After my recent rant on just how awful Made in Abyss really is, morbid curiosity got the better of me and I finished watching it. I suffered this psychic damage so that you all can also suffer it with less effort. To my surprise, seeing the rest of it did change my opinion on it: despite all the odds it turned out I could, in fact, think even less of it than I already did. It is disgusting, vapid, and gratuitous, being awful both in content and in quality. In this piece I will explain what Made in Abyss is for anyone unfamiliar with it, go over how rubbish it is as a story problematic content aside, and tear into how it handles problematic themes in exactly the opposite way that they should be handled.
There will obviously be spoilers, but I feel assured in saying that anyone who wants the plot of fucking Made in Abyss to not be spoiled for them should get fucked. Anyone who wants to avoid psychic damage from learning about it should probably bow out now, however. I’ll dance around the specific details for the sake of decency, of course, and the worst stuff will be spoilered at the end with a reiteration of the CWs, but there’s only so vague I can be before I’m just saying “it’s bad, just trust me.”
To begin, so everyone knows what I’m even talking about here: Made in Abyss is basically a surreal fantasy adventure about a little girl (Riko) and a robot (Reg) trying to descend to the bottom of a 20 kilometer deep magical pit full of stupid bullshit out of what is literally an innate mystical compulsion to do so. On this journey, a key threat is that if you start to ascend bad things happen depending on where you are; in practice this means that the author has a constantly available plot device to make walking up a small hill or sitting up too fast into a deadly threat, except when that would get in the way of the story and so gets handwaved away as not being an issue right there.
The story so far has the pair descending at a breakneck pace through surreal fantasy landscapes, meeting the victim (Nanachi) of a serial killing mad scientist (Bondrewd) who joins up with them, meeting the adopted daughter and grooming victim (Prushka) of said serial killing mad scientist who wants to join up with them (she dies and turns into a magic rock that imprisons her soul instead), then defeat the mad scientist and then let him go before using the magic rock to descend further. At this point they find more surreal fantasy landscapes to gloss over and instead spend the entire second season in a village of babytalking ancap blob monsters who are just the absolute worst, and I am not exaggerating when I say there is literally no point to anything that happens there at all: the place is awful, Riko thinks it’s neat and explicitly endorses it, the show revels in all the gross awful shit they do there, we learn it’s literally built on unfathomable horror and suffering and must end, Riko and Reg try to stop it from being destroyed, the story waffles back and forth a bit, then the village is destroyed and they move on as if none of it had even happened.
Now that we’ve covered what’s going on, let’s really dig into the problems it has that aren’t the extremely revolting ones, which I’ll save for a spoiler at the end with additional CWs as a reminder. Now, the story basically has two modes of pacing: a breakneck sprint past the admittedly somewhat interesting world, and bogging down interminably while basically nothing happens. However, in neither case is there ever meaningful progression and at no point is there character growth. Stuff happens, the party grows and gets new tools now and then, but despite this fundamentally remains static. Despite going through training montages and overcoming obstacles the main characters never grow in any way, they don’t become more competent or powerful and any power boosts are temporary and costly solutions to the author writing them into a corner. Further, despite suffering horrors, serious injury, and in one case literal dismemberment they don’t become diminished either, never being traumatized, becoming jaded, or having their abilities decreased by what they’ve suffered.
The whole experience is that of a sort of cargo cult imitation of a dark fantasy adventure story by someone who is fundamentally vapid and brain poisoned. It’s basically just mimicking genre tropes and trying to bring out emotion through showcasing horrific things, but it fails horribly because to put it bluntly the author is too twisted in his perspective and too aroused by what he wrote to do anything but revel in and whitewash the horror.
Often with problematic content there is raised the excuse that simply having bad things happen or dealing with dark concepts doesn’t constitute endorsement or exploitative spectacle. Here I say without an ounce of exaggeration that Made in Abyss is not only creating an exploitative spectacle but is, in fact, endorsing the horrible things it involves. Every antagonist of the story is narratively treated softly while being the most evil piece of shit you’ve ever seen, to the point that I can’t even call them “villains” because that implies at least some degree of narrative condemnation that just isn’t present. For one example: Bondrewd, a mass murdering vivisectionist whose entire perspective is “I love doing abjectly evil things for selfish reasons and I will keep doing them forever lmao,” basically gets treated by the narrative as a sort of menacing but very polite guy who’s just doing his thing and who comes to an understanding with the party where he sees them as his equals who he likes, and they decide they understand him and just leave instead of destroying his fucking body stealing relic that he uses to be immortal and unkillable, never to think another ill thought of him again; other characters who know exactly what he was doing describe him as “a bit of a scoundrel” or just shrug and don’t care.
