Manga / Blattodea

"The ant swarm keeps growing... by attacking settlements, one after another. Shall we use the troops to eradicate them, along with the civilians? Or not? This decision... I'd like to leave it up to you, Fujii Alice-san."

— Kozue "Hanakamakiri" Shiihara

Blattodea (ブラトデア) is a 2020 shonen manga written by Shinya Murata and illustrated by Hayami Tokisada that's published on the Gangan JOKER magazine. It is a direct sequel to Arachnid from 2009 and its 2012 spinoff Caterpillar.

Alice Fujii is as miserable as ever. She might have survived the Organization's Arachnid Hunt, an assault of psychotic bug-themed assassins at her school, but also suffered no end of physical and emotional trauma without gaining anything in return. After choosing to face the outbreak of rapist zombies that overran Japan since the incident, Alice finds the Organization wants to take her as their new Boss — whether she wants it or not.

Putting that aside, newcomer Chiyuri Haijima is a bright and easygoing roach-girl who lives with a community of homeless people. Right before the Arachnid Hunt starts she makes friends with a troublesome ant-girl named Setsuna Dinoponera... Considering what happens later that day, what could be their role in all of this?

Spoilers pertaining to Arachnid and Caterpillar will be unmarked. Beware of spoilers related to Himenospia, too, as both series borrow a lot from each other despite not sharing the same setting.

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This manga features the following tropes:

#-I

• Aborted Arc: Arachnid ended with Kabutomushi and Gokiburi looking to invade the Organization's headquarters in search of Alice, with Kabutomushi being noted to have a sense of duty over it. Then there is a year-long Time Skip that brushes all of it aside. Gokiburi ended up working for the Organization again as a prison director but failed to find Alice despite her surveillance drones and is left in the dark about the whole "make Alice the Boss" thing. As for Kabutomushi, she's just hanging out at an abandoned WcDonald's to keep the zombies from reaching the prison.
• Action Prologue: Chapter 0 is about Alice trying to survive the zombie apocalypse on her own.
• Aesop Amnesia: After everything Dinoponera went through trying to make friends in all the wrong ways back in the Arachnid Hunt, she still runs off without Chiyuri and wreaks havoc at Hibarigaoka Prison while expecting Megumi to deploy "friend candidates" for her to fight against.
• Affectionate Gesture to the Head:
  • When Alice is crying herself to sleep in the prologue and remembers her master Kumo, there's a whole page with him patting her on the head.
  • During chapter 1, Chiyuri is thinking about how Yamato has been raising her since she's fled from the Organization, and there's likewise a small panel of him patting her head.
  • When Yamato asks Dinoponera to admit she's been infected by the zombies, Chiyuri holds her with one hand around her shoulder and the other over her head, saying she looks just fine.
  • At the Takobeya labor room, Dinoponera has a Normal Human Interaction with Makoto, who pats her head and says they'll be friends from then on.
• After the End: Over a year, most of Japan has turned into a wasteland thanks to the rape zombie apocalypse provoked by the Organization. The villains use this as an excuse to further kill as many as they see fit, in order to build some sort of utopia.
• All Men Are Perverts:
  • Even without anything to do with the outbreak, nearly every male character in the series is a deranged rapist. The exceptions are Chiyuri's adoptive father Yamato and his pals, who he scolds for thinking he had any dirty thoughts over her. But once the minor hobos are infected, they act like deep down they did want to rape their adopted niece. It's worth noting that unlike in Arachnid, female zombies are also shown trying to rape people.
  • At Hibarigaoka prison, the original inmates start hollering and drooling over Chiyuri and Dinoponera as they pass by with Geji holding them at gunpoint. Chiyuri mistakes them for zombies until she is told otherwise. An unimpressed Kamadouma, who is known to indulge in Rape by Proxy to punish female enemies, then shuts them up and goes on a misogynistic rant about females being vile things whose beauty isn't comparable to that of men.
  • And a minute later when Chiyuri and Setsuna think they're safe at the Takobeya room it turns out Juzuhigemushi, Ugly Bald Rapist #47453412, has forced his sex slaves to trick them into drinking an aphrodisiac and wants to take their clothes off.
  • When Alice and Hanakamakiri arrive on Hibarigaoka Prison, they first come across a settlement of inhuman-looking male hobos between the front gates and the building. They waste no time in making Alice wish to murder them all, but a nearby Chiyuri orders the men to stop harassing Alice and they actually listen to her.
• All Women Are Lustful: Most of the female characters in the story other than Kabutomushi and Chiyuri are on the lewd side. This includes a certain pair who were portrayed as fanservice girls of the Innocent and Reluctant kind:
  • Poor Setsuna Dinoponera became a half "rape-zombie" after being tossed to a bunch of them by Sasori in the previous series. Combined with her love for Chiyuri, it makes her lose control and force herself on the roach-girl on the most inopportune times even as she insists she isn't a pervert.
  • Alice Fujii, who readers knew as a Shrinking Violet with No Social Skills, surprisingly starts swooning over how elegant and powerful Hanakamakiri is. She spends several days being rather intimate with him while unaware that he's a boy and that he's in love with Imomushi.
• Always Someone Better:
  • In Arachnid, Alice was, by the author's own words on the final afterword, an Invincible Hero. His goal for the sequel actually was to figure out a bug that's even better than a spider, and Chiyuri the cockroach—a wild American cockroach specifically—is who he came up with. She's all-around strong, skilled and clever, as well as capable of beating Dinoponera's and Alice's pseudo-Time Stands Still technique. Rather ironic considering how Megumi the house cockroach was a Faux Action Girl in the previous stories. Furthermore, the author did research on bugs that prey on, parasite or have better attributes than spiders for Alice to fight against throughout the story.
  • Dinoponera tearfully reflects on how she lost not only to Alice but also Sasori, all while Chiyuri wonders what could've happened to make Dino so distraught.
• An Arm and a Leg: The story opens with Alice having just completely crippled a nude zombie girl covered in roaches with a hatchet, with a nearby newspaper telling survivors to amputate all four limbs of the not-exaclty-dead zombies to neutralize them. This scene becomes very ominous because Dinoponera, who's friends with a "roach", is juxtaposed with the chopped-up zombie girl in chapter 8. It adds to multiple scenes from Caterpillar which had a suspicious subtext tying poor Dino to characters getting their limbs severed...
• And I Must Scream:
  • After Kuramoto is killed, all her drones including Sara become brain-dead and are only able to shamble around trying to rape people. The zombie girl seen in the very beginning, for example, can only beg for more sex despite having all her limbs chopped off by Alice. So far it is left ambiguous what triggered them after they left Alice's school in a passive state (possibly Dinoponera being violated a second time and fighting back) and if they can be restored to normal. Dinoponera's poison can produce antibodies against the virus, but at the time of the prologue Chiyuri hasn't managed to bring her to Alice like Yamato asked. A vaccine in development is nonetheless mentioned in a newspaper, but Hanakamakiri lies to Alice that there's been no real progress for a cure.
  • Dinoponera, who was tossed to the zombie mob while paralysed and likely experienced it in slow-motion, seemingly remains just lucid enough to try calling for Chiyuri but too weak to avoid the thugs who assault her later. Once one of them violates her, though, she suddenly springs back alive and as unhinged as ever to rape him instead. It's difficult to tell how conscious the brainwashing leaves her as she tries to attack Chiyuri with a crazed look upon finding her but suddenly turns back to normal and saves the roach when other zombies were molesting her.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: After catching up with Alice in the prologue, the reader is introduced to the titular "blattodea" heroine. However, she isn't Megumi Oki, but instead a new roach-girl called Chiyuri Haijima.
• Animal Motifs: The series is set in an apparently mundane world but there is a bizarre and widespread obsession with insects among people and secret syndicates made up of mutants with bug-like superpowers rule over everyone. On every chapter the narrator hypes a character with (sometimes wildly inaccurate) wild life trivia about the critters they represent. You can expect roaches to be treated like the apex of living beings here, even above spiders, for their continued survival despite being on the bottom of the food chain.
• Apocalypse How: Class 0 and possibly above that. A zombie outbreak fueled by rape devastates Japan over the course of a year, reducing it to a Ghost Town of dilapidated buildings and wrecked upturned cars. The state of the rest of the world is so far unknown, but Hanakamakiri expresses worry over that and the magazine version of chapter 1 has a narration line declaring Blattodea is a "story from before the world collapsed".
• Apologetic Attacker:
  • Chiyuri's homeless friends all end up infected. When she's suddenly groped by the first one she comes across, she knocks him down in confusion and promptly apologizes.
  • Dinoponera apologizes for killing Chiyuri's hobo friends to prevent them from raping her, but Chiyuri is too thankful to think badly of her. It doesn't help that the zombies were talking like they were grooming Chiyuri for that all along.
• Arc Welding:
  • Arachnid and its spinoff Caterpillar were tied together by the reveal Suzumebachi and Hanakamakiri were plotting to make Alice the new Boss of the Organization. Blattodea then reveals Kirigirisu, who apparently worked for Suzumebachi and barely did anything on-panel in Arachnid, actually outplayed everyone for unknown reasons.
  • Dinoponera's 3 volumes long rampage in Arachnid had no apparent impact on the plot other than Alice stealing her ability. Blattodea then makes Dinopo very "important" with the reveal that the reason Suzumebachi called her was because her venom is the cure to the Queen's Rule virus.
• Arc Words: "Freedom", which is Alice's and now also Chiyuri's goal in life.
• Aren't You Going to Ravish Me?: While guiding Alice to Hibarigaoka Prison, Hanakamakiri wears perfume that lures the zombies to himself. Without knowing of either this or the fact her Elegant Gothic Lolita partner is a crossdressing boy, Alice watches the zombies ignore her and starts feeling inadequate as a girl compared to him.
• Art Shift:
  • Arachnid was illustrated by Ifuji Shinsen, but Hayami Tokisada took over the role from Caterpillar onwards. Some early flashback panels in Blattodea are recycled straight from Arachnid, with the art zoomed down enough that readers might not notice until they squint. Later flashbacks to Arachnid do have redrawn art mimicking the former illustrator's style.
  • Unlike in Caterpillar or Choubu no Shinobi, several flashbacks and imagination scenes are just left as rough drafts. Really rough ones.
  • Female characters in the story repeatedly switch from having very sharp and blocky faces with noodle-like bodies to having more refined anatomy, giving the artwork an inconsistent appearance that wasn't there in either Caterpillar or Choubu no Shinobi.
• Art-Style Dissonance: Hayami Tokisada's cute art style contrasts with the dark subject matter of the story, and the occasional colored pages have a pastel palette.
• As You Know:
  • Kabutomushi explains to Alice (and the readers) that the zombie outbreak was planned by the Organization so they can throw Japan into chaos and get away with murdering countless people. This retroactively makes a comment from Gokiburi in the final chapter of Arachnid rather awkward, as she explains the exact same thing to Alice and the readers 28 days into the outbreak.
  • Kabutomushi has to remind Imomushi that they're living on a WcDonald's to keep the zombies away from the nearby Hibarigaoka Prison, informing readers they're not just slacking off in there.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Dinoponera was a cruel and sadistic casual killer who offed a civilian by accident, beat up half of the cast for fun and tortured Alice for petty reasons. She then had her prized time-slow technique stolen and improved by Instant Expert Alice like it was nothing, was humiliated and defeated before getting goaded into a hopeless fight against Sasori and getting tossed into a pit of rapist zombies while paralyzed and begging for her life. However, it would be unfair to say the poor child soldier had no redeeming qualities, and her portrayal in Blattodea helps humanize her further.
  • The three men who attempt to rape Chiyuri in chapter 1 later prey on a zombiefied Dinoponera who's just looking for the roach-girl but she gleefully dominates and infects all of them. Might as well cheer her on.
• Attempted Rape: With the rapepocalypse the story is set in, rape attempts are nearly episodic.
  • Alice nearly gets infected by the zombies in the prologue, but is saved by Hanakamakiri.
  • Chiyuri is introduced as a trio of perverts try to rape her while she's asleep, but she breaks free instantly.
  • Dinoponera is shown to have been rape-zombified offscreen after all. This gives her the dubious distinction of being the first major girl in the author's mangas that actually gets raped right after being (re)introduced. In the next chapter, while wandering around as a zombie, Dinopo is raped by one of the guys who wanted to assault Chiyuri earlier but then... she starts asserting herself.
  • Chiyuri is molested and "half" penetrated by her infected homeless friends, but a fully conscious Dinoponera saves her in the nick of time and brutally kills the two men. There's little time to rest, though, as the two girls are still surrounded by a crowd of zombies afterwards.
  • Played for Laughs when the half zombified Dinoponera gets pushy on a sleeping Chiyuri, who just pins her down telling her to get ahold of herself. Chiyuri even says them sleeping together isn't out of the question if the ant-girl romances her properly.
  • At Hibarigaoka Prison, Megumi doesn't hold back against Dinoponera and tries to reenact her gangrape from the Arachnid Hunt by releasing all the prisoners and ordering them to defile and murder her. Although Dinoponera arrives in a horny goofball mode from being tricked into drinking a whole bottle of aphrodisiac, she freaks out when the inmates start molesting her and kills so many of them that the remaining ones start running for the hills.
• "Back to Camera" Pose: Whenever somebody mentions Alice, the dreaded natural-born killer with wires and a knifegun, she is framed in an Imagine Spot looking ominous with her back turned to the reader. Sometimes she'll even be staring back with Glowing Eyes of Doom. This also applies to mentions of various other characters, to the point it gets repetitive if two or three end up imagined on this pose in a single chapter.
• Bag of Spilling: Alice sacrificed the Kumoito in the end of Arachnid by outsniping a sniper and ended up fighting the zombie apocalypse with her bare hands, improvised weapons and finally a hatchet. Her beloved knifegun is finally granted back to her in chapter 10 by Bekkōbachi.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • Chapter 8 opens with Setsuna crawling towards Chiyuri like she's relapsed back into a horny zombie, but she's just hungry for Pocky candy. In the second half of the chapter, however, she does try to rape Chiyuri for real.
  • While trying to decline the role of Organization Boss, Alice is confronted by someone who appears to be her late mother but is instead, supposedly, a distant relative.
  • When Megumi kicks Chiyuri and Setsuna inside the Takobeya labor room at the prison shelter, the two look around in the dark and see people looming over them and grumbling about women... but they're a bunch of friendly female inmates instead of the usual rapists, zombies or not, they're used to seeing by then.... But it doesn't last. The women are all sex slaves of a Dirty Old Man named Juzuhigemushi who made them trick the girls into drinking water mixed with aphroadisiacs so they can be forced into an orgy.
• Bait-and-Switch Comment:
  • When Yamato reveals he raised Chiyuri under the Organization's orders the whole time, Chiyuri is shocked... for other reasons.
    Chiyuri: I— I didn't know... I can't believe it. Master... actually had a job...
    Dinoponera: Wait, what?
  • In chapter 12, the Green Tree Ants catch Gokiburi playing with herself and ask to join the fun. She pretends to agree to have sex with them and starts angrily stomping on them instead.
• Bare-Fisted Monk: Hibiki prefers to fight bare-handed because it befits his heroic Kamen Rider motif, even when Abu the samurai challenges him with a katana in hand. Unfortunately for Hibiki, Chiyuri sucker-punches Abu into submission before he can do anything.
• Batman Gambit: On top of plotting for Alice to become the new Boss, Suzumebachi is said to have called Dinoponera to Japan to counter the Queen's Rule virus because her namesake ant's venom is the cure. To this end, he didn't tell her anything and expected Alice to defeat her specifically by making her stab herself. It is all but directly stated that he sent Sasori to get Dinoponera raped so her body could produce antibodies to let her resist the zombiefication and be able to help other people. Then it is only by Contrived Coincidence that Dinopo had previously met Chiyuri and Yamato to be able to learn what she is supposed to do next.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: The current illustrator for the series doesn't detail scars on most female characters said to have them, leading to certain oddities.
  • Back in Arachnid, Alice had scars on her palms from the time Dinoponera repeatedly stabbed her, but in Blattodea she doesn't. On that note, neither Hayami Tokisada nor the series' other illustrators ever detail the scars Imomushi was repeatedly said to have in Caterpillar.
  • When Dinoponera is shown defeated by Alice, the spider-girl appears completely unharmed despite being all bruised and stabbed in the original story. The smear of Alice's blood left on Dinopo's cheek when she slapped her, on the other hand, is detailed like it is a bruise. This gives the wrong impression that Dinopo was utterly curb-stomped by Alice for the entire fight. It's also subverted by her short time as a braindead drooling zombie.
  • Kabutomushi is reintroduced at the point she had saved Alice from the Boss. All the injuries and damage to her uniform she suffered during the Arachnid Hunt are gone. The nearby Alice, again, doesn't look like she just had the crap beaten out of her minutes before, either.
  • Dinoponera gets a bleeding nose after Imomushi hits her with a Caterpillar Cannon headbutt. This is notable because in the previous series as well as in her fight against Chiyuri in this one no good physical hit on Dinopo would even bruise her. And this is after Chiyuri gets a whole dropkick to the face that was meant to break her neck and is briefly KO'ed but not visibly injured.
• Big Bad: Despite all the talk of making Alice the Boss, Serena Cervantes already took over the Organization after Yoriko died. An antagonist seemingly reused straight from Himenospia, she's a foreign Shadow Dictator who apparently had Yoriko on the palm of her hand all along and who wants to enslave Alice.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Megumi Oki of all people appears in the Sinister Surveillance role held by major antagonists in the prequels, talking big about having to make ruthless decisions as a ruler and plotting to use Chiyuri as a pawn before disposing of her. The roach's main goal is still to find and protect Alice, though, so she can't be all that evil. Also, for all her posturing she is afraid of Shoichiro, her co-director at Hibarigaoka Prison.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • Hanakamakiri saves Alice from a horde of zombies with a squad of armored soldiers, and declares Alice is now the new Organization Boss.
