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Narm / Arachnid

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With their reliance on animal funfacts for character and world development, absurd asspulls and constant Mood Whiplash, Arachnid and its followups Caterpillar, Choubu no Shinobi and Blattodea can be very cheesy stories.


Arachnid

  • The insect fun facts from the narrator, which are informative and mostly accurate, are a main draw of the series. Some, however, feel they detract from the action scenes. It's also hard to take seriously how the lectures give the impression each character is only as good as the analogies they have or how they're used to avoid actually answering how they even got their super powers, which range from mundane skills to sci-fi and supernatural abilities.
    The *insert bug here* from somewhere or other is oodely dodely cool and does this and that BUT THERE IS A SPIDER THAT--
  • Alice's wire traps are a Story-Breaker Power, as she uses them to their utmost potential. She gets brutally beat up as much as Seiya in any given fight and the situation will look dire but guess what, the enemy is All Webbed Up from out of nowhere. Likely before the battle even began. The process of crafting the traps is rarely shown, so they just seem to magically spawn all over the planet with next to no limitations and make every battle the same old test of endurance. It looks rather cool and it would actually make less sense for her to use it in any lesser way, but it can get tiring and predictable fast.
  • At one point, Alice restrains Amenbo underwater and leaves her to drown, but she survives by inflating like a balloon. That's because water striders can float by catching air between hairs on their bodies, ok?
  • The tongue-in-cheek way Kabutomushi reveals her steel plated heart has people flipping off their chairs wondering how that even works. And her arms are spiked. The prequel goes on to show all her other organs are armored as well.
    • Kabutomushi then no sells nerve gas. How? Because rhinoceros beetles are tough. That's the whole explanation.
  • Given Dinoponera is the resident "antagonist who looks like the protagonist and parallels them in practically everything", to get on Alice's level she runs the gauntlet of four characters who have been established as some of the strongest around without breaking a sweat, which easily comes across as ludicrous.
  • Chapter 60 has Alice and Kuramoto surrounded by Sara's army ants while she demands the two have sex in front of them. It's a tense situation, but there's something really amusing about how Alice puts on a strong front and politely asks Kuramoto to fuck her while she works on a solution.
  • For once strings have failed Alice, so she defeats Suzumebachi by simply dropping the Kumoito at him like a fang. The drat knife pierces through him, making a huge crater on the floor.
  • Ginyanma makes a shocking return after over 50 chapters and kills an important character. We then learn her bullets have dragonfly wings on them.
  • When the real Big Bad is finally revealed, you might think that "Alice being betrayed by a friend is old news", but don't worry, the author's got that covered... by spicing the scene up with an almost self-parodical string of ludicrous claims from the villain: Yoriko is immune to poison, can read minds and has lived for 100 years as an ageless girl in control of Japan's politics. She let Japan get nuked on purpose because it'd be an awesome loss! Any drama the reveal of Yoriko being an evil false friend could have is further turned into hilarity by the dozens of reaction shots of Alice looking utterly flabbergasted at every single word that comes out of their mouth.
  • Suzumebachi's corpse leaps over Alice to protect his daughter from sniper fire. It's supposed to be poignant, but ends up breaking suspension of disbelief as readers often point the story went for such an unlikely situation when having Alice just pull his corpse with her threads would've worked just fine.
  • The mind-reading Boss argues that Alice would have turned into a monster even if her whole family wasn't destroyed by the Organization before she was even born because she's repeatedly wishing death upon her. Why wouldn't Alice do that, considering the circumstances? In general, the series as a whole wants to pretend Alice is a mass murderer in the making while actually portraying her as a borderline Only Sane Woman.
  • When the Boss is about to drop Alice off the roof of the school, both characters hang a huge lampshade on how she's going to be rescued in the nick of time a couple pages later. Also, readers might be amused at how the dialogue sounds like it is quoting Polnareff's "reality is cruel" speech from Stardust Crusaders.
  • As Yoriko is about to go splat from being blown off the roof of the school, she reads Alice's thoughts of regret for losing her very first friend and replies she feels the same for her. This should be sad, but falls flat becuase it just comes off as yet another way to screw with Alice after all the fucking evil things Yoriko went out of her way to do against her.
  • Arachnid can be said to have made an arms race with Akame ga Kill! in the Gangan JOKER magazine out of making everything revolve around rape. Starting right from the first few pages with the usual random douchebags who try to rape the heroine once or twice per volume to going out of control with a woman with the power of mind control STD who causes a rape zombie apocalypse all over Japan. That every new character can be expected to be either a rapist, a rape victim in their backstory or otherwise threatened with it starts to get old after the first half-dozen times. By Blattodea, even Dinoponera is turned into a sexual predator for laughs after she nearly died from being gangraped by zombies and is suffering from both half-zombiefication and PTSD from it.

