Literature / Kyouran Kazoku Nikki

This is a story about Kyouka-sama told by Kyouka-sama for Kyouka-sama!

Kyouran Kazoku Nikki ("The Diary of a Crazed Family") is a light novel series written by Akira and illustrated by x6suke ^note  pronounced "peke-rokusuke" , which was published from 2005 to 2011 for 24 volumes. It was adapted into a manga that was serialized from 2007 to 2010, and a 26-episode anime in 2008 by Nomad.

A thousand years ago, Enka, an evil dragon thing, was defeated, but died cursing that its child would destroy the world in... a thousand years. In the present day, DNA testing has narrowed it down to six candidates. Ouka, a paranormal investigator, is ordered by the government to marry one candidate (Kyouka) and adopt the rest as children, in the hopes of discovering the true child of Enka and raise it in a loving family situation to placate it.

The Top Six "Most Likely To Destroy The World", now the Midarezaki Family:

• Kyouka (Vanessa): Egotistical, hyper-active Cat Girl, Lethal Chef and Really Twenty Years Old Motor Mouth Third-Person Person. Can send telepathic messages and jump really high. Is surprisingly on the ball about everything in general in spite of her looks.
• Gekka (Warave): Flying, psychic, Electric Jellyfish with a taste for sushi. Attacks with Frickin' Laser Beams and Mind Rape.
• Hyouka (Black 13): Three year old experimental Predator-Overman-cyborg-thingy; wields a lightsaber (paired with Gekka).
• Teika (Shakuya): a king lion, mostly Last of His Kind. Nice guy.
• Ginka (Ginichi Kizakura): Young man with gender identity disorder (paired with Chika).
  • Chika (Senko Himemiya): Honorary member, not a true Great Destroyer candidate. Yuka's blood-related older sister.
• Yuka (Reiko Himemiya): Clumsy young girