Anime / Lycoris Recoil

Protecting the public safety of Japan - but which public? ^note From left to right: Sakura, Takina, Fuki, Chisato, Erika, Hibana

"In the constitutional nation of Japan, and its capital city Tokyo, there are no dangers. We cannot allow the existence of people who disrupt our society. We can't even allow them to exist in the first place. Erase, delete, eradicate, and beautify. Dangers never existed to begin with. Peace is upheld by the very nature of us Japanese people. To be able to think that way makes me the happiest. And we are the ones who create that. The purpose of a Lycoris.”

"That's what I was told!"

—Chisato Nishikigi

DA: Direct Attack, a secret organization dedicated to maintaining the public safety of Japan through any means necessarily. DA utilizes "Lycoris," young women trained as spies and assassins, to assist in this process. Takina Inoue was a member of DA's headquarters before being transferred to the cafe "LycoReco" due to a mission where she disobeyed orders. She is partnered with Chisato Nishikigi, considered a top-tier Lycoris by many. Chisato doesn't appear to be the ideal Lycoris, though — but nothing is as it appears in the world of Lycoris.

Lycoris Recoil is an original action thriller anime created by Spider Lily and Asaura (of Ben-To fame), produced by A-1 Pictures and aired in the Summer 2022 Season. The series is licenced by Aniplex USA who are simulcasting it on Crunchyroll, with an English dub from Bang Zoom! Entertainment currently streaming. The English dub premiered on Adult Swim's Toonami block on January 20th, 2024 and aired until April 14th, 2024.

There is also a stage play adaptation that ran in January 2023.

On February 11, 2023, a new LR-related animation project was announced to be in production.

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Whatever your order is, leave it all up to these tropes!

• All Part of the Show: Invoked. Despite Majima's public broadcast exposing DA to Japan, Kurumi manages to take back control of the airwaves from Robota and then quickly kludge up a fake broadcast claiming the footage of all the gunfights is just part of a Spy Fiction-themed Alternate Reality Game taking place at the Enkuboku. Combined with the restored Radiata returning to run media control, Japan's populace (mostly) buys the excuse, sparing all the Lycoris from being executed by the LilyBell agents in a clean-up operation.
• Artistic License – Physics: In real life, PKM machine guns have a weight of 4.5kg even in their lightest versions and not counting the ammo, and they also produce an appropriately fearsome kickback. No amount of presumable strength (additional factors in play like body weight and weight distribution would be just as necessary) would allow a slender, 1.60m girl like Takina to fire it at full auto from the hip all casually and achieving enough precision to hit a target without harming the dangerously close hostage.
• As Lethal as It Needs to Be: In one scene, Chisato shoots non-lethal bullets and they penetrate through a metal car's door, yet when she attacks the enemies in the next scene, the non-lethal bullets don't penetrate through them, only knock them out.
• Awesome Backpack: Lycoris backpacks contain pistol holsters and submachine guns, and can also expand into a bulletproof airbag in a pinch.
• Beneath Notice: Schoolgirls are everywhere in urban Japan, so by dressing their agents up in school uniforms, DA ensures that most people who see one ignore them completely.
• Bloodless Carnage: Lots of mob Lycoris get killed during large-scale operations (most notably the metro and the flashback back to the Tower incident ones), but thankfully, we are spared from seeing their corpses. Not so much the case in Episode 11 when an armed civilian and a Lycoris agent shoot each other dead.
• Book Ends: In the first episode, Saori starts the LycoReco crew on their journey after accidentally snapping a shot of the arms deal. Then, in Episode 13, she accidentally snaps a shot of Chisato when she and her boyfriend are on vacation, as Chisato had run away after receiving her surgery and was trying to hide.
  Chisato: Miss Saori, at some point you're gonna take a picture of an alien or something.
• Breaking the Fellowship: By Episode 10, Takina returns to DA, and Chisato decides to shut down LycoReco so that Mizuki and Kurumi won't waste time trying to repair her heart. That said, though they all claim they'll leave the country, it's strongly implied they haven't given up on Chisato. Episode 11 shows Kurumi and Mizuki cancelling their flights when Kurumi finds out that Shinji acquired a new artificial heart for Chisato.
