is a robot who's more than likely to have originated from the Abyss' very bottom.
** Riko, who was born in the lower layers of the Abyss before being taken up to the surface for safety.
** Nanachi became what they are due to the Abyss' influence.

An anime adaptation by Kinema Citrus aired in Summer 2017, covering the first three volumes. Volume 4 and 5 were adapted in a feature film called ''Made in Abyss: Dawn of the Deep Soul'', released on January 17, 2020. In January 2022, it was announced that the first season will air on Creator/{{Toonami}}. A second season (with the subtitle ''The Golden City of the Scorching Sun'') aired in Summer 2022 and adapted volumes 6-10.

** Played with. The kids supposedly have to hide Reg from the adults so they don't [[TheyWouldCutYouUp dismantle him]], but none of the adults suggest this, it's just what the kids ''think'' they would do. The orphanage has one stereotypical EvilTeacher, and Jiruo, who seems highly competent but takes an extremely hands-off approach, to the point of knowingly allowing Riko and Reg to escape into the Abyss as long as he doesn't catch them before they reach the second layer (he doesn't even come close). It would make sense for a skilled adult raider to go with them, and Habolg chases them down to do just that; but Riko convinces him not to. The whole story revolves around discovering what happened to Lyza, the most respected of all Delvers, which is apparently a job for [[RagtagBunchOfMisfits her twelve-year-old daughter, a robot with memory loss, and a mutant rabbit-child]]... instead of any adult explorers close to Lyza's skill level. So, in that sense, it's played straight.

* ArchaeologicalArmsRace: A lot of the rarest, most powerful artifacts retrieved from the Abyss are seized or bought by the government and used in warfare against enemy nations. Other countries also have their own delvers, and things can get very ugly if two teams from opposing factions bump into each other in the Abyss.

** The various creatures of the Abyss have a plethora of ways to play merry hell on the human body. Evisceration, poison, swelling, parasitism and much more. In addition, there's the form the "Curse of the Abyss" takes when a delver ascends from the sixth level: it inflicts such havoc on their body that everyone accepts the reality that there is no returning once you've reached that level.

** [[spoiler: Ozen does it ''again'' after Riko and Reg pass their survival training, though this time it was so they could mentally process and start planning for some of the horrors they could encounter while they were in a safe location with more experienced delvers that they could go to for advice, and scaring the crap out of them was just a bonus.]]

* CapitalismIsBad: You have the child labor at the top... then there's Ilblu, the city that turned body horror into an economy. The local currency ''is'' body parts; either someone else's or the trader themselves. It's strictly enforced, even with an "equal value" justice system. If you decrease the value of someone else's possession, the city itself will proceed to rip the flesh from your body until your "value" is reduced by the same amount as the damage you caused. It's handled in such a "matter of fact" way by the locals, they all come off as violent psychopaths. GoodThingYouCanHeal...

** Dialed up well above 11 with Ilblu, where horror is their economy.

* {{Conlang}}: Most of the Hollows have forgotten human language and those gathered in the Hollows village have created their own peculiar language. Delvers who reach the village are basically like tourists visiting a strange foreign country.

* CoolClearWater: {{Subverted}} with the series' usual cruelty. Delvers who venture into the Sixth Layer should be very careful when picking water sources, lest they accidentally drink Mockwater, a parasitical organism that disguises itself as a pond of clear, fresh water. It's practically indistinguishable from normal water and it can survive extreme temperatures, so boiling it won't kill it. Once ingested, the Mockwater lays eggs in the host's digestive track and attacks its flesh, dissolving them from the inside out. [[spoiler:This creature is what decimates the Ganja expedition]].
* CrapsaccharineWorld: The town of Orth is a lively place; cave delvers are treated like celebrities and heroes, there is almost nowhere you can go without witnessing a splendid view worth a thousand words, artifacts are worth good money and have varied effects that are, if not convenient, at least a good source of entertainment, and people seem generally content with their lot in life. Even the Belchero Orphanage isn't exactly what one would consider an OrphanageOfFear - orphans are given education and job training, and the heads running them are well-meaning and reasonable, if stern. Of course, the rosy and idyllic image of the town is made unsettling considering the ''rampant'' child labor, with children being fully expected to work and/or explore the Abyss before they hit puberty, and even dreaming of going down to more dangerous depths. Delvers are treated as martyrs, and their offspring are inspired to follow in their parents' dangerous footsteps. These circumstances however have helped the main characters become ConditionedToAcceptHorror for when they ''do'' go down into the Abyss and [[HadToBeSharp made them mentally resilient enough]] to weather horrors and predicaments that would completely debilitate a child from a culture with standards more closely aligned with the developed world of reality.