  • Dinoponera breaks free from the Queen's Rule to save Chiyuri from getting zombified, and then Yamato appears out of nowhere to help both girls escape into the sewers.
  • Subverted when Imomushi "saves" Dinoponera from Chiyuri and starts demanding food and water while holding the girl at gunpoint. Each remembers who the other is, and Imomushi becomes the first major antagonist Dinopo and Chiyuri must face in the story.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Hanakamakiri becomes rather intimate with Alice while acting as a maid just to lower her guard and tries to beat her into submission as soon as she steps out of line. He even throws a fake apology in after his initial threat to try to stab her, with Alice guessing he's been conditioned to deceive others as much as herself.
• Black Comedy:
  • One chapter opens with Setsuna comically crawling on the ground while begging Chiyuri for something, like she's zombiefied again. It turns out she just wants candy, with the implication that Chiyuri beat her to the ground just to deny her some of it. Despite the lighthearted tone of the scene, it also reads as disturbing because it explicitly mirrors Alice amputating the limbs of the zombie girl covered in roaches in the prologue, as if implying Alice will eventually cripple or murder Setsuna too.
  • This Zombie Apocalypse story was serialized during the COVID-19 pandemic. There's one scene where Kabutomushi, who's dressed in an essential McDonald's worker uniform, meets Alice and Hanakamakiri while jokingly acting like they're zombies and that she's going to whack them away. Hanakamakiri responds by casually pulling up a certificate that proves neither of them are infected.
• Black Comedy Rape: Blattodea goes for this to avoid making the mood too bleak despite relishing in the Sequel Escalation of the attempted and successful rape scenes that sometimes get portrayed more graphically than in the Caterpillar seinen spinoff.
  • The story refrains from showing Setsuna being raped by zombies during the Arachnid Hunt just to show her being assaulted by thugs a while afterwards. Then her zombiefication kicks in and she comically and violently rapes one of the scumbags offscreen while the other two are unaware of what's actually going on.
  • Setsuna tries to jump on a sleeping Chiyuri at night due to being a Zombie Infectee in heat, but it's Played for Laughs with the latter merely being annoyed and pinning Setsuna to the floor.
  • When Imomushi argues with Hanakamakiri about him leaving her behind in the previous year without even spending a night together like they promised, she says he can't complain if she later rapes him. He consents to having sex eventually, since he loves her too, and gets her to calm down. As it happens, Alice is comically surprised to see him being threatened, as she most likely has a very bad opinion of the Wholesome Crossdresser and men in general at this point.
    Alice: (Who's raping who?!)
• Bland-Name Product:
  • As before, the series "Sailor-Force" and "Kahen Rider" are repeatedly mentioned by geek characters in the story.
  • Chiyuri is seen eating from a box of Pocky sticks named "Lucky". Alice does directly mention the "Pocky Game" at one point, though.
  • After disappearing for a whole year in-universe, Kabutomushi is reintroduced hanging around an abandoned "WcDonald's" restaurant in uniform as she casually blasts zombies left and right.
  • Serena is seen eating "Cup Men" noodles. Back in Himenospia it was "Cup Poodle".
• Blatant Lies:
  • Yamato isn't fooled by Setsuna's attempt to pretend she hadn't been assaulted by the zombies because of how beat up she looks.
  • Hanakamakiri claims nobody will force Alice to become the Boss if she hates the idea of it so much. The boy has been conditioned for years to deceive others and yet even he cannot say that with a straight face.
• Boobs-and-Butt Pose: Several partially or fully naked pinup illustrations in Blattodea are of girls in this pose, like the opening scene with Alice, the quite risqué cover of volume 2 featuring Chiyuri or the inside covers of volumes 5 and 6 with Setsuna and Rin, respectively. One such illustration with the resident Dude Looks Like a Lady Hanakamakiri was never properly finished but a sketch was shown on the illustrator's Twitter profile.
  • The volume 2 cover with nude Chiyuri is really a redraw of the cover illustration for when the second half of chapter 8 was released on Gangan Joker. That version was removed from volume 2, and as of volume 6 it remains the only chapter cover to be exclusive to the magazine publication.
• Bookends:
  • The final chapter of Arachnid started with some dramatic narration about the troubles Alice had overcome and then a nude pin-up of her looking determined (Caterpillar also had an equivalent scene for Imomushi, sans nudity, for parallelism). This story opens with the narrator teasing some kind of bug that's superior to spiders and then we get another nude pin-up of Alice.
  • Volume 2 starts with Chiyuri getting groped from behind by a zombiefied hobo. At the end of the volume is an illustration of Setsuna doing the same thing to her, which is obviously portrayed as just cute and harmless teasing.
• Boss Subtitles: Characters are introduced like this, starting with Chiyuri and Dinoponera after they fight. This instance is used to reveal "Wamongokiburi" is Chiyuri's bug codename and that "Setsuna" is Dinoponera's civilian name.
• Break the Cutie:
  • Despite her determined closing monologue about fighting with all she's got back in Arachnid, Alice is first seen with no real goal but to survive the zombie hordes, all battered and depressed over all she's lost, being unable to sleep in peace and having no home to return to.
  • While still plenty bitchy, Dinoponera shows a kinder side to her and is a very naive girl, as she barely makes friends with Chiyuri and still thinks she'll make even more during the Arachnid Hunt. While returning readers know it was her own fault, seeing her as a nearly brain dead zombie clinging to the hope of meeting Chiyuri again is very sad. Fortunately, she resists the brainwashing to save Chiyuri and recovers some of her confidence over time while living with her.
  • Chiyuri loses her adoptive father to the zombies after having nearly getting raped by the other zombified hobos and is driven to tears as she escapes with Dinoponera. But over a year she is mostly back to her carefree nature thanks to Dinopo's company.
• Breather Episode:
  • After all the drama in the Prolonged Prologue, chapter 8 has mostly comical interactions between Setsuna and Chiyuri before Imomushi shows up from out of nowhere.
  • Chapter 23 and 25 cut away from the battles faced by Setsuna and Chiyuri to more lighthearted situations with Alice and Hanakamakiri as they travel to Hibarigaoka Prison and reunite with both Kabutomushi and Imomushi.
• Brick Joke:
  • Setsuna denies she is "lewd" after forcing herself on Chiyuri while under the army ant virus' influence and cries that her bathing nude on a fountain when Chiyuri first met her was a one-time thing. A few chapters later, Setsuna gets drugged with aphrodisiacs and starts masturbating in front of everyone while still denying in tears that she's a pervert.
  • Hibiki is interrupted from fighting Kagimushi's henchmen twice in a row, with both Hebitonbo and Abu being defeated instantly by Setsuna and Chiyuri, respectively. He isn't bothered on the first time, but on the second he can't help but shout at Chiyuri to not spoil his fun.
• Building of Adventure: In chapter 12, Chiyuri and Setsuna walk up to what seems to be the setting for the battle royale to come; a huge prison where survivors are taking shelter from the zombie outbreak.
• The Bus Came Back:
  • Dinoponera is reintroduced in chapter 1. And six real life years and two months after she got very abruptly tossed into a pit of rapist zombies at the 2/3 mark of Arachnid, she is finally seen in chapter 2 looking barely conscious and desperate to meet back with Chiyuri. In chapter 4, she comes back for real as Chiyuri's sidekick.
  • Imomushi reappears in chapter 8.5, trying to force Chiyuri and Dinopo to do as she says.
  • Gokiburi reappears in chapter 11.5, in the same role of an evil overlooker that Sara and Akiho once held.
  • After she dropped out of Arachnid with Goki offhandedly assuming she had been caught by the zombies, Geji reappears in chapter 12.5 just as suddenly as the roach-girl's subordinate in the Hibarigaoka prison shelter. Just in time to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the WataMote series.
  • Kamadouma was written out of Arachnid together with Geji but shows up at Hibarigaoka Prison in chpater 13. He looks a bit disheveled with Perma-Stubble on but is otherwise ok.
  • Abu got blown out of Shouran High by Kabutomushi back in chapter 35 of Arachnid but shows up ok in chapter 16 of this story as one of Kagimushi's subordinates.
  • Kabutomushi herself finally reappears with no build up whatsoever, just casually killing zombies while "working" at an abandoned WcDonald's.
  • Himekuwagata reappears as a guard for Hibarigaoka Prison in chapter 36, like Murata implied in a Twitter Spaces roundtable interview held in 2023 when volume 6 was published.
• But Now I Must Go:
  • Alice left Gokiburi's bunker to be a killer hobo for three reasons. First, Gokiburi is just less horny and forceful than the zombies outside, and while Alice likes Goki back she was afraid of snapping and harming her. Second, she's becoming addicted to violence. Third, she doesn't feel at "home" anywhere.
  • While it goes unstated in the prologue, Hanakamakiri left his partner Imomushi because he felt he had betrayed her by making a deal with her enemy Suzumebachi to later help Alice become the Boss in exchange for him not killing Imomushi if he had the chance.
• Call-Back:
  • Alice briefly mentions leaving Gokiburi behind and thinks about her late mother and her master Kumo.
  • Alice goes back to Kumo's house to rest. The stuffed bear she used to cope with Kumo's death is still in the same place and she even tries to take it with her while escaping from the zombies.
  • Alice's conflict against the Organization mainly started after she refused Kamakiri's offer to let her into the Organization and killed him in self-defense. Blattodea starts with Hanakamakiri declaring Alice the new Boss and the spider-girl having no choice but to go along with it.
  • After Dinoponera leaves Chiyuri, it cuts to her being defeated by Alice at the Arachnid Hunt and some brief scenes from later, with Kuramoto's death kickstarting the zombie apocalypse.
  • Dinoponera's reaction shot upon being raped in chapter 3 mirrors the one from chapter 50 of Arachnid, except she looks disturbingly happy instead of horrified at her predicament.
  • Kabutomushi feels like she's seen Sasori before. They never interacted in Caterpillar but both escaped from the Ageha ship with Imomushi. Sasori was knocked out at the time.
  • In the afterword for volume 1, Murata mentions "what is the strongest bug?" as mankind's eternal question. This was a line from Sara back in Arachnid.
  • In chapter 4, Dinoponera rescuing Chiyuri by performing a flying kick on her assailant is an inversion of Alice being saved from Hibiki (who actually had just saved her) and the Media army ants by her own roach friend during the Arachnid Hunt. Interestingly, just two months later this scene repeated in Himenospia with the local Alice and Megumi analogues Himeno and Nagisa.
  • Dinoponera is seen stabbing one guy through his head for real like she once tried on Hibiki.
  • Back in Arachnid, Dinoponera killed a bystander while thinking he was some random assassin and shruged it off once she found the guy wasn't related to the nearby Kabutomushi or anything. In this story, Dinopo kills two of Chiyuri's hobo friends who were infected and about to rape the roach. This time she is truly sorry for what she had to do.
  • Chapter 8 starts with a crazy-looking Dinoponera crawling towards Chiyuri with the panels framing her just like the dismembered zombie girl from the prologue, but the ant-girl is just craving for Pocky sticks. It is shown the two actually are on the exact same street Alice went through, newspaper randomly blowing in the wind and all, with the difference Chiyuri has a friend by her side and is actually excited about the apocalypse she finds herself in.
  • Shortly after Dinoponera was introduced in Arachnid, Imomushi failed to hold her at gunpoint. When Imomushi is reintroduced in Blattodea, she succeeds for all of ten seconds before Dinopo starts pummeling her again... except this time she easily smashes the ant-girl's face with a headbutt. Imomushi then mocks her by calling back to a retcon from Caterpillar where she did not believe Dinoponera was stronger than her father Paraponera.
  • Alice asking Yoriko how she survived is repeated twice with Sasori a while later and then what seems like Alice's mother at the Organization's HQ. The last one is a subversion, as the woman is actually Alice's aunt.
  • In chapter 10, Hanakamakiri watches Bekkōbachi meet Alice like Mika did with Imomushi back in the ending of Caterpillar, but appears less concerned since he wants Alice to remain manipulated to be the new Boss. Chiyuri is then shown overcoming Imomushi in a contest of strength, unaware that the caterpillar is about to snap and brutally beat her as she previously did to Kabutomushi. Ironically, this means Dinopo is saddled with Gokiburi's role of being a helpless observer...
  • In chapter 11, Imomushi continues to mock Dinoponera while hyping Natural Born Murderer Alice up, unknowingly echoing a speech from Alice about how a short-sighted fighter like Dinopo is easy prey to her.
  • In chapter 20, when Hibiki is talking crap about all the naked women before him, Setsuna asks him if he's "LGBT". Like when Alice and Megumi prevously asked this in Arachnid, he bluntly confirms it just to backpedal on his words right afterwards.
  • In chapter 22, after Setsuna was portrayed as a wimpy goofball for quite a while, both Hibiki and Megumi acknowledge her as a powerful berserker that easily beat both Hibiki and Kabutomushi silly during the Arachnid Hunt.
  • In chapter 25, Alice thanks Kabutomushi for her help in the previous year and asks about Megumi. Apparently, the first thing to come to Alice's mind in relation to Megumi is that panty raid incident from Arachnid chapter 11.
  • In chapter 27, Setsuna attempts to attack Rin in a Bullet Time scene that mirrors her fighting Alice in chapter 46 of Arachnid, complete with Setsuna backflipping over Rin. Unfortunately, Setsuna is the one who gets owned and almost killed in this instance while Rin is always a step ahead of her despite just standing in place.
  • Setsuna's little misadventure at Hibarigaoka prison is a redux of her Arachnid appearance: she beats up a bunch of nobodies only to get humiliated by both a pseudo-Alice and Sasori. At least she doesn't get raped even more this time...
  • Chapter 33 frames Alice and Hanakamakiri arriving at Hibarigaoka Prison the same way as when Chiyuri and Setsuna got there. The same chapter has Chiyuri scolding some hobos for harrassing Alice while posing like when she ordered Setsuna to not bath naked on a fountain.
  • When Setsuna wakes up under the care of Sasori of all people in Chapter 35, the entire scene is framed to match them with Alice and Kumo back in Chapter 1 of Arachnid — complete with a conveniently placed spanner for the scared girl to point at Sasori.
• Call-Forward:
  • In Arachnid, Dinoponera brags to Kabutomushi she can't be defeated with pure power, and here, before the Arachnid Hunt, she boasts to Chiyuri she can't be beaten with pure speed. She even dares both of them to try and beat her with a special move.
  • Dinoponera getting walloped by Chiyuri and yet suffering no injuries from it mirrors her getting repeatedly kicked across a corridor by Hibiki during the Arachnid Hunt, with the difference that she is impressed by fellow Sailor-Force fan Chiyuri but doesn't give a damn about Kahen Rider fan Hibiki.
  • Before fighting Sasori, Alice's monologue about how she must keep killing just to live in such a Crapsack World is the same one she does in the final chapter of Arachnid. The difference is that the "I've no choice but to kill" part is only implied in the original with her just sighing in Tranquil Fury but is stated out this time with her looking utterly unhinged.
• The Cameo: One of the trivia scenes about reproduction in cockroaches shows Moriyama from Killing Bites trying and failing to woo a girl.
• Cast Herd: The story starts divided between Chiyuri and Setsuna's side and Alice and Hanakamakiri's side, with other main characters like Imomushi, Kabutomushi and Gokiburi eventually converging into one place. It's on chapter 33 that Chiyuri finally meets Alice.
• Casual Danger Dialogue: Kabutomushi first appears "working" at a WcDonald's in uniform while violently refusing to give Happy Meals to the nearby zombies. It's seen that Imomushi has been living with her, and the two talk about what's going around Hibarigaoka Prison while killing zombies.
• Cerebus Rollercoaster: This sequel might seem darker and gorier than Arachnid, but Chiyuri's half of the story comes off as more lighthearted than Alice's and the manga still turns into an action comedy at the drop of a hat.
• Character Title: "Blattodea" refers to roaches (and termites), so it works as a Protagonist Title for Chiyuri and an Antagonist Title for Megumi. As mantises are closely related to roaches, it makes sense that Hanakamakiri also gets plenty of spotlight on Alice's side of the story.
• Charge-into-Combat Cut: Chapter 3 cuts away from Alice jumping at Sasori, which is a recurring The Worf Barrage for her. Good thing the one who blows Alice out of the air this time is Kabutomushi and not Sasori.
• Chekhov's Gunman:
  • Right before the outbreak begins for real, there's a single shot of a random zombie girl at Shouran High who a few pages later wanders into the rooftop and tries to attack Kabutomushi's group.
  • When Alice's mind is connected to the world wide web for info on the outbreak, there's an odd newspaper page in the corner depicting Sara Kurokawa, who was last seen turning into a zombie in the previous story despite being Kuramoto's autonomous second-in-command. From what is readable, it seems to imply her condition is being treated somehow. ​
• Chekhov's Skill: In a flashback to his youth, Yamato mentions a Wave Cannon ability which later turns out to be a ki blast he taught to Chiyuri. His ability to splatter the zombies with mere punches can also be seen as foreshadowing for it.
• Chickification: Dinoponera has mellowed quite a bit from the psycho-bitch she was in the previous story due to Chiyuri being a good influence on her, but this comes at the cost of her being portrayed as rather frail and ineffective despite the overwhelming power she demonstrated in the Arachnid Hunt.
• Cliffhanger:
  • The prologue ends with Alice being heralded as the new Organization Boss as was implied in Arachnid and then confirmed in Caterpillar, but then time is turned back to expand the open ending from Arachnid from both Alice's and Chiyuri's point of view.
  • Volume 1 ends with the zombified Dinoponera looming over a half-awake Chiyuri.