• Broke Episode: The first half of Episode 8 focuses on Takina's attempts to get LycoReco back into profitability, some of these even hampering Chisato directly on missions. It's dropped shortly after the café has enough money to not only make above profit, but to buy a robot server to help out.
• Character Blog: LycoReco has a real Twitter account, which had Chisato and Mizuki post about the cafe and the destroyed radio tower until the broadcast. During the broadcast (as of Episode 4), trailers of the next episodes are posted with a comment from one of the staff, and life advice for troubles of the viewers by the staff are given as well.
• Child Soldiers: The Lycoris are trained as assassins from a very young age - Chisato stopped a terrorist attack 10 years ago... and she's still only 17-18 now. Mika notes that Lycoris generally retire around 18, which is why he was (initially) fine with Chisato's artificial heart giving out when she reached adulthood.
• Color-Coded Characters:
  • As part of their job at the LycoReco cafe, Chisato wears a red kimono, Takina a blue one, Kurumi wears yellow, Mizuki wears green, and Mika wears purple.
  • The Lycoris wear color-coded jackets as part of their school uniform "camouflage", depending on their rank: Top-tier agents wear scarlet red, mid-levels wear navy blue, and lower level/trainees wear khaki.
• Cool Car: The "supercar" that Chisato sees in Episode 2 is a Lexus LFA. It's no wonder she's all mopey afterwards when Walnut shows up in a much less extravagant white hatchback and they have to leave the Lexus behind.
• Crapsaccharine World: Tokyo particularly and Japan overall are touted as being the safest places to live in the world, but that comes at the cost of DA preemptively assassinating anybody that is a potential threat. And their agents? Orphaned girls trained and indoctrinated from childhood to be government-sanctioned assassins. And they're fighting terrorist threats on almost a daily basis. Episode 11 also has Majima reveal that 3,000 people a year go missing in Tokyo and implies that many of those disappearances are caused by Lycoris agents.
• Conspiracy Theorist: One of the hackers Robota hires in episode 6 proudly proclaims himself as one, even proclaiming that both Freemasons and the Illuminati (both common conspiracies) are themselves hoaxes. He makes the mistake of hacking into Radiata directly, something even Robota is terrified about. The police quickly arrest him for both the hacking and the subsequent child porn they "find" in his possession.^note It's implied the authorities planted it to avoid discussing D.A.
• Death Faked for You: Walnut turns to LycoReco for help escaping. What Mika and Mizuki cook up is an audacious plan to masquerade as Walnut, while an unaware Chisato and Takina bodyguard the real Walnut in a supposed "escape" to the airport, until "he's" gunned down by rival hitmen, leaving everyone initially convinced that Walnut has been killed.
• Dodge the Bullet: Chisato seemingly has this ability, since a gunman using a rifle at close range was unable to hit her and she's able to dodge Takina's hair-tie bullet at the end of Episode 2, despite Takina being behind her. It turns out this is because she has enough awareness to know where the bullet is going to end up; Kusunoki states Chisato could dodge a bullet fired right against her head. This is further explained in Episode 6 by Mizuki: Chisato watches the movements of her opponent's muscles and clothing, allowing her to predict where they plan to shoot.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • In Episode 5, Detective Abe starts recognizing that the government may be covering up violent incidents as simple accidents. When considering how to respond to this, he spies Chisato and Takina, and decides that if the cover ups help make Japan more peaceful for girls like them, it should be fine. He's completely unaware that those exact same girls are in fact aiding in the cover ups, meaning they will never have the peace they are upholding for everyone else, Abe included.
  • In Episode 9, Mika's flashback reveals that when Chisato first met Yoshimatsu, he called himself a "savior". This had an enormous impact on Chisato, prompting her to take on her non-lethal mantra when Yoshimatsu wanted her to become a killing machine. Episode 10 shows he's aware of this mistake and his attempts to get her to kill are meant to correct it.
