Yukito Urabe had a rough upbringing, especially due to him being the son of The Cult of Mitama's muscle-bound leader. One day, Yukito finds himself the victim of a ritual where he would be tossed into the ocean and be reborn as the new leader of the cult. As he sank to the bottom, Yukito wishes to be born into a world bereft of religion and gods.
Sure enough, he finds himself in another world, but instead of fighting monsters or practicing magic, he ends up doing the most mundane of tasks for his new home. But even without gods or magic, the world-ruling Empire is twisted and cult-like; humans are brainwashed into becoming obedient shells that commit suicide on command, and anyone who is resistant to this brainwashing is branded and sent to a concentration camp. One day, the Imperial City kidnaps and executes Alural and her sister Siluril due to their refusal to commit suicide. Yukito himself is mortally wounded when he tries to save them, but, as he is succumbing, he prays to Mitama for help. Mitama reveals she is real and proceeds to wipe out the Imperial City's forces and resurrect the dead. Unfortunately, gods require faith and prayer to power their miracles, and Mitama's energy and followers are fully tapped out. With an ironically-atheist cult-ruled empire ready to purge the concentration camps, Yukito realizes he must fulfill his old fate with a wacky twist: to rebuild and lead the Cult of Mitama and ascend Mitama as the One True Goddess in the most un-cultlike style possible!
KamiKatsu: Working for God in a Godless World (Kaminaki Sekai no Kamisama Katsudou, literally "What God Does in a World Without Gods") is a manga series written by Aoi Akashiro and illustrated by Sonsho Hangetsuban. It began serialization in Monthly Hero's in 2019 before transferring to the Comiplex website in 2020. It received an anime adaptation in April 2023.
In 2022 it got a spinoff named Kaminaki Sekai no Onee-chan Katsudou ("Onee-chan Adventures in a Godless World") with page layouts by Shinya Murata and art by Tokisada Hayami. It begins with Yukito's burly sister Chiyomaru forcing their father to also toss her into the sea so she can also cross over into another world and attempt to marry her brother.
This manga provides examples of:
- 2D Visuals, 3D Effects: In the anime adaptation, monsters are rendered in rather crude 3D graphics. The animators confirmed that the out-of-place 3D was done on purpose, serving as a hint that the world Yukito ends up in is not what it seems.
- Absurdly Sharp Blade: Bertrand's sword can slice through rocks and monsters. Yukito thinks it is magical, but Bertrand says it is a feat of strength and skill.
- A God Am I:
- Loki seeks to become a God after learning the true nature of the empire, and knows the other Archons will fight her over it. Yukito lets her break the world's status quo by destroying the empire's machine, but assures her that he'll make Mitama the one true god in the end.
- Subverted with Gaia, who needs god-like power to kill the other Archons only because she hates the very idea of a god who controls everyone.
- Abusive Parents:
- Soichiro put Yukito through a seemingly nonsensical Training from Hell to become a cult leader that led the boy to be shunned by everyone and then tossed him into the sea. Yukito has nothing but resentment for his father, even as the training does pay off throughout his quest.
- Gaia suffered from much of the same kind of abuse as Yukito did when she was a human, and killed her deranged mother over it. She stoops very low herself by adopting a bunch of children and using them as pawns to gain faith and fight the other Archons. Kai almost executes Gaia for it, but Shian, who pitied her own parents who blindly followed the Empire's orders to abandon her and kill themselves, knows Gaia does genuinely care for them and spares her life.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: An early twist is that the dystopic traits of the future Yukito got sent into are part of a design of a machine that has regulated civilization since an apocalyptic incident.
- Ain't Too Proud to Beg: Yukito and Atar kneel before an unwilling Mitama and beg her to rebuild their village which was destroyed by a stampede. Both are internally really insincere, with Atar only doing it because she really really really wants to eat ice cream.
- All Women Are Lustful:
- Alural is basically introduced giving Yukito a hand job, and would like nothing more than to bed him. Her sister encourages this, and is only slightly less interested herself.
- It is revealed that lust is seen as abnormal for both sexes in the setting, as all people in the empire were artificially conveived and made to not have sexual interest for the purposes of population control. This greatly dismays Dakini, who was created with powers over libido. Her desire for godhood and to pervert everyone around her came from when a girl she made friends with was murdered for getting pregnant and giving birth.
- Riche has an interest in erotic books inherited from her mother, which landed her in trouble when she was mistaken by Dakini's cultists to be a huge sex maniac when she's really a virgin. Yukito simply forcing her onto a wall causes her to hallucinate being raped and orgasm on the spot.
- Art Shift: The anime uses pixel art and low polygon 3D characters in several scenes for a retro videogame feeling, with RPG interfaces and dialogue boxes.