• Clothing Damage:
  • In the prologue, Alice's uniform is worn out from what appears to be a year of fighting the zombies and her skirt goes missing between scenes.
  • Setsuna is gang raped offscreen, and is seen afterwards with her sailor uniform rather damaged and missing the tie... even though she was specifically paralysed at the time so she wouldn't even be able to struggle. Later chapters depict the outfit without any tearing but the tie remains missing. Eventually, the entire outfit is slashed off for good by Rin.
• Cockroaches Will Rule the Earth: Played With, as there are no actual bugs involved but Chiyuri has cockroach traits and is able to survive the zombie apocalypse with her experience as a homeless person. Meanwhile, fellow roach Megumi holds a position of authority as she plots against the heroine. This trope was previously alluded to in both Arachnid and Caterpillar, where the atomic bombings of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Ageha ship were used to the advantage of the bug-themed Organization.
• Combat Pragmatist: Abu's "Shadow Nero" fighting style consists in exploiting blind spots to insta-kill people as soon as possible. He decides to not do this against Hibiki so he can see learn from the man's moves first, but then Chiyuri is the one who sucker punches Abu onto the floor. Hibiki actually becomes offended at Chiyuri's lack of sportmanship.
• Comically Missing the Point: When Chiyuri watches Hibiki go on a rant about how women are bad while striking Kamen Rider poses, what she takes from it is that he's a closeted Sailor Moon fanboy and starts making poses back at him while doing an In the Name of the Moon pre-battle speech.
• Conflict Ball:
  • Caterpillar protagonist Imomushi starts up trouble with Chiyuri, who she mistook for a zombie, and Setsuna by dropkicking the first and threatening the latter with a gun before trying to cripple her when she retaliates. When Chiyuri tries to hold Imomushi down, she stubbornly escalates the fight until Chiyuri nearly kills her with a Wave Cannon. Afterwards, after escaping from a crowd of zombies, the three calm down and suddenly turn friendly towards each other.
  • Hanakamakiri wants to force Alice to become the Organization's Boss and mantain the status quo out of paranoia that somebody might put a hit on Imomushi again if anything goes wrong, which Imomushi herself in the ending of Caterpillar already considered an unnecessary concern. There's an air of both the mantis-boy and the spider-girl being Conditioned to Accept Horror to such an extent that they just compulsively resort to either deceit or violence in everything they ever do.
  • Gokiburi was a main character in Arachnid with a supporting role in Caterpillar. Instead of helping Chiyuri find Alice and solve the outbreak, she is highly hostile for no reason other than being her usual bossy-bitch-to-anyone-not-named-Alice self and takes Geji along to harass her and Dinoponera near the gates of Hibarigaoka prison. Likewise, Shoichiro is supposed to be the Token Good Teammate in there, and yet his reasoning is that if two 16 to 17 years-old dumbos show up in the prison and refuse to be subjugated by his henchmen, then they are American spies and must be annihilated. Even when Chiyuri tells him she's Yamato's pupil, all Shoichiro does is cheap shot and knock her out for no real reason.
• Continuity Nod: The story ties back to Choubu no Shinobi by establishing that Yoriko started the Organization by hiring the last clan of ninjas who lived in a village isolated from the rest of Japanese society. The Rin who works for Kagimushi is said to be a descendant of Rin and Hanza from that spinoff.
• Cosy Catastrophe: Over a year has passed since the "gang-rape terrorist attack" and Japan has turned into a dilapidated wasteland. Alice is still torn with grief, almost falls prey to the zombies and only then does the Organization bring her in as the new Boss. Elsewhere, Chiyuri feels her mission to find Alice and work on a cure for the outbreak is hopeless and misses her father figure a lot, but not only does she and Setsuna handle the apocalypse together far better than the spider-girl but also the roach remains awfully carefree about being homeless.
• Covers Always Lie: Alice is given the first cover for marketing's sake. While she is still very important, "blattodea" stands for roaches and Chiyuri is soon introduced as the actual protagonist with just, if not more, as much focus than her.
• Crapsack World: The setting's Japan is ruled by an order of deranged assassins that have nuked the country and unleashed a zombie apocalypse upon it for unfathomable reasons, with the rest of world seemingly being under the thumb of an likewise evil American Shadow Dictator. Every character has a Dark and Troubled Past, most of them are murderous rapists and the few good people involved are barely scraping by.
• Crazy-Prepared: Hanakamakiri assumes that by posing as a friendly maid around Alice for long enough and swiftly beating her to death at the first opportunity, he could be the one to defeat her spider web trickery. However, the apparently defenseless Alice was Properly Paranoid enough to hack a blast door to slam right over him.
  Alice: I was able to walk through your trap without even knowing its existence. However, if you had shown... even a bit of disdain for me in your heart, I assure you... that you couldn't even have set it up.
• Crime of Self-Defense: The staff of Hibarigaoka Prison, including the Token Good Teammate expy of Shotaro Ishinomori, are all extremely hostile to Chiyuri and Setsuna, wanting nothing but to dominate, rape and kill them as soon as they ask Megumi for shelter. Despite this they act indignant when Chiyuri fights back against Juzuhigemushi or when Setsuna starts brutalizing a massive crowd of inmates who were all willing to rape her to death under Megumi's orders.
• Damsel in Distress: The zombified Dinoponera turns out to be a Damsel out of Distress who suddenly recovers her senses to save Chiyuri from also suffering that fate.
• Darker and Edgier: The story has gore and on-panel rape both depicted more graphically than in Arachnid, and from Alice's perspective things are still quite hopeless. On the other hand, Chiyuri is brighter than the spider-girl and she brings the best out of Dinoponera, so from their perspective the story goes on a more idealistic angle.
• Decapitated Army: Subverted with the army ant zombies, to the point of actually contradicting their Animal Motifs. Army ant species usually have a single queen and her death spells the end of the colony, but after Kuramoto was killed by Alice her minions ran wild and infected most of Japan for a year without her despite being supposed to die from starvation.
• Declaration of Protection: While resisting the effects of her zombiefication, Setsuna declares that no matter how much the army ants want to violate Chiyuri, letting them lay a hand on her is absolutely unacceptable.
• Decoy Protagonist: Downplayed; former Arachnid protagonist Alice is the focus of Chapter 0 and all the marketing for the series' release focused on her, but from chapter 1 on she shares the spotlight with the actual protagonist for this story, Chiyuri the roach-girl.
• Defeat by Modesty: Karina can easily disrupt Alice's traps by touching the strings she sets all over and around herself and turning them into a sort of vibrator that makes her too aroused to fight properly.
• Defeat Equals Friendship: Dinoponera is obsessed with making friends with people who can match her in combat... but never tires of fighting until she kills her foe and doesn't consider whether she'd be spared if she ever loses. Chiyuri overpowers and impresses Dinoponera enough that she quits fighting (what seals the deal is Chiyuri also liking Sailor-Force), and as a result Dinopo actually acknowledges her as a friend and Chiyuri happily returns the sentiment.
• Depending on the Artist:
  • In Arachnid's ending, Alice was portrayed with scars on her palms but those are, at least visually, gone here.
  • As seen in the Volume 1 cover, Hayami seems to feel the engravings on the Kumoito provide no tactical advantage whatsoever. Back in Caterpillar, Hanakamakiri's scythes were simplified after the art style change as well.
  • The sketches for chapter 1 show Chiyuri with a plain hairstyle akin to Alice's and her look-a-likes from the author's other works. Hayami gives her one that makes her resemble Mayuri Shiina from Steins;Gate instead. Also notable is how Dinoponera is portrayed — several sketch pages that have her looking cartoonishly unhinged or shocked are changed to her looking nonchalant or mildly worried in the final version.
• Depopulation Bomb: The point of the zombie outbreak, another stunt from this Organization that deliberately got Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuked to lose WWII spectacularly. Half of Japan's population is supposed to die from sex frenzy-induced starvation, and the Organization employs armed forces to terminate them, pretending that there's no cure and making Alice decide which areas to eradicate or spare. There never was a real justification for why Yoriko sought to do population control, but as Sasori points out, a world of chaos would be perfect for the most demented bug assassins to live in.
• Destructo-Nookie: When zombie Dinoponera is starting to get raped by some thug inside a van, she grabs him by the throat and pins him to the floor. Whatever happens afterwards causes the van to shake wildly, to the amusement of the man's friends who are standing outside. And then all three men are next seen as zombies.
• Deus Sex Machina: The army ant zombie plague, which started from the death of a Living Aphrodisiac, turns its victims crazy for sex to the point they'll end up dying of starvation (or at least they were supposed to). Even the previously innocent Dinoponera goes ravenous if anyone tries to rape her while she's zombified, and it's difficult to tell how self-aware she is during the act.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: In yet another man behind the man twist, it is revealed that the mysterious Kirigirisu, who barely did anything on-panel, had outplayed everyone during the Arachnid Hunt to get Yoriko killed. He had not only Alice but also Sasori saved for unknown reasons.
• Double Standard: Rape, Female on Female:
  • Chiyuri and Setsuna being preyed upon by men is portrayed as disturbing, but Setsuna in her zombified state outraping her rapists or clumsily attempting to molest her beloved Chiyuri is Played for Laughs.
  • Alice getting molested by her uncle all the way back in the beginning of Arachnid was Played for Horror, but her aunt Karina using her powers to molest Alice via the vibrations on her Razor Floss is eroticized.
• Downer Beginning: Everything's terrible for Alice in the prologue until she's saved from getting infected, and the idea of her getting hired into the Organization for real, even as the new Boss and with Hanakamakiri looking after her, seems rather ominous.
• Drama-Preserving Handicap:
  • Subverted with Alice, who lost her very powerful and versatile Kumoito upon sniping Ginyanma back in Arachnid, and during the final chapter implied she had trouble using her concentration powers as well as before. During the prologue for this story she spends a year fighting off zombies with improvised weapons until Hanakamakiri saves her. Then she actually soon gets the Kumoito back from her aunt Karina and is taught about new tricks her master Kumo hadn't told her about.
  • Dinoponera survived her zombifying rape but it had some lasting damage to her health, pride and confidence. This leads to her getting easily scared and injured by things that wouldn't have even fazed her back in her debut, on top of the story finding excuses to get her worfed as much as Gokiburi did in previous installments — quite the downgrade for the smug villainess who stomped on the Arachnid cast for nearly a year.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • Chiyuri doesn't have the first idea who's this smarmy ant making trouble on her home, and neither of them imagine just how big a reality check Dinoponera will get in a few hours or how Japan will collapse afterwards from the zombie outbreak. Only Yamato realizes something bad is about to happen, and what makes it more tragic is that Dino and Chiyuri actually become friends after they fight.
  • When zombie Dinoponera walks up to Chiyuri, the roach thinks she's drunk and wonders how her attempt to befriend Alice turned out. She's then shocked by how school is a place that could destroy Dinopo's personality in just half a day, not knowing anything about the Carnival of Killers that took place there.
  • By Foregone Conclusion, readers instantly know Chiyuri's quest to bring Ms. Zombie Cure Dinoponera to Boss Alice won't work so easily because the spider-girl was hiding away and doesn't get found and crowned by the Organization until a year later.
  • Gokiburi got a surveillance job and has drones and minions watching over the outbreak but has still failed to locate Alice, who happens to have become her Boss without her knowing. On top of that, Alice gets a crush on Hanakamakiri while barely thinking about Goki until that point in the story.
  • Alice starts getting a crush on Hanakamakiri while unaware that he only has eyes for Imomushi. She also doesn't know he's a crosdressing boy while praising his femininity, in an obvious set up for yet another Unsettling Gender-Reveal.
  • Despite having spent time at Pomario when she was a child, Chiyuri is very naive and oblivious to anything regarding the Organization and how it might be a bad idea to bring Setsuna to them even if it's to Alice. Due to plot contrivance reasons, Setsuna appears to not ever have told her anything either.
  • Chiyuri trusts Hibiki to capture a rampaging Setsuna while believing him to be far nicer a guy than he really is.
  • Megumi was all ready to bully Chiyuri and Setsuna when they arrived at Hibarigaoka Prison but when her dearest Alice-sama finally comes up she is nowhere to be seen.
  • Chiyuri is frequently accused of having been manipulated into entering Hibarigaoka Prison as some kind of spy when she genuinely had no idea about it or anything else regarding the Organization or Serena.
• The Dreaded: As usual, Alice, who mostly wants to be left in peace and eat pudding, is seen by other characters as a shadowy invincible mass murderer and Dinoponera in particular seems traumatized by her defeat to the spider-girl.
• Drop Dead Gorgeous:
  • There's a brief flashback to Kuramoto being executed by neck-crushing by Alice while she's only wearing underwear. The girl's expression as she dies is far more disturbing to look at compared to how it was portrayed by Ifuji Shinsen in Arachnid, which is actually truer to Murata's sketches of the scene.
  • Also used in a non-lethal sense comparable to Panty Fighter series like Agent Aika or Senran Kagura. There's a fixation on Setsuna, who has been violated on-panel while zombified with a dead stare on her face, being repeatedly and specifically knocked out while nude and with increasingly exploitative views of her defenseless body.
  • Played for Laughs when Megumi sees Alice again and is so shocked that she flops on her back like a dead cockroach, in a silly pose with raised limbs and exposed panties.
• Dude, She's Like in a Coma: There's a noticeable amount of scenes involving girls being threatened in their sleep. Worth noting is that the voyeuristic fetish nature of those was spelled out in Konchuki by the same author on the same time period.
  • An ugly-ass zombie appears out of thin air to attempt to rape Alice while she's trying to sleep in a hideout.
  • Three thugs attempt to rape Chiyuri in her introduction scene while she's sleeping, but she leaps away in a split second. They also have no qualms about raping a zombiefied Dinoponera, but get way more than they bargained for — she jolts awake and rapes all of them offscreen.
  • Subverted when Chiyuri wakes up to find a barely conscious zombie Dinoponera looming over her. Dino resisted the brainwashing enough to just wait for Chiyuri to wake up but still ends up scaring the roach away with an attempt to shove a palm on her face while giving her a Death Glare.
  • In chapter 8.5, a half-zombified Dinoponera tries to force herself on a half-asleep Chiyuri but the roach pins her to the floor until she stops. It seems Chiyuri has to manhandle her friend like that all the time.
  • Subverted when Sasori takes an unconscious Setsuna to a bedroom and just removes her shredded clothes to put a shirt on her, appearing to have, for the time being, no ill intent towards the girl she previously got raped by zombies.
• Dumb Muscle: Army Ants have atrophied brains and yet are capable of coordination and show no hesitation. This trivia was used in the author's Himenospia to illustrate Himeno's classmates being willing to die for her, and in this work it explains how the already queenless zombies are able to move despite mortal injuries.
• Dynamic Entry:
  • Setsuna comes back to her senses and enters the scene to kill the zombies who were trying to rape Chiyuri with a flying kick and a needle through the brain.
  • Imomushi dropkicks Chiyuri right in the face and then holds Setsuna at gunpoint. It's especially out of left field because Imomushi was last seen looking for Hanakamakiri and Alice in the ending of Caterpillar. Chiyuri then headbutts her right back to help Setsuna.
• Establishing Character Moment:
  • Alice is first seen after mutilating a zombie girl in what turns out to be a government-sanctioned Cruel Mercy, and then fails to save another girl from being infected. Readers unfamiliar with the series can tell she has a mountain of issues weighing her down but is good-natured and does whatever it takes to survive the apocalypse.
  • Chiyuri is shown to take pride in being homeless and cares a lot for the community surrounding her. A lot of detail is given on their daily routine and how Chiyuri has to beat up Dinoponera to keep her from getting them all chased out of the park.
  • Even if she acts cute and really just wants companionship, Dinoponera is a very self-centered and violent cloudcuckoolander. She's seen bathing on a public fountain without a care in the world, and then she greets Chiyuri just to kick her in the face while calling Japanese people weak.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • In Arachnid, Hibiki was an antagonist with a twisted sense of justice who attempted to get Alice raped and killed for killing their master Kumo even if she was forced to. In Blattodea, he's disturbed enough by how Megumi rules over Hibarigaoka Prison that he helps Chiyuri in her quest to take her down.
  • Kabutomushi is known as a Sadist Teacher and an indirect child killer for how she manages the Pomario orphanage, but even she feels sorry for Hibarigaoka Prison if her pupil Megumi "Gokiburi" Oki became its director.
  • Megumi and Momoko are disturbed by how Setsuna started gleefully killing a crowd of prisoners around her like it was a game... instead of staying put and getting gangraped to death by those hundreds of men like the two wanted.
• Evil Is Petty:
  • Setsuna was actually going to murder Chiyuri just for interrupting her from bathing on a public fountain, but changes her mind when the roach proves to be strong enough for her tastes.
  • Megumi hostilizes Chiyuri simply because she's a bitch and likes it that way. In the following chapters, Chiyuri and Setsuna are prosecuted for refusing to be raped by Juzuhigemushi, and the more half-assed justifications Shoichiro and his henchmen make while trying to kill the pair, the less sense any of it makes.
• Evil Versus Evil: Unleashing the zombie apocalypse upon Japan is supposed to disrupt the plans of Serena Cervantes, an ageless global conqueror from America who's copy-pasted from Himenospia. However, the "rebels" who know of Serena and oppose her continue to be more and more gratuitously evil to Chiyuri and Setsuna while the villainess is just sitting around eating noodles and monitoring Alice's actions.
• Exact Time to Failure: The first chapters after the prologue have a dramatic countdown to the zombie outbreak. So dramatic that 12 HOURS LEFT UNTIL THE OUTBREAK^*"姦染", literally "rape infection" is both the first panel of chapter 1 and a splash page a while later. It ends on the next chapter, showing Kuramoto's death triggering the zombie outbreak.