• Due to the Dead: While the OP heavily focuses on colourful shots of Takina and Chisato being cute and awesome, there is also a section right in the middle where we see plenty of faceless Lycoris agents in subdued colors and walking slowly before being engulfed in an explosion - the scene clearly evokes a funeral march, and the faceless girls are all the dead Lycoris agents that get routinely killed during DA operations.
• Enhance Button:
  • Done in Episode 2 to figure out who is in the picture of the arms deal that was taken by Saori. Kurumi also does it in Episode 3 to DA's version of the photo, leaving Mizuki rather pissed off.
  • Episode 11 takes Kurumi's analysis abilities to ludicrous levels, especially given all she was using at the time was a headset and voice commands. With those, she does the following: analyze a photo of a person's face, use the reflection in the person's iris to determine their immediate surroundings, use time-lapsing to look at the location when it was an active workshop, look through camera footage from 10 years ago, record audio vibrations in liquids like coffee to create a profile of the person's voice, then cross-reference it to find the latest point the person spoke in the same room. Phew.
  • In Episode 13, this is done again when Saori sends Takina another photo of her and her boyfriend that accidentally caught a snapshot of Chisato, who had gone into hiding.
• False Utopia: Japan is known to be the safest place in the world, but this is only possible due to preemptive assassination of anyone who might cause an incident. This is then reinforced by a media that reports only what DA tells them, covering up deaths and violent crimes as nothing more than accidents. And all of this is only possible due to intensive surveillance by the government and their exploitation of orphan girls to serve as child soldiers.
• Flower Motifs:
  • Both the imagery of the series and the name for DA Child Soldiers is linked to the Lycoris radiata, a flower heavily associated with death, funerals and graves in Japan. It seems appropriate for the Lycoris girls' role as assassins, and how many of them are regularly killed in action without ever receiving any official tribute for their sacrifice.
  • Even more directly, the spider lily seen prominently in the show has a direct, straightforward meaning from its historical use. The scientific name - Lycoris radiata - is the name of our assassins and of DA's computer system. Historically, the poisonous plant was grown at the edges of rice fields, to discourage bugs and mice from eating the rice, just as DA and the Lycoris protect the peace of Tokyo.
  • To further drive the point home, almost every character have Floral Theme Naming:
    • Chisato's name is written with the kanji for "thousand binds", while her last name Nishikigi refers to the winged spindle-tree.
    • Mizuki means "dogwood".
    • Kusunoki means "camphor tree".
    • Fuki refers to giant butterbur, a herbal plant that can be used as vegetables.
    • Erika refers to the erica flower.
    • Sakura means cherry blossom.
    • Hibana means "sparks", but also comes from Higanbana, Japanese for red spider lily, the very flower of the series.
    • Kurumi means "Walnut", which also connects with her alias. It may in fact, just be her alias and not her real name.
• Fourth-Wall Mail Slot: LycoReco has a real page where viewers can post about their troubles, with some of them getting a reply from the cafe's staff. The page can be accessed here.
• Gambit Pileup: Yoshimatsu arranged for Majima to terrorize Tokyo as part of a greater scheme to push Chisato towards killing. But by episode 9, Majima's obsession with Chisato winds up having him track down Yoshimatsu, capturing the very man who was trying to use him.
• Gas Leak Cover Up: One of the standard-issue excuses released to the public in regards to any Lycoris-related incident. In the first episode, Takina ventilates a room of arms dealers in a high rise building with a machine gun, but Saori, a civilian Takina later meets, only hears that a "gas explosion" had occurred.
  • The Scapegoat: After Majima and his gang perforate a police station, the news comes out with a story that a 52 old year old Yakuza lieutenant had orchestrated the attack. Mizuki comments that fully tattooed Yakuza are a rarity in the modern day, implying that DA went and dug up the most stereotypically Yakuza looking stooge they could find within their cellblocks.
• Girls with Guns: A very straightforward example. The Lycoris is a secret police force consisting of young badass girls, and Chisato and Takina the most badass of all.