* DeathWorld: The Abyss is home to contained ecosystems as diverse as they are numerous. However, this means that many of the fauna and flora have evolved to become incredibly dangerous to cave delvers. Prospective raiders run the risk of suffering a downright gruesome fate with every dive, and that's not even touching the subject of the Curse enveloping the entire place.

** Iruburu and Orth mirror each other. In Orth, people leave the town to travel into the abyss, to collect artifacts, which are exchanged for money. The high mortality rate of abyss explorers provide the town with a continuous supply of orphans. In Ilblu, the citizens can’t leave the town, and would be considered living artifacts, by Orth’s standards. Instead of artifact hunting, the Iruburu citizens harvest their own bodies for wealth. Its almost as if Iruburu is Orth, with the ‘exploration’ piece removed.

** The Village of Ilblu has distinct rules separate from those that govern the rest of the Abyss. The curse doesn’t exist within it. The village itself operates as sort of a banker, judge, and jury. When someone joins, their soul is read and dollar values are attached to absolutely everything about them. An act of violence is considered vandalism. All nearby citizens know immediately the dollar value of the damage done, and removes that value from the perpetrator. Even their organs have value, so the value extraction process can get pretty squicky.
* EmergencyTransformation: The citizens of Ilblu took on their Hollow forms to continue surviving in the Sixth Layer.

* GenderIsNoObject: Orth's society is meritocratic, and female Delvers are seen as often as male ones. Three of the introduced White Whistles are also female. The Abyss itself also doesn't care what gender its victims are.
* GhibliHills: The First Layer of the Abyss. The landscape is more surreal than in most examples, with enormous stone trees and cliff faces honeycombed with tunnels, but it's no less idyllic. The ruins of an ancient civilization can be found in the caves, but the scenery generally looks untouched by humanity. [[spoiler:Predictably, it's still a hazardous environment where Abyssal predators sometimes kill untrained Delvers]].

** {{Inverted|Trope}} with the orb-piercers, a species of venomous, porcupine-like giant creatures native to the Fourth Layer. They are algae eaters, but they are ferociously territorial and will attack whatever trespasses into their feeding grounds, making themselves the most dangerous animals in the entire layer. A particularly large, aggressive specimen considers the entire central column of the Abyss to be its territory, and is responsible for the deaths of over a hundred delvers.

* MasterApprenticeChain: Cave Raiders are traditionally responsible for training up people (oftentimes children) into future delvers, who would follow in their masters' footsteps and raise the next generation of delvers, and so on. For example, Ozen mentored Riko's mother Lyza, who mentored Jiruo, who mentored Riko and Reg. It's a necessary process, given that the Abyss has ways of cutting people's careers (and their lives) short.

* MercyKill: As a rule, Delvers kill people who have gone to the Sixth Layer and tried to come back since they are warped by the effects and lose their humanity. [[spoiler:Reg does this for Mitty, who was forcibly turned into an immortal blob of flesh after being exposed to the Curse of the Abyss who can't be killed by any other means and suffers in horrible pain when she's injured]].

* NothingIsScarier: An in-universe example. As the group makes their way down into the sixth layer, they come across the body of a fellow delver with a black whistle. Most of the group reacts with curiosity... save for Faputa, who refuses to get anywhere near the body, saying, "He's dead... but he's terrifying!". The group then notices that, despite being dead long enough for the elements of the sixth layer to effectively mummify the corpse, the creatures of the Abyss haven't touched him, making it clear there is something imperceptibly but profoundly '''wrong''' with him. The effect is extremely unsettling.

** Nanachi is concerned about this happening to themself, if they were ever discovered. Since most Hollows found so far are [[WasOnceAMan unthinking, unreasoning things]] that Delvers usually MercyKill upon encountering, they fear that anyone who discovers them will want to experiment on them to determine why they are an exception.

