YMMV / Franken Fran

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Fans... differ on how they feel about Fran's Technical Pacifist For Science! morality.
• Creepy Cute:
  • Franken is a Mad Scientist who thinks that there's nothing worse than death and has a case of Blue-and-Orange Morality but she does have geunine good intentions and cares very much about her patients which she does best to help them even though it might lead to disaster.
  • Veronica is a assassin who will kill anyone in cold blood but however she is very polite, kind and nice towards people and is very adorable as well as shown with her love for her friends.
  • Gavrill is scary and terrifying but can be adorable as well as it is shown when she's with the people she cares about and does have moments of compassion and kindness when she's with other people and her sisters with her being very friendly towards Fran and even Veronica at times as well despite how things went the first time they met.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • A girl with an eye-patch wielding giant scissors shows up in chapter #7.5 page 14.
  • Another chapter features the cast holed up in a room while surrounded by killer mascots.
• I Am Not Shazam: The title character is named Fran Madaraki. She has never actually been referred to as Franken Fran; that's just to hammer in the Frankenstein reference.
• Les Yay:
  • Invoked Trope for the covers, which depict more...uh..."friendly" interactions between major female characters.
  • Veronica has a couple times gotten highly contemplative when the idea of "girls loving each other" or "girl on girl" was brought up. Especially in Chapter 22, which resolves around two girls who think their crushes on each are unrequited.
    • In general, Veronica's feelings her Fran are sometimes framed in this light. The final bonus chapter of the original run even lampshades this by having the interviewer directly ask Veronica about her rumored attraction to Fran.
  • Fran at one point gives Veronica a hickey. Just to make a point. You know.
  • Fran-M and L reuniting is immensely played up in this manner.
  • The penultimate chapter of the original series results in a brainless but alive clone of Fran. For some reason, Veronica likes spending a lot of time alone in her room with her...
• Moe: Several examples, in stark contrast to all the Body Horror:
  • Fran herself, usually. Then you see what monstrosities she has released upon the world, and occasionally see her at her most callous moments.
  • Veronica might appear to be a ruthless killer, but she actually has a good heart and is the most moral and ethical of the siblings, feeling a moral responsibility to at least grant quick and relatively painless deaths to her victims. Plus, she looks really, really cute and everyone screws with her so much that you can't help but want to hug her.
• Nausea Fuel: The copious amounts of gore and body horror can make this manga hard to sit through while eating.
• Signature Scene: The page(s) featuring a girl with a caterpillar body is probably the most infamous scene from the series, as it is somewhat of Memetic Mutation with people who haven't read the manga and have only seen the image out of context. Ironically enough, this is arguably one of the least disturbing things in the series.
• Squick:
  • The story runs on this and Body Horror, often with a Fate Worse than Death and/or And I Must Scream thrown in. You may as well introduce Franken Fran to others as "Squick: The Manga."
  • In Chapter 30, the people who get off on nearly killing themselves proves to be one of the few things that can get this reaction out of Fran herself.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The tale of Emily and her dog Pudding, even if it was a Franified parody of the legend of Hachiko. Emily watches her beloved dog get torn apart by a truck, gets him back in human form, and knows their relationship won't ever be like it used to be, but after months and almost getting assaulted by creeps on the street, they finally make their master-dog relationship work again...until she's revealed to have a nasty case of pneumonia and leaves Pudding at the station until she recovers. Emily dies of illness, and Pudding dies of hypothermia waiting for her.
  • Chapter 25, when Veronica is almost sold to a pedophile group by the only friend she made on school. The saddest part? She knew it the entire time, but stuck around as the girl was still the only one at school who ever treated her nicely. And at the end, Veronica said the only phrase that can be used to comic relief and heartwarming at the same time: "I'm not crying...I SAID I'M NOT CRYING!"
  • Chapter 38. One of the few times the final result of Fran's work is not played for Nightmare Fuel.
  • The ending of chapter 43, where a rich girl's uncle who formerly came to Fran for a brain transplant ended up sharing a body with her due to an "incomplete" operation. When a bomb goes off in her house and several people who were after the inheritance she received were killed, the uncle has his own brain put in the girl's old body while he made Fran put the girl's brain into a clone of her. The other people who got killed ended up sharing the old body along with him, as was the uncle's wishes (the body can't move unless all the minds sharing it agree on it, and he refuses every time just to spite them), just so that the girl could live freely.
  • Chapter 48. The somewhat Sympathetic Murderer Nogizaka finally finds happiness... comatose and dreaming of a fantasy world where, finally, there are people who love her. Come to think of it, this fact is what makes said character sympathetic.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Inevitable, given the manga's determination to make every chapter standalone (even the ones that are direct callbacks to earn earlier one). Many of Fran's genuinely world-changing inventions (such as the cocoon birth-method in Ch. 29) seem to vanish into the ether after being squeezed for 24 pages' worth of satirical Black Comedy and Body Horror, when they could have provided at least several more chapters' worth of worldbuilding.
• Ugly Cute: Okita, the cat with a guy's head. Said head (if you ignore the cat body) is actually quite handsome, as demonstrated when Okita used a puppet human body. Many of Fran's other creations also count, such as her dog-headed butler.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Despite having a high amount of body horror, gore, and female nudity, this was serialized in the Shonen magazine Champion Red, which was infamous for allowing a lot of edgy content before it eventually rebranded itself as seinen.
• The Woobie:
  • Adorea. She's got one hell of a tragic backstory. She's also a very sweet girl... when she's off the clock anyway. Only Franken Fran could make a tentacle faced man-eating organ harvesting Humanoid Abomination into a Woobie.
  • Officer Kuhou. She's always running into Fran and she's had far too much experience with her in the past. Kuhou will start to have a mini Freak Out any time she comes across her or if she even suspects her to be involved in her current case. Fran made her fight her own clones after a case for reasons best know to Fran. She does not even know if she is the original or not. Poor girl...Then it happens again.
  • Veronica, if you consider that she passed through quite a hell after she separated from Professor Madaraki and before she found Fran: Having a dog as her only companion (which very likely died), being scolded as a freak and constantly targeted by the mysterious organization that wants the professor's secret projects. Not to mention the bad things that occasionally happen to her, like the bullying she had to endure in chapter 25 - though in that case she came off as an Iron Woobie. Also, Fran apparently likes to take her apart and do...things to her.

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