• Go-Karting with Bowser: Downplayed, but also implied that Majima and Chisato seem to have a lot of common ground and would hit it off really well over film discussion alone if the circumstances were different.
• Good Guns, Bad Guns: Chisato and Takina use different western high-end pistols while the assorted arms dealers, terrorists, and mercenaries opposing them have largely been using post-Soviet firearms such as Kalashnikov-family rifles and PKM machineguns.
• Halloween Episode: While not adhering to the theme of the trope, the closest that the series gets is Episode 8, with Chisato wearing a pumpkin-themed dress with bat wings and horns, and Takina dressed as a Cute Witch wtih cat ears and tail as well. One scene even goes as far as to include decorations saying "Happy Halloween" and children dressed in costume as well.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Episode titles are taken from pieces of advice ("The more the merrier", "More haste, less speed", etc.)
• I Don't Know Mortal Kombat: In episode 4 Takina walks in to the cafe to discover Chisato playing a VR shooter game. Despite being a gunslinging one woman army in real life, Chisato is apparently struggling with the game, and has to get Takina to beat her opponent for her. Justified in that a bulk of Chisato's combat skill comes from her ability to read her opponents by watching their body language, even allowing her to dodge bullets by reading where they are aiming. The simplistic character models of the game lack all the minute movements that make this possible.
• It's All Upstairs From Here: The location of the final battle in the anime is both the Enkuboku and the ruins of the Skytree, with DA's Lycoris squads storming one, which turns out to be a trap, and Chisato raiding the other alone, to rescue Yoshimatsu and stop Majima.
• Karma Houdini: The hitmen hired by Robota to kill Walnut are not taken in for their actions in Episode 2, though this is after Takina gravely wounds one of them and then Chisato saves the man from bleeding out. Robota manages to avoid justice until Episode 12, when Kurumi fries his setup and pinpoints his location for Detective Abe, who arrests him. By the end of the series, Majima is the only character who still qualifies for this trope, as he survives falling from Enkuboku Tower and is still at large. While he is shown to be heavily injured from the previous battle, it is implied that he will be coming up with a new plan.
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: In episode 4, several background Lycoris happen to be dead-ringers for Asuna, Suguha and Rika from Sword Art Online, which was also adapted by A-1 Pictures. Just to drive the reference home, they appear when Majima makes his first appearance, who also happens to have Kirito's voice actor.^note Tragically, all three were presumably KIA'd when Majima detonated explosives kept in his men's bags.
• Lighter and Softer: The series has much in common with Gunslinger Girl and Under the Dog, with the government using female child assassins to covertly enforce public order. However, Lycoris Recoil has a much more optimistic outlook on the situation compared to those series thanks to the chipper and happy Chisato, and the levity from the slice of life moments.
• Lovely Angels: Chisato and Takina, following in the footsteps of the Dirty Pair, right down to one being a Genki Girl with light-colored short hair and the other more demure with long, dark hair. Furthering the similarity, they are the best team on the force, but are hated by management.
• Minor with Fake I.D.: Kurumi whips up some fake identities for Chisato and Takina so they can get into Bar Forbidden, boasting about how people will blindly trust whatever a computer shows them over their own eyes. She then tries to enter the bar with her own fake ID, only for the employees to stop her for being very obviously a child.
• Luminescent Blush: In Episode 4, when Takina asks what kind of situation would involve showing off her panties, Chisato's face turns red before brushing off the question, obviously not wanting to discuss sex. At the end of the episode, Takina herself turns red when Mizuki lifts up her skirt to check what lingerie she's wearing.
• Mission Control: Multiple versions:
  • DA Headquarters is a standard version of this, with multiple big screens, and a staff on computers direction the action.
  • Robota is a one-man version, directing and supporting Majima with a bank of monitors, drones, and the like.
  • Kurumi is also a one-man mission control, but doing it improvised with just a laptop and VR glasses. She's just that good.
