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Mind Screw / Anime & Manga

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  • Urasawa's 20th Century Boys is mostly just confusing because of overlapping crazy gambits and... stuff... but it's also stuffed with symbolism everywhere, all the time, and when the 'flashback' scenes start to overlap with the 'present time' scenes through a virtual reality simulation of the main characters' neighborhood in the Showa era created by the Big Bad, which various characters enter to find out what really happened, and in which one character's consciousness survives for some time after being shot in the head, it has crossed the line. Especially since you have to read the companion series Twenty-First Century Boys just to find out the ending.
  • After School Nightmare is rather hard to explain. At first it seems like a normal manga with an intersexed protagonist... then it quickly changes into a psychological manga full of Freudian influence, similar to Neon Genesis Evangelion. That's not even getting into the ending, where it's revealed that all of the students are actually unborn children, with the special class representing pregnancy and "graduating" it representing childbirth. Moreover, Mashiro's struggles with his gender identity actually symbolize the birth of a pair of boy-girl twins, with the boy dying so the girl can live.
  • Alien Nine. Even if you read the entire manga and watch the anime more than three times, all keeping the coming-of-age metaphors in mind, you are still most likely to be left scratching your head at something.
  • Angel's Egg, an animated "tone poem" that was seminal for this sort of work in anime.
  • The Animatrix is an animated series inspired by The Matrix, but "half of it couldn't even be understood unless you were crazy or an art major."
  • You have Azumanga Daioh, a slice-of-life anime. The concept seems normal. Then they bring in a giant, floating cat that hates the color red and is voiced by Norio freakin' Wakamoto! Though Chiyo-chichi only exists in one character's dreams/daydreams. The other characters are appropriately weirded out when she mentions it in real life, besides Osaka, who saw him once as well, after Sakaki already made some hints about it. She is just screwed up enough to put everything together, but she did give Chiyo-chan the stuffed animal. The anime adds an extra screwy element by giving him random and brief appearances in between scenes, where he's floating around above the school.
  • Betterman on several occasions...
  • The Big O, though it wasn't entirely intentional: the planned third season was apparently supposed to explain things in a more straightforward manner, it's just that they didn't get to.
  • Billy Bat, also by Urasawa, is doing well with the Mind Screw aspects, what with the timeline shenanigans, future-predicting/altering cartoon characters, ancient conspiracies, and real-life events smashing into each other.
  • Some episodes of Mushishi.
  • The OVA Ciel in Wonderland for Black Butler. Since it is another take on Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, this shouldn't be a surprise. However, it is surprising how dark and serious it gets after all of the weird imagery and characters we see.
  • The Black★Rock Shooter OVA. Hands up, everyone, if you went "What was THAT?" when it ended.
    • The 2012 anime version goes into more detail, and more confusion. Everyone has psychotic "other selves" in a parallel universe who are trying to kill each other. Why they're so violent, why they even exist, and so on isn't explained very well. The whole thing with the picture book about a rainbow-colored bird was supposed to be an explanation (linking colors to the "other selves?"), but it's too vague to help much.
  • Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, another example played for humor and parody. It's about a man with a blond afro with extra-long nose hairs going around trying to stop an empire based on the premise of destroying all hair in the world. Joining him is a... THING that looks like the sun, and a living block of jelly. Most fights start off like typical shonen battles and quickly have the characters getting distracted and roped into sideplots and stories-within-stories, most of which rely on Insane Troll Logic.
  • Boogiepop Phantom. Compared to this, the last two episodes of Evangelion are about as confusing as See Spot Run. It doesn't help that it's a sequel to a novel, which it completely fails to mention. If you've seen that, it becomes a lot easier to comprehend, though still heavily in the Mind Screw department. It also, unlike Evangelion, starts out confusing and gets more understandable (slightly) as it goes along.
  • Biorg Trinity is more of a sequence of non-sequiturs than an actual manga with a plot. It's written by Otaro Maijo, the man responsible for the infamous Jorge Joestar, and it's exactly as crazy as one would expect. The unnatural dialogue, bizarre plot twists and surreal yet amazingly drawn art make it hard to tell WTF is ever going on. This trope gets taken to literal levels when a girl wearing an outfit made of strung together bikinis gets skull-fucked in the back of her head by a Louis Vuitton panda bear.
  • Brain Powerd. Okay, so there's a monster that employs people to help it absorb all Life Energy on Earth so it can fly into space, and it produces robots with cockpits in their crotches, except that there are other crotch-piloted robots fighting against them, and all the robots are built from giant killer Lego disks. The robots may or may not be metaphors for children, and somehow every episode is about incredibly screwed-up family issues, except the ones where they toss around the word "organic" way too much. Um... Yeah, no idea. And that's just the premise. The last several episodes are a downward spiral of nonstop epic WTF-just-happened-itude.