• Exotic Eye Designs: The visual eye effects when Alice uses Congenital Excessive Concentration (lines spreading from her pupils) or either her or Dinoponera use Concentration Driving Force (crosshair-like irises) are oddly absent for quite a while in the sequel. Those effects are seen on Alice in just chapter 3 and on Dinoponera in chapter 27.
• Explaining Your Power to the Enemy: Since Dinoponera asks Chiyuri to show her a special move, she tells Chiyuri about her own, "Concentration Driving Free", which sharpens her senses to the extent she views the world in slow motion. She does this to brag that Chiyuri won't hit her no matter what (and she's so wrong).
• Expy:
  • Being partly themed after the works of Leiji Matsumoto, Chiyuri Haijima appears to be inspired by Tetsuro Hoshino from Galaxy Express 999 in how she's a impoverished girl in shabby clothes who lost her family. She looks all too similar to Mayuri Shiina from Steins;Gate, though, and is likely named after her.
  • Yamato Mitsuda is meant to represent Leiji Matsumoto in the story and he's designed after Tochiro Oyama, a recurring character from that mangaka's works.
  • The story goes out of its way to emphasize how Momoko "Geji" Ashida is based on Tomoko Kuroki from Wata Mote by naming her that and making her actually act more Tomoko-like when previously this was only seen in a side chapter from Arachnid and not the story proper.
• Extreme Libido:
  • The cockroach animal trivia in chapter 12 is used to establish that like them Megumi can have much more sex in her lifetime than most people. She's seen furiously playing with herself while looking at a picture of Alice, who she hasn't seen in over a year. In contrast, the idea that female roaches are sexually dominant, able to reproduce asexually and to copulate just once to stay pregnant for life is used to portray her foil Chiyuri as a chaste heroine, much to Setsuna's dismay.
  • Juzuhigemushi is said to have been tremendously perverted as a child, to the point he got a teacher pregnant when he was 10 years-old. He uses his bug powers to collect a harem of slaves who are at his beck-and-call in Hibarigaoka Prison's takobeya labor room.
• Eye Scream: Alice kicks one zombie's face so hard one of his eyes pops out. Really, there have been multiple times since Arachnid that Alice ripped eyes out of people just by hitting them that hard.
• Eye Take: Several chapters end on a two-panel page layout with a close up of a shocked character's eyes as they react to somebody's appearance or statement.
• Face Framed in Shadow:
  • When Kagimushi introduces the oddball assassins Chiyuri will face later, all of them have their faces slighty shadowed to give even the little Sun Spider and the droopy-eyed Ladybug a sinister appearance.
  • The scene of Sasori greeting Setsuna in chapter 27 is altered in volume 6 so that the smug nurse's face is shaded so ominously that it borders on looking like a Nightmare Face.
• Failed Attempt at Drama:
  • A very beaten-up Alice still resolves to fight Sasori and monologues her final words from Arachnid before charging at her enemy, complete with her fanciful eye effects used in the previous series when she's focused. But then Kabutomushi just blasts her out of the way.
  • Setsuna's attempt at fighting Rin is played as her comeback moment after so much bad luck, including her actually having her fanciful eye effects finally on while using Concentration Driving Free. What follows is her just being stripped and humiliated even more before Sasori pops up behind her again and puts her to sleep.
  • When Abu is drawing his sword against Hibiki, he goes on an internal monologue about how he learned from his loss to Kabutomushi and will adopt a more defensive strategy this time. He's sucker punched by Chiyuri in the same way he would stab an enemy under their blind spot, and then collapses unconscious.
• Fan Disservice:
  • After a random nude shot of Alice from behind, the story opens with a naked girl lying on the ground and begging for sex... but she's a mind-broken zombie whose arms and legs have just been severed by Alice's hatchet. Right afterwards another girl is undressed and gangraped before turning into a crazy zombie who Alice might have killed.
  • Although readers are spared from seeing Dinoponera getting rape-zombified during the Arachnid Hunt, her next rape is shown in some detail with her looking badly stoned but turning into a questionably-conscious frenzy as soon as she's penetrated. In fact, most of the nudity scenes Dino gets in Blattodea are for making her look Defiled Forever and vulnerable, particularly considering what happened to her and how little fanservice focused on her back in Arachnid.
  • On chapter 4, Chiyuri is molested not once but twice by her zombified neighbors on a surprising level of graphic depiction for a shonen entry in the series. She is helpless and terrified the whole time until Dinoponera arrives to kill the two men. The several upskirt angles on Dinopo afterwards serve more as an ironic reminder that she's been harshly raped for hours than straightfowarded fanservice.
• Fanservice:
  • Dinoponera has a pretty eyebrow-raising reintroduction after being gone for so long, as she spends two chapters fighting Chiyuri while naked. Outside of a "few" Male Gaze close-ups, this is used in an ironic tone to portray her as a very Innocent Fanservice Girl on the last few hours before... that happens to her.
  • Karina fully undresses herself and prostrates before Serena to report to her. She's certainly much easier on the eyes than Donald Trump in the equivalent Himenospia scene.
• Feel No Pain: The sex-crazed zombies are known to not react to pain and can only be killed from enough damage to the brain, leading civilians to be instructed to amputate all the limbs of the zombies in combat to properly disable them.
• Flat "What":
  • While travelling to Hibarigaoka Prison, Alice vents to Hanakamakiri that lately she feels like she's missing something as a person and can't focus during combat because of it. When she elaborates that it might be a lack of femininity ("女子力", or "girl power" in the sense of a prowess in certain fashionable skills) in comparison to "her", Hanakamakiri gasps "...Huh?" with a blank smile.
  • Kabutomushi's reaction to Alice's own exaggerated reactions to Imomushi and Hanakamakiri's reconciliation.
• Foot Focus:
  • Clearly there are close-ups of Alice and Setsuna stamping their bare foot on somebody's face in back-to-back chapters for no particular reason at all...
  • One pin-up poster for volume 3 is of a nude Geji with her legs folded, feet pointed at the viewer and fiddling with her tights. She always had this trope's aspect to her due to her tights being her hidden bludgeon weapons.
• Foregone Conclusion:
  • Chiyuri is tasked by Yamato to find Alice as soon as possible, but the prologue of the story had already shown she will fail for just over a year.
  • When Setsuna and Chiyuri both end up beaten and captured at Hibarigaoka Prison, there is a flashfoward to three months later showing Chiyuri doing just fine as part of the prison's staff and finally coming across Alice. This serves to leave the whereabouts of Setsuna and the antagonists conspicuously unclear as the story turns back in time.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The opening narration for the prologue hypes the titular "blattodea" as something superior to spiders and then we see a close up of a cockroach. Turns out the new protagonist is a cockroach-girl, though not actually the one most readers were expecting.
  • Yamato locks himself behind a gate to Hold the Line for Chiyuri and Dinoponera. When he tells Chiyuri to take Dinoponera to Alice, Dinopo is onimously framed behind the gate's steel bars. Later, the main setting of the story is revealed to be a prison and the villains just want to kill Dino to prevent the outbreak's end before they can slaughter most of Japan's population.
  • Karina is an aunt to Alice who resembles her mother and wants to creepily seduce her to the side of evil. The constant parallelism between Alice and Setsuna makes it implicit that the latter would get her own nasty Evil Mentor soon enough, and that turns out to be Sasori.
• From Bad to Worse:
  • Chiyuri and Setsuna getting into Hibarigaoka Prison to get away from the zombies just leads them into much more trouble as the place is swarming with assassins planning to rape and kill them.
  • Chapter 27 has Setsuna completely failing to do any harm to Rin and barely dodging her deadly slashes. Then Sasori comes up from behind Setsuna with ambiguous intentions, taunting her for not growing any stronger since the Arachnid Hunt. The chapter was published on January 2023 after a break on November in the previous year, meaning it and the following chapter were clearly intended as a twisted celebration of Setsuna's defeat and Rape by Proxy at the scorpion-girl's hands back in January 2014.
• Full-Frontal Assault:
  • Setsuna is introduced nonchalantly fighting Chiyuri in the nude after being kept from bathing in a public fountain.
  • Rin chops the pantyless Setsuna's skirt in half when they begin fighting and then slashes the front of her shirt off, leaving her nude and deeply unnerved.
• Funny Foreigner: Having recently arrived on Japan from Thailand, Dinoponera starts up trouble by bathing nude on a park's fountain like the ridiculous ant she is. Her favorite anime "Sailor-Force" also heavily colors her perception of the country, even though she knows it's not real.
• Gilded Cage:
  • Discounting that one "forcefully rape Alice" plan, Gokiburi does genuinely love Alice and wanted to keep her safe from the Organization in her underground bunker. Alice remarks on the prologue that she had no problems with Goki or the bunker, but staying there didn't feel right.
  • The prologue ends with Alice stupidified (once again) that the people who ruined her family and plotted the destruction of Japan think they can make a new home for her, even if Hanakamakiri offers her a lifetime of pudding with the best of intentions. As Alice tries to refuse the call to duty to uphold her promise to Kumo, Karina "Bekkōbachi" Tsuji, an unknown aunt of Alice's, returns the Kumoito to her but is clearly up to no good as she pushes Alice to rule over the Organization.
  • Hibarigaoka prison is made into a shelter from the zombie outbreak outside and Imomushi guides Chiyuri and Dinoponera to it, but she makes vague ominous remarks about not wanting to be there and for Chiyuri and Dinopo to survive no matter what. The place's director is Gokiburi of all people, who claims it's like Heaven in there but immediately starts bullying both of them before they even reach the main gate and has the two arrested as common prisoners for forced labor. It's also said by Bekkōbachi that the prison is actually intended to hold rebels from within the Organization under captivity, and later Kabutomushi openly discourages Alice from visiting it even though Gokiburi, for all her faults, is an ally to her.
    Dinoponera: ...Chiyuri. Those girls are pissing me off. Should we kill them?
    Chiyuri: Please be patient. Food, clothing and housing are guaranteed here. It's an environment where there's no "ants". Compared to the outside world, it is like a paradise...
• Gilligan Cut:
  • Played for Drama; Dinoponera kindly waving goodbye to Chiyuri is followed by her reduced to a crying mess when Alice defeated her, and then by her appearing zombified after Sasori got her raped by the army ants.
  • Dinoponera quickly gets irritated with Goki and Geji arresting her and Chiyuri and asks if she can just kill them. Chiyuri tells her to not cause a ruckus as they'll at least have food and shelter, away from the hell of rape-zombies outside. Cue the inmates of the prison catcalling and drooling upon seeing them, causing Chiyuri to retract her statement.
• Girls Behind Bars: Chiyuri and Setsuna end up in a prison-shelter where Megumi is acting like the third "She Wolf of the SS"-esque female antagonist in the series so far. This trope is surprisingly underplayed because Hibarigaoka is a men's prison where only a few female civilians are seen. Still, Setsuna is almost gangraped to death by hundreds of inmates under Megumi's orders and she's stripped naked right in front of them by Rin before she's captured by the sadistic nurse Sasori.
• Given Name Reveal: Unlike in previous installments, all the bug-people from the Organization have their proper names revealed in their introduction scenes.
  • Dinoponera introduces herself as Setsuna at a point she's trying her darndest to present herself as a decent, friendly human being to Chiyuri rather than a crazy bug. The intent is to make her more sympathetic as one of the new protagonists.
  • Conversely, Sasori and some other characters are unceremoniously introduced by their actual names in a Boss Subtitles text box. In particular, it was already established that Kabutomushi's real name is Ran but her text box gives her surname which is just "Kabuto".
  • Jigabachi getting introduced as Yasuomi Fujimoto is interesting because that's exactly what his counterpart from Himenospia is called.
  • Geji is named Momoko Ashida, furthering her status as an expy of Tomoko Kuroki.
• Going Commando: While inspecting the zombified Dinoponera, a trio of thugs note her panties have been removed by whoever has already raped her. This is really a sordid Brick Joke payoff to Dinoponera originally having a Magic Skirt in Arachnid but getting panty shots for no reason on Caterpillar's reprise of her debut. And even a year into the apocalypse she doesn't acquire any new clothes at all to wear.
• Gone Horribly Right: The Organization wanted to chop Japan's population in half because... because... and got a potential worldwide apocalypse instead. Hanakamakiri claims they're doing all they can to prevent the outbreak from reaching that point, but he can't be trusted on the matter because he's trying to get rid of a certain ambulant virus cure to keep the outbreak going for as long as possible.
• Gonk: Practically every minor male character, from the rape zombies to the non-zombie rapists and even the hobos who are friendly to Chiyuri... while hiding urges to rape her that come to light once they're infected, are extremely ugly.
• Got Me Doing It: Chapter 4 ends with Dinoponera lamenting she might fail to save Chiyuri from so many zombies, and Chiyuri muttering "No way..." in Thai like the ant-girl does.
• Gratuitous English:
  • One odd example; Dinoponera's Hyper-Awareness ability was called "Concentration Driving Free". It was changed to just "Concentration Driving" (C. Drive for short) for some reason, changed back to the original in the tankobon version of volume 1 and then changed again to the retconned version afterwards.
  • Mixed with her usual gratuitous Thai is Dinoponera shouting "YEAH! Di mak!" after Chiyuri smashes a zombie's head open. She later says "WHY?!" in multiple languages including English out loud to Rin, seemingly establishing it as an habit even though she didn't have it before and had nobody to pick it up from during the time skip.
• Gratuitous Latin: In chapter 13, Alice is put in a machine where her threads connect her to the internet so she can instantly absorb info on the outbreak from all over the world. This is represented by a bunch of screens tied to her, and some are newspapers with a Lorem ipsum pasted over them for some reason.
• Gratuitous Ninja: The gimmicky assassins in the series are explained to be the modern equivalent of the Feudal Japan ninjas seen in the Choubu no Shinobi prequel, with Yoriko having hired the last ninja clan in the country to work for her when she started the Organization. During the events of Blattodea, Rin is the only one specifically calling herself a "shinobi" and tossing shuriken around.
• Gratuitous Rape: For over ten years, this series has really been Murata's experiment on just how much rape he can get away with in a shonen demographic magazine. From Arachnid to Choubu no Shinobi to Blattodea, there's a whole process of him being denied from portraying a female character getting raped on-panel and resorting to various tricks and double standards until he could get away with it twice in a row. It gets to the point the "rape zombie apocalypse" manages to seem redundant, since every other villain is also a sexual predator.
  • Chiyuri is introduced while avoiding rape from three unnamed guys who even lampshade the random cartoonish villainy of their act, and this is simply to fit the "introduce heroine with her suffering or avoiding some form of abuse" pattern the author continues in most of his works since Arachnid.
  • The problem: an outbreak of "rape-zombies". The solution: luring a foreign teenage girl into getting gangraped to turn her into an ambulant cure. The story couldn't sound more insensitive◊ about it, forcing Setsuna to admit she's been infected and bluntly affirming that's the whole point like it's a good thing. Couldn't they have grabbed Dinoponera venom from Butantan Institute or something?
  • Chiyuri and Setsuna, who is infected and attacks Chiyuri against her will sometimes, take shelter at Hibarigaoka prison to be free from the zombies but it doesn't take a minute for Chiyuri to note it is all more of the same inside. The inmates are all perverts who start drooling over them on sight and the hard labor room is managed by an assassin with a dozen female sex slaves who he forces to trick the girls into drinking aphrodisiacs so he can assault them as well. Director Gokiburi is a sexual predator only made sympathetic by her loyalty to Alice, Kamadouma had attempted to get both her and Alice raped in the past, the Tsumugiari triplets harass every girl they see... Only a few characters in the prison aren't rapists, but they're all villains who endorse what happens in there anyway.
• Gratuitous Spanish: As a Funny Background Event while Alice and Hanakamakiri are shooting zombies on chapter 23, one of the zombies has a Fun T-Shirt reading "¡Llena mis adentros con mierda!" ("Fill my insides with shit!") on its back.
• Guns Are Worthless: Subverted compared to the previous installments in the series, at least when it involves the disposable zombies.
  • After all the oddball skills and weapons from the previous series and Alice outsniping a sniper with her magical knife-gun, it can be a surprise to see the zombie horde in the prologue getting gunned down by mundane firearms. Hanakamakiri further shows how much firepower is needed to kill the zombies in chapter 8, after he spent the entirety of Caterpillar without ever touching a gun.
  • Imomushi holds Dinoponera at gunpoint, telling her it's a rule of thumb to obey someone who has a gun if you don't have one. In a few minutes it becomes the second gun of hers that Dinoponera easily breaks, and Dinopo being able to do that just to repeatedly fall for Imomushi's swinging dodge routine like a moron further exacerbates this trope.
  • Subverted when Momoko pins Setsuna to the floor while pointing a gun at her and both Setsuna and Chiyuri are forced to surrender if they want to be sheltered at Hibarigaoka Prison.
• Have We Met?: Setsuna recognizes Imomushi, who is her father's killer, but barely remembers either Megumi or Hibiki, possibly due to being so arrogant back in the Arachnid Hunt that she wouldn't bother to. At first both of them also completely ignore Setsuna upon crossing paths again, despite having reasons to hold a grudge towards her.
• He's Back!:
  • So Dinoponera got repeatedly defeated, was gangraped for hours and turned into a zombie. Still didn't keep her from resisting the Queen's Rule and dramatically saving Chiyuri for the sake of their friendship. It's the first time the usually bitchy and selfish ant-girl is cast in a heroic light.
  • ...But afterwards the story makes a point of portraying Dinoponera very weakly to the point she's repeatedly humiliated and practically disappears into the background. Then she meddles in the fight between Hebitonbo and Kamadouma from out of nowhere, instantly defeating Hebitonbo with her venom while declaring she's tired of playing nice in front of Chiyuri... but then she gets harshly humiliated yet again by both Kocho and Sasori...