• Monumental Damage: The Skytree ended up being destroyed in in a past incident (for which Majima is responsible and which Chisato foiled), and its partially standing wreckage still remains as a monument to peace.
• Mook Horror Show: When Majima pays a visit to Chisato's safehouse uninvited, he asks if she remembers him from the Radio Tower incident, which she does not. When Majima finishes his Flash Back, Chisato complains that she doesn't appreciate being described like some kind of monster.
• Murder by Remote Control Vehicle: Robota attempts to do this to Walnut by hacking their car and driving it into the ocean, but the hack is overridden and Chisato and Takina distract Robota long enough to prevent another hack. He tries again in Episode 6 by controlling a van and trying to collide it with Mizuki's car, but Mizuki dodges it.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: The Governor of Tokyo that makes a brief appearance in Episode 13 is a dead-ringer for the real-life Governor of Tokyo, Yuriko Koike.
• Never Trust a Trailer: Early trailers focused entirely on the cafe and slice of life elements, entirely omitting the whole "Secret Police preemptively killing potential threats" aspect, only for the first episode to immediately open with the premise.
• Panty Shot: In Episode 4, Chisato takes Takina shopping after seeing that she wears men's boxers on Mika's recommendation. When Takina checks Chisato's panties for comparison, they're obscured by Takina's head. Chisato's panties are briefly seen when she tries out the boxers at the end of the episode, but only when they've dropped down to her feet, and when she directs Mizuki toward Takina to explain who the boxers came from, Takina's new panties are also obscured by Mizuki's head.
• Police Are Useless: Due to Lycoris agents intercepting all terrorists and violent criminals, the Tokyo Police don't have sufficient experience in dealing with potentially hostile scenarios. This bites them in the ass in Episode 10 when Majima spreads his thousands of guns around Tokyo and encourages civilians to take them. This quickly results in one officer shooting a curious civilian dead for holding a pistol.
• Punch-Clock Villain: Part of Chisato's motivation in avoiding killing her opponents is the belief that they're not inherently bad, they just had the bad luck of taking on a job that puts them in opposition against her and they wouldn't be hostile otherwise. This appears to be the case with the mercenaries sent after Walnut and Silent Jin, who peacefully part ways with Chisato after she spares them. Not so much with Majima, who is very much evil and willing to kill anyone to further his needs.
• Put on a Bus: Kurumi and Mizuki in episode 10. Or, rather, put on a cab. Subverted the next episode.
• Real-Place Background: The final episode has a scene that takes place on Miyako Island, which is in Okinawa Archipelago south of the mainland. Scenes include the front of the airport, Irabu Bridge (which connects to the nearby Irabu Island), and the "Blue Turtle" restaurant, which is an actual restaurant.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: The series starts with Takina being demoted and transferred to LycoReco as punishment for disobeying orders during a mission. Episode 3 also suggests this happened to Chisato, as neither she nor Kusunoki are on friendly terms, though it's unclear what happened to cause it. However, unlike Takina, Chisato doesn't mind it in the least.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Chisato (red) and Takina (blue). Chisato is friendly, vibrant and outgoing, while Takina is professional, logical and introverted. Fittingly, they dress in their respective colors.
• Red Spider Lilies of Mourning: The Lycoris are a group of schoolgirl assassins who covertly kill criminals in order to maintain the facade of Japan being a crime-free nation, just as their namesake is used to protect farms. The organization they work for, DA, also has an advanced AI called Radiata that controls information and covers up Lycoris activities.
• Running Gag:
  • Both Kurumi and Robota lose a lot of drones throughout the series. Robota even lampshades it in Episode 11.
  • Robota shouting "MY DOOR!" whenever it gets kicked in by someone. The third time this happens, it's due to Detective Abe arresting him.
• School Uniforms are the New Black: Lycoris wear school uniforms when "on duty." As Walnut notes, in Japan, girls in school uniforms are practically urban camouflage.
• Secret Police: The DA is essentially this, as they assassinate criminals and terrorists to prevent crime, and cover up the ones they cannot.
• Sequel Hook:
  • Majima survives his fall off the Enkuboku Tower in the finale and is still at large.