  • Casshern Sins is kind of hard to understand in general, but you can tend to take all the symbolism in stride. Episode 18, however, just kicks your brains out. It seems a fairly standard episode of Lyuze, who is trying to kill the robot who killed her sister, but actually loves him too. She dreams of her sister telling her not to forget her. But in the middle of all that, we have random, real-life photographs of a woman. As in of a human, not an anime character. Given the themes of the episode, it may be her voice actor, but who knows?
  • Cat Soup is one extreme 30-minute instance of this trope.
  • Chaos;Head is one right from the beginning. The viewer is forced to pay attention to everything that goes on, not knowing if it's simply a delusion or possibly real. Even when things get cleared up, there's still another layer of mystery beneath that.
  • The manga version of Chrono Crusade has elements of this, thanks to its Gainax Ending. For the most part It Makes Sense in Context, but finding out that what you've been told are demons for most of the series are actually aliens, their "hell" is a Space Whale under the ocean, and their Hive Queen was a human woman abducted by them really throws most readers for a loop.
  • Surprisingly for an episodic Science Fiction Film Noir anime that's packed with pop culture references and driven entirely by its music, Cowboy Bebop loves this. This is especially apparent in "Pierrot le Fou" and "Brain Scratch".
  • Darker than Black has a lot of weird Techno Babble concerning the Gate, and some fairly critical things are never really explained. The last episode of the first season gets special points, given that it includes a segment inspired by Evangelion's Gainax Ending (specifically the "Congratulations" scene). The second season has even more of a "reach for the aspirin" ending. And another Eva Shout-Out for good measure.
  • Dead Leaves: It begins with a guy who looks like Canti from FLCL and a girl with a weird eye marking waking up naked in the middle of nowhere, and ends with a super-intelligent (?) baby coming out of the girl's panties with Guns Akimbo, putting enough dakka in the air to kill a bull elephant, and flying off into space to kill a giant worm. Retro, the Canti Expy, frequently comments along the lines of "This is so screwed up."
  • Digimon Tamers. It may be a kids series, but since the main writer (who is not new to Mind Screw) relies on realistic dialog, often just with quick comments explaining what's happening, often the meaning behind the dialog is lost by the audience. One needs to really pay attention or rewatch it several times to appreciate it. He's also a fan of H. P. Lovecraft. However, his use of Magic A Is Magic A means nothing outside the known rules of what can happen ever does, and the surprises are never Ass Pull. (If anything, it's more grounded in reality). We find out how the Digimon began, and just how denizens of Cyberspace can pop up in the real world. Craziness that coexists with a well-told, coherent story with characters that manage to keep acting like themselves. Tamers will never spout nonsense at you in hopes that you'll figure "I have no idea what the hell they're talking about, so it must be too profound for me", while remaining just as freaky and horrific as those that do.
  • Dragon Ball Z: Fusion Reborn: Even for Dragon Ball, this movie is weird. An evil essence tank overloads and turns into a giant, demon, man-baby that warps reality for both the dead and living world. He traps King Yemma and the spirit world in giant, multi-colored orbs and the only way to free Yemma is to curse like crazy which, in turn, causes the orbs to crack. Meanwhile, Goten and Trunks are fighting Hitler.
  • Earth Maiden Arjuna. On one hand, the general theme of letting the earth be and saving the environment from unnatural influences is pretty clear. On the other hand, the details of the plot are rather surreal, to say nothing of the presentation...
  • Ergo Proxy: Lain with shotguns. Full of mind-screw situations - especially when Proxy One starts playing mind-games with Vincent Law, his host and when the identity of Real herself comes into doubt later on. The group also has other weird experiences, like an episode focusing on the characters taking part in a game-show, and an episode where Pino explores a Disney-like theater complete with anthropomorphic animals. When compared to the rest of the tone of the series, it's no wonder most of the cast are near-crazed by the end.
  • Excel♡Saga, particularly the anime, though mostly for humor's sake... though not always. In the final few episodes, when Excel is trying to cope with what's happened to her there are a few more "serious" psychological scenes.
  • Once they start talking about the Coralians in Eureka Seven, get ready to not understand ANYTHING.
  • The Five Star Stories is what happens when Mamoru Nagano, Brain Powerd's mecha designer, writes his own manga. The action is often interrupted for bizarre, dreamlike visions of gods and monsters.