Caterpillar

  • The prequel shows Ageha is working for an old man who fervently worships the Organization's Boss due to being hired after he lost everything on WWII and has a Stalker Shrine of her. This reveal is played as a big deal and spoils the final twist of the main story, but once again it is hard not to laugh at a certain detail: the room only features a single regal picture of a little "6-years-old" Yoriko framed in multiple portraits all over it.
  • The story retcons Imomushi's thoughts about Dinoponera, with her now saying Dino's nowhere as unhinged and experienced as Paraponera and is nothing compared to natural-born murderer Alice... as she's nonetheless getting the snot beaten out of her by the girl. Blattodea turns this up to eleven by allowing Imomushi to effortlessly defeat Dinoponera and say all of this to her face, but even if Dinoponera really is a flawed and even cowardly fighter it doesn't change how she dominated Imomushi, Kabutomushi, Kamadouma and knocked Riokku out with a single damn uppercut Imomushi is now calling "light". Combined with several chapters portraying the formely threatening ant-girl as a goofy love interest and a rape fanservice joke character, it just comes across as heavy character derailment for her.
  • Hanakamakiri leaves Imomushi an Anguished Declaration of Love letter, saying he made a deal for her protection with her enemy Suzumebachi behind her back and that he wants to keep any conspiracies from targetting her again behind the scenes after he forces Alice to be the new Boss. As Imomushi doesn't give a damn about this "betrayal", doesn't have any enemies within the Organization anymore and was left asleep in her underwear right before the rape-zombies came knocking on her door, Hanakamakiri's departure can come off as something more baffling than saddening to even the audience.

Blattodea

  • The new protagonist Chiyuri starts out fighting Dinoponera of all people and does well against her. Suddenly, the narrator hypes cockroaches up as the pinnacle of arthropods after over 100 chapters of Megumi being a small potato who only ever won a fight against Geji, who then got worfed with her afterwards. As such, Chiyuri usurping Megumi and Alice simultaneously can end up rather amusing if you're not annoyed with her instead.
  • The story gives poor Setsuna Dinoponera a couple pages to cry in anguish over being gangraped and nearly doomed to undeath as a zombie before not just pulling the Rape Portrayed as Redemption card on her but also unironically establishing Suzumebachi called her over from Thailand just to get her raped in a convoluted plan to make her an ambulant zombie plague cure like it is some kind of amazing feat.
  • Megumi and Momoko effortlessly restrain and capture both Chiyuri and Setsuna. Those two did nothing but job practically every time they fought in previous installments (Momoko even just existed to give Megumi a single win) and now are just super strong all of a sudden. Momoko being literally an evil Tomoko Kuroki with a gun and doing a Title Drop to that character's series as her Catchphrase only makes the scene sillier.
  • Shoichiro turns up as an antagonist who unveils the next Quirky Miniboss Squad for the series, certain that they'll kill Chiyuri if she cannot be disciplined by other minions at Hibarigaoka Prison. The new characters aside from the reused female protagonist from Choubu no Shinobi don't look all that threatening on first glance, and it doesn't help one of them is just Shion "Abu" Matsuda, a swordsman who already got clowned on by Kabutomushi back in the Arachnid Hunt.
  • Chapter 36, which was published exactly ten years after Setsuna got raped senseless in Arachnid chapter 50, has Chiyuri solemnly telling Alice about how Setsuna was "reborn as a kind girl with a caring heart" after the "terrible experience" she suffered... OK, OK, we get it.

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