  • Chisato and Takina are taking troubleshooting requests from locals in Hawaii.
  • Even after Kurumi manages to trick most of Tokyo's population, there are many who still suspect the Lycoris agents actually exist. Additionally, over half of Majima's firearms are unaccounted for, just waiting for someone to pick them up and start some havoc.
  • The LilyBell is introduced at the very end of the first season, with one of their members being set up as a possible rival for Chisato.
• Shock-and-Switch Ending: Used in Episode 2. It appears that Walnut has been gunned down, but it turns out to have been a ploy to fake Walnut's death, and Chisato and Takina weren't told of this because their reactions needed to be genuine.
• Shoe Phone: The schoolgirl backpacks the Lycoris carry around actually carry pistol magazines on the bottom and the pistols themselves on their sides in quick-release compartments.
• Shoot the Hostage Taker: In the first episode, when a Lycoris has been taken at gunpoint by arms dealers, Takina does this. With a PKM machinegun. She didn't particularly care if she had hit the Lycoris, though. It turns out, she justifiably had the utmost confidence in her ability to shoot the hostage taker without hitting her fellow Lycoris.
• Shout-Out:
  • An unexpected shout out to the film Stand by Me, of all things, where two characters are walking away and one kicks the other and the recipient retaliates. It's a frame-by-frame match for the original.
  • The show's closing credits shows a doodle that's a clear reference to a rocket landing on the Moon's face in A Trip to the Moon.
  • Chisato's habit of holding her pistol in a diagonal Center Axis Relock almost exactly mirrors another former professional killer, John Wick.
    • Episode 11 has Chisato wielding a Keltec KSG shotgun like what John Wick used in the first film.
  • The words around the hacker Walnut's logo read "I have you properly taped, my lad," a line from the short story "Grace" in James Joyce's Dubliners.
    • Walnut's circular logo and slogan spinning around the logo are the same style as the Laughing Man from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, but Walnut's logo is a squirrel instead of an emoji with a baseball cap.
  • In Episode 2, Some of the movies Chisato was considering to suggest to Takina include "Rum Air", "Eliminator", "Guy Hard", and "Max Trick".
  • In Episode 4, Chisato flips Takina's skirt and finds out that she wears boxer shorts underneath it. During this moment, the theme from Terminator 2: Judgment Day plays.
  • In Episode 8, the names of some of the social media accounts commenting on Takina's cake are direct references to pilots from the Ace Combat series, such as Mobius 1, Yellow 13, Omega 11 and Jean Louise from Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies. Additionally, Chisato and Takina’s color schemes resemble that of Pixy and Cipher’s respectively.
  • In Episode 12, Kurumi leads the Lycoris agents to avoid the LilyBell strike team with an interface that looks like a game of Pac-Man.
  • The setup, and Chisato's name, reference the 2021 film Baby Assassins:
  Teenage professional assassins Chisato (Akari Takaishi) and Mahiro (Saori Izawa) are suddenly ordered by their boss to become ordinary members of society and move in together to disguise their true identities. Their already unreasonable lives are now tangled up in tedious official business, absurd job interviews and roommate clashes. Tension starts to rise when Chisato easily adapts to more conventional channels of employment, while Mahiro remains unable to cope with interpersonal relations.
• Shown Their Work:
  • Episode 1 shows Chisato taking the retention stance when it comes to shooting a pistol, which is where the shooter tucks in their shooting arm into their body. This is to prevent a close range attacker from grabbing your gun, easily smacking the arm out of the way, or using the arm for leverage in some manner. This is necessary because Chisato's non-lethal bullets are inaccurate, requiring her to shoot her targets at essentially melee range. Everyone else doesn't adopt this stance, and Chisato takes advantage of this in Episode 3.
  • Episode 2 shows a Lexus LFA in a parking lot, which Chisato considers a "super car".^note To her dismay, she doesn't get to drive it.
