Manga / Hinamatsuri

Yoshifumi Nitta is an up-and-coming yakuza who one day has a girl in a metal cocoon drop into his apartment — specifically, onto his head — from out of nowhere.

The girl's name is Hina, and she's quite happy just to eat, sleep, and play console games. She also happens to be a psychokinetic who needs to regularly use her powers, otherwise they'll go wild.

Nitta is not happy about any of this, but Hina refuses to leave, so he reluctantly finds himself in the role of adoptive father to a gluttonous, lazy, none-too-bright psychokinetic freeloader.

Soon, more weirdos show up, and Nitta is forced to become the worst thing imaginable... a responsible adult.

Hinamatsuri is a half screwball comedy, half coming of age story written by Masao Ohtake. The series was originally serialized in Enterbrain's magazine Fellows! before it got rebranded into Harta, and published into 19 volumes and 100 chapters. The manga ran from 2010 to 2019.

An anime adaptation produced by Studio feel. started in April 2018, running for 12 episodes. It is available for worldwide streaming on Crunchyroll here. Funimation's Simuldub of the anime series premiered on April 26th, 2018. Watch it here.

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Tropes:

• Adults Are Useless:
  • A reccuring theme in Hitomi's spotlight chapters is her coming to the resolution that all the adults in her life are completely unreliable. The closest person she has to depend on is Nitta but when she tells him that, he's too obsessed with trying to get Anzu to view him as a father-figure.
  • Lampshaded by Nitta during the time he & Hitomi are competing for a launch in another company, where somehow their competitors manage to be defeated by a yakuza & a high school girl.
• All Part of the Show: Hina's school play is surprisingly standard on the big performance day, but when she accidentally trips and lands in a small coma, the kids are forced to improvise and Masutani insists on keeping it going so it can reflect well on him. The end of the play turns into a mashup of Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella, with Hina forgetting all her lines upon waking up, and ending it on Cinderella aspiring to be the greatest actress on Earth. No one in the audience buys it being genuine for a second.
• Ambiguous Situation: For the longest time, where Hina, Anzu, and Ikaruga come from went unanswered. Apparently, their time period was the subject of a huge war that only recently ended; it's hinted Hina and Anzu were human weapons and Ikaruga was their handler. The only clues to their origins are the numerous Terminator jokes. Finally answered in chapter 61 when Mao says she is from the future, while Chapter 76 further reveals the origins of the Organization that the three Esper girls worked for.
• And There Was Much Rejoicing: The twist of Chapter 38; while Hina is heartbroken to leave Nitta and suddenly overjoyed when she discovers she can't go back to her home time, she discovers that Nitta throws an entire party on his own because he just got his bachelorhood back. The note she intended for Nitta to read is instantly thrown in the trash.
• Anti-Climax: It's a series staple. The author frequently sets up dramatic moments as the Cliffhanger of one chapter, and then follows it up in the next chapter by turning the serious situations into farces instead.
• Asleep in Class: Hina is almost always sleeping through class, and after she starts getting a bunch of part-time jobs Hitomi joins her.
• Awkward Father-Son Bonding Activity: Chapter 43 focuses on Nitta and Hina awkwardly making vases together, after Nitta develops pottery as a hobby. They're only able to make a good vase when Hina adds her psychic powers to the mix, and both are interrupted by the police when they believe that Nitta, as a high ranking yakuza, is actually using his getaway cottage as a front for criminal activity.
• Bait-and-Switch Credits: The anime's opening sequence, set to the very positive and upbeat "Distance", portrays the series as a rather mundane but lighthearted story centered around the four main girls and their quirky town. The actual series is way more zany than how the opening portrays it, and skips over the yakuza subplots and the fact that Nitta and Utako aren't at all close.
• Beach Episode: The three esper girls head to the beach in chapter 75. This being the series it is, however, things don't go entirely to plan...but by the end, it does end up being one of their first true bonding exercises together.
• Book Ends: Volume 12 opens and shuts with a story about Nitta's reputation as the Monster of the Heisei Era. What's more, the first chapter of that volume has a chapter cover of Mika with her back to the audience, and the last has Nitta in the same position.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: Invoked. Chapter 55 has a rival yakuza attempt to assassinate Nitta for days, getting foiled by Hina, Anzu, Hitomi, and Mao at every turn. When he finally gets caught and is forced to apologize to Nitta, Nitta coldly tells him that he doesn't even recall an assassination attempt. In reality, all of the girls had successfully kept the fact that he was targeted a secret from him until that point, so he genuinely didn't know he was gonna get whacked.