  • FLCL. It may take you two or three viewings to understand just the plot, which is, in and of itself, just a Coming of Age story. Fridge Brilliance is everywhere and the show will only make sense after multiple viewings. This comes as a surprise to many since everyone is too surprised that there's actually a plot. The manga escalates this by being basically its own story, yet still requiring knowledge of the show to try to follow it.
  • Fullmetal Alchemist relies heavily on Hermetic symbolism. The conversation between Truth and Father during the last chapter clearly shows that reason of Father's downfall was actually misinterpretation of Hermetic philosophy and stealing other people's power instead of self-development.
  • Genocyber, because there's an unexplained Time Skip between the first and second arcs, compounded by the fact that the first arc has No Ending.
  • Ghost Hound = Psychological conditions + I can't tell what's real and what's a dream + awesome, creepy ambient music + the supernatural + I can see your butt + scriptwriter from Texhnolyze and Serial Experiments Lain.
  • Ghost in the Shell (1995) is cramped with obscure symbols, random quotes, and lots of philosophical discussions that come out of nowhere and are over as suddenly as they came. The second movie is nothing but 96 minutes of obscure symbols, random quotes, and philosophical discussions, from the beginning of the opening to the end of the credits. And this is Mamoru Oshii, after all.
  • Girls Go Around: Trying to explain the story and which time-loop is going on at what moment will make you dizzy!
  • Gregory Horror Show can and will leave you wondering what just happened in the span of a 2-minute long episode. And not just for the viewer, either—in the first two series, the main character (whose eyes are you seeing the action through) doesn't understand what's going on or why, and in the third series we find that not even the lord of the freaky place is immune to it.
  • Haibane Renmei is a much gentler version of this; while the plot itself isn't all that ridiculous, the Backstory and setting are never explained. It, Lain, and Texhnolyze all have one thing in common: Yoshitoshi ABe. Most of the mind screwing is in the nature of little mysteries left unexplained to everyone... including the characters, making it less of a shock and more of a curiosity that accentuates the surreal setting.
  • Key the Metal Idol, commonly described as the strangest anime ever made when it was released.
  • The King of Thorn movie. You know an anime is a mind screw when the latter parts of it completely invalidate what we were shown in the earlier part.
  • A mild version at the end of the Lucky Star OVA, to give a brief synopsis; everyone turns into frogs and Shiraishi flies around singing. The scene was possibly another Shout-Out to End of Evangelion as well as the Urusei Yatsura movie Beautiful Dreamer (a legendary Mind Screw itself); Shiraishi is actually wearing one of the character's outfits.
  • Lupin III sometimes drifts into this territory in the anime.
    • Many fans have been confused about what the order of events was, or who the winner was, in Green vs. Red.
    • The Mystery of Mamo has the Mamo character who enjoys messing with Lupin's head.
    • Lupin III: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine used a number of Mind Screw elements, especially where the series was preparing to reveal why Fujiko acted the way she did. "Because she's Fujiko" is basically the answer fans were given, the entire story arc leading up to the reveal getting turned into a Take That, Audience! for getting invested on her tortured history as a little girl.
  • Melody of Oblivion, also by Studio Gainax, is a good example of this.
  • Milk Closet, by the guy who made Alien Nine. It's about kids who can jump across universes. The first chapter is confusing enough, and it just gets weirder from there. It ends with the three main girls fusing together and giving birth to an entire universe.
  • Mononoke, particularly the "Noppera-bou" story. The art style alone is trippy (and beautiful) but the stories are explained in the end. It's heavily rooted in Japanese mythology, though, so the "answers" are even more freaking bizarre than the original "questions" ever were.
  • Naruto:
    • There's Chapter 654, which is basically Naruto's version of Snarl of Memories.
    • One filler episode has Naruto's Shadow Clones rise up and usurp him. It's hard to make sense but it goes something like this: the clones are resting on a ship when something drops on the real Naruto's head. A sleeping Naruto clone wakes up and takes the hit. The dream the clone was having when he died mingled with Naruto's thoughts and made him hallucinate. Still keeping up? The real kicker is when the hallucination ends with Naruto being killed because they accused him of being a clone. Are you mindscrewed yet?
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion. Forever the anime Trope Codifier. Don't even start on how much controversy this provoked.
    • The main reasons for it are the very unusual ways the characters save the world, and the fact that the abundant religious symbols' religious meanings and Evangelion meanings are totally different - the creator even admits that they were only added for flavour.
    • While the actual series is majorly mind-screwy, it's End of Evangelion that truly takes the trope and flings it out the window into unexplored territory. For the two of you out there who haven't seen it, here some quick examples-
    • It involves a giant robot being transformed into the tree of life by a set of nine other giant robots crucifying themselves and a huge tuning fork, then getting plunged into the vagina-forehead of a giant alien who has taken on the form of the male lead's mother's clone. This is to save the world. Probably.