    • In the same episode, one of the hitmen after Walnut pulls the pin on a grenade before Chisato knocks it out of his hands. The timer on it doesn't start until she does this. The pin is not what starts the timer on a grenade - it holds a handle in place that starts the fuse once said handle comes off.
  • Episode 4 starts with Chisato and Takina at a firing range, using rubber bullets. As would be the case in real life, they are horribly inaccurate. Chisato overcomes this by using her dodging skills to get into point-blank range of her targets, eliminating the accuracy issue. Once Takina switches back to her regular pistol rounds, she's back to near-perfect accuracy with her handgun.
  • Episode 6 shows that rubber bullets, while intended to be non-lethal, are still capable of inflicting grievous harm on a person if they hit the right spot. Majima takes a rubber round to the forehead from Chisato and is left bleeding afterwards.
    • In the same episode, one of Majima's terrorists uses a Panzerfaust-3, which the JSDF is known to have access to.
  • The DA's use of KRISS Vector submachine guns may come across as Rule of Cool considering that they're notoriously failure-prone, but there's one very practical reason for using them: they're compatible with Glock magazines, the same kind of magazines that the Lycoris school bags are custom-made to carry.
  • In Episode 11, Chisato enters the Skytree armed with a Keltec KSG shotgun, a weapon fully capable of loading non-lethal cartridges.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: pretty much sums up the whole series; a dark and deadly world of spy fiction where youngs girls are trained to murder terrorists in secret - said girls being at the danger of being "erased" at any moment notice if the higher-ups think their existence compromise the masquerade - where the main protagonist is a superpowered shounen manga Technical Pacifist who avoid killing anybody while moonlighting as the cute and friendly mascot of your local cafe.
• Spear Counterpart: Lycoris has LilyBell, which is essentially the same kind of agent trained from birth, but they are all boys. They are intended to be a counter to the Lycoris agents should they ever go rogue or threaten The Masquerade of peace in Tokyo.
• Spy Fiction: A dark and dangerous Dirty Martini world with Chisato thinking (or at least acting like) she's the protagonist of an idealistic and fun Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan Tuxedo and Martini Bond Film, whereas Takina and the rest of the organization (tries) to embrace the cruel and dark Stale Beer cynicism of a Timothy Dalton and Daniel Craig Bond Film in spite of Chisato trying her darned best to make everyone look on the bright side of life.
• Strange Minds Think Alike: Chisato and Takina play an online video game at the café but are unaware that the opposing players are Fuki and Sakura, who likewise don't know who their opponents are. The two groups have the following exchange: One of the girls (Takina/Sakura) comments how her partner (Chisato/Fuki) is taking the game seriously, to which the partner responds in unknown unison:
  Chisato/Fuki: "Well/I Mean Yeah! Take a look at their annoying username!"
• Surveillance Drone: A recurring element in the setting, with both Kurumi and Robota having a large supply of what are essentially quadrotors with cameras attached serving as eyes in the sky, with DA also employing one in Episode 10 as well.
• Terrible Artist: When Takina and Chisato draw a picture in Episode 7, they both look utterly amateurish. They were supposed to draw Majima's appearance for DA, but Takina's attempt is creepy, and Chisato's only just being slightly better by looking more "like a manga". Fuki's attempt, while better on a technical level, looks nothing like the subject. Sakura snarks about how drawing should be a requirement to be a Lycoris as this happens.
• Title Drop Episode: Episode 13 is titled "Recoil of Lycoris", which can also be grammatically interpreted as "Lycoris Recoil".
• Toilet Humor:
  • Chisato groans while mulling over "Bar Forbidden" that she saw in a text on Mika's phone. Since she's in the restroom, a passing Kurumi assumes that she's suffering constipation.
  • One of the ways Takina tries to boost profitability for LycoReco is by creating a new desert made of chocolate. Many characters point out that it looks like a steaming pile of poo (though not to Takina's face, not wanting to upset her), which the café eventually capitalizes on. In spite of its looks, it's actually a very tasty dessert. Much to Takina's embarrassment, by the time she realizes what it looks like, the dessert is too popular to stop making.