• Hive Mind: It is implied the army ant zombies have this, as otherwise Dinoponera couldn't know about them being ant-like and that they are missing a queen.
• Hollywood Hacking: Alice is hooked to the world wide web via a news machine and takes the time to hack into the Organization's security systems without her captors knowing. This is portrayed as her floating naked in a void while using her spider threads to interact with the cyber world.
• Hotter and Sexier:
  • There's plenty of female nudity here even compared to Arachnid, even if, as usual, in a Fan Disservice fashion with all the eroticized distress and rape going on. Following Choubu no Shinobi, and unlike in Arachnid, female nipples are uncensored on the volume releases.
  • Originally, Dinoponera was depicted under Magic Skirt rules and had no fanservicey scenes outside of two mild official illustrations. Then the reprise of her debut in Caterpillar ignored that and gave her several panty shots. Her introduction scene in this story? She's butt-naked; and her panties being pulled off at the time she was raped by the army ants is Played for Laughs with upskirt shots of her being used whenever possible.
  • All the volume covers as of #5 are semi-naked pinups, and the second one even dares to have Chiyuri's bare butt on full display, only covered by a flap of paper on the physical releases. The inside covers and bonus posters for each volume are often lewd as well, even compared to the ones Arachnid used to have.
• I Am Your Opponent: Sasori walks by the Shouran High's rooftop to dare Alice to an one-on-one rematch despite Kabutomushi and Gokiburi being right there. Kabuto naturally stands up to Sasori and argues that the Arachnid Hunt is over, but Alice accepts the duel with her hated enemy anyway... just to get bashed out of the way by the Kabuto Horn and end up (finally) knocked out.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: After lusting over Hanakamakiri for a bit, Alice learns he and Imomushi were in love with each other the whole time. She quietly starts praying for their happiness while imagining the couple as a bride and groom, respectively.
• Ignored Enemy:
  • Curiously, when Gokiburi watches over Chiyuri and Imomushi's fight she makes no comment about Dinoponera, whom she dislikes for kissing and torturing Alice, not even to mock her for losing so badly to Imomushi. When she meets the two, Goki starts beating up Chiyuri without adressing Dinoponera at all, and Dino happens to have mostly forgotten about her. Hibiki also seems to ignore Setsuna at first, but then it's made clear that he and Megumi do remember her and, unlike Imomushi, give credit where it is due and know she can't be taken lightly. Megumi then reponds to Dino wandering the prison by trying to get her gangraped to death, saying she deserves it for tormenting Alice.
  • In chapter 21, Hibiki and Hebitonbo are supposed to fight Chiyuri but instead attack each other out of a disagreement. After Hebitonbo recovers from getting Rider Kicked through a wall, he suddenly gets stabbed with venom by Dinoponera, who by this point was portrayed with so little presence that she might as well not be there at all. This marks the point the ant-girl resumes acting like herself and proclaims she'll stop holding back and just kill anyone who threatens her and Chiyuri even if it goes against her friend's no-killing rule.
  • In chapter 29, Abu is so focused on preparing to fight Hibiki that he ignores Chiyuri and gets instantly knocked out by a punch to the gut. Made ironic by how he specializes in quickly killing people by exploiting blind spots.
• Immediate Sequel: Subverted; the prologue takes place an unspecified amount of time since Alice was last seen and at around the time the Arachnid epilogue with Goki and Kabuto took place in. Chiyuri, however, is introduced in a P.O.V. Sequel set Just Before the End. Once the story starts for real, it turns out 58 weeks have passed since the outbreak began.
• Improbably Female Cast: The vast majority of characters worth giving a dime about in the story are female, with a lot of them being young hitwomen who work for a nebulous order of assassins. Only a few noteworthy male characters like Hanakamakiri (the series' resident otokonoko), Hibiki and Shoichiro remain alive at this point.
• In the Name of the Moon: When Hibiki antagonises Chiyuri with his Kamen Rider-like boasts, Chiyuri retorts by spouting Sailor Moon one-liners. A certain ant-girl relegated to tiny background panels has her heart melt away the more Chiyuri does it.
• Inconsistent Coloring:
  • Alice is depicted with green eyes on the cover for Gangan Joker issue the story debuted on, when they're normally greyish-yellow. They seem to have really retconned them to be green over time, as seen in the color pages for chapter 34.
  • One of the volume 1 posters depicted Chiyuri with blue eyes and a red scarf, but on the cover for volume 2 and one of its promotional posters her eyes are orange and her scarf is grey.
  • It took over 3 years for Chiyuri's full costume to appear in color, in chapter 34, due to the staff's fixation in only giving her nude pin ups in previous promotional illustrations. But even then, her tights are dark blue in one panel and dark brown like Alice's in the next.
• Insistent Terminology:
  • The characters always refer to the zombies as "ants", which leads to things like Setsuna calling herself "half-ant" due to being a Zombie Infectee even though she's already the only Dinoponera ant-themed character in comics to begin with.
  • Characters always refer to Alice by her full name with the "Alice/Arisu" part in katakana. Whenever Alice herself does that, her dialogue spells out the proper homophone kanji her given name is supposed to be written with.
  • Rin always uses the term "shinobi" instead of the more broad "ninja" to speak of herself, leading to Setsuna's confusion as she isn't familiar with "shinobi" at all despite knowing about ninjas, their weapons and techniques.
• Instant Sedation: While Setsuna was shocked from being stripped and nearly slashed to death by Rin, Sasori was stinging her right on the butt with sleep-inducing toxin at the same time. The sedation kicks in just a while later, while Setsuna was attempting to stab Sasori from behind.
• Interplay of Sex and Violence:
  • From how Dinoponera behaves as a zombie, she seems to act on her usual bloodlust and doesn't just crave for sex like the other zombies. Later, after being tricked into drinking aphrodisiacs, she defeats Hebitonbo and starts talking about resuming her murderous antics while sweating and suggestively licking her fingertips.
  • Sasori still makes suggestive comments over the thought of fighting Alice.
• Ironic Echo:
  • The Title Drop of the prologue is a miserable wandering Alice saying she's looking for a home. The Title Drop of Chapter 1 is Chiyuri, a much happier hobo roach, saying she'd rather not have one. Their circunstances are further mirrored in chapter 8, where Chiyuri happens to walk past the same street Alice was in, but with a look of excitement on her face and a friendly Dinoponera by her side.
  • Chapter 2 ends with zombified Dinoponera crying out Chiyuri's name. Chapter 3 ends with the two face-to-face, and a disturbed Chiyuri calling her by name.
  • Karina's False Reassurance that she won't let anyone take Alice's freedom echoes Alice herself saying she'd rather let the world burn than let Yoriko claim her freedom by controlling her mind.
  • Setsuna being disturbed about how Rin reminds her of Alice's Crazy-Prepared nature is immediately followed by her best friend Chiyuri being praised by Hibiki for being selfless like Alice.
• Ironic Name: At one point, Dinoponera and Chiyuri discuss a Sailor-Force character who is an expy of Setsuna Meioh, or Sailor Pluto. It is then revealed that Dinoponera is actually named Setsuna — so she just made friends with a girl themed after the bug Sailor Pluto dislikes the most.
• Irony:
  • After a whole year wandering about without making any progress, Alice is found and saved by Hanakamakiri and the Organization's soldiers. Despite so much effort trying to be free of them, Alice admits she might like to be their Boss and murder people at this point. The whole time Alice was in danger, Gokiburi was unable to find her despite acquiring a ton of security drones and Kabutomushi, who was soooo determined to protect Alice, was slacking in a WcDonald's.
  • When Setsuna saves Chiyuri, the narrator talks about how Megaponera analis ants are the only animals other than humans who retrieve injured comrades and nurse them back to health. This contrasts with how Setsuna was abandoned by Paraponera as a child and felt horrified at how nobody came to help her when she was raped. Also, the woman who got her raped is a nurse. The research paper that the story references is from 2017 so she possibly only got to have such a triumphant comeback from her 2014 zombification by sheer happenstance.
  • Sasori had attempted to kill Yoriko with a deadly toxin, but Yoriko turned out to be highly resistant to poison and came back later to reveal her true self to Alice. Right after Kabutomushi turns Yoriko into a bloody smear in the pavement, Sasori casually walks up to Alice saying she also faked her own death upon being defeated and hanged.
  • Dinoponera saving Chiyuri with a flying kick two chapters after being first shown as a zombie is a clear parallel to Gokiburi "saving" Alice with a drop kick back in Arachnid. Said scene happened two chapters after Dinoponera was Put on a Bus to Hell and was also a major Mood Whiplash. Furthermore, the release date of volume 2 with her grand return is exactly seven years after said chapter 50 of Arachnid was published on Gangan Joker.
  • Chiyuri goes out looking for freedom for herself and Setsuna but finds their destination, where people are hiding from the outbreak, is The Alcatraz. It's also nothing but rape rape rape inside, so the only change is that Chiyuri and Setsuna now have hostile assassins to worry about.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Hanakamakiri states the infected are no longer human but instead mindless "ants" beyond recovery and whose rights and lives they do not need to be concerned with. Alice coldly concludes they then "have no choice but to kill them".

J-R

• Join or Die: Implied when Hanakamakiri declares Alice the new "Boss" while backed up by a squad of armed soldiers and Alice has no choice but to follow. After Alice defeats Hanakamakiri in her escape attempt, Bekkobachi directly orders her to do what they say or die. Alice ends up accepting the deal, so long as nobody tries to erase her name and sense of self.
• Ki Attacks: After Kagimushi's use of Fa jin movement in Caterpillar for his Inazuma Punch technique, a long-ranged ki blast is introduced in this story — the Wave Cannon taught by Yamato to Chiyuri, which is named after the Wave-Motion Gun from Space Battleship Yamato.
• Kick the Dog:
  • Dinoponera was perfectly willing to kill Chiyuri during their first meeting just for interrupting her bath and being "mediocre", but the roach's battle prowess dissuades her from doing so. Afterwards, Dino, or rather, Setsuna, warms up to Chiyuri quite a bit.
  • The homeless men who live with Yamato and Chiyuri seem nice to her, but once they're infected and force themselves on the hobo-roach they talk like they always wanted to rape her. Setsuna ends up killing them in a hurry and Chiyuri is nothing but thankful for that.
  • Megumi is hostile to Chiyuri For the Evulz just because she thinks there's no place in town for two roaches, and leaves her at Juzuhigemushi's mercy minutes after arresting her and Setsuna. She's mean to Ms. Did-Nothing-Wrong Setsuna too, and later personally sics like a hundred rapist prisoners on her. This nearly equates Roach #1 to Sasori, the series' resident Hate Sink who got Setsuna gangraped by the zombies while immobilized, even if she partly does it out of revenge for all the harm Setsuna did to Alice back in the Arachnid Hunt.
  • After a few false pleasantries, Hanakamakiri turns antagonistic and lands a shower of hits from his scythes on Alice to force her to be the Organization's obedient Puppet Queen. Alice's backpack is torn apart as this goes on, symbolizing the trampling of whatever remains of her wish to be an ordinary schoolgirl.
• King of the Homeless: Yamato Mitsuda is the leader of the homeless in the Miyamoto Park who acts like a father figure to Chiyuri. He actually is a retired mangaka who works for the Organization.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler:
  • The prologue actually avoids giving any context for why Japan became a sexual wasteland and about anything else that's going on.
  • The magazine version of the first chapters come with character profiles for Alice and Hanakamakiri and a little recap that spoils who the Queen of the army ants was.
  • Chapter 2 has a brief recap of Arachnid Hunt scenes from Alice defeating Dinoponera to Kuramoto getting her neck crushed, but there's no context for any of that for new readers. Even the point Dinoponera is defeated by Sasori and raped by the army ants is omitted, with her just appearing as a zombie afterwards.
  • The identity of the former Boss, Yoriko Tajima, is shown in Chapter 3. Notably, it had already been a topic midway through the prequel Caterpillar and even in the ending of the Sengoku era spinoff Choubu no Shinobi.
  • When Setsuna fights Rin the butterfly-like ninja, there are callbacks, and therefore spoilers, to the events and ending of Choubu no Shinobi.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • Yamato's argument about conforming to no rules when writing manga, aside from being a reference to author Leiji Matsumoto, can be seen as him justifying both the chaos of Arachnid itself and Murata Shinya's self-indulgence as an author. Osamushi complains about him breaking immersion by using WWII motifs on fantasy-themed stories, which calls to mind Yoriko the ageless telepath baba-loli brainwashing Hideki Tojo to get Japan nuked on purpose.
  • While Imomushi is talking down to Dinoponera for lacking willpower despite her strength, a flashback has Yamato telling Chiyuri that being on the defensive and even running away during a fight to later make a comeback is fine, her victories don't need to be all overwhelming. This reads like the author asking readers to put up with how wimpy the once confident and near-invincible Dinoponera might seem until she can get her groove back.
  • Setsuna denies being "lewd" and cries that her bathing nude on a fountain when Chiyuri first met her was a one-time thing. Her protests and Chiyuri's reply of "Really?" work both as Tempting Fate and Lampshade Hanging of the ant-girl's almost out-of-character Butt-Monkey characterization in the story.
• Leeroy Jenkins: Setsuna recklessly rushes into the corridors of Hibarigaoka Prison without Chiyuri after beating Hebitonbo. While she does fine against the crowds of unarmed prisoners out to rape her, she's terribly ineffective against the first henchwoman she comes across and is then captured by Sasori while Chiyuri is busy with another threat elsewhere.
• Let's You and Him Fight: Chiyuri's goal is to bring Setsuna to Alice so they can work on stopping the outbreak with the antibodies poor ant-girl got after she was forced to get raped. However, Bekkōbachi and Hanakamakiri already know of this and scheme to goad Alice into killing Setsuna so there won't be an easy cure.
• Limited Wardrobe: A year goes by in the post-apocalypse and Alice, Chiyuri and Setsuna still wear the same set of damaged clothes. And as soon as Alice is rescued she's simply given a new blazer uniform to wear, though she's also shown wearing a fancy new dress at night while inside the Organization's HQ.
• Literal Asskicking: Megumi kicks Chiyuri's and Setsuna's butts simultaneously before locking them inside the Hibarigaoka prison's Takobeya room. She must've enjoyed kicking Setsuna in particular...
• Love at First Punch:
  • Chiyuri beating Setsuna up real good when they first met plays a role in the ant-girl's endearement towards her, as she usually only values people in terms of strength.
  • Alice starts getting rather enamored with Hanakamakiri despite her trust issues only worsening after he attacked her with killing intent for defying the Organization, because she's impressed with his fighting skills and how nice he seems to be outside of the dirty work he's expected to do. This doesn't get anywhere, though, as Hanakamakiri soon reunites with Imomushi and Alice is happy for them.
• Love Confession: When Imomushi argues with Hanakamakiri over him leaving her in the previous year for questionable reasons, the boy confesses his feelings to her and promises they can "do it as much as possible" once the current mission is over. Imomushi instantly calms down, drooling with a bashful look on her face. While an impressed Alice quietly wishes happiness to them, Kabutomushi just reacts to the scene with confusion.
• Male Gaze: An often used trope, to say the least. And typically associated with cartoonishly ugly men doing the gazing, as if equating readers with them...
  • A nude pin-up of Alice is chapter 0's title double-page for reasons.
  • A trio of jackasses prepare to rape a sleeping Chiyuri in chapter 1 while commenting on her figure, complete with gratuitous close-ups of her curves and crotch.
  • Dinoponera gets a double-page nude pin-up of her own in chapter 1, plus she fights Chiyuri while still naked and as a bunch of middle-aged hobos watch in awe. Notably, she wasn't ever depicted like this back in the already fanservicey Arachnid.
  • Dinoponera starts drooling over Chiyuri's half-asleep body while under the ant virus' influence in chapter 8. The intent being that Chiyuri, who's been retconned into the series to help Dinoponera, is the Audience Surrogate in this instance and that being lusted over by Dino is something desirable even if Chiyuri is hardly in the mood for that at the moment.
  • Chapter 27 starts on an closeup of Dinoponera's bare ass so lovingly detailed in comparison to the rest of the artwork that one gets the impression they spent all the budget on it and that's why the chapter is just 20 pages long. She once again ends up nude in front of a ton of ugly predatory men, but in a far more distressed state as Rin attempts to kill her.
• Masturbation Means Sexual Frustration:
  • In chapter 12, a sexually frustrated Gokiburi relieves herself to a surprisingly plain picture of her clueless Japanese Spider-Girl while rambling about wanting to confort her instead of taking her by force. The Tsumugiari triplets barge in hoping to "play doctor" with her, but get beaten up in response.
  • Chapter 16 has Setsuna, who's half zombified and really wants to get cozy with Chiyuri, getting too hot and bothered in front of everyone due to drinking a bottle of water laced with Juzuhigemushi's aphrodisiac that the Hibarigaoka inmates gave her and Chiyuri. The roach-girl acts like she's overcome with lust too, but then just breaks the monk's nose as she is practically immune to any toxins.
• Meaningful Background Event: When Alice is placed inside a news machine to observe the outbreak, there's a single newspaper on the bottom of the page without "Lorem Ipsum" gibberish. Its headline reads "—ech Treatment" and shows a picture of Sara Kurokawa, who was last seen zombified after Kuramoto died. And there's a publication date on the paper... "Monday 15 July 1908", which makes no sense. And even assuming it's a typo and the story takes place in 2008, July 15 on that year wasn't a monday either. Also notable is that the volume 4 revision of the scene moves the paper so a conspicuous mention of an "airship" can be read on it.