    • Then everyone gets a hug and turns into glowy Tang, there's some conversation about human nature, the giant alien falls apart and spurts a giant stream of blood onto the moon, and lastly, "Kimochi warui". Post any segment of End of Evangelion at or past Lilith's rise for other people to watch and a good portion of reviews will ask "What the *** did I just watch!?!"
    • Disclaimer: Unless it's Jet Alone, in EVA "robot" means "giant cyborg made by cloning an angel, growing it in a probe, putting it into armor that restrains it to a 80 meters tall vaguely humanoid form, then transplanting a woman's soul into it" and getting her child to pilot it.
    • Gainax actually has made fun of this in FLCL with Kamon, where they take pot-shots at fans for overanalyzing it.
  • Nijigahara Holograph has a timeline which frequently jumps back and forth between the present and 11 years prior, with characters that at times appear to be in both the present and the past at once, and it's never clear which events are real and which are just people's delusions.
  • Night on the Galactic Railroad is a rare example of when all the mind screw, that has been thrown at you during the movie, is... mostly explained at the end.
  • Noein is based (loosely) on quantum mechanics and the plot revolves very heavily around The Multiverse. The main character's Reality Warper powers allow her to jump freely between the many dimensions, and since a new dimension is created whenever somebody makes a decision, there are a lot of them, with outcomes ranging from slightly off to outright dystopian. Also there's a lot of interaction between characters from the present dimension and dimensions in the future. Naturally, the series gets confusing.
  • Ouran High School Host Club has hints of this, though you'd have to look really, really closely to notice them. Things like showing a shot of a character looking out of an empty window, turning the camera away for a moment, then turning back to the window, only this time the pink-tinted clock tower seen throughout the series is visible through it. Hey, it's made by the same guys as Revolutionary Girl Utena, what did you expect?
    • In the first episode, clips of light bulbs turning on are shown as more of the characters realize Haruhi's secret. In the last episode, during an interaction between Éclair Tonnerre and Haruhi, a shot of an unlit light bulb is shown. (Which then turns on once she discovers Haruhi's secret as well. Problem solved.)
  • PandoraHearts. The series as a whole. With Alice in Wonderland as its template, this isn't too surprising. It only gets worse as the series progresses... Various characters thought to be the epitome of truth were lying, and their truth was what was keeping us all sane.
  • Studio Gainax managed to top everything they have ever done with Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt. Just the first episode of it is more than enough to screw your brain up.
  • Paranoia Agent: In the end, Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies because that designer chick lied about how her dog died... when she was in sixth grade. In between, a smiling lad on golden rollerskates who may or may not be real, magic or just a metaphor goes around bashing people's heads in, except when he doesn't. This was also directed by Satoshi Kon.
    • Clap Your Hands If You Believe turns guilt and repression into a real life serial killer. Since these are staples of Japanese culture, most of the country (well, Tokyo anyway, the rest we don't see much) dies.
  • Penguindrum, by Kunihiko Ikuhara, has a lot of symbolism and general weirdery as well.
  • Perfect Blue by Satoshi Kon does this for most of the movie until the climax, which partially serves as a Mind Screwdriver, followed up with the Wham Line. It gets worse when you notice Mima was singing her solo at the beginning in Rumi's voice.
  • Puella Magi Madoka Magica featured a mostly understandable, though still complex, plot with somewhat screwy Eldritch Locations and a few other scenes of bizarre imagery. Puella Magi Madoka Magica The Movie: Rebellion, on the other hand, is filled with strange and confusing visual effects and not-quite-symbolism with some really weird representations of Homura's psychology.
  • If you think Eva is confusing, watch RahXephon and cry your brains out. Over half of the series is spent Contemplating Our Navels and the backstory is revealed almost completely without exposition; it's so hardcore that it's nigh-impossible to piece it all together. Special mention goes to figuring out all the connections between Ayato and the rest of the cast. The Movie is clearer but not by much.
  • Revolutionary Girl Utena. The anime series is screwy enough, but Adolescence of Utena rivals End of Evangelion. Utena's director Ikuhara has expressed particular, almost sadistic, delight in the despair fans have shown over figuring things out. Some of his more famous replies to fans have been "Miki keeps timing things because his watch contains the secret of the universe" and "The reason Utena turns into a car in the movie is because I really wanted to turn a cute girl into a car."