• Break His Heart to Save Him: The bum who took in Anzu decides to reject her so she can get a good home.
• Call-Back:
  • Hitoshi's chapters call back to his first chapter with Hina, with chapter covers or spreads putting them side by side on the same street. They do this once he's introduced again in his second "Hang in There, Hitoshi" chapter.
  • "The End of Heisei"'s opening chapter page has Hitomi in the same stance he and Mika were in their focus chapters for Volume 12. Visually, it shows that she has the same, if not more power than either of them physically and financially.
  • When Nitta asks Hina to conjure up a storm, he recalls when Hina snapped from stress and created a rainstorm all the way back in Volume 5.
  • At the very end of the series, Hina comments that her being confessed to by Hitoshi finally makes her a woman, a small callback to a young Hina proclaiming that she's grown up after eating a bowl of salmon roe in Chapter 2.
• Child Care and Babysitting Stories: The plot starts with Nitta, whose life takes a new turn after a mysterious girl called Hina literally drops on his head out of nowhere. He reluctantly takes in and becomes her caregiver.
• Children Do the Housework: Nitta is good at housework because his mother and sister made him take care of all the household chores after his father died. They try to do the same to Nitta's adoptive daughter Hina, but she is as much of a slob as them so she still lets Nitta do everything around the house.
• Clark Kenting: After the three year time skip, Nitta and Hina move into a new house in the hopes of avoiding previous problems with neighbors complaining about him being a Yakuza, with Nitta trying to hide his job by dyeing his hair black and wearing glasses. His luck being what it is, however...
• Cluster F-Bomb: In chapter 41, when Hitomi was supposed to have English study in New York, she ended up in a military camp in Florida and the soldier who trained her couldn't speak without a single profane word. She picked up this way of speaking English when she came back to Japan and unknowingly badmouthed a foreign customer in the bar when she tried to speak in English.
• Companion Cube: In a Shout-Out to Cast Away, Mao makes two coconuts look like Hina and Anzu. After ending up in China in the care of a martial arts dojo she makes two wooden sparring dummies look like Hina and Anzu.
• Compressed Adaptation: The 12-Episode Anime compresses eight and a half volumes, leaving out a notable number of stories from the manga.
• Concert Climax: The last arc of the manga centers around securing a place for Atsushi's interest in Rockllusion to skyrocket instead of pursuing superhuman powers. This results in Hitomi setting up an entire concert for Central Park, all of the esper girls working together to pull off some amazing psychic feats and starting a band of their own, and Atsushi to be so moved he decides to stay a rocker.
• Cringe Comedy:
  • After Ikaruga finally decides to take Hina back home, Hina and Nitta have a heartfelt goodbye. But after Nitta leaves Hina reveals to Ikaruga that she no longer has her travel bead; without it an esper can't survive travel through space/time. Hina runs home to tell Nitta the great news only to run into him having a solo party about no longer having Hina. The home life becomes awkward for a while.
  Hina: Not cool.
  • When Naito, Nitta's old boss, gets out of prison Nitta's subordinates become convinced that Hina is Naito's child and set up a big reveal. Nitta tries to tell everyone it's not true and Hina is his own daughter, but no one believes him and Nitta decides it might be entertaining just to watch.
  • After Mami discovers Hina is an esper, the latter is enamored by the former's worship of her abilities and pretends to teach her to use psychic powers. The latter half of the chapter focuses on Mami then demonstrating her new "power" to the class, while Hina is sleeping. It all ends with her becoming so embarrassed that she skips school for a few days, and the source of emotional blackmail when Hitomi uses the incident to keep her quiet about her tutoring job.
  • The climax of Chapter 48 has Baba and Naitou round up a few of their underlings to go recite to Nitta all of his "accomplishments" thus far as the acting kashira of their syndicate. They do this for him at a perfectly innocent neighborhood barbecue, in full view of their neighbors and the local HOA.
  • Chapter 67 is devoted to Anzu pursuing a hobby in art and applying for an art contest. The problem is that her art is really childish, and while no one is willing to tell her upfront they all encourage her to try out. The chapter ends with her art actually winning a spot—but in the children's section, as her age wasn't given in the initial submission. What makes matters worse is the large celebration Nitta had planned for her, along with her adopted father and Nitta getting into a fist fight over the blunder.
  • Chapter 82 has Nitta's subordinates very awkwardly try to worm their way into his good graces by following Hina's advice. Said advice amounts to flattering and manipulating Nitta the way a daughter would, so all of their attempts end up creeping Nitta out until he sadly realizes who they got their techniques from.
  • Everything involving Naito's attempts to bond with his son. He wants to do right by Hitoshi and protect/support him, but being a thug at heart it often resorts to violence and dirty tricks that embarrass the hell out of him. Every resulting attempt just pushes him away more.
• Deserted Island: Mao, the third esper, ends up on one after Ikaruga calls her to bring an extra travel bead for Hina. The minute Mao lands on the island she loses both beads. It's 153 days before she finally builds a raft and decides to go find her fellow espers, though the map showing the direction she's going, towards Taiwan, indicates she'll be taking even longer to finally meet them; as it turns out, it's three years before she even ends up in Japan.
• "Dinner, Bath, or Sex" Offer: Chapter 83 has a variant; when Hina goes to the arcade to blow off some steam, her choice of video games mirrors the phrasing in Japanese, but before she can move on to the "or maybe", Haru drops by to ask for a rematch.
• Disproportionate Retribution: A pair of men kidnap Hina to force Nitta to pay a ransom. But after Nitta pays them they reveal they are going to kill Hina anyways just to make Nitta suffer. Why? Because if Nitta had never given them a loan they wouldn't have become gambling addicts.
• Distant Finale: The two-chapter epilogue takes place two years after the epic Rockllusion concert that saved the future. The reader is shown what the characters are up to:
  • Hina still lives under Nitta's care, but managed to graduate from high school and entered video game development college.
  • Hitomi became one of the world's top billionaires and invested some of her massive fortune on AI technology so she could get three years free from work and go to college with her friends.
  • Anzu ended up asking Nitta to get Hitomi to patronize the reopening of the Chinese restaurant Rairaiken so Anzu's adoptive parents could work with her again.
  • Mao is still working with Atsushi who put his old band back together and they're more successful than ever thanks to Mao using her psychic powers to create the Rockllusion special effects.
  • Utako hired the former Jadou yakuza Tsuda to work for her at the bar Little Song. Meanwhile, Tsuda complains that most of the money he earns goes to paying Haru's cabaret's bills.
• "Do It Yourself" Theme Tune: The opening theme is sung by Rie Murakawa (Anzu) and the ending theme is sung by Yoshiki Nakajima (Nitta).
• Dramatic Irony: Chapter 26 has Hina get kidnapped by a pair of small time crooks looking to get revenge for the debts they received from Nitta's firm. When trying to harass Nitta about it, he's more annoyed than worried, counting on Hina to use her powers to get herself out of the situation. Little does he know that while Hina could escape, she really is helpless, as her ability to focus on her powers is blindsided by the pain of the foot Nitta broke while swinging her around.
• Dustbin School: Teihen High School, where Hina and some of her middle school classmates wind up going for their secondary education, is explicitly stated to be a mediocre school where idiots and problem children can easily enter. Hina, slacker that she is, managed to get in after getting a perfect zero sleeping through her entrance exam. Even the name's kanji come out to mean "poor school".
• Evolving Credits: After Utako rejects Nitta during their date in Episode 7/Chapter 25, the opening credits of the subsequent episodes remove her from certain scenes. Most notably, she no longer stands next to Nitta at the end.
  • In Episode 11, after Nitta receives a call telling him that Hina has gone missing in the mountains during her skiing class, she is removed from the ending credits of that episode.
• Explosive Leash: The organization used to control Hina with a necklace that would cut her head off if she disobeyed them. Hina doesn't seem to be aware that she destroyed it in her freak-out that got her sent to Earth. Anzu & Mao also had one, and needed to undergo a harsh fasting session in order to be released from it.
• Fantastically Indifferent: In contrast to Takashi, Kengo, and Hitomi's shock over Hina's superpowers before the timeskip,the Ashikawa-gumi discovering Hina's powers was way more casual. They pretty much accept it as something that could obviously be capable of the daughter of their fearsome leader and leave it at that.
• The Food Poisoning Incident: Chapter 8 has Hina get food poisoning from some expired salmon roe. She snuck off to eat a bowl left out in the open, that Nitta intended on giving to her when she behaves. However, Nitta never felt like giving her the bowl because of how bratty she was, and in his absentmindedness left the bowl out way past its expiration date. Hina finds this poison bomb while cleaning, downs the whole bowl, and she gets hospitalized.
• Gag Series: A hilarious situational comedy with slapstick psychics and gangsters.
• Get Out!: After having dealt with Hina's crazy antics for eight chapters, Nitta finally has enough when she breaks his most expensive vase and coldly tells her to leave his apartment. From the looks of things, he meant it, even giving her enough resources to survive on her own for a while.
• Happily Adopted: Hina by Nitta...eventually. Anzu by a old couple who run a noodle restaurant.
• Here We Go Again!: To prevent a Bad Future she is responsible for, Hitomi anonymously reveals her age to the media and resigns as CEO of her company. While taking a break in Florida, she ends up becoming the CEO of a bigger company.
• Hit Me, Dammit!: Mika at one point starts restraining herself after getting one too many complaints about her monster strength hurting her martial arts students. Since those same students are there to get clobbered, in the mistaken belief that they'll become as strong as Nitta going through Mika's training, they try provoking her until she gives in.
• Homeless Hero: After Anzu gets stranded in the present day, she ends up joining a homeless community for a time and evens out her temper there.
• Host Club:
  • One of the cast's haunts is a hostess bar. They usually go it it to celebrate major events in the series—and yes, this includes the kids. Hina eventually gets a successful part-time job at a champagne tower illusionist over there.
  • Hina, through no fault of her own, turns her relatively normal job as a cafe waitress into this trope. She ends up attracting the attention of many of her town's lonely elderly male population, who come to the cafe to dote on Hina and have her talk to them as if she were someone dear to them. She even gets Nitta to indulge in it once!
• Hypocritical Humor: Sabu chastises Naitou and Baba for their actions during Chapter 38, saying their incompetence and the amount of danger they put Nitta in drove him to distance himself away from the Yakuza. He does conveniently forget that he was the root cause of that incident, and causes just as, if not more incompetent mishaps throughout the series.
• Idol Singer: Hina's ingenious idea to revive Central Park involved one part actual playing of instruments like the old members, and two parts reinventing the group into a trio of underground teenage rock idols. Since Atsushi didn't say how he wanted the girls to play at a sold out show, this was the quickest method.
• In Medias Res: The very first scene in the anime, where Mao beats up Baldy and some other monks, was taken from chapter 47 of the manga, with the full chapter appearing in episode 12.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • Apathetic and lazy she may be, but Yokoyama was absolutely on the money when she said her students would never earn a passing grade through normal means. To show her up, the decide to outright cheat.
  • Sabu also has a point in wanting Anzu to diversify her ramen and study how other people do it, since most seasoned ramen eaters (including Nitta, who won't say it to her face) think her family recipe is bland and underwhelming. He really just wants to help her out to get out of eating it all the time, but the act itself royally pisses off Nitta and somehow earns Anzu's admiration. And to his credit, Anzu does later admit that she's seen more business after changing her recipe.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Nitta. Although he isn't at first, as things go on and get crazier he proves to be a good guy more often then not. A journalist trying to get a hard-edged Yakuza story is devastated to find that Nitta is a good guy.
  • Hina will sometimes show that she is not a complete asshole.
  • Utako. Sure she exploits Hitomi and isn't very nice to Nitta, but she sets up breadlines for the homeless, was the leader of those protesting the eviction of the homeless from the park, and was the one who arranged for Anzu to be adopted.
• Licking the Blade: Parodied. Hina has an unconscious Nitta do this to intimidate some yakuza thugs, but after they've won the battle, he keeps licking the blade to the point where even his teammates look at him weird.
• Lower-Deck Episode:
  • Chapter 32, about a TV journalist trying to make a documentary about Nitta;
  • Chapter 44, about a customer of Hitomi's who discovers just how far her influence now extends.
  • Chapter 78, about a marriage scammer who selects Nitta as her next target.
  • Chapter 83, concerning three Ashikawa-gumi goons who want to butter up Nitta and become his junior.
• Manipulative Editing: Chapter 32 focuses on a journalist trying to do a documentary about Nitta after all of the crazy stunts he's been involved in. When he discovers that Nitta is way more ordinary and responsible than someone with his reputation should be, the journalist takes the footage and edits it to make Nitta out to be a womanizing, scum sucking "Monster of the Heisei Era" based on totally innocuous statements from the initial interviews. At one point, he even has Nitta strike Sabu with an ash tray, and takes footage of what's really a lecture to the journalist into Nitta "extorting" him.
• Meaningful Name: The three main high schools depicted in the manga are so named for their quality of life. Seihen, Chuuhen, and Teihen respectively refer to a "great school", "middle (of the road) school", and "poor school".
• Men Are Strong, Women Are Pretty: Supreme Fitness Dojo advertises itself this way. To guys, the dojo emphasizes muscle building and fat burning with their techniques, but for girls they advertise slimming down the waistline and lither figures instead.
• Moment Killer: When Nitta thinks Hina set up a date between him and Utako, he swings the girl around in a fatherly fashion for the first time. Hina even seems to be enjoying it...right up until he accidentally swings her foot into a wall, which then sprained it and made her unable to use her psychic powers for a time.
• Mood Whiplash: Chapter 49 has Nitta make Hina increasingly more elaborate school lunches in an effort to make her attend classes. Unbeknownst to him, Hina ends up giving the lunches away during lunchtime, and when asked gives him her classmates' feedback without ever saying it's from them. The exchange turns out to be one of the nicest Nitta and Hina have ever had, as the feedback makes him put his all into the lunches and the food itself earns Hina some school friends...right up until the last page, where Nitta learns about what Hina did offscreen and ends the chapter with a severe case of parental heartbreak.
• NEET: Hina would certainly wish to be, but she does end up going to school. Nitta's sister Mika is, but only because of severe anger problems that make her unsuited even to work for the Yakuza.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Early on, Hina decides to be more helpful around the house and clean instead of lazing around. While she's able to do well the first day, the second has her try so hard she ends up breaking things again, including one of Nitta's prized vases. This incident is the last straw for Nitta, so once she was out of the hospital he told her to pack up and leave his apartment.
• Nonchalant Dodge: Invoked in Chapter 59. Hina uses her powers on Nitta in order to look like he's capable of doing this, as well as reinforce his body to withstand hits, in order to make himself out to be the tough badass that Mika's karate class thinks he is. It doesn't stop his body from having the ever-loving daylights wrung out of it.
• Not Cheating Unless You Get Caught: Hina's class is fired up trying to avoid getting supplementary lessons over the summer, but they all recognize that they have none of the smarts to avoid it. Their solution? A host of cheating techniques and tricks to avoid the teachers. Hina in particular is the keystone for all of it, as she uses her psychic powers to make distractions for the teachers or even knock them unconscious if they get caught.
• Oblivious Guilt Slinging: Chapter 58 focuses on Ikaruga and Hina disabling the chokers on Anzu and Mao. The problem is, both can only be deactivated by starving them, as the chokers are powered by the movements of their throats. In an act of solidarity the former two, as well as Nitta, eventually offer to starve along with them, for almost a week. They eventually take the chokers off, but not before Hina and Ikaruga sneak a lunchbox to eat behind their backs. While Mao and Anzu are eternally grateful to the other two girls, pledging any favor at all for freeing them, Hina and Ikaruga are only able to awkwardly smile and take their moment of weakness to the grave.
• Of Corpse He's Alive: Hina once does this to Nitta when he's unconscious from a bad bout of pneumonia and the sore limbs he sustained from taking on Mika. She has him, via psychic powers, lead his group into a shootout and intimidate them into surrender.
• Oh, Crap!: When Hitomi's classmates barge into Little Song thinking that Hitomi is engaging in prostitution after her suspicious behaviors, and eventually discover her bartending part-time job, saying that Hitomi is horrified by this is an understatement.
• Person of Mass Destruction: Every esper is easily a One-Woman Army.
  • It's indicated Hina was this where she came from, and she remains so even if she rarely uses her powers that way - to date she has destroyed an entire Yakuza headquarters, demolished a building and caused a thunder storm.
  • Anzu would probably count as well; she isn't as strong as Hina but she can easily take out a whole biker gang, and she was able to protect a group of five from falling building debris.
  • Mao is able to take out an entire martial arts school with ease and sends a supped up training dummy capable of turning huge boulders into dust through several walls.
• Pinky Swear: Made between Nitta and Hina regarding her not using her powers outside the house in the first chapters.
• Pity the Kidnapper: Happens in the Chapter 26 and 27 two-parter, when some guys decide to kidnap Hina and ask Nitta for a ransom. Hina is convinced she's on a reality show and has to be coaxed into pleading for her life, while Nitta refuses to play along and thinks Hina's more than fine on her own.
• Putting the Band Back Together: As soon as Hina learned that Atsushi's Rockllusion concert is the sole reason the future doesn't get worse, she goes after the former Central park members to put on one last show. However, the trope is subverted, as Shirou, Tetsuji and Kiyomaru have their own lives to live so they can't just jump in on a band opportunity. This leads Hina to form a new Central Park with her esper companions. They do, however, reunite with Atsushi at the end of the story, with Mao serving as their illusionist.
• Pseudo-Romantic Friendship: Hitomi is the first friend Anzu makes, and tends to go out of her way to make Anzu happy and has become a little protective of her. Anzu is shown to be a bit possessive of Hitomi and becomes sad after finding out Hitomi is also friends with Hina.
• Psychic Powers: Hina, Anzu, and Mao are telekinetic.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Chapter 88 has a mutual defeat for both involved parties:
  • Hitomi delivers a crushing blow to Nitta's pride and economically strong-arms him into actively helping her stop the Superhuman Organization from ever forming. She only got minor satisfaction from it, because while Nitta is now completely subservient to her, the fact that he is submissive bothers Hitomi greatly since he is the only adult Hitomi genuinely respects.
  • Meanwhile, Nitta regains all of the properties he'd lost to Hitomi's corporotism and reestablishes himself as the Monster of the Heisei Era, but it's only because Hitomi willed these things back to him, and he had to beg to have Anzu's shop untouched. On the surface, he's still the formidable economic powerhouse behind the Ashikawa-gumi, but on the inside he knows he's a defanged figurehead living on the mercy of his daughter's stupidly rich friend.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: The Heisei Era really was about over when Chapter 88 was released, so the metaphor of a Heisei-era kingpin (Nitta) being overturned by a next-generation corporate monster (Hitomi) was a little too on the nose. One of the company leaders even smugly lampshades it:
  "You may be the Heisei Monster, but we're in the Reiwa era now."
• Robinsonade: The chapter in which Mao has to survive alone on the Deserted Island she landed in because of Ikaruga messing up the time travel coordinates.
• Running Gag:
  • Hitomi always gets into situations where she can't say no.
  • Hina's shirt always has one romanized word that is related to or describes any situation that is going on. Sometimes, it is ironic to the said situation (like in a flashback where she calls Nitta's cabbage chopping skills lame yet her shirt says "SUGOISUGI" which means "it's awesome".) and occasionally, the print changes mid-scene when something happens.
• School Play:
  • Hina and Hitomi's class put on a Cinderella play with Hina as the lead role and it goes surprisingly well (even if to memorize her lines Hina spoke only words from the play for a couple days), that is until the signature scene where Cindy loses her shoe and her balance and dies.
  • Hitomi's high school class puts on a science fiction play for their school festival, featuring Hitomi as the co-lead AI assistant to a researcher. Problem is her play is also scheduled on the same day as her monthly corporate meeting, so she has to clumsily juggle her professional and school lives once again.
• She's All Grown Up: Slightly. After the Time Skip, all young characters including the esper girls visibly aged into teenagers, except Hitomi who remained the same.
• Ship Tease: Nitta and Utako get a bunch; at one point she is even referred to as Hina's mother...until the time skip, where her Hitomi-induced downward spiral (along with her cruel attitude) is too much for Nitta to handle and he stops pursuing her as a love interest.
  • Hina and Hitoshi get a bit, and Kengo shows attraction to Hina during the school play.
• Shout-Out:
  • Quite a few Terminator gags occur throughout the series:
    • The way time travelers arrive to the present, and how they exit their time capsule in general, harks back to how Terminators time travel and activate.
