"This place... It gives me the creeps."
—Yuri
In the small isolated seaside town of Kurosaki, plucky young nine-year-old Kimi Shirokado is happy to make a new friend in Yuri Koshide, whose family just arrived for the summer along with a bunch of foreign interns- much to the displeasure of the island natives. While investigating a storage room for something to help beat the summer heat, the residents find a hidden compartment. After that, strange phenomena begin to happen. Animals are being slaughtered and left scattered around, and residents begin to disappear. Soon, the already delicate situation between the natives and interns give rise to racial tensions, distrust, and mutual enmity. Kimi and her friends, both old and new, set out to find the truth of these strange events and discover who is really responsible.
Housing Complex C is an [adult swim] original anime four episode mini-series produced by Studio Akatsuki under director Yuji Nara and writer amphibian (with the original character design of Kimi
by Yoshitoshi ABe). It aired on Toonami from October 2 to October 23, 2022.
Housing Complex C contains the following tropes:
- A House Divided: While there was already tension between the people already living at Housing Complex C and the foreign interns, things break down badly after the shaved ice party. Finding a decapitated dog head in the fruit syrup everyone was eating causes everyone to become suspicious of each other and hostilities to flare up. It gets to the point where several of the interns sell out Kan as a likely suspect who's responsible for the bizarre happenings.
- Body in a Breadbox: In Episode 2, at the end, everyone suddenly starts to taste something strange from the shaved ice with syrup. Taka then finds out that a severed, skinned dog's head was disposed inside the syrup pot.
- Chekhov's Gun: A knife with an octopus-like creature engraved on its sheath appears atop the unpacked moving boxes in Yuri's apartment. Neither Yuri, her mother Keiko, or Kimi make note of it, even with it lying very nearby them at the entrance. It shows up again in the final episode as the Koshide family's primary murder weapon. They intend to murder everyone in Housing Complex C with it in an attempt to awaken the god they worship.
- Comically Missing the Point: A rather dark version in the finale, just before the reveal of Kimi's true nature: she shows Yuri the severed limbs of her parents, and Yuri demands "What is this?!" to which Kimi nonchalantly replies that it's part of a torso.
- Cosmic Horror Reveal: Initially, it seems to be a more grounded horror story with some hints of strange creatures and abductions. But the story heavily takes its cues from the works of H. P. Lovecraft, specifically The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and this becomes more apparent the longer the story goes on when the vanishings start looking like the work of a cult that worships an ancient god of the ocean. Kimi herself appears to be a representation of Yog-Sothoth itself, if the imagery shown during the time she arrived on earth is anything to go by and her apparent powers over time-space. Also, the bubbles shown around her are likely supposed to be the Silver Globes described in the lore regarding Yog-Sothoth. Interestingly, this then becomes subverted when Kimi turns out to be more-or-lees the Big Good, with the story actually being about the horrors of human cruelty and prejudice.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Many, but Yuri's takes the cake. After Kimi rejects her efforts at offering a sacrifice, Yuri is forced to vomit a seaweed-like substance that subsequently oozes out of all of her orifices, covers her body, and then seemingly turns her inside out.
- Didn't Think This Through: Once Yuri is confronted with the revelation that she's attempting to murder a genuine god above the one she worships, she has no idea how to respond at first— until the blood and gore of her own parents are unceremoniously dumped on her head. It's at this point that she has a Villainous Breakdown and desperately attempts to plead fealty to Kimi in some hopes of survival, saying she'll kill and pillage whoever she needs to for Kimi's blessings. .. despite the fact that Kimi just outlined how pissed off she was that the Koshides murdered everyone in the first place and ruined her Secret Test of Character. Yuri's inability to empathize and her sheer panic gets her blown apart from the inside-out in utter agony.
- Dramatic Chase Opening: Episode 1 opens with a flashforward of Kimi and Yuri being chased by a seemingly crazy Kan until they get cornered in the basement, where they are saved by Yuri's father Seiichi knocking Kan out with a metal pipe.
- The Ending Changes Everything: Yuri and her family are insane, murderous cultists who only went to Housing Complex C in the first place to sacrifice the residents to their "god", including Kimi. Then it turns out Kimi is another, different and far more powerful god who seemingly knew that all along and expresses little more than slight disappointment before gruesomely disposing of all three, saying that she's been on Earth for over 20,000 years and humanity always screws up and she's tired of living among them. Kan is the only survivor, after reciting words that Kimi gave to him, and awakens outside a long-abandoned and overgrown Housing Complex C in the town of Shirosaki.
- Evil All Along: Yuri and her parents are worshipers of a "sea god", heavily implied to be Cthulhu.
- Fish People: First glimpsed in episode 1, the sea around the housing complex is full of them, and they've been leaving dead fish by Kimi's door as a blasphemous offering. They're shown to be the original worshippers of the Cthulhu like monster that died in the sea nearby.
- Foreshadowing:
- During the Dramatic Chase Opening, Mr. Koshiide strikes Kan while yelling out for Kan to stay away from his daughter. This is an early hint that he didn't care about what would happen to Kimi.
- The rainbow seen above the complex can be seen several times on the surface of several objects like water and Kimi's bubbles before it becomes a crucial hint for Taka to decipher.
- When some of the residents find the remains of dead animals left at the complex, among them is a dead dog's body, minus its head. The head later shows up at the shaved ice party in the worst possible way.
- Several objects in the storage room contain dates set well after the year 2000, indicating that time loops are involved.
- Gainax Ending: Kimi is revealed to be a god and quickly kills Yuri and her parents. Disappointed in humanity, she chooses to leave and wipes all traces of her influence away. As the entire area is swallowed up by light, Kan survives by praying to Kimi, who is heavily implied to be Yog-Sothoth, for protection. He escapes the time loop and wakes up to discover the entire area long-abandoned and decrepit. Kimi, who now has white hair, is last seen blowing bubbles atop the overgrown ruins of Housing Complex C.
- The Ghost: Hideo barely averts this, though we only see him from the back or as a cloaked figure. The only time we ever clearly see his face is during the opening.
- Gonk: Hideo is your typical fat, hideously ugly Otaku shut-in.
- Gorn: There's the whole bloodied dog's head in the syrup pot, and then there's the utter gore that happens to the Koshides once Kimi is upset enough to end the story after they ruined everything.
- History Repeats: The Kurosaki legend slowly comes to repeat itself with the foreign interns being shunned by the townspeople, which is in lieu to the sea monsters looking for a place to live in Kurosaki, only to be pushed back by the townspeople.
- Humans Are Bastards: This is Kimi's ultimate conclusion at the end of the story. She laments how, in the hundreds of thousands of years she's observed humanity, there are always horrible people like the Koshide family who kill their fellow humans for selfish reasons and keep humanity from advancing.
- Humans Are the Real Monsters: Despite setting up an apparent Cosmic Horror Reveal, it turns out that the eldritch god (Yog-Sothoth) is basically a Benevolent Abomination and the Fish People never harmed anyone in the story. The murders are all the work of a family of human cultists, and the bigotry and hatred displayed by both the current cast and generations past disgusts Kimi to the point that she gives up on humanity ever improving and leaves.
- Hypocrite: During episode 2, Yuri confides in her mother that the complex and its people "give [her] the creeps." Considering she and her family were crazy cultists willing to murder everyone in the complex, she comes across as this.
- I Ate WHAT?!: Everyone at the shaved ice party is horrified when examining the syrup pot reveals a severed dog head.
- Kick the Dog: The Koshides were presumably the ones that planted the severed dog's head in the shaved ice, and otherwise repeatedly murdered several people before the big final sacrifice while trying to turn the complex's tenants against each other subtly. The only reason they might've had for this was to make sure no one would trust each other when they started the mass sacrifice, and given the sheer Ax-Crazy glee they show combined with Yuri trying her damnedest to terrify Kimi in the murder attempt, the path to the results was likely a fun bonus.
- Killed Off for Real: By the end of the series, the only characters still alive are Kimi, Kan, and Rubel.
- Missing Mom: Kimi is seemingly talking to her mother at home, but the audience never hears her mother talk at all, nor does anyone else mention her, implying that Kimi may be talking to a photo of her. Episode 3 reveals that Kimi's mother doesn't exist. Instead, what she calls her mother appears to be bizarre fetus-like organism growing inside a hydroponic plant.