  • Sailor Moon is usually free of this... Except for the fact that, in the manga, there's at least three Sailor Pluto at the same time.note 
  • Serial Experiments Lain. We dare you to try to make sense out of it without help. Or... well, even with help. The first four episodes of the story are (relatively, mind you) coherent. The remaining nine are so absurd and dadaist that it makes Evangelion look completely self-explanatory by comparison.
  • Being the Spiritual Successor to Chaos;Head, Steins;Gate proves to be a massive Mind Screw, but inverts it because everything is solved or explained by the end.
  • Sonny Boy seems to resists interpretation. The story starts with a pretty strange setting of a school with superpowered students floating in the middle of nowhere and it only gets stranger from there. Any explanation comes with its own plethora of questions and complications, the time skip between episodes is disorienting due to days or weeks passing with no explanation given to the viewer, surreal visuals and plot elements are abound (for example, a talking dog joining the main cast and characters raving about the story of a baseball league composed of monkeys that can only be seen when a specific flashlight is turned on someone), and even the editing of the anime seems to want to disorient the viewers and give the impression of things impossible to understand happening suddenly. Many fans and reviewers believe that this is partly the intent, however, as the anime is less interested in telling a narrative as much as furthering its themes of growing up and the world being a confusing, unknowable place for a teenager, as well as provide a treat to the senses through visual elements and its soundtrack.
  • The SoulTaker is what happens when you take Devilman and mix it with Neon Genesis Evangelion. The seventh episode's screwy enough that it will make you realize how easy it is to understand Evangelion. Make that Devilman meets Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Akiyuki Shinbo, and as we all know most of the stuff he directs is Mind Screw, even Pani Poni Dash! to an extent.
  • Tekkonkinkreet starts out pretty straightforwardly. The ending, on the other hand...
  • Many fans commented that Tokyo Ghoul features so much symbolism that its either impossible to keep up without rereading it or you need to pay close attention to notice the more subtle details.
  • Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE-. So ambiguous and convoluted at times that official translators admit in the notes that they're making a guess and winging it. Unofficial translators do not say such in the notes only because that takes up space better filled by actively and profusely cursing at CLAMP. Making a timeline for this series is practically impossible. And don't even think about trying to create a character chart. Even the characters are baffled by some of what's going on. Among the characters that have expressed a great deal of confusion is The Chessmaster Big Bad. AKA, the man who planned a decent chunk of the confusing events. And believe or not, in a Funny way, now that ×××HOLiC has ended, even Word of God has admitted that they too are rather confused over how everything turned out and want to re-read it.
    • Though it all makes a weird sort of sense when you take into account that said Big Bad had been mucking about with the laws of reality, screwing up everything and causing things that should not make sense, or are flat out impossible to happen.
  • Urusei Yatsura's second movie, Beautiful Dreamer, which before Evangelion could possibly have been called the gold standard for anime Mind Screw. It was directed by Mamoru Oshii, and basically set the tone for much of his future work.
  • Yakuza Girl. So much. Starts off as a standard tits-n-gore seinen sort of manga, and just spirals into "WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN" territory. When a psychic preventing the bombing of Hiroshima by freezing the plane in time (and midair) for 50+ years isn't even the strangest part of the series, you know you've got a Mind Screw series on your hands...
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: The fun starts in Season 3, when suddenly the main enemy is a severely psychologically damaged Human Alien intent on proving their affection by putting the protagonist through horrendous trauma. That's the straightforward part. Then comes Season 4. Those three seasons that made it look like your typical Gaming and Sports Anime & Manga were just deceiving you.
  • Yuri Kuma Arashi, by the same creator as Utena and Penguindrum above, is about bears who can disguise themselves as humans. While this concept, and a few others, are explained at the very beginning of the series, a large amount of details regarding the setting have to be learned through observation — and, just like the creator's other works, said setting is a World of Symbolism. In the end, it ended up being easier to understand than his previous shows, but that's not to say it was a straight story either.
  • What happens when some Hentai such as Issho ni H Shiyo!, Betsu ni Anta no Tame ni Ookiku Natta ja Nai Dakara ne!! and Tsunpri effectively wrote the POV part in such a way to make you have sex with characters like Yui, Hina, Aoi, Haruka and so on and just completely disregarded the fourth wall altogether, as if a good look at the characters' voluptuous bodies with nicely-shaped breasts and nipples isn't enough? Well, even if you're a veteran Hentai fan, the POV segment will still catch you off guard, since most hentai do not enact the POV segment that bizarrely, or at least put a large emphasis on that. Not with Issho Ni H Shiyo! and others though, these hentai puts you, the viewer, in direct sex scenes with the characters. The Fake Interactivity was well-exploited on this one.

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