    • Anzu beating a delinquent up for his clothes is a reference as well.
    • In the middle of Utako's He's Back! speech, she keels over from too much alcohol and sinks to the floor with a thumbs up, calling back to Terminator's iconic thumbs up while melting. This is repeated in Chapter 96 with Nitta 4.0 sinking into the river after crashing the real Nitta's car to buy Hina and company a distraction.
  • Chapter 4's cover image is of Nitta and Hina reenacting the Jack and Rose bow scene from Titanic (1997).
  • Chapter 38's title references Battles Without Honor and Humanity.
  • When Hina recalls some sage advice, she vaguely remembers "that old guy" from the Spider-Man Trilogy (Uncle Ben) saying "With great power comes great responsibility".
  • Chapter 79 has Mami attempt to summon aliens by dancing, one move of which comes from the "Smooth Criminal" music video.
  • Extra 29 shows Haru playing through multiple games, with one of them very clearly being Final Fantasy VII. He even complains about the long, unskippable summoning cutscenes.
  • Episode 8 features a restaurant named JoJonathan's. Chapter 83 also has Hina read a manga titled ZoZo's Complex Adventure (ZoZo no Bimyou na Bouken).
  • Episode 9 has a horse race where all the racers are parodies from Uma Musume Pretty Derby.
  • The key event that saves their horrible future is forming a rock band and playing a song so great it brings peace. The build up and payoff for this climax, however, has BECK written all over it.
  • When Hina, Mao, and Anzu finally arrive for their SUPER SUGEE FESTIVAL rehearsal, she smugly enters the scene with a "Kept you waiting, huh?". Furthermore, while the "back to the audience" pose has been done multiple times, Mao's version of it looks remarkably like Akuma's iconic "Wrath of the Raging Demon" finisher.
• Stock Scream: Whenever someone is in pain (whether minor or severe), they will scream "Ouchy!" in a comedic fashion.
• The Thing That Would Not Leave: Hina forces Nitta to take care of her, and when he tries to tell her to get out Hina uses her psychic powers to contort him into painful positions. Luckily they both start to actually care about each other eventually.
• Time Skip: Chapter 47 jumps three years into the future.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Nitta and Hina, who go from selfish, somewhat spoiled individuals to people able to care for themselves and others. Heck, Ikaruga's introduction even has her pull out a checklist that documents all the ways Hina has become less of a jerk.
• Too Many Babies: Ikaruga had 3 babies and is pregnant with the 4th in just 3 years. Lampshaded by both Mao and Nitta in two separate scenes.
  Mao: Just how many times did they make love?
  Nitta: And this is the lady who's been pumping out babies every year since she's come here?
• Trademark Favorite Food: Hina loves salmon eggs.
• The Unmasking: Hitomi, Hitoshi, and Kengo find out about Hina's powers when they get lost in the mountains and Hina decides to use her powers to find help.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Anzu and Hina; Anzu can find Hina pretty annoying and Hina is rather flippant about Anzu's hardships, but they hang out regularly and seem to enjoy each other's company most of the time.
• We Want Our Jerk Back!: After dealing with his uncouth little sister for two months, Nitta forces Hina to stick to a regimen meant to straighten out her lazy habits. While Hina is initially reluctant to do so, she soon religiously sticks to it, to the point where she forgoes all of her old pleasures and restrains her powers for too long. It doesn't take much for her acquaintances to want her back to her old lazy self.
• Wham Episode: Chapter 76. Haru spills the beans to the important cast members about the origins of the Organization, the civil war in the future it caused, and why the heck the time-travel shenanigans even started in the first place. And it still manages to play everything for laughs.
• When She Smiles: Hina and Anzu.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Very present in the post-reveal chapters. Every effort the characters make to avoid the Bad Future ends up pushing them directly towards it:
  • Hitomi becomes the world president and the benecificiary of the Superhuman Association (formerly known as Superhuman Fitness). To avoid this, Hitomi exposes herself and resigns as CEO, but she ends up sparking the success story of a major American corporation and grows even more powerful.
  • Atsushi becomes the head of the Superhuman Association, but at present he's a penniless wannabe rockstar. He, Mao, and Wang confront their master's corruption head on, and with Mao propping Atsushi up as a modern day superhuman, he defeats the master and becomes the head of the entire organization.