• Mercy Kill: The prologue starts with Alice completely dismembering a zombie girl as a form of Cruel Mercy and leaving, with seemingly no one to retrieve her before she bleeds out. Then Alice tries to save another girl from being infected but fails and appears to kill her too via a Gory Discretion Shot.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • A distraught Alice just trying to survive the apocalypse is followed by Chiyuri and Dinoponera having a catfight a month before and becoming friends... which then cuts to the point the outbreak starts and Dinoponera walking out of it broken and nearly mindless from getting defeated by Alice and Sasori and infected by the zombies.
  • A terrified Chiyuri being molested by people she considered friends in a scene portrayed even more graphically than previous rape scenes in Arachnid is followed by a conscious but scared Dinoponera killing the two guys and vowing to protect Chiyuri. Not only there are multiple random upskirt shots of Dinopo during this, but the chapter ends with Chiyuri comically mimicking Dinoponera's "no way" Catchphrase when the two are surrounded by more zombies.
  • After Yamato's heart-wrenching Heroic Sacrifice for Chiyuri, the next chapter cuts to the worrisome sight of an apparently re-zombified Dinoponera sprawled on the ground, clearly mirroring the gored girl from the prologue... but no, she just finds Pocky sticks Orgasmically Delicious and is asking Chiyuri for more.
  • Chapter 11 ends with Gokiburi being ominously reintroduced as an antagonist just for the next chapter to begin with her as wacky as always, masturbating to a plain picture of Alice's surprised face and beating up her weaver ant minions for interrupting her.
  • When Shoichiro dramatically talks about how Yoriko caused the Zombie Apocalypse to thwart the plans of the immortal Serena, it cuts to the blonde villainess... absentmindedly eating cup noodles. This deflates the mood of the scene and underlines how absurd it was to wipe out Japan's population just to get back at her, particularly when the story hasn't elaborated on what she wants or how bad a person she even is.
• Mook Horror Show: After incapacitating Hebitonbo, Setsuna decides she's just going to beat everyone in the prison to death and runs off without Chiyuri. All the inmates are let out of their cells by Megumi and they promptly attempt to gangrape Setsuna, but it doesn't take long until they're all running in horror as she smashes, stabs and mutilates them by the dozen. All while she's gleefully laughing about that other time and having the most fun she's ever had. Setsuna only stops when one of Kagimushi's subordinates, Kocho, confronts her and demonstrates her powers by slicing one of the inmates in half.
  "If only I could move freely back then, I could have saved myself a lot of pain. ...Aha! AHAHAHAHAHA--!!"
• More Deadly Than the Male: The series in general aside from Jackals is based around bug motifs, meaning most of the cast is made out of strong and dominant females while the males are lesser and only present a threat by being rapists. The group of hitmen that Kagimushi presents to Gokiburi in particular has two men, Hebitonbo and Abu, who both get defeated in a single hit. Rin, on the other hand, almost kills Setsuna, and then the other two girls in the group (plus the feminine-looking Hiyokemushi) all ambush Chiyuri together.
• Ms. Fanservice: Exaggerated with Setsuna, who went from not even having panty shots in Arachnid to being constantly nude in situations of distress in this sequel to the point that in only a few chapters she outdoes Imomushi's portrayal as a Shameless Fanservice Girl throughout the entirety of Caterpillar.
• Mundane Object Amazement:
  • Setsuna starts clinging and begging at Chiyuri to let her eat a few more Pocky sticks than they had previously agreed to because she never had them before.
  • A good real life decade since she was implied to enjoy pudding without ever being shown eating one, Alice is overly surprised that homemade pudding can be better than industrialized ones.
  • When Chiyuri and Setsuna get to apparent safety at Hibarigaoka Prison after a year struggling in the apocalypse, the female inmates give them bottles of ice-cold mineral water. Both girls are awestuck to the point of being portrayed in chibi form, which is a visual gag very rarely used in the series.
  • Serena waxes philosophical about Cup Noodles, which she apparently never ate before, by calling it parasitism to take a traditional Chinese food and industrialize it to sell it back at them.
• Murder Is the Best Solution:
  • While fighting Dinoponera, the thought of Murder crosses Chiyuri's mind before she dismisses it and manages to successfully talk things out instead. This sets her apart from Ms. "no choice but to kill" Alice, who later drives Dinoponera away with fear.
  • The moment they set foot on Hibarigaoka Prison, Alice and Hanakamakiri are sexually harassed by fugly hobos and Alice is so disgusted that she itches to crush their necks with wire. Hanakamakiri casually offers himself to be searched by them in Alice's place, which only gets the girl more disturbed. Then Chiyuri shows up and makes the men stop and apologize just by shouting at them, much to Alice's surprise.
• Mythology Gag: The cover for Gangan Joker's February 2020 issue (also used as the opening page in volume 1) is a redraw of the cover from Arachnid volume 1. Notably, Arachnid never got the cover page on that magazine...
• Naked First Impression: Dinoponera is happily showering on a public fountain when Chiyuri tells her to respect the laws a little bit. She just hits her foot on the roach's face, provoking a catfight from her. Amusingly enough, Dinoponera is completely casual about being naked and Chiyuri doesn't make any comments on that.
• Naked People Are Funny: Dinoponera's introduction is her trying to bathe naked on a public fountain, since she doesn't have a clue of social norms. After she recovers from being a zombie, her panties having been ripped off by the rapist army ants is played for laughs with several random shots of her crotch and butt in the following chapters.
• The Nameless: The Organization's assassins are all deprived of their original identities and receive codenames based on bugs. Notably, Dinoponera, who never knew her birth name, is suddenly established to have been named "Setsuna" by her adoptive father Paraponera. Unlike in previous installments, characters like Gokiburi, Kabutomushi and Sasori are all introduced by their real or fake names on text boxes.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Alice is allowed to use an information aggregator device with her spider webs at the Organization's HQ to learn about the zombie outbreak, but Hanakamakiri going out of his way to erase any record of Hibarigaoka Prison instantly makes her want to check it out. Furthermore, she takes the time to hack into security and force one of the corridor gates to close on top of Hanakamakiri for when she tries to escape later.
• Nipple and Dimed: Female nipples are mostly uncensored in volume releases of the shonen entries of the series since Choubu no Shinobi. "Mostly" because a few pages were published unfinished, like a scene of Alice floating naked in a virtual void and another of Setsuna lying unconscious on the floor.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Yamato is based off mangaka Leiji Matsumoto and is a pupil of the in-universe Osamu Tezuka alongside Shoichiro, the story's Shotaro Ishinomori.
• "No More Holding Back" Speech: After incapacitating Hebitonbo, Dinoponera declares she's been Willfully Weak out of fear of Chiyuri hating her murderous nature. She wonders out loud why she should hold back against all those people trying to rape and kill them and states that maaaybe she should just kill them all.
• No-Sell: As a parasitoid wasp-person, Bekkobachi is aware of Alice's thread traps at all times and can disrupt the girl's control over the strings by touching them.
• Non-Standard Character Design: In contrast to the cutesy female characters, all minor males like the prison inmates and the homeless are drawn far more detailed, with appearances ranging from unattractive to monstrously deformed, like they've come out of an entirely different series.
• Not as You Know Them: Averted with Alice before the protagonist switcheroo; Arachnid ended with the impression she was going to embrace the Kumo title and turn into a real maniac, but what we see here is that, while she got more blood on her hands, she's the same well-meaning girl as before.
• Not Quite Dead:
  • Chapter 3 reveals Sasori did not die from either her own venom or from Alice hanging her — but she only survived because Jigabachi broke her free from that noose.
  • Jigabachi didn't die from getting tossed off the school by Kabutomushi, got himself patched up and went back to save Sasori when Kirigirisu warned him about it. He then says Anabachi also left safely after getting his head slammed into the floor by Kabutomushi.
  • Subverted when Ayana seems to be alive, much to Alice's shock as she asks "Why are you alive?" for the third time so far, but then the woman introduces herself as Karina "Bekkōbachi" Tsuji, a previously unknown aunt of Alice's.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: In Caterpillar, Hanakamakiri had called the army ants "sex zombies who copulate endlessly". From here on this trope is played straight as Setsuna remarks the zombies behave as if they're actual ants. Scientists call them "Eciton virus victims", but the Organization people simply call them "ants" as a form of dehumanization.
• Oddly Named Sequel: The series so far consists of Jackals, Arachnid, Caterpillar, Choubu no Shinobi: Lepidoptera and Blattodea. The marketing for this story often stresses that it is a sequel to Arachnid due to the time gap between them and their animal title scheme.
• Offscreen Teleportation: When Alice returns to Kumo's house to sleep, she barricades the door with literally everything but the kitchen sink. And yet a ridiculously ugly naked zombie just walks up to Alice between panels without making a sound.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • In the prologue, Alice escapes from one zombie just to find the street next to her hideout swarming with them. She concentrates and plans a way out as usual, until they pull her by the plush she's carrying along.
  • Back in the Arachnid Hunt, before being disgraced by Alice and Sasori, Dinoponera was only ever mildly surprised at any attempt to harm her — including Kabutomushi trying to hurl her around. Here, though, encountering Imomushi makes her panic and get decked in the face from a headbutt she was previously well able to see coming. She then uncharacteristically freaks out at Imomushi violently swinging Chiyuri around and crawls away like a scared kitten.
  • Hanakamakiri rushes Alice down and beats her up before she can even react and set traps against him, noting he can tell from Alice's expression and body language that she's scared and defenseless. Then she dunks a blast door onto him and he's left baffled for the rest of the scene.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • Being as insane as she is, Dinoponera could've fought Chiyuri forever and turned increasingly lethal, but when Dinopo realizes Chiyuri is also a Sailor-Force fan (the roach actually barely remembers any of it), she drops all hostility, introduces herself by her real name and begs Chiyuri to be her friend. While talking about her past to Chiyuri later, she lets it show how sad she is over having no friends. Her turning into a shambling zombie who goes happy-go-lucky to rape people is all kinds of wrong too.
  • Dinoponera's Smug Super confidence was broken by her humiliation, rape and time spent as a zombie. When Dino breaks free from the brainwashing to save Chiyuri's life, she looks very unnerved and starts Suddenly Shouting as if struggling to maintain control over her mind. Despite her Declaration of Protection, she is too scared to be sure she can save Chiyuri from all the other zombies. Fortunately, she gradually recovers while fighting by Chiyuri's side.
• Orphanage of Fear: It's been established in Caterpillar that orphanages known as "Pomario" are a front for the Organization to train child soldiers, and that even Kabutomushi had a reputation of being abusive towards the children in her care. Chiyuri is heavily implied to have suffered from her training and ended up escaping from there.
• Our Zombies Are Different: The zombies in the story behave like agressive army ants who spread their infection by sex, but without a queen to follow they seem to lose the team tactics that actually made them resemble ants such as moving together as blockades and towers to collapse upon their targets. As such, it makes the terminology of calling them "ants" rather than zombies a Distinction Without a Difference.
• Orwellian Retcon: Dinoponera's Bullet Time skill was called "Concentration Driving Force/Free" in Arachnid, but is changed to "Concentration Driving" or just "C. Drive" on the magazine version of Chapter 2. The published volumes and the magazine versions of following chapters actually flip-flop between the original term and the retcon one more than once.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Dinoponera's kind treatment of Chiyuri after acknowledging her as a friend isn't outright a Heel–Face Turn but shows that all her yapping about wanting friends is sincere.
  • Hanakamakiri promises to make as much pudding as Alice wants if she stays as the new Boss, which is the nicest thing anyone has done for her in quite a while... but it doesn't take long until this is revealed to be bait, as Hanakamakiri and Bekkobachi just want Alice turned into their Puppet Queen.
  • Sasori saves Setsuna from Rin and takes an interest on becoming a teacher figure to her like how Kumo was to Alice, which kind of... sort of... vaguely makes up for the whole "gang-raped a million times by dozens of zombies" thing?... She also puts a shirt on the perpetually-stripped girl, which is a surprisingly nice gesture.
• Pose of Supplication:
  • A miserable Alice makes this pose while lamenting Yoriko's and Suzumebachi's deaths right before the zombie outbreak.
  • Dinoponera falls to her knees in tears while confessing to Chiyuri and Yamato she did get raped and temporarily zombified by the army ants. It's then Played for Laughs when Chiyuri also collapses upon learning that Yamato was working for the Organization the whole time. What shocks her is him actually having a job at all.
• Poor Man's Porn: When Megumi is seen masturbating to a picture of Alice, it's just a close-up of the girl's classic surprised face. You'd think the stalker roach would have lewder stuff than that...
• Post-Climax Confrontation: Subverted; the story reveals Sasori turned up alive to fight Alice at the Arachnid Hunt after Suzumebachi, Ginyanma and Yoriko had all been killed. Alice lunges at her in blind rage, but gets blown out of the air by Kabutomushi. The beetle then just ignores Sasori and Jigabachi but still has to fight her way through the zombies to lead Alice and Goki to safety.
• Posthumous Character:
  • Alice's late mother Ayana is briefly mentioned in the prologue. Specifically, the panel shows the pills found near her corpse to make it look like she commited suicide from medication overdose. Since she died, Alice has never felt at home anywhere.
  • Alice's late master Kumo is repeatedly mentioned. He's who kidnapped and trained Alice as an adopted daughter but forced her to a Duel to the Death after her training was completed. She often recalls his advices to figure how to win fights.
  • Dinoponera explains her father Paraponera named her Setsuna, further implying he wasn't a bad dad to her despite being a horrible guy otherwise. What drove them apart, leading to her calling him "not a friend" in Arachnid, is still unclear.
  • Yoriko Tajima, whose corpse is seen on-panel in chapter 3, weaseled her way into Alice's heart while hiding that she was the Boss and the one who ruined her family. She wanted to kill Alice for refusing to become her final wasp puppet and being a loose end despite caring for her on some level, but was foiled and killed by Kabutomushi. Alice regrets her death a lot, and worse, takes to heart her claims that she would have grown into a murderer no matter what. This sequel elaborates on why Yoriko did all the absurd things she did by retconning her as the unwilling slave of a megalomaniacal American immortal girl.
  • Kamakiri, the mantis assassin killed by Alice early in Arachnid, appears on a flashback in chapter 15. While having tea with Kinohadakamakiri, he discourages him from abusing Hanakamakiri and tells the latter that by compulsively manipulating others he can kill or save anyone at will.
• P.O.V. Sequel: The prologue is set after Arachnid ended, but then the story rewinds to just before the Arachnid Hunt and then its aftermath. The point of view is switched between Chiyuri, Dinoponera and Alice.
• The Power of Friendship: As flawed as Dinoponera is, she sincerely cherishes Chiyuri and that helps her resist and break free from the Queen's Rule once Chiyuri is about to get infected as well. Together, they handle the apocalypse far better than lonely Alice despite their own traumatizing experiences.
• Production Throwback:
  • Compare Megumi's masturbation scene in chapter 12 to Ui's in the first chapter of Hoshi Gari Sugidesho!? Inaba-san. Those have them in similar poses with the order switched, but most noticeable is The Immodest Orgasm page◊ of "rabbits/roaches have strong libidos" narrator trivia with the exact same framing and page layout.
  • Karina undressing herself and prostrating before Serena to report to her is a panel-by-panel recreation of Serena's introduction scene in Himenospia.
• Prolonged Prologue: The prologue and the following 7 chapters introduce Alice, Chiyuri and Setsuna and goes over their motivations. Chapter 8 moves the story back to the present day to kick things off for real, going as far as to mirror the prologue's opening for symbolism.
• Puppet Queen: Alice is pressured to become the Organization's Boss until she accepts, under the pretense of finding a solution to the zombie outbreak. However, the order of assassins has secretly already been taken over by a foreign "queen" named Serena Cervantes who considered Yoriko a failure and wants to make Alice into her perfect slave.
• Quirky Miniboss Squad: Kagimushi introduces a group of six bug-people to deal with the Chiyuri problem. Those include Shion, also known as Abu, who was blasted out of Shouran High by Kabutomushi in Arachnid, and Rin the butterfly-girl, who has the same design and given name as the heroine from Choubu no Shinobi.
• R-Rated Opening: Opens with an ecstatic nude girl lying on the floor with all her limbs chopped off and then a good introduction to what exactly fuels the ongoing zombie apocalypse. The author even remarked on his penchant for starting every manga with ryona (fetish for physical and psychological abuse) a few days before the debut of this series.
• Rape by Proxy:
  • It is made clear that Suzumebachi's reason for calling Dinoponera to Japan was to get her raped by the army ant zombies and turned into an ambulant source of antibodies for their virus.
  • At Hibarigaoka prison, Gokiburi jokes about letting Chiyuri be a comfort woman of the place's inmates and kicks her and Dinoponera inside the Takobeya labor accomodation room expecting the two to get raped by Juzuhigemushi, who forces his sex slaves to poison the girls with aphrodisiacs without them noticing. Then she unleashes all the prisoners on Setsuna, claiming she deserves it for harming Alice and that it's the least she can do to threaten a dangerous enemy like her.
• Rape Discretion Shot: Subverted and averted in some instances for shock value, suggesting any censorship rules at Gangan JOKER that required Murata to use this trope back in Arachnid aren't quite in place anymore.
  • During the prologue, Alice fails to save a civilian from being raped and zombified just barely offscreen.
  • The story cuts from Dinoponera getting defeated by Alice to her leaving the Ouran school at night as a mindless zombie after Sasori got her raped by the army ants. When she later explains what happened to Yamato and Chiyuri, still nothing is shown past a redraw of her screaming while the zombies were jumping over her either.
  • The next time Dinoponera gets violated it is on-panel, as she lies locked inside a van with a random thug who doesn't care about how drugged out she is. Then she suddenly shakes off her brainless state to beat and rape him instead. The scene cuts away as it happens for comical effect, and later both him and his two friends are seen zombified.
