Made in Abyss is the worst thing anyone has ever made - a comprehensive critique (CW: gross, violence, pedo shit) (effort post)

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.

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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.