- Asshole Victim: In the spinoff's beginning, Chiyomaru beats the crap out of her father Soichiro and tosses him out of a building for sacrificing Yukito. It's just plain hilarious since Soichiro had been portrayed as nothing but an abusive jackass in the main series.
- Back from the Dead:
- Several times for Yukito: he is drowned the first time only to end up in the fantasy world, and he is later stabbed only to be resurrected by Mitama. Then Gaia attempts to kill him over and over in increasingly gruesome ways upon capturing him, but to no avail since Mitama revives him every time.
- Mitama also revives Yukito's murdered friends.
- Bertrand and his henchmen are revived thanks to Mitama's powers... however, he gets transformed into a woman.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Yukito wanted to be reincarnated into a world where religion didn't exist. He got it, but quickly learned that an oppressive government doesn't need religion to control people. The entire world is under the thrall of the Empire, which brainwashes its citizens to never fear death or feel love, causing them to (sometimes happily) commit suicide when ordered, and hunt down those who are resistant to the brainwashing, even their own children. Without religion, there is no resistance or opposition to this twisted monoculture.
- The Beastmaster: Gaia's specialty is creating and controlling giant monsters.
- Boob-Based Gag: Upon hearing that Yukito liked smaller breasts, Alural places her ample bosom on a log and suggests someone lend her an ax.
- Big Bad: The Emperor, the tyrannical ruler of the Imperial City and also the one who started the end-of-life system... is soon revealed by Loki to be Dead All Along. She takes over the Empire and appears to become the overarching antagonist behind the scenes while Yukito concerns himself with a set of villainesses who are also looking to rule over mankind.
- Brother–Sister Incest: In the spinoff, Chiyomaru is dead-set on marrying Yukito because he, as a child, looked up to her and said they would do that once he grew up.
- Butt-Monkey: Bertrand is introduced as a threatening antagonist who temporarily kills Yukito, but then he's killed, revived as a woman, and spends most of her scenes being put into sexually humiliating situations. Yukito even stops regarding Berrandt as a combatant at some point and exploits her growing feelings for him to make her do whatever he wants.
- Celibate Hero: Yukito has little interest in sexnote and can resist even Dakini's powers because of his religious training, so he ignores the advances of Alural and other women towards him. Even when Alural gets fed up with this and outright attempts to rape Yukito at night, he remains as limp as ever with a blank look on his face and this keeps her from molesting him any further.
- Charles Atlas Superpower: Chiyomaru has god-like strength and resilience earned just from training really hard.
- Chekhov's Gag:
- Early on, Yukito is confused by how a pornographic book without even any lewd illustrations is treated as something forbidden by the townsfolk. This foreshadows the Empire's extreme population control methods, and later it turns out Dakini is the one who's been secretly spreading those books around.
- Gaia is distracted for a long time by an obvious doll shaped like Mitama. When Yukito and Mitama are both Eaten Alive by Typhon, that doll assures the other heroes that they have survived. The doll is also used as a link to send faith power towards Mitama.
- Corruption of a Minor:
- Played With; Dakini was forced for millennia to make children incapable of having lust, resulting in a civilization of sociopathic drones incapable of loving anyone at all. Her befriending a rare Dirty Kid named Touka and encouraging her behavior is portrayed as something positive, but a global lack of sex education leads to the girl eventually being murdered for giving birth. Dakini is horrified and resolves to change the world back to how it once was.
- Yukito sends Dakini to deal with Gaia's cult of children for their own good, expecting Dakini to use her powers to force them to enter puberty and break the hold that Gaia has over them. The story briefly frames Dakini as a fetishized groomer for all its worth until it turns out she's just harmlessly playing with the kids and helping them become more mature by overcoming their insecurities.
- Crapsack World: Mankind has seemingly been reduced to a single empire where people are born artificially and then executed when they reach a certain age. They have been conditioned to accept this as normal and psychotically reject and kill those who fear death or want to have sex and conceive children.
- Creepy Child: Among the children adopted by Gaia, Kai is the most violent and willing to turn his sword on anyone who break the rules set in their family. This comes back to bite Gaia when Kai almost executes her for treason, and the manipulative Yukito sees no reason to fix that behavior.
- Cruel Mercy: Upon being resurrected as a woman instead of a man, Bertrand is so humiliated that (s)he just wants to die. Considering Bertrand nearly slaughtered Yukito's entire village, no one is willing to entertain her wish.
- Cult: Yukito was the heir to a cult in his previous life. He soon uses his experience with the cult to recruit more members to his new religion.
- Death Seeker: Yukito finds himself in a world where people do not care about dying. Then in the spinoff, his crazy and seemingly invincible sister willingly attempts various methods to get herself killed and isekai-ed until their father stuffs her into a cement barrel and tosses her into the sea as well.
- Description Cut: In the climax of the fight against Dakini, Mitama depowers Dakini by bragging that she convinced the real goddess Dakini to rescind her power that Archon Dakini taps into. Right after that bragging, we see Mitama desperately begging goddess Dakini for a favor.