  • Chiyuri getting assaulted by the homeless men at the public park is rather graphic as well, with a lot of molestation and one of them actually beginning to take her from behind on-panel and almost zombifying her.
• Rape Portrayed as Redemption: The lonely but prideful and violent Dinoponera getting rape-zombified and tossed out of the Arachnid plot like trash doesn't just teach her some much needed humility and empathy, but was actually a convoluted plan to make her a source of antibodies against the army ant virus. As the main page for the trope puts it, it's like "getting raped was the best thing that ever happened to her" — and the world, apparently.
• Reaction Shot: In all of his series, Murata frequently uses the bottom right panel of pages for reaction shots. It gets to the point of an Overly Long Gag of Alice being confused or shocked at everyone and everything. Chapter 33 manages to end on something of an inversion of this use — it's a splash page close-up◊ of a puzzled Alice looking at Chiyuri, with the roach-girl holding at the bottom right of the page a mugshot picture of Alice with a blank expression.
• Refusal of the Call: Alice tells Hanakamakiri that she would only enjoy being the new Organization Boss if she concluded that their actions are justified, and that it was Kumo's dying wish for her to be free from the Organization's grasp. Through a Hannibal Lecture, returning Alice's prized Razor Floss dagger and pointing a firing squad at her, Bekkōbachi forces her to quit whining and accept her new role.
• Reluctant Fanservice Girl: Murata once said that girls lose half their charm if they're confident in their bust size. This sequel, needless to say, still stands by that statement.
  • Setsuna only shows up merrily hopping around naked in the beginning because you the reader already know she gets violently gangraped in that same day. The story then proceeds to play up her vulnerability for all its worth with many many many scenes where she's stripped while under threat of more rape or death, and even she can't explain what she was doing naked on that one fountain to begin with.
  • The busty Makoto gets multiple Shameful Strip scenes and is an obvious retread of the secretly lascivious Kuramoto from Arachnid, but she's genuinely in distress and is just one out of several sex slaves who are abused by a rapist who forced them to take drugs until their breasts became bigger than their heads.
• Remember the New Guy?:
  • Chiyuri befriends Dinoponera a few hours before the Arachnid Hunt, leading to a few inconsistencies with Dino's scenes back in Arachnid, in which she never mentioned having made a friend or even having fought somebody strong before Alice.
  • Yamato is revealed to be one of Osamushi's pupils. In Caterpillar, only Shoichiro was shown working closely with Osamushi and no other pupils were mentioned by name.
• Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain: The ant-zombies must either be sufficiently disabled by quadruple amputation or killed by destroying their brains.
• Retcon:
  • Chiyuri meets and befriends Dinoponera some hours before the Arachnid Hunt, despite Dinopo never alluding to her in Arachnid and acting like she never met anyone whom she could share her feelings with. Dinoponera is also impressed by Chiyuri beating her without weapons and on brute force alone. This clashes with how, in Arachnid, Dinoponera is confused by how Hibiki wanted to fight her unarmed, saying she "never thought of weapons as a weakness". Dino never being pleased by whatever he or anyone else does, however, is justified in Blattodea by her remarking her standards have increased from fighting Chiyuri.
  • Sasori was hanged from the ceiling by Alice's wires and then stung herself with deadly venom to die on her own terms. In the context of Arachnid alone, she was as good as dead. Blattodea then establishes her as Not Quite Dead by revealing she only pretended to commit suicide by going into suspended animation and that Kirigirisu asked an injured Jigabachi to come rescue her.
• Reused Character Design:
  • Rin Saotome is based on the heroine from the previous spinoff in the series, Choubu no Shinobi, in a case of her being an identical-looking descendant.
  • Serena Cervantes from Majo ni Ataeru Tettsui and Himenospia is introduced on chapter 19. The scene is framed to give the impression that she was lifted with no changes from Himenospia.
• Rule of Symbolism:
  • While Setsuna often ends up in Megumi's Butt-Monkey role in call-backs to previous scenes in the series, her being Alice's main foil is still emphasized by many similar situations happening to both girls at different times, sometimes in back-to-back chapters.
  • Clothing Damage and panty shots are used to express how vulnerable Setsuna is from scene to scene. She used to be threatening and untouchable in Arachnid, so readers couldn't get a look at her panties no matter how scenes framed her. As Caterpillar retconned Imomushi's positive opinion of Setsuna to make her seem weak, the redrawn scenes then did feature panty shots of the ant-girl. Following Setsuna's humiliation and gang-rape from being dropped by Sasori onto a crowd of zombies, it is immediately pointed out how her panties got ripped off and she starts to get portrayed as very frail and ineffective, with way more outright nude shots of her than readers could know what to do with. Setsuna still hangs on to her damaged middle school sailor uniform for a whole year until it is sliced to pieces and she's left at Sasori's mercy, with the nurse remarking Setsuna hasn't grown at all since they last met.
• Running Gag: A scene of Megumi imagining Alice in a wedding dress is followed by Alice imagining Imomushi and Hanakamakiri as groom and bride. It was immediately followed by the author doing the same gag in Kaminaki Sekai no Onee-chan Katsudou with same framing, recycled background and all, as its protagonist imagines herself marrying her own brother.

S-Z

• Scenery Censor: Volume 2 has Chiyuri's bare butt on the cover. Each physical volume is sold wrapped in plastic with a flap of paper containing a synopsis on the bottom, keeping it as tasteful as this series can manage.
• Series Continuity Error:
  • So Dinoponera waves goodbye to Chiyuri at 14:05 of the Arachnid Hunt day and Kuramoto is killed at 18:00. Problem is, Dinoponera is shown trapped by Alice with a narration panel reading there are 2:36 hours left until the outbreak. That's 15:24, which if taken at face value contradicts Chapter 30 of Arachnid showing she hadn't even arrived at Shouran High by 16:02.
  • When Kabutomushi and Alice appear at Ouran High's rooftop, Kabuto is missing the slash wound she got while fighting Abu and Alice is shown with her usual blazer uniform which was stripped from her earlier. At that point in Arachnid, she was wearing an outfit stolen from the then zombified Sara, with overknee socks instead of pantyhose and no blazer. It doesn't help that in the magazine version of Chapter 5 Goki and Kabuto are then repeatedly drawn with outfit errors — Goki with her missing blazer on in the same page she's portrayed without it and Kabuto missing her tights on three pages. The retcon on Kabutomushi was poorly fixed in volume 2 by smearing some blood on her otherwise still undamaged clothes.
  • After Juzuhigemushi's defeat, Setsuna starts begging Chiyuri for sex like a cat in heat but gets blasted unconscious and is left topless on the floor. The narrative cuts to Alice's perspective for a few monthly chapters, and when it comes back the still KO'ed Setsuna is magically fully clothed again. You'd think that was a detail the illustrator wouldn't forget about!
  • Chapter 22 has two flashbacks showing Dinoponera dunking on Hibiki and Kabutomushi. In both of them she is missing the red tie on her shirt when she shouldn't, because, uhhh, "that" hadn't happened to her yet. Throughout the rest of the chapter, the ring fabric where said tie would go is also suddenly missing for some reason!
• Sexy Packaging: Every cover in the series is of a half naked girl (and the resident otokonoko), as are some of the inside covers. This makes it readily apparent how Hotter and Sexier it is even compared to Arachnid, which didn't use this trope as much.
  • Chiyuri's cover in volume 2 is a naked Boobs-and-Butt Pose that was meant to be covered up with a tagline paper flap when sold physically. Setsuna's volume 5 cover was supposed to match this by having her in an action pose wearing no skirt or panties, her crotch barely covered by her armguard's sting. This was self-censored to putting the skirt back on and tearing her shirt to expose cleavage instead, but the inside cover happens to be her flaunting her bare butt to the reader. So much for "not being lewd"...
• Shameful Strip:
  • Juzuhigemishi forces his female minions to take aphrodisiacs and undress while Chiyuri and Setsuna are watching, after the roach and ant themselves are tricked into drinking water laced with those substances. Dinoponera gets so out of her mind that she starts stripping and masturbating uncontrollably, but Chiyuri has a powerful immune system and just beats the crap of Juzuhigemushi to keep him from raping everyone any further.
  • Karina seems forced to get naked and prostrate before Serena every time she has to report to her, in a throwback to Donald Trump doing the same in the Himenospia continuity.
  • The inside cover of volume 4, which is also used for chapter 22 on the magazine version, shows a humiliated Makoto having a mugshot taken at the Hibarigaoka prison while nude and covering her overly large breasts with a placard.
  • Setsuna's clothes being slashed to tatters in her fight against Rin hardly bothers her as much as the fact she's completely outclassed and barely avoiding being killed. However, she's left in such a sorry state right in front of Sasori, the woman who got her horribly gangraped in the previous year.
• Ship Tease:
  • Half the reason Chiyuri even exists in the story is to take care of Dinoponera, who bearhugs her while naked when Chiyuri accepts to be her friend. When Dinoponera attempts to rape Chiyuri while under the virus' influence, the roach remarks she isn't adverse to them having sex (not even mentioning the risk of also getting infected) but would prefer for Dino to get on her good side and bring her sweets first.
  • On Megumi's side, she's suffering from Alice Withdrawal after a year since her "Forcefully Rape Alice" plan failed and wishes to find the spider-girl and have the stickiest, slimiest sex ever with her.
  • Alice gets a crush on Hanakamakiri and monologues at length about how she'd like to be more intimate with the elegant and powerful mantis while blushing and breathing out puffs of steam. She's actually never been portrayed like this before, not even towards Megumi.
• Shirtless Scene: A rare female example. On the front cover of Volume 1 Alice is depicted with just her jacket hung over her shoulders barely concealing her nude upper half. The following covers as of volume 4 have similarly stripperific characters, particularly the second with Chiyuri as she's outright nude in a Boobs-and-Butt Pose.
• Shout-Out:
  • As before, some panels during funfact scenes are traced from research papers on bugs, like this one about huntsman spiders setting leaf traps to prey on frogs.
  • The Show Within a Show Sailor-Force is referenced again, as not just Dinoponera but also Chiyuri are fans of it. Plus, Dinoponera is revealed to be named "Setsuna" after Setsuna "Sailor Emerald" Midorigaoka (that is, Setsuna "Sailor Pluto" Meioh) — fitting for a girl who can kind of stop time. Of note is that when Dinopo first mentions the series, the unnamed expy of Usagi who appears on the page was originally sketched as just her before being changed to how she was portrayed in Arachnid.
  • Dinoponera has traits of Nagisa from the original Futari wa Pretty Cure such as her clothing, punching style and "Unbelievable!" tic. Chiyuri likewise is introduced as capable of incredibly high jumps (a Running Gag for first-time transformations in Precure) and goes "Dadadada" while fighting Dinopo on a public fountain. Her name, hairstyle and hat also seem to mark her as an expy of Mayuri Shiina. The time travel theme of Steins;Gate adds up to Dinoponera being named after Sailor Pluto and having a pseudo-time-slowing power.
  • Yamato is an expy of Leiji Matsumoto and Bland-Name Product versions of his series are shown to the reader, such as "Space Battleship Musashi" instead of Yamato, even though that term is otherwise freely used in the story. His and Chiyuri's ki blast is even named after the Wave-Motion Gun.
  • Pocky snacks are shown in chapter 8 with the bland name "Lucky". It was published only a couple weeks after November 11, which is considered "Pocky Day" in Japan. Unfortunately, Dinopo doesn't get to play the Pocky Game with her roach friend...
  • The pod Alice is put in to connect her mind to worldwide news looks very similar to the teletransportation pod from The Fly (1986).
  • Two expy characters were introduced on significant dates: Momoko's reintroduction was timed for the 10th anniversary of the Watamote series and Serena's first appearance was timed for the 30th anniversary of the Sailor Moon anime.
• Silence Is Golden: The prologue has very little dialogue, which adds to its slow-paced melancholy. Even the bug funfacts narrator is absent after the first page.
• Sinister Surveillance: In chapter 11, Gokiburi is seen watching a drone's footage of Chiyuri fighting Imomushi from a security room and wondering whether she should let them all die. This makes the trope a Recurring Element for the series, as Sara and Akiho previously filled this role in Arachnid and Caterpillar, respectively.
• Slipping a Mickey: The bottled water Juzuhigemushi's sex slaves give to Chiyuri and Setsuna turns out to be mixed with aphrodisiacs. Thanks to her zombie infection and to how she had been drinking most of her bottle in the background, Setsuna starts feeling weird way faster than Chiyuri does...
• Slow Doors: Averted, as Alice hacks into the Organization's security to make a blast door quickly close on top of Hanakamakiri. Amusingly, even though the door smashes into the boy with a hugh shockwave and is left with a tiny gap between it and the floor, there's no sign that it injured him at all and he's more disturbed at Alice pulling a fast one on him than at how he could've died right there.
• Social Darwinist: The Organization is known for either murdering those they consider weak to steal any assets they might have or enslaving them as psycho assassins. They are willing to nuke their own country or unleash a Zombie Apocalypse into it as a means of Population Control and artificially conceive Child Soldiers who are raised to become jerkass supremacists.
• Somewhere, an Entomologist Is Crying:
  • The bug trivia about Dinoponera ants portrays what looks more like a Paraponera clavata instead by mistake (which never happened in previous chapters), and as usual Setsuna acts like a mix of both. Setsuna's and her adoptive father's ants are popularly lumped together as "bullet ants", but in reality belong to different subfamilies, and Dinoponera is instead closely related to Pachycondyla — which Setsuna is only vaguely themed after by how the "巨針蟻" furigana given with her name refers to Pachycondyla chinensis. Also, the narration scenes often describe Dinoponera ants as being way more agressive than studies report them to be and pretends they have a major grudge against Paraponera ants. The series, as well as other Japanese media, also love conflating Dinoponera with species that have Army Ant syndrome despite that being a whole different kind of behavior.
  • The chapter 2 funfact about roaches getting upwards of 300 IQ and remembering how to fly when in danger appears to be based on bogus internet rumors. The concept of IQ isn't easily applied to animals, but there are studies on how well roaches can learn at different times of a day.
• Sorting Algorithm of Evil: When walking up to Hibarigaoka Prison, Chiyuri and Setsuna get captured by Gokiburi and Geji, who seem a bit stronger than their usual jobber selves. They drop the two to get raped by Juzuhigemushi, but his toxins don't work on Chiyuri and she easily beats him senseless, to Gokiburi's disappointment as she watches over the cameras. Goki states she's the place's Final Boss and wants to save herself for the last minute instead of fighting Chiyuri seriously from the get-go, which Kagimushi agrees with as he unveils a squad of six weirdoes for Chiyuri to fight against for the chapters to come.
• Spoiler Cover: Volume 5 was supposed to feature a bottomless Setsuna on its cover, foreshadowing Rin chopping her skirt off in one of its chapters. They couldn't get away with this and settled for having her show cleavage from a tattered shirt, reflecting the further Clothing Damage she suffers on chapter 27 on the next volume.
• Stealth Pun: Chiyuri compares wrestling Imomushi to trying to stop a tank bare-handed, and tanks have caterpillar treads.
• Stunned Silence: Wouldn't be Arachnid if Alice wasn't left utterly confused at something on a regular basis. And Chiyuri and Setsuna, being two foils for her, aren't too far behind.
  • When Hanakamakiri declares Alice the new Boss of the Organization, Alice is left gasping like this. Kind of like how Himenospia started, actually.
  • Dinoponera is awestruck by how Chiyuri is able to blast her out of C. Drive mode by brute strength alone, without a plan, tricks or weapons "like a real Sailor-Force".
  • Karina hands back the Kumoito to Alice and claims the Organization can make an unlimited amount of those dagger pistols. Alice spends the rest of the scene just gazing at her beloved knifegun in silence, blushing and sweating. It doesn't help that it's implied that Karina is manipulating her in some supernatural way.
  • When Alice learns Hanakamakiri is a crossdressing boy, she's so taken aback that Hanakamakiri has to kill the zombie she was trying to warn him about. She remains flabbergasted for a minute before foaming at the mouth and fainting, realizing she spent days walking around half-naked, getting back massages, talking about underwear sizes and even playing the Pocky Game with a boy and not a girl.
• Stylistic Suck: The artwork for several flashbacks in the story are left as sketches. It's very jarring.
• Sudden Sequel Heel Syndrome: Due to a matter of allegiances, multiple characters portrayed as "good" guys in Arachnid or Caterpillar reappear as foes to either Chiyuri or Alice.
  • Megumi "Gokiburi" Oki hasn't changed from her "mistreats everyone except Alice" nature, but is portrayed as a villain due to working for the Organization again and is hostile to Chiyuri For the Evulz.
  • Kozue "Hanakamakiri" Shiihara was the co-protagonist of Caterpillar and a loyal friend to Imomushi, but he doesn't hesitate to beat the crap out of Alice to enforce the Organization's plan to turn her into their Puppet Queen.
  • Shoichiro "Kagimushi" Iwamine, who is Imomushi's master and was portrayed as a good guy, is also an high-ranked member of Hibarigaoka prison's staff and ominously introduces a Quirky Miniboss Squad with the intent of killing Chiyuri if Gokiburi can't subjugate her.
• Swiper, No Swiping!:
  • Tried and failed when Chiyuri asks Setsuna to stop bathing naked on a public fountain before the police finds out and the assassin girl just kicks her on the face while intending to murder her for no reason. Chiyuri manages to pacify Setsuna with some walloping and small talk about "Sailor-Force" before anything terrible happens and they become best friends, contrasting with Alice who not only drives Setsuna away with fear after a far more violent fight but is also prevented from making peace by a hostile Kabutomushi who was demanding her to execute Setsuna.
