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Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Himeno emerging naked from some kind of machine in the first pages of the story is never contextualized, though it likely has something to do with the alien twist at the very end.
Captain Obvious Reveal: The identity of the "Sovereign", on top of having some foreshadowing since the beginning, was quite obvious to readers familiar with Arachnid due to the story's numerous throwbacks to it.
Crosses the Line Twice:
- It is a plot point in the story that trans women are women. For the purposes of gender-exclusive mutation and brainwashing, but women nonetheless.
- The real Shinzo Abe resigned out of health concerns in August 2020. A month later, his stand-in for this story is blown up sky-high in a terrorist attack and the chapter gets published online on September 11. Furthermore, the scene appears to be a reference to the assassination of Luis Carrero Blanco. While the character survives this incident that he actually requested on purpose, this turned Harsher in Hindsight when the real Abe was assassinated on July 2022 in broad daylight by a man armed with a homemade shotgun.
Fan Nickname: Some call Serena a "Burger Queen".
Friendly Fandoms: On top of the reused elements from Arachnid, the author releases Himenospia and Killing Bites on the same magazine. They're often all discussed at once in imageboards and the like.
Funny Moments:
- On chapter 20, Nagisa, Joyce and Marjorie get shocked when Serena french-kisses Himeno. A later scene shows Nagisa jumped out of the bushes she was hiding in such that she got a Funny Afro of leaves over her head.
- The omake for volume 4 has Nagisa getting Himeno to play the "Pocky game" (eating a pocky stick from opposite ends) with her, only to go berserk from out of nowhere and insist, in a decidedly non-romantic and angry way, that only a fancy cereal bar is worthy of Himeno while trying to force herself on her.
- While on the way to step on Shinzo Abe's head, Serena asks Mizu if she knows what is it about being a sovereign that she has and Himeno lacks. Mizu starts listing Serena's flaws instead, and the queen takes it in stride before arguing that what gives her the better perspective on things is her sexual experience. Mizu has a Spit Take from hearing that.
Harsher in Hindsight: The story begins with Himeno being forced to crawl naked around her school and it being recorded and spread online, with none of the school staff doing anything about it. In March 2021, a schoolgirl was found dead in Asahikawa, Hokkaido, and investigators uncovered the disturbing lengths of bullying and sexual harassment that led to her suicide after already jumping off a bridge two years before — which the largely unpunished perpetrators were unrepentant about and that was denied as bullying by her school.
Hilarious in Hindsight: Himenospia was always known for being similar to Arachnid despite not being a Fighting Series, but it got really on-the-nose as it went on and from 2020 to 2021 it was published concurrently with Blattodea. So the author essentially wrote Arachnid twice at the same time. Then a year after Himenospia ended, Serena showed up in Blattodea virtually unchanged from how she appears here, with a remake of her introduction scene and all.
Inferred Holocaust: It is not shown if Nagisa's death in the end made any of the wasp-girls in Himenospia crazy, assuming she did still have her own hidden soldiers in there.
It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: The story follows the same general plot of Murata's Arachnid, but with a more serious tone and 31 chapters shorter. If you're familiar with Arachnid, just how Recycled In Space the story is can feel repetitive or fun to guess; and on the contrary, you might miss its flashy cast of characters, its fighting scenes and how all-powerful Alice was in comparison to Himeno, even though that was a complaint acknowledged by Murata once Arachnid finished.
Les Yay: Only girls can join the wasp club... and the bonus posters for purchasing the physical manga volumes are mostly of Himeno getting hugged by the other female characters.
Memetic Mutation: One panel of Shinzo Abe talking to Donald Trump in the story can be often seen edited with "marry and reproduce" whenever the man or reproduction rates in Japan are discussed online.
Narm: Combined with Narm Charm.
- There's an inherent hilarity to the wasp women having their deadly sting tail coming out of their genitals.
- The whole "allergy to kindness" condition Mizu suffers from has readers rolling their eyes, especially because the psychologically abusive treatment from her mother that caused this is as cartoonish as it can be.
- While watching Serena talk to Himeno from afar, Joyce and Marjorie put on a serious face and guess, from how Serena is acting like they've never seen before, that she must be telling Himeno the story of her life that she has barely told them about.
- Some think the Brain Transplant plot twist from volume 5 is hard to swallow, and it came after a retread of a similarly out-there twist that made Arachnid a bit infamous to some.
- Niho's cartoonishly villainous expressions and actions (putting on a dominatrix costume to whip Himeno, really?) come off as hilarious when you know that Niho is a middle-aged cop who almost got killed by vagina dentata but got his brain transplanted into the corpse of a highschool girl and is impersonating his innocent and demure dead wife.
- When mediating between Nagisa and Serena, Mizu tells the first to flip off the latter with a dose of Gratuitous English even though she's supposed to be fluent. Particularly amusing is that she manages to fuse "don't fuck with me" and "I don't give a fuck" into "don't give a fuck with me".
- In Chapter 40, Nagisa's Dying Declaration of Love for Himeno is a genuinely heartrending scene, and yet the story still can't help itself from interrupting it to babble animal trivia about dogs and wasps being known to feel sadness just like humans!
- The ending reveals from out of the blue that the red wasps are manufactured by an unknown alien civilization, finishing with a shot of a lone wasp ominously buzzing away into space. Cue the Giorgio A. Tsoukalos memes.
Newer Than They Think: More likely than reading Himenospia expecting it to retread Arachnid is reading Himenospia and then Arachnid without even knowing they're from the same author while still noticing the heavy similarities between the two stories and believing the latter copied the first.
Squick:
- You might turn your nose up at how the mutant queens stop aging at 16, complete with Serena, a former child prostitute who femdoms American presidents, referring to it as the peak of womanhood.
- Something from Arachnid this doesn't have are multiple female characters wetting themselves from torture or fear, so instead there's Niho getting off to making Himeno suffer from food poisoning.
Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The story is set on an over the top World of Jerkass and the cast is filled with self-centered sociopaths out to destroy each other. Himeno herself grows darker and deluded during her time as a wasp queen; and no matter how she tries to fight back she still gets knocked around by people with way more experience and influence than her. A lot of the schoolgirls she stung and wants to protect end up killed as a result without receiving any real characterization. And unlike in Arachnid or Killing Bites, even the campier aspects of the story don't lighten the mood much.
The Woobie: Himeno starts out suffering from a ridiculously abusive mother and classmates and resorts to brainwashing them to have some measure of peace. Then all of them get killed, leading her to brainwash even more people just to survive; but she ends up outplayed by multiple sides and is imprisoned half-naked on a dungeon while Niho humiliates her much like her classmates used to in the beginning. And in the meanwhile, Mizu signs off Himenospia to Serena to try and get Himeno out of this and yet more of Himeno's lackeys get shot dead. Ultimately, it is shown she was nothing but a Puppet Queen of the "Sovereign", also known as Nagisa, since she entered high school.

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