- Double Standard: Rape, Female on Female: Roy is seen as disgusting for acting perverted around women and particularly towards the child-like Mitama. However, Gaia, who's a mature demigoddess in a small body, can act lewd around Mitama and even suck on her cheek to get life force as much as she wants and it's simply seen as comical.
- Earth All Along: Rather than being reincarnated into another world, Mitama instead sent Yukito thousands of years into the future when civilization was destroyed. All this time, machines ran everything, and the belief in religion or gods was suppressed.
- Easily Forgiven: Downplayed with Gaia, as even though she's spared by the children she betrayed, she's left with minimal power as only Shian truly forgives her.
- Epic Fail:
- Yukito's attempt to gain followers by dressing Mitama as a cute idol gets no spectators.
- Mitama summons the Kusanagi sword for a peasant to fight a giant monster with, only for the guy to get knocked into the horizon because the sword came up all battered and rusted from ages of being sunk in a river.
- Yukito convinces Summanus to make comics about her sister Jupiter to raise her faith power until she breaks free from the tank she's trapped in. Yukito works his comrades to the bone for it, investing in digital methods to produce the comics and printing a ton of copies. However, the readers hate the content. They call the story nonsensical and the artstyle terrible, leaving Yukito and Summanus completely baffled.
- Everybody Has Standards:
- Yukito and the others are repulsed when Roy becomes obsessed with Mitama.
- Dakini is genuinely friendly to children and upon approaching the kids in Gaia's cult, she helps them mature by working through their personal issues and not by using her sexual manipulation powers like Yukito expected.
- Exact Words: Yukito wished to be reincarnated into a world without religion or gods. As a result, Mitama grants his wish by exactly importing him into a future without religion.
- Face–Heel Revolving Door: Roy switches sides to Dakini after being rejected by women too many times, but turns back to Mitama just as easily, allowing Atar to defeat Dakini.
- First-Episode Twist:
- The world Yukito finds himself in manages to be even more cult-like without gods, with people executed for merely existing too long. And then it turns out gods are real.
- Very early on, after Atar's defeat, Loki reveals the Emperor was Dead All Along and that the world is just a post-apocalyptic Earth. The series from then on is a battle against Loki and the other Archons to be the supreme god of the world.
- God Is Dead: It is later revealed that the emperor has been dead long ago and only Mitama can see his dead form and dispel the illusion. This creates a power vacuum for the next "God" of this world to replace the emperor.
- Gods Need Prayer Badly: Thoroughly played straight. While gods can exist without followers, their power directly depends on their followers, and are only as strong as their physical shells without any. The main plot is about Yukito finding ways to collect followers for Mitama in a world that doesn't ascribe to standard religions.
- Heel–Face Turn:
- Atar joins Yukito only so she can eventually rebuild the empire she was born to serve, but quickly becomes amicable with everyone.
- Riche defects from Dakini's cult because she disagrees with the woman's way of promoting sexuality. She then convinces the defeated Dakini to manage the cult together with her since she's a dear friend of Riche's late mother.
- Hotter and Sexier: In the anime, Bertrand is made to fight Atar in a very provocative carnival dancer costume.
- Idiosyncratic Episode Naming:
- Each chapter number is a "theory" and is titled "The story of..."
- Each anime episode title features an overly long praise for goddess Mitama which is always incomplete.
- Each spinoff chapter number is a "legend" and is titled with some kind of statement about the titular older sister.
- Look Both Ways: Parodied in the spinoff, where Chiyomaru is told to get hit by an incoming truck to get warped into another world but she just casually shoulder-checks it into the air and acts like it wouldn't be enough to kill anyone.
- Love Redeems:
- Dakini is forgiven by Riche because of her connection to Riche's late mother and becomes an ally to Yukito from then on.
- Gaia attempts to use the children under her care as living batteries for a giant monster but Shian prevents Kai from killing her in revenge, knowing that Gaia was just as broken as them and that her love for them was ultimately genuine.
- Manipulative Bastard: Yukito is all about exploiting people to make them dependent on his cult or to sabotage the religions of the enemy Archons. Due to this, he ensures Bertrand sticks to his side after she was despairing from being of no use to Loki and the empire.
- Meaningful Background Event: Summanus is introduced by deflecting a railgun blast away from Yukito's group. Three pages before, as the cannon appears, she can be seen standing behind Mitama without any of them noticing.
- Medium Blending: The anime adaptation uses heavily filtered live-action footage for farming scenes, where character faces are overlaid on top of actual people.
- Ms. Fanservice:
- Several moments are focused on Alural's large breasts, or she is often placed into compromising positions.
- Upon becoming a woman, Bertrand develops a large bust and is made to wear Stripperific attire much to their chagrin. It's implied to be punishment by Alural and Siluril for killing them.
- The Archons are all attractive women who often appear practically naked with only what seems like body paint covering their private parts. Among them, Dakini and Gaia at full power are the most voluptuous and provocative.
- Naked on Arrival: Yukito arrives in the new world evidently without any clothes on, and is seen in a later flashback with nothing but a convenient leaf over his privates. Later, when Yukito summons Mitama with his prayer, she appears naked as well.
- Naked on Revival: Mitama normally revives people with their clothes, but when Bertrand is revived as a woman, she emerges completely naked.
- No Sex Allowed: The citizens in the Imperial City are born artificially and genetically engineered to not have sexual desire as a form of Population Control. Deviating from this norm as seen as a reason to be banished to the Kakuri towns, where people are abducted and killed if the population of a town becomes higher than around 2000.
- "Not So Different" Remark: Gaia remarks that she and Yukito are both unfortunate children who were abused by religious fanatics only to become as manipulative as them. She almost breaks Yukito's spirit, but the arrival of his allies allows him to assert that everything he did was truly for their protection.
- Not the Fall That Kills You…: Bertrand jumps from a high wall to attack Yukito's party but just after apparently landing safely she flops onto the ground and her armor crumbles from falling damage.
- Ordered to Die: Citizens are ordered to kill themselves when they are deemed useless by the emperor, and the citizens would willingly commit suicide via poison. Occasionally they cull the deviants in the outlying villages and execute them when they refuse the order.
- Power Levels: The power level of Mitama and the Archons is determined by their number of followers and the faith of each individual. This conveniently shows up in the air as a number that anyone can see.
- Production Throwback: In the spinoff, a splash page of Chiyomaru imagining herself as a bride carrying Yukito is specifically framed to match a then-recent Running Gag from Blattodea by Shinya Murata, who does the page layouts for both stories. In fact, the background is recycled straight from the second instance of that joke in Blattodea.
- Redemption Demotion:
- When Atar is beaten by Loki, she loses all of her powers due to depending on the empire's machines to use them. Atar is convinced by Yukito to join him and regains some of her strength because Mitama's power is split with her.
- When Dakini and Gaia are defeated, they are spared and found to be good people deep down but end up left with just a single follower each. This heavily restricts their powers and they're kept that way to prevent them from becoming a threat again.
- Remember the New Guy?: Yukito's sister Chiyomaru was never mentioned or even alluded to throughout the main series up to the point that her spinoff began serialization.
- Samus Is a Girl: Klen is revealed to be Loki, a female enforcer of the empire, in disguise. Only Mitama could tell her real gender before the reveal.
- Satire: This series satirizes both the Trapped in Another World plot, Cults and the Idol Genre.
- Shadow Dictator: Loki takes over Imperial City in secret and prevents the decay of its society by pretending the emperor is alive and well, which gains her the faith power of over a million people. Yukito hopes to invade the city and expose her lie to disable Loki's powers and defeat her.
- Shout-Out: When Gaia summons a monster to demonstrate the weapons installed over the Imperial City's walls, Yukito instinctively puts up Baki Hanma's fighting stance against it. In the spinoff, Chiyomaru is said to drop off a cliff on purpose like Baki did in his series, and lands on top of a bear that she fights in Yujiro's characteristic stance.
- Stylistic Suck:
- There are some terrible 3D "Strange Beasts" and lazy Rotoscoping of farm equipment, which the staff has admitted are intentional, and proven by the quite good 3D Effects in other places.
- During the adaptation of Gaia's arc, the anime's sound direction noticeably drops in quality on the scenes where Yukito introduces music to his village and starts a band.
- Too Smart for Strangers: Gaia tries luring children to her cult-like orphanage to gain power, but a few of them know not to talk to suspicious strangers like her. Dakini is then sent to convert the five children Gaia managed to adopt, which is framed as if she's doing some rather inappropriate stuff until it turns out she's just playing and doing counseling work with the kids.
- Trapped in Another World: Yukito finds himself in another world thanks to his dying wish to be resurrected in a world without religion. Unfortunately, this world turns out not to be an RPG Mechanics 'Verse, much to his disappointment. It's later revealed that Yukito wasn't actually transported to another world at all, but Earth thousands of years in the future, though it's a different enough society that it probably counts anyway.
- Villainous Rescue:
- Loki is introduced as she prevents Atar from tossing a massive energy sphere on Yukito's town and then incapacitates her with illusions. A while later, she's established as an antagonist who needed Mitama to dispel the illusion of the emperor in the Imperial City.
- After Gaia is beaten, it is revealed that Loki was secretly among the Archons sending power to let Mitama impale Gaia with a giant spike.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: According to a decree, if a citizen of the Imperial City was no longer useful or did not fit in with society, they are expected to kill themselves.
