YMMV / Kuma Miko: Girl Meets Bear

• Audience-Alienating Ending: The anime's Gecko Ending, in which Machi is traumatized after performing in front of a crowd and has a mental breakdown that undoes all of the growth she underwent throughout the show and then some, while causing her to give up on her dream of living in the city, became a hot topic after the show's airing. This Esoteric Happy Ending quickly became the most infamous and reviled aspect of what would otherwise have been a fairly unremarkable anime. One Twitter comment that was used in a few articles covering the controversy basically said the show started off fun but will likely go down in history as "That mind break show with the bear."
• Esoteric Happy Ending: The anime has Machi successfully doing a performance in front of a crowd (with great difficulty and only by going to her Happy Place and seeing the audience as the forest) but once she completes her performance, she hallucinates that the cheering crowd is throwing rocks at her and has a complete breakdown. She continues to falsely believe that the crowd attacked her after she gets home and becomes terrified of the city. Then Machi, broken and dead-eyed, gives up her dream of living in the city and declares she will never go there again. Natsu and Yoshio, instead of correcting her delusions and getting her psychological help, just decide to happily celebrate her decision. Natsu tells Machi that she never has to think about anything ever again, and the series ends with Machi seemingly mentally regressing to the personality of a 5-year-old, becoming more ignorant about the outside world and reliant on Natsu than ever before. And the show treats this as a happy ending with happy music playing in the background. The manga's author, Masume Yoshimoto, was heavily displeased with the ending, and wrote a very politely-worded response in his blog while one of the anime's writers completely scrubbed all mention of it from their resume after its airing.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • SEXUAL HARRASSMENT! DON'T TOUCH ME!^note Courtesy from Kaori, shortly after Yoshio warns her and her friends about the "sexy parts" of the original folklore Kumade Village's secret's legend.
  • BAD END! ^note The Gecko Ending of the anime hasn't garnered ANY fans, and the manga readers have been especially livid about it, but with good reason this time: the ending erases all the development Machi experienced through the series, and regresses her mentally into a 5-year-old child. Not only that, both Yoshio and Natsu actually think it's a good thing Machi turned out like this (something very out of character especially for Natsu). Needless to say, people started to compare it immediately to the bad endings of many Visual Novels.
• Moe: Machi is a constant victim of this in the anime, especially when she poses with the different outfits the villagers proposed for her summer miko outfit.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The show certainly looks and sounds wholesome from its description and artwork. Any viewer would be under this impression... until they got to the second half of the first episode, which proudly revolves around young children learning about bestiality. It all culminates in one of the most infamously depressing (and reviled) Sudden Downer Endings in anime. Funimation's box set of the series also gives no help, using the same cutesy artwork and a PG rating giving no clue as to the actual content contained in the show.

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