* UndergroundCity: The Capital of the Unreturned in the sixth layer. Nobody knows how an entire city ended up down there, but the few reports that have made it to the surface describe it as a CityOfGold. [[spoiler:A small part of it, Iruburu, is still inhabited by former delvers who relinquished their humanity to the Abyss or became trapped by the city]].

* VillainsOutShopping: Tepasté and Cravali spot a group of off-duty Umbra Hands hanging out at the Plummet Pub, a popular tavern for delvers.

[[caption-width-right:350:[[BlatantLies Seems like a happy story, right?...]] ''[[BlatantLies right?!]]'']]

** Played with. The kids supposedly have to hide Reg from the adults so they don't [[TheyWouldCutYouUp dismantle him]], but none of the adults suggest this, it's just what the kids ''think'' they would do. The orphanage has one stereotypical EvilTeacher, and Jiruo, who seems highly competent but takes an extremely hands-off approach, to the point of knowingly allowing Riko and Reg to escape into the Abyss as long as he doesn't catch them before they reach the second layer (he doesn't even come close). It would make sense for a skilled adult raider to go with them, and Habolg chases them down to do just that; but Riko convinces him not to. The whole story revolves around discovering what happened to Lyza, the most respected of all delvers, which is apparently a job for [[RagtagBunchOfMisfits her twelve-year-old daughter, a robot with memory loss, and a mutant rabbit-child]]... instead of any adult explorers close to Lyza's skill level. So, in that sense, it's played straight.

** [[spoiler: The Sixth Layer, the Capital of the Unreturned,]] is just plain ''weird''; buildings twist and turn, mashing together like gnarled tree roots. Clock-towers stand virtually upside-down without crumbling. Many stairs turn sideways and lead into open air, and pathways stand on stilts that appear too flimsy to be supporting anything.

** When Riko and Reg enter the fourth layer, Riko gets lanced in the arm via a large porcupine monster's quill laced with venom and Reg has to bring her away before they all die from the porcupine's persistent attacks. However the only escape was up, so Riko is forced to endure the Curse ''while'' being poisoned by the quill and starts hemorrhaging from every orifice. The combined pain gets so bad that Riko practically begs Reg to amputate her poisoned arm, which Reg ''botches'' the bone-breaking and slicing procedures of. [[spoiler:Thankfully Nanachi came to help and was able to save the arm and Riko's life]].
** After being forced to ascend from the sixth layer, [[spoiler:Mitty]] was transformed into a grotesque blob of flesh.

** The members of the Suicide Corps have their bodies warped by the water they're drinking, turning hard and into a stone-like substance. This causes their bodies to sort of bloom outwards to resemble the bark you would see around a tree, but without the wood the bark surrounds. The hands and feet are affected first, turning into what looks like tangled roots. [[spoiler:Obviously it kills them, but leaves their face visible, so people always knows who the person was. It turns out that the water was actually a parasitic organism and the pool they were collecting it from was the remains of a creature that it killed the same way.]]

* CapitalismIsBad: You have the child labor at the top... then there's Iruburu, the city that turned body horror into an economy. The local currency ''is'' body parts; either someone else's or the trader themselves. It's strictly enforced, even with an "equal value" justice system. If you decrease the value of someone else's possession, the city itself will proceed to rip the flesh from your body until your "value" is reduced by the same amount as the damage you caused. It's handled in such a "matter of fact" way by the locals, they all come off as violent psychopaths. GoodThingYouCanHeal...

** Orth is a town with an economy dependent on exploring the dangerous Abyss. Its inhabitants, down to every last child, is fully aware death while cave-raiding is just part of the job, and have since accepted that as a regular part of life, to the point where they can be seen as remarkably blasé about tragic or frightening circumstances.
** Dialed up well above 11 with Iruburu, where horror is their economy.
** Dialed up well above 20 with their predecessors, the Ganja Corp. At least one person is snatched up by a predator, and mutate Mitty style long before the monster gets around to eating them. Before being snatched up, they were probably already fatally poisoned by the local food supply.

** Iruburu and Orth mirror each other. In Orth, people leave the town to travel into the abyss, to collect artifacts, which are exchanged for money. The high mortality rate of abyss explorers provide the town with a continuous supply of orphans. In Iruburu, the citizens can’t leave the town, and would be considered living artifacts, by Orth’s standards. Instead of artifact hunting, the Iruburu citizens harvest their own bodies for wealth. Its almost as if Iruburu is Orth, with the ‘exploration’ piece removed.

** Vueko after the sixth layer curb stomps the Suicide Corp, and results in [[spoiler:her surrogate daughter being horrifically mutated, first into a meat production plant, and then into an entire village]], tries to jump off a cliff but is stopped by Wazukyan.

** Iruburu Village has distinct rules separate from those that govern the rest of the Abyss. The curse doesn’t exist within it. The village itself operates as sort of a banker, judge, and jury. When someone joins, their soul is read and dollar values are attached to absolutely everything about them. An act of violence is considered vandalism. All nearby citizens know immediately the dollar value of the damage done, and removes that value from the perpetrator. Even their organs have value, so the value extraction process can get pretty squicky.
* EmergencyTransformation: The citizens of Iruburu Village took on their Hollow forms to continue surviving in the Sixth Layer.

* {{Foreshadowing}}: When they reach the fourth layer, Riko mentions that the giant "goblets" are for trapping prey. Not long afterward, as they walk across one, [[spoiler:a porcupine-monster corners them and tries to kill them. The unpleasant aftermath is also hinted at way back in episode 1, when Riko falls while being chased by a monster and briefly thinks her arm might be broken--the "orbed-piercer" they encounter poisons Riko's hand, and Reg ends up breaking her arm while trying to [[AmputationStopsSpread cut it off to get rid of the poison]].]]

* FromBadToWorse: Happens a lot. Yet, this is part of the series’ charm. It's always hyper aware of the implications for what’s happening. When it shows trauma, it KNOWS it's traumatic and never glosses over this, which gives every step taken an emotional weight that few other franchises can match.

* GenderIsNoObject: Orth's society is meritocratic, and female delvers are seen as often as male delvers. Three of the introduced White Whistles are also female. The Abyss itself also doesn't care what gender its victims are.

** The Abyss is breathtakingly beautiful, but also [[DeathWorld horribly dangerous place]], where even the seasoned explorers venture with a full knowledge that the odds of returning diminish the more they explore. Putting a couple of kids there is definitely not the easiest of adventures.

* JustBeforeTheEnd: [[spoiler:It's revealed that the "praying skeletons" have been found in batches in various layers of the Abyss coinciding with 2000 year cycles. The implication is that every civilization that lives near the Abyss suffers some sort of catastrophe every 2000 years. It's no coincidence that the next 2000 year cycle is about to hit and many people in Orth are starting to die of mysterious causes right before their birthdays.]]

* MercyKill: As a rule, Cave Raiders kill people who have gone to the Sixth Layer and tried to come back since they are warped by the effects and lose their humanity. [[spoiler:Reg does this for Mitty, who was forcibly turned into an immortal blob of flesh after being exposed to the Curse of the Abyss who can't be killed by any other means and suffers in horrible pain when she's injured]].

* PointOfNoReturn: The frontier between the fifth and sixth layers is considered this, as the ascension curse of the sixth layer is pretty much fatal to human beings. The sixth layer is called "City of the Unreturned" for this reason.

** The Abyss is littered with treasures unique to the rest of the world, some with miraculous and physics-defying properties, and is home to entire worlds divided between the layers, each carrying their own host of monsters and mysteries. Not to mention what happens if one were to try climbing back out.

** Although Riko was born the normal way, she also experienced an elaborate metaphor for childbirth. [[spoiler:She was born in the fifth layer of the Abyss, put in a giant box-shaped relic--which stretches open to reveal a fleshy womb-like interior--and pushed up to the surface by her mother Lyza (with help from Ozen, Lyza's close friend and midwife). She was actually stillborn, but the box brought her to life during the ascent, making her metaphorically born from the Abyss itself.]]

* AnimeHair: A person's hair curling in unnatural and gravity-defying ways is one of the more benign effects of prolonged exposure to the Abyss's force field. (Ozen's odd hairdo is deliberately styled that way, however.)

''Made In Abyss'' is a {{Seinen}} adventure manga by Akihito Tsukushi, serialized via Takeshobo's digital publication Web Comic Gamma. So [[ArtstyleDissonance despite the cutesy looks of the main characters, don't be fooled for even a second]].

* AlienLunch: Riko has cooked testicles in Chapter 44. She does a ShrugTake and keeps eating, though it's pretty spicy.

* {{Curse}}: "The Curse of the Abyss". No one on the surface is sure exactly what it is, but there's ''something'' within the Abyss that induces increasingly harsh symptoms on raiders attempting to climb back to the surface, making ascension potentially riskier than even exploring. [[spoiler:It's explained by Nanachi that the "curse" acts as a sort of weave, filling the Abyss with a sort of energy. It's easy to navigate through going down, but when you try to climb upwards it stabs into you and causes the symptoms.]] The effects are as follows:

* PowerTrio: Nanachi joins the team in chapter 26 after Reg does them a favor, making the protagonist's team effectively a RagtagBunchOfMisfits composed of a [[spoiler:resurrected]] girl with barely any combat prowess [[spoiler:holding another girl's SoulJar after chapter 38]], a HollywoodCyborg [[spoiler:with a SuperpoweredEvilSide]] who will likely never grow up and a jaded formerly human Abyss mutant bunny person who can see the Curse and is highly experienced with the Abyss' tribulations.

One day exploring the murky depths Riko stumbles upon a unconscious little boy, who turns out to actually be a DeceptivelyHumanRobot. Upon awakening the robot turns out to have a meek, but friendly personality and suffering from severe memory loss, having no idea who he is, where he came from, and how he came to be where he was found. Riko befriends the robot and takes him under her wing, giving him the name "Reg", and brings him along to the surface. Not much later, a mysterious letter for Riko arrives from the far depths of the Abyss. The writer of said letter claims to be Riko's long lost mother, Lyza, a famously bold and hardy Cave Raider and explorer, [[CallToAdventure telling her to come to the bottom of the fabled seventh layer of the Abyss, where she is waiting for her]]. Included in her letter are descriptions and drawings of beings found on the lower levels of the Abyss, which much to Reg's interest include a sketch of a figure who closely resembles himself. Compelled to find her mother, Riko then bids farewell to her friends and departs to the Abyss along with Reg in search for her mother, despite knowing of the risks and the fact that due to the Curse of the Abyss, she will never be able to return.

An anime adaptation by Kinema Citrus aired in Summer 2017, covering the first three volumes. Volume 4 and 5 were adapted in a feature film called ''Made in Abyss: Dawn of the Deep Soul'', released on January 17, 2020. In January 2022, it was announced that the first season will air on Creator/{{Toonami}}. A second season (with the subtitle ''The Golden City of the Scorching Sun'') aired in Summer 2022.

* ShoutOut: One of the [[RidiculouslyCuteCritter small animals]] in the OP for the anime is white with a pink circle in the middle of it's body with a white bushy tail. It's basically a smaller [[Anime/PuellaMagiMadokaMagica Kyubey]] in terms of design. Fitting considering that [[spoiler:both shows look kid friendly at first due to ArtStyleDissonance but are actually very dark anime filled with [[EldritchAbomination abominations]]]].

* DarkestHour: As bad as Iruburu is, before everyone’s conversion to mutants, [[spoiler:their only water supply in the 6th Layer turned out to be some kind of creature disguised as water. Everyone gets infected and BodyHorror ensues. They attempt to use an artifact to save a little girl. Its grants her wish, to be able to have ‘children,’ but they lack organs and constantly die, turning her wish into a nightmare. The situation improves, but not before sprinting straight at the DespairEventHorizon]].

* AerithAndBob: Riko is a rather normal-sounding Japanese name, but many other characters have ''absolutely weird''-sounding ones. Ozen, Srajo, Belaf... to name a few.

An anime adaptation by Kinema Citrus aired in Summer 2017, covering the first three volumes. Volume 4 and 5 were adapted in a feature film called ''Made in Abyss: Dawn of the Deep Soul'', released on January 17, 2020. In January 2022, it was announced that the first season will air on Creator/{{Toonami}}. A second season with the subtitle ''The Golden City of the Scorching Sun'') aired in Summer 2022.