• Truth in Television: Chisato's rubber bullets are notoriously inaccurate at any sort of distance, which is also the case for real life rubber rounds. Due to their design, they have terrible aerodynamics and frequently will veer off course rather than straight-and-true at anything beyond close range. Additionally, just because they are intended to be non-lethal does not mean they cannot kill; a rubber round that hits a person in the right spot could still be deadly. This is subverted, however, in the first episode when Chisato fires several rubber bullets through a car door; real life rubber rounds have next-to-no penetration power, especially against metal targets.
• Unstoppable Force Meets Immovable Object: Effectively any encounter between Chisato, a Fragile Speedster who can dodge bullets but fights with nonlethal rubber ammo, and Majima, a Stone Wall who refuses to stay down. Unlike most of Chisato's opponents, a few rubber rounds are simply not enough to keep Majima down for a prolonged period, so she needs to empty entire clips to pacify him. Chisato, the unstoppable force, always comes out ahead, though she needs assistance in her first two bouts with Majima. Their third fight, which ends the first season, is one Chisato wins without assistance, though she would have died if Takina hadn't arrived in time to save her from falling to her death. Majima actually enjoys invoking the trope because Chisato's morals interest him; he knows his life is never in danger when he fights Chisato, just his time, so he actively seeks her out.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: This is the justification for DA using Lycoris agents to covertly assassinate terrorists and criminals throughout Tokyo. To their credit, they've managed to keep things peaceful for 10 years by the time the series starts.
• Vehicular Assault: In Episode 6, Majima shoots at Chisato from his team's van after his initial strike fails. He comes close to doing this again during her rescue by commandeering the van Robota used to try and take out the LycoReco team before getting hit point blank by the blast of a Panzerfaust-3 rocket.
• Wham Episode:
  • Episode 10, in spades. Chisato decides to close down the café due to her limited remaining lifespan, while Majima unveils his ultimate scheme to expose the existence of DA and plunge Tokyo into chaos by scattering his thousands of firearms across the city, broadcasting to the public to go nuts with them. This immediately leads to tragedy when a curious civilian is shot dead by a police officer just for holding a pistol. To top it all off, Robota contacts Chisato and tells her not to interfere at the Enkuboku tower or they will kill Shinji.
  • Episode 11 follows it up with Majima revealing a scene of utter carnage inside Enkuboku tower to the people of Tokyo and exposing the Lycoris agents to the public, making it look like they caused a massacre. This is immediately followed by an armed civilian shooting a Lycoris agent, who shoots him dead in turn in her final moments. Majima also reveals that 3,000 people a year go missing in Tokyo, implying that a lot of them are killed by Lycoris agents. Utter panic ensues. Chisato then tracks down Majima in the Skytree, but the terrorist is fully prepared for her and gets the upper hand. And despite Takina's arrival at a crucial moment, Majima isn't defeated right away.
  • Befitting the penultimate episode, Episode 12 is a rollercoaster. The LilyBell agents are introduced with orders to eliminate any Lycoris agents in the Enkuboku Tower, while Robota is finally shut down and arrested thanks to Kurumi’s efforts, and the chaos in Tokyo is subdued for now. Shinji reveals that he has implanted Chisato’s replacement heart into himself, forcing a Sadistic Choice on whether to kill him and break Chisato’s moral code in order to save her. Then, Chisato ends up shooting Shinji with a live round in order to save Takina, though his wounds are non-fatal. Finally Majima, who had been subdued by Chisato and Takina earlier in the episode, shows up at the end to challenge Chisato one last time, separating her from the other Lycoris agents and ending the episode on a cliffhanger.
• Wham Line:
  • Episode 12: "The heart that will keep you alive is in here now."^note Shinji has implanted the new artificial heart in his chest, meaning Chisato would have to kill him in order to get it.
• Where It All Began: In Episode 11, Majima challenges Chisato to a duel at the ruins of the Skytree, where they first fought, and where Japan symbolically transformed into the incarnation manipulated by DA and the Lycoris. Chisato herself remarks on having to return to the tower as she storms it.

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