  • Alice and Hanakamakiri are sexually harassed by a trio of yet more cartoonishly ugly rapist thugs the moment they step into a prison-shelter. Alice, who's being forced to be the Shadow Dictator of the genocidal Organization that caused the outbreak, is disgusted enough to want to demolish the whole place. But then Chiyuri the Magical Homeless Person shows up just like in the fountain scene and demands the thugs stop to avoid trouble with the prison's management. And they actually do, as if to convey Alice is being unreasonable for resorting to violence every time this happens.
• Sympathetic P.O.V.: Dinoponera is portrayed from hers and Chiyuri's point of view as a rash and violent girl who nevertheless can be sickeningly sweet to anyone who earns her trust. The story glosses over Dinopo's evil actions during the Arachnid Hunt such as casually killing a civilian by accident and developing an irrational grudge towards Alice, making Alice look bad and Dinopo all the more pitiful when she ends up zombified.
• Tastes Like Friendship: Chiyuri and Dinoponera bond over baked potatoes and their shared love of magical girl anime.
• Team Spirit:
  • Chiyuri and Setsuna learn to get along as they survive the outbreak, with Setsuna stunning zombies by stabbing their heads so Chiyuri can then behead them with a baseball bat strike. However, due to Setsuna's recklessness the two quickly get separated at Hibarigaoka Prison and teamwork continues to be practically inexistent throughout the series. Other than loose examples such as Megumi baiting Kirigirisu into Alice's traps and Hibiki tricking Riokku into launching him towards Setsuna in Arachnid, the story so far has been exclusively about one-on-one fighting.
  • Hakiriari is one of the very few antagonists who has the common sense to order her comrades to gang up on the protagonist, in this case Chiyuri, with her. This gets Hibiki to back Chiyuri up for fairness' sake despite him disliking her, with Chiyuri pointing out that in "Sailor-Force" the entire team fought together against even a single villain. However, even then none of those knuckleheads get to fight because Shoichiro interrupts them and knocks Chiyuri out by himself.
• Technically-Living Zombie: The army ant zombies are actually alive but since their Queen died they became incapable of doing anything but raping anyone who's not yet infected. The Organization intended for all of them to die of starvation in a Depopulation Bomb scheme but it didn't seem to happen.
• There Can Be Only One: Megumi debuts in the story as an antagonist to Chiyuri, declaring there's no need for two roach assassins to exist.
• There's No Place Like Home:
  • Back in Arachnid's ending, Alice claimed she felt more at home fighting the zombies than hiding away with Gokiburi. However, in the prologue for this series, Alice is stressed out again and monologues about how she feels like she doesn't belong anywhere since her mother got killed. Hanakamakiri claims the Organization can help fill that hole in her heart after all.
  • Chiyuri on the other hand exults in her homelessness even after the collapse of Japan, much to Setsuna's annoyance.
• This Cannot Be!:
  • Dinoponera has a habit of repeatedly screaming something along the lines of this in Thai (ไม่มีทาง/mâi mee taang, meaning "no way"; translated to "arienai"/"impossible" in furigana) when she does get scared, which is seen when Chiyuri lands an uppercut on her despite Dinoponera being on Bullet Time mode. Keeping with her Magical Girl motif, this is a nod to Nagisa Misumi from Futari wa Pretty Cure going "arienai" at everything. And Dino does it enough that it even rubs off on Chiyuri.
  • Alice lures Hanakamakiri to get smashed by a security gate. As his abilities revolve around deceit, Hanakamakiri is in disbelief that by all accounts Alice had just looked completely defenseless and fearful for her life when in truth she had this trap set up the whole time.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: Upon being pulled into the Organization, Alice spends a good dozen chapters without getting beaten black, blue and counterclockwise. She even gets to eat pudding. Problem is, Hanakamakiri and especially Bekkobachi are some of the most untrustworthy people in the universe towards her. As soon as Alice tries to go outside on her own, Hanakamakiri beats the stuffing out of her.
• Time Skip:
  • After chapter 7 is done establishing Chiyuri's and Setsuna's characters and motivations, chapter 8 moves the story to 58 weeks into the apocalypse, just after the point Alice is declared the new Organization boss by Hanakamakiri.
  • After Chiyuri confronts Shoichiro in chapter 32, the next chapter cuts to Alice's side and she finally comes across Chiyuri upon arriving on the prison. Chapter 34 then reveals there was a time displacement between their scenes at some point (it's rather confusing) — 3 months have passed since Chiyuri first entered the prison. The narrative then moves back to the conflict between her, Shoichiro and his henchmen.
• Toilet Humor: Hanakamakiri's Unsettling Gender-Reveal moment with Alice comes when he's on the toilet and Alice barges in to warn him about a zombie. This was while Murata was showing surprising restraint in not inserting several incontinence fetish scenes for female characters in Blattodea like he did in previous installments or the other series he was writing around that time.
• Traced Artwork:
  • Several bug funfact scenes have artwork traced from research papers and some backgrounds are traced from real life pictures.
  • Flashbacks to Arachnid early on are copy-pasted from that story. Later ones are traced and have a faded look to them.
• Trademark Favorite Food:
  • Dinoponera likes sweets sold exclusively in Japan and starts relapsing back into a horny zombie when Chiyuri doesn't let her have too many Pocky sticks.
  • In chapter 9, Alice finally gets to enjoy a plate of pudding the way Oki said she liked to back in Arachnid. For all of a minute she seems to forget about the chain of disasters that's been her life so far, and Hanakamakiri even tries to use the dessert as motivation for her to remain in the Organization.
    Hanakamakiri: This pudding... I made it myself. It's not a rare brand or anything...
    Alice: A— A pudding... A pudding this good... was made by human hands?...
• Tragic Keepsake: In the prologue, Alice drops her guard and nearly gets infected because she was trying to protect a teddy bear Kumo gave her.
• Uncertain Doom: After Setsuna is captured by Sasori, there is a jarring Time Skip to a conspicously unconcerned Chiyuri meeting Alice three months later while looking like she became part of the prison's staff. So what happened to Setsuna, Gokiburi and all the other villains? After some chapters, it turns out Sasori had been looking after Setsuna in the interim...
• Unsettling Gender-Reveal: Alice spends several days being quite a bit intimate with Hanakamakiri while under the impression he is a girl when he's really a crossdressing boy. When she barges into a bathroom to warn him about a zombie, she freezes on the spot and drops like a sack of potatoes upon realizing she went as far as to play the Pocky Game with a boy.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Alice killed Kuramoto in self-defense and found there was a ridiculous Evil Plan to halve the population of Japan from the pandemic of her brainwashed soldiers. Soon after, the zombified Dinoponera is assaulted by a group of thugs and fucks them right back. Her bloodlust is possibly what actually triggers the then passive zombies into attacking everyone, and then her three assailants among other people end up right next to Chiyuri's master and his friends, meaning poor Dinoponera did bring ruin to her friend's home without even realizing it.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: The Organization's late boss Yoriko repeatedly tried to curb the world's population for the sake of some vaguely defined utopia, which characters such as Sasori believe to be simply a World of Chaos where the bug assassins could thrive. Alice actually would be willing to become the new Boss if she is convinced that the rape zombie apocalypse is somehow being done for the greater good.
• Very Punchable Man: Basically 99% of the Japanese male population in the story are made out of ugly scumbags indistinguishable from the zombies who try to rape either Alice, Chiyuri or Setsuna on sight. So then it is no big deal for the girls to beat and kill every single one of them.
• Villain with Good Publicity: As explained by Hanakamakiri back in Caterpillar's ending, the Organization caused the zombie apocalypse so their forces can operate in plain sight and kill truckloads of people under the pretense of peacekeeping.
• Villainous Rescue: Sasori keeps Rin from killing Setsuna by putting the latter to sleep and appears to plan on being a master figure to her, with later scenes framing them in the place of Kumo and Alice from the beginning of Arachnid. Setsuna, unsurprisingly, isn't very thrilled about it...
• Villains Out Shopping:
  • A few hours before killing a clueless teacher and beating up a lot of people in the Arachnid Hunt, Dinoponera was innocently bathing on a park's fountain until Chiyuri stopped her.
  • There are two instances of Serena and Sasori, the two most vile gals in the world, eating noodles with a cute look on their faces before they go back to acting sinister.
• Visual Pun: The Organization has a capsule device which Alice enters to absorb knowledge through her Hyper-Awareness and Instant Expert traits. This is visualized as Alice using her Razor Floss to access news and research papers in the World Wide Web.
• Waking Up Elsewhere: After being sedated and captured by Sasori, Setsuna wakes up in a basement with Sasori nearby declaring she will only get out if she becomes strong enough to defeat her. This mirrors Kumo kidnapping and training Alice back in the beginning of Arachnid.
• Wham Shot:
  • Hanakamakiri meeting Alice in the prologue, making good on his promise to make Alice the new Boss.
  • The reveal of poor zombie Dinoponera in chapter 2, six real life years since she got Put on a Bus to Hell in Arachnid. And later her rescue of Chiyuri in chapter 4, confirming her recovery and promotion to tritagonist of the story.
  • The reveal in chapter 3 that Sasori faked her death when she lost to Alice.
  • Chapter 9 seems to reveal Ayana Fujii, Alice's mother, is somehow doing just fine and is working for the Organization... but the next chapter shows she is just an identical-looking relative.
  • Chapter 11.5 ends with good old Megumi "Gokiburi" Oki in some kind of evil mastermind role from out of nowhere after she was chronologically last seen in the Arachnid epilogue just looking for Alice alongside Kabutomushi.
  • Chapter 19 shows Karina prostating before the real villain, Serena Cervantes, who seems exactly the same as her Himenospia counterpart.
  • In Chapter 37, Shoichiro encounters Serena already inside the prison, as Makoto introduces him to her under the pretense of Serena being a refugee skilled in resource management.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Back in Arachnid, Kamadouma and Geji were assumed to have fallen prey to the army ants but they show up looking just fine at Hibarigaoka Prison. This left Kabutomushi as the one important character who's suspiciously absent, especially considering Gokiburi was with her looking to rescue Alice from the Organization but has instead joined them as the director of the prison. Then, in Chapter 17, Kabutomushi finally shows up... dressed like a WcDonald's employee and just having fun killing zombies on the streets. Alice? What's an Alice?
• Whole Costume Reference:
  • Setsuna Dinoponera cosplays as a Sailor Soldier because she's fond of the "Sailor-Force" anime, but her black undershirt and "Unbelievable!" tic is meant to evoke Nagisa Misumi from Pretty Cure and there's no indication she's also familiar with that series.
  • Momoko "Geji" Ashida wears a school uniform very similar to Tomoko Kuroki's from No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular! but colored violet because she's an expy of that character.
• Wisdom from the Gutter: Chiyuri and Yamato are portrayed as wise, humble and kind-hearted homeless people, contrasting with the villains who are all Social Darwinists looking to steal assets from the poor and weak. However, despite the author expressing in the end of volume 2 an intention to portray the homeless in a humanizing way, this remains a very misanthropic fetish series — all the other hobos are comically ugly male assholes who, if they aren't just minding their own business, are prone to attempting to assault any woman in their sights like all the other villains.
• World of Jerkass: Aside from good girl Chiyuri, every other character in the story is either very flawed or a straight up cartoonish rapist supervillain.
• The Worf Barrage:
  • Dinoponera's Concentration Driving Force lets her increase her heartbeat to view the world in slow-motion and she handily beat Imomushi, Kamadouma, Riokku and Kabutomushi with it. However, her lack of foresight while using C.D.F. against Crazy-Prepared opponents ultimately causes her to be easily defeated and humiliated by both Alice and Sasori. This story then adds that before even that Dinoponera's ability was beaten by Chiyuri with brute force alone, retroactively making the ant-girl even more stupid since she learned nothing from that.
  • Alice tries to pounce at Sasori but gets knocked out of the way by Kabutomushi. From the very beginning of Arachnid Alice has loved being a Salticidae spider, but that only ever works as a distraction at best.
  • Dinoponera tries to pin Imomushi to the floor and beat her up once again but fails and gets blasted away by a headbutt before she can trigger her concentration power. Imomushi says that even back when Dino first rearranged her face her punches felt light, like she didn't measure up to her monstrous father at all.
  • Setsuna enables C.D.F. to fight Rin in Bullet Time with a serious demeanor and with the Exotic Eye Designs she used to have in Arachnid for once, but she's completely unable to hit the butterfly-girl even though she's barely moving and almost gets slashed in half.
  • Setsuna's addiction to attempting to stab people In the Back, failing and just continuing to do it while expecting different results is taken to the extreme that at one point she tries hitting Sasori in a panic while forgetting or not noticing that she's been disarmed.
• The Worf Effect:
  • Dinoponera, who was a supposedly all-powerful Arc Villain back in Arachnid, is the first opponent Chiyuri fights, and it is shown Chiyuri is too strong and fast for Dinoponera's and Alice's Hyper-Awareness powers. Although she was butt-naked and without her venomous elbow-stingers, Dinoponera gets knocked down repeatedly and acknowledges Chiyuri as a friend.
  • The army ant zombies are just going berserk and lack the team tactics they had under Kuramoto's control, but they're monstrous, very resistant to damage and there's enough of them to pin down and nearly infect both Alice, who lost her thread weapon, and Chiyuri. Dinoponera resists their hivemind, but given what she's been through she is uncharacteristically afraid and unsure if she can protect Chiyuri from them despite having a Child Soldier background in war zones.
  • Imomushi does much better in her rematch against Dinoponera and hits her with a headbutt right in the nose, making it necessary for Chiyuri to come to help, and the roach won't have an easy time either. After outright no-selling so many beatings, this is the first time Dinoponera bleeds from a physical blow in the entire series so far. The author handwaved this portrayal on Twitter as ants "being more vulnerable to environmental degradation than caterpillars and cockroaches" (Dinoponera lucida in particular are an endangered species because of that). Chiyuri ends up defeating Imomushi by introducing ranged Ki Attacks into the series.
  • Upon arriving at Hibarigaoka Prison, Chiyuri and Dinoponera are immediately restrained and arrested by Gokiburi and Geji, two dumb-dumbs who hardly did anything but job in the previous stories but have apparently become super strong. As Chiyuri doesn't want to miss out on the shelter and info about Alice, she tells Dinoponera to be patient and not defy them.
  • On chapter 15, Hanakamakiri puts a good showing against famed Trap Master Alice by simply bum-rushing her and performing a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown before Alice, even with her Super-Reflexes, can do anything. As usual, however, it soon turns out Alice had prepared for this as a blast door suddenly crashes on top of Hanakamakiri to keep him from harming her any further.
  • Setsuna knocks Hebitonbo out with her venom and goes around killing a bunch of predatory minions to try and prove her strength but all it does is show how she's outclassed by both Rin, who humiliates and nearly kills her, and her nemesis Sasori, who puts Setsuna to sleep without her even realizing it.
  • Chiyuri performs well against Shoichiro's henchmen only to job to his instantaneous energy punch and get knocked out instantly, in what's the first time she loses a fight in the series.
• Worf Had the Flu:
  • Alice had a reputation for being overpowered in the original story, and that was even acknowledged by the author in the last volume's afterword. But when you get down to it, she had the home field advantage and a week of prep time to set traps thanks to Sasori babbling about the Arachnid Hunt to her. Without any of that or her trusty Kumoito and exhausted from an untold amount of time aimlessly fighting the zombie hordes, it's no wonder Alice almost gets caught and infected by them. Kabutomushi also knocks her out in one hit at a point the spider-girl was running on fumes but still trying to stand up to Sasori.
  • Dinoponera is severely traumatized and half-zombified, which makes her very ineffective in combat and forces Chiyuri to do all the heavy-lifting when they fight. Things like Dino being so used to winning that she's scared of any adversity, Chiyuri's good influence on her, her upbringing in the wilderness or even environmental problems faced by endangered ant species are brought up as excuses for why she's being so wimpy.
• Yank the Dog's Chain:
  • After a year fumbling alone in the apocalypse and almost getting zombified, Alice spends a few days in the Organization's HQ being treated with enough decency that she grows maladjusted and becomes very friendly with Hanakamakiri. Unfortunately, the boy just wants to use Alice and beats her up when she tries leaving to Hibarigaoka Prison on her own.
  • Setsuna makes friends with Chiyuri, gets raped a million times, saves Chiyuri's life, learns she was called to Japan just to get raped in the first place to become an ambulant zombie virus cure like it is some kind of amazing feat and afterwards swerves between doing cool feats and being humiliated in fights as badly as Megumi did in previous installments of the series.
• You Kill It, You Bought It: Strangely, the official synopsis for the story and Alice herself claim she killed the Boss even though she no, she didn't. It was Kabutomushi who blew Yoriko to her death. Alice was hopelessly immobile and being tossed off the building by Yoriko before Kabuto and Goki rescued her (Alice was even trying to reach out for the falling Yoriko in despair), and the event was reported correctly by Kirigirisu. Nonetheless, Hanakamakiri forces Alice to take over the Organization as he promised to Suzumebachi midway through the Arachnid Hunt.
• Zombie Gait: The army ant zombies wander like this while passive, but will charge at the non-infected if set off. Dinoponera, for example, stumbles around pitifully while drooling with her head tilted sideways and her eyes rolled up... but when provoked she's about the most dangerous rapist around thanks to her innate lunacy, speed and strength.
• Zombie Infectee: Dinoponera is the only one able to resist the army ant virus out of happenstance from Alice forcing her to stab herself with poneratoxin, which makes her a Living MacGuffin Chiyuri must deliver to Alice. Although Dinopo recovers her consciousness she still gets overwhelmed by lust from time to time and gets forceful on Chiyuri, who simply puts her on a submission hold until she calms down. Unsurprisingly, the villains need Dinoponera dead to prevent a non-violent end to the outbreak and both her and Chiyuri are oblivious to that.

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