YMMV / Uzumaki

• Awesome Art:
  • The entirety of the manga boasts some of the most horrific, yet beautiful artwork in the whole medium. The hypnotic use of spirals in everything from the obvious, like the infamous scar scene, to the subtle, like it being in every single blade of grass, is a truly terrifyingly gorgeous touch.
  • The anime adaptation deserves special mention here, as it manages to flawlessly recreate Junji Ito's artstyle, right down to keeping it in black and white. It's best shown during moments where it recreates specific panels from the manga, making it truly look like the manga has come to life. Here's a scene from it in motion.
• Awesome Music:
  • From the film, "Raven" by Do as Infinity is a haunting and melancholic song to play in the credits.
  • Among the Sef, the haunting piece used in the teaser for the mini series.
• Base-Breaking Character: Chie Maruyama. Some fans find her to be a poor replacement for Shuichi as he steadily falls Out of Focus.
• Broken Base: Just check the fan lore wiki page for this fandom; it has three opposing sides (fans of the manga, the movie, and those part of the Newbie Boom), two of which frequently argue with each other.
• Crazy Is Cool: Everything relating to the wind phenomenon, which lets people create whirlwinds and tornadoes by swinging their arms, or blowing people away by yelling or just exhaling. The Dragonfly gang in particular stands out as being extremely cool, due being a biker gang who ride inside of tornadoes instead of bikes.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Reviewers of the manga have some very... interesting interpretations of some of the chapters. And whatever you do, don't mention Chie Maruyama.
• Iron Woobie: Shuichi loses both his parents in gruesome ways, is ridiculed by the townspeople, stops eating and sleeping, is severely mentally ill, has only Kirie for support, is constantly forced to fight various supernatural Spirally things, and yet still keeps trying to help.
• Memetic Mutation: Captioning screencaps from the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "I Was A Teenage Gary" (where SpongeBob, and later, Squidward, slowly and horrifically turn into snails after accidentally receiving injections of snail plasma meant for Gary the Snail) as being from Uzumaki.
  Um... SpongeBob as you've never seen him before!
• Moral Event Horizon: Prior to their transformation to a mass of hedgerows, the refugees kicked out Kirie's family out of their very own place to make space. No really.
• Nausea Fuel:
  • You'll be sick of looking at spirals after reading this.
  • The giant snails. They used to be people, and we get to see this beautiful transformation numerous times. Not only that but when things go From Bad to Worse, some of the human survivors start turning to eating the snails. At least they want it cooked at first (while comparing it to normal escargot, no less)... but then another group decides they want to try them raw (comparing it to how insects do the same to snails) and they try crawling inside a hiding human snail's shell to eat them.
• Paranoia Fuel: You may not want to eat cinnamon buns for a long time!
  • Which highlights another bit of paranoia: After a few chapters of Uzumaki, you'll start noticing the spirals all around you, which is exactly how most of the characters start their "spiral obsession", which inevitably leads to madness, deformity, or death.
  • There is also a chance that if you used to be fond of snails, that fondness will stop. And if you, by accident, step on a snail or hurt it in any other way, prepare to slightly panic the following days if you see or feel an irregularity on your back (or just if you for some reason feel very slow or thirsty).
• Ron the Death Eater: Shuichi is often depicted as a very standoffish and even abusive boyfriend towards Kirie, even in reviews of the manga, when in reality, he was just about the opposite. It also doesn't help that in the film, that's exactly what he is.
• Signature Scene: The spiral scar, having taken over about a third of Azami's head as her left eye begins to bulge out.
• Spiritual Successor: The whole premise is a lot like The Colour Out of Space. Both plots are about these unusual things that appear and corrupt as well as warp the residents in the proximity. But instead of a Fictional Colour controlling everything it’s a series of strange spirals.
• Squick: The abundance of Body Horror can be really unsettling to look at.
  • You could probably buy a nice TV if you had a dollar for each time a human body contorts in ways that they shouldn't.
  • What seems to really take the cake for people besides the unnatural body twisting is the Snail chapter. A classmate of Kirie and Keiko clearly looks sick and his state worsens throughout the week until he finally shows up one day as a human-sized snail climbing on the school building. After the school throws him in a makeshift cage until they can resolve the issue, his bully also turns into a snail and gets put in the cage. And because snails are hermaphrodites, they start sexually reproducing. Their eggs are later found and destroyed, but one can only wonder what would have hatched from them.
• Tear Jerker: The end of the movie. Kirie finally agrees to leave with Shuichi, only to find that her father is missing. As she and Shuichi search for him, Shuichi sees his legs twist together. He only has enough time to warn Kirie before he twists up completely and dies. Kirie is left sobbing and completely messed up, having lost the only two people she had left. And then Shuichi wakes up, apparently possessed by the spiral and now trying to harm her. In the manga, Shuichi's entire character arc.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: For some, the fact that the series spends most of its time in a chapter-by-chapter format with little or no continuity is a point of frustration.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Though this is somewhat of a given for Ito's works in general, as he almost never writes anything but Downer Endings, being given the hope that at least Kirie could manage to survive the horrors of the town given the fact that she's narrating the events only to have it be revealed that she and Shuichi ended up trapped together in the catacombs before being turned to stone is enough to turn off many a reader.
• Ugly Cute: The snail people to varying degrees, especially Mitsuo.
• Values Dissonance: In western culture, burying a body in the ground as opposed to cremation is very common. But in Uzumaki, it plays with the Japanese thought of walking on top of dead bodies directly beneath your feet in graveyards to be deeply unsettling.
• The Woobie: Kirie, Shuichi, Kirie's family. Really, just about every named character who isn't a Jerkass. Most of them, too. This is a Cosmic Horror Story, after all.

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