- Police Are Useless: When the residents of the housing complex call to report missing persons who may or may not have left moss piles in their places, the police dismiss the disappearances as people running away or leaving of their own volition. It's likely Kimi has a hand in this, as she is trying to protect the "peace" of the complex by replacing the murdered neighbors with moss, so it's likely she's affecting the police's minds.
- Prejudice Aesop: A major conflict through the series is between the Japanese natives of the island and the Middle Eastern interns who move there. When the strange incidents- including animal corpses- start occurring, both sides blame the other for it. The natives view the customs of the interns with disgust and treat them as the obvious culprits, while the foreigners in turn begin acting hostile to the natives. Ultimately, it turns out their bickering was for nothing as the culprits were neither natives nor the interns, and had either of them not been so focused on blaming the other, they could have realized this and stopped the deaths that followed. And Kimi herself in particular describes the instances she has seen of past civilizations on the island destroying each other out of racism and xenophobia.
- Racist Grandma: Wada is instantly overcome with paranoia when a group of Middle Eastern foreigners show up to assist a researcher. She finds their morning prayers to Allah to be unsettling and chastises them for doing so without prior notice to the other residents. She gets called out for being racist by one of the other residents at the start of episode 2. It then gets averted when she's actually very nice when no one is looking, and she ironically becomes the only resident in the complex who treats them fairly without suspicion after the shaved ice party incident.
- Red Herring:
- Advertising for the series before its airing says that, essentially, everything was fine and dandy at Housing Complex C "until they showed up" with attention being drawn to the new tenants, obviously insinuating that they're responsible for everything. Come the first episode, these characters turn out to be foreigners who came to work at a nearby fishery and are implicitly Middle Eastern Muslims; coupled with the other Lovecraftian themes established from the very start of the series, this might hint at touching on the uncomfortable but less-cosmic parts of the Cthulhu mythos—namely, Lovecraft's racism which led him to attribute the Cthulhu cult to basically every non-white people on Earth in The Call of Cthulhu. There is friction between the new tenants and the Japanese characters, but it's the Koshide family who are responsible for everything and the foreigners are just as much victims of them as the earlier tenants, with the series using this to deliver a Prejudice Aesop.
- The Dramatic Chase Opening makes it seem like Kan has lost his mind and is hunting down Kimi and Yuri to kill them before Yuri's father saves them. This scene does its damnedest to make you think that Kan is going to go nuts for the rest of the story. Once episode 4 finally gets around to this, Kan is completely sane of mind, and Yuri's family are actually the insane killers, meaning the entire scene was a giant red herring to throw off the twist. A similar subversion occurs with a vision Kan had seen during this sequence, as Kimi and Yuri have no relation and are not the incarnations of an ancient tribe's princesses; they were Kimi's followers of a past generation, also pointlessly slain like what Yuri's family does to Kimi's new followers.
- The green moss that appears where people presumably died seems to hint that something is transforming people into it to silence them. In reality, it's simply Kimi erasing the corpses from the "board" so that people don't overreact and break the peace she's trying to establish, because the Koshides keep killing people off and making things hard for her.
- The third episode's ending implies that Kimi might be a fish person or some sort of entity born of a strange fetus-like creature she calls her mother. Come the finale, she just pours the fetus onto Yuri's head and then casually stomps it into moss as she reveals it was all a part of her attempts to "blend in" with the setting she's manipulated with fake backstory — one that's now pointless after Yuri's family pushed Kimi's patience to its brink.
- An extremely short-lived one in the final episode: Koba is about to confront Kimi about possibly being a god based on notes from Taka that he'd been given and mentally exposits about Kimi and her apparent mother, saying that she'd first arrived at Housing Complex C just about to give birth and with no idea who the father was, and then she shut herself up in her apartment and hasn't been seen since, apparently turning into the fetus-like creature that it's turned out Kimi calls Mommy. With the other Cthulhu mythos themes of the series in mind, this insinuates that Kimi's true backstory is similar to that of Wilbur Whateley from The Dunwich Horror, who was the half-human offspring of an Outer God. However, Koba never gets into the apartment to confront Kimi about it and the true culprits, who Taka meant when he said "that family," are the Koshides.
- Rewatch Bonus: It's obvious on a rewatch that Hideo and his mother Momo were murdered by the Koshides because of his research and drawings, and that Yuri tipped them off after seeing it. Yoshiiken was also killed because he'd most likely caught one of them with dead fish/animals. And while it's implied that Taka lost the will to live over what he'd discovered in the cave, it's possible that one of the Koshides followed him there to silence him as well.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Rubel becomes so stressed from the bizarre events at the complex that he flees at night. This helps him survive the slaughter of everyone else there, as Kan finds out via a text message once all is said and done.
- Secret Test of Character: The entire series was this to see if humanity could live in harmony. Thanks to a certain family of Serial Killer cultists, the god responsible declares this one the last failure after 20,000 years of them, and outright quits. But not before pulling an abrupt Rocks Fall Everybody Dies on the family responsible.
- Shout-Out:
- One of the villagers mentions Yog-Sothoth, and Hideo is shown specifically researching the Cthulhu Mythos on his computer.
- Two of the villagers are named Hideo and Kojima. This is a nod to how he was originally planned to create a new Silent Hill game with the P.T. demo.
- Space Master: Kimi. During the chase in episode 4, she changes the exit of the underground cave into her room in the housing complex. Then proceeds to teleport pieces of her parents onto her.
- Time Loop: For reasons known only to herself, Kimi has been intentionally making the residents of Kurosaki relive the year of 2000 AD. It was a peaceful year for her and she enjoys it. It only applied to the town though, as outsiders like the Koshides would bring in modern technology like cell phones that threatened to shatter the illusion. Considering that she's existed for 20,000 years, it's implied that she does choose to update the year every few decades as to make people not too suspicious.
- Trailers Always Spoil: When it aired on Toonami, the next episode previews always gave away the big moment towards the end even if out of context. Part of the twist that the Koshides are the people behind everything was even given away for the finale via showing one character attacking another. Though nothing spoiled the ending.
- Ugly Hero, Good-Looking Villain: Kan, despite his somewhat "off" facial features, is ultimately one of the noblest characters in the story and seeks to protect Kimi out of genuine kindness. The more conventionally attractive Koshide family (particularly Bespectacled Cutie Yuri) are ultimately revealed as the true villains of the story, as they're actually insane, murderous cultists.
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight:
- At night, Kimi watches a whole legion of humanoid sea monsters advancing through the beach, but all she can think of is that it's an optical illusion and doesn't even bother to show it to Yuri.
- A knife with an octopus-like creature engraved on its sheath◊ appears atop the unpacked moving boxes in Yuri's apartment. Neither Yuri, her mother Keiko or Kimi make note of it, even with it lying very nearby them at the entrance◊. This turns out to be Foreshadowing.
- In episode 3, a rainbow appears. At night. When there's no sunlight to create a rainbow. And above the light illuminating the complex. And without any rain, either. All Rubel says about it is that it looks pretty. Averted with Taka, who has a "Eureka!" Moment upon seeing it.
- Wham Shot:
- In the very first episode, Taka catches a glimpse of a humanoid fish man climbing up a nearby cliff. Kimi later sees an entire legion of them coming onto shore.
- Everyone at the shaved ice party quickly realize that there's something wrong with the flavor of the fruit syrup they're all eating. Examining the serving pot reveals a severed dog's head.
- We've been led to believe that it's the year 2000, as indicated by the calendar Kimi keeps in her apartment. However, when Kan is examining the abandoned storeroom in episode 3, it's shown the dead dog's body has a year tag that reads 2003, a newspaper article is dated 2011, and several canned goods are dated as far as 2022. Even before that, Yuri is shown playing a rhythm game on a smartphone◊ during the car trip in episode 1, suggesting the story's events have been in some form of the present day since the start. Episode 4 confirms that Housing Complex C is in time stasis that was broken by the visitors.
- In the final episode, Koba is brutally attacked... by Mr. Koshide.