That last bit is a running theme: everything about the institutions in the world is evil and horrible, and the story revels in it and not so much as once tries to make a point that any of the rampant abuse is at all a bad thing. And before anyone thinks “well, can’t a story just have something bad with the understanding that it’s bad, and not need to become some polemic condemnation of it?” rest assured that while I do in fact think authors should actually make overt polemics against the bad things they portray since anything less will go over too many consumers’ heads, Made in Abyss goes the opposite way and simply includes this vile shit as matter of fact details that are narratively treated as nothing to worry about.
[CW abuse, pedo shit, CSA, gross, violence, cannibalism?] Seriously, I’ve said a lot of “trust me, it’s bad” and “I’m not exaggerating even a little bit,” and if you really can’t believe it’s as bad as I’m saying, well here’s an overview of all the very bad shit I’ve been referencing:
Here we get to the elephant in the room: the author of Made in Abyss is a nonce and from the themes of Made in Abyss I’m pretty sure he’s a fascist of some sort as well. As an aside I checked his wikipedia page and found this which is just fucking hilarious:
He cites Norman Rockwell as a person he admires.
He also apparently includes just straight up loli porn in the manga and is way more explicit than the comparatively sanitized anime is, which is itself very very bad. The story is frequently finding ways to undress its underage main characters, having them talk about sexual situations or concepts, and is uncomfortably focused on Riko’s bodily fluids in general. In fact, I’d say the author has a considerable love of bodily fluids in general and never fails to find a way to make something ooze or splatter. The ancap frenworld village is full of that, just gross oozing and shitting blob monsters that are also all pedophiles.
Now as I mentioned earlier, there is an ongoing theme of child abuse running through the world’s institutions, along with the heavy implication that pederasty is normalized. And as always the narrative not only doesn’t condemn it, not only does it not show it as traumatizing and destructive, but instead it treats this all as just normal and unremarkable, with no consequences or problems to it. I can’t stress enough how much that’s a running theme. The author clearly likes the world he’s writing about, especially the disgusting and horrible parts.
Remember those content warnings? Now’s where it really starts getting bad.
And it gets worse. Remember Bondrewd? His whole thing is that he’s trying to conquer the stupid narrative device that stops you from going up, and to do this he runs an operation to take big elevators full of kids from the surface down to his lab where he experiments on them, and later starts vivisecting them so they’ll fit in briefcases to make them into more portable receptacles for the curse. The story positively revels in this and lingers on it, and then actively avoids letting him suffer any sort of consequences at all – not because he is protected by some institutional power or anything, but simply because the protagonists don’t bother to stop him for good after they defeat him.
As for the ancap village, it’s literally the paracausal living body of a horribly mutated child, who was cynically tricked into become it in a sequence that involves her and a bunch of other people getting magical dysentery that also turns them into mottled stone, her being magically warped into a blobby fleshsack that constantly births non-viable little animals, everyone else eating those animals to cure their magical dysentery, and her being used for another paracausal wish for safety which causes her to grow into a massive hollow pillar which they all then live inside as horrible blob monsters. Her literal last coherent wish after that created a being (Faputa) to destroy her and end her constant, unfathomable torment.
That is treated, narratively, as a bad thing that can’t be allowed to happen, because the horrible frenworld blobs believe in things and enjoy being awful, and “it would be wrong to take that away from them.” But it ultimately doesn’t matter, the village gets destroyed despite the party’s actions and her daughter’s change of heart, and then the main characters and Faputa leave just as happy and completely oblivious to what just happened as ever.
There are other things I’ve left out, but I honestly just don’t have the will to make an exhaustive list. It’s just tons of shit like this, though those two things are probably the most extreme examples. I have a strong stomach and even I’m feeling a bit sick after having dredged enough of this filth up to write all this out. I hope this psychic damage was worth it.
.
Fuck, why did I think this was a good idea? I’ve gone and written two thousand words about a horrible anime series that makes me angry and nauseous just thinking about it, and there’s not even any catharsis to this. I watched it in the first place because I couldn’t imagine it was really as bad as everyone said only to realize it was even worse, and I kept watching just so I could authoritatively write all this down. Now that this polemic against Made in Abyss is written I can’t say it was worth it.
Well, if I dissuade anyone from going and watching it themselves maybe it was, but I can’t help but think some of you will go “oh well that sounds so ridiculous, surely something as awful as this couldn’t get published and become so popular! I must confirm it for myself!” And to that I can only say: enjoy your psychic damage, you'll have earned it just like I did.
I don't understand how people can be so bad at media analysis that they can't understand the massive difference between "character does something bad" and "character is portrayed as and treated as a villain in the story".
I think OP slightly overstates her case but it's just overwhelmingly obvious when you actually try to think about it that the characters don't interact with mad scientist like the evil serial killer he is, and in fact could not have reached the next stage of the trip if not for him killing his most recent grooming victim, turning her into essentially an elevator key. Surely it's, like, kind of an issue that he's just endlessly trafficking children to vivisect and make into flesh canisters, right? So when he's on his last legs, shouldn't you either kill him or take him down a layer so he can't get back up or something? Nope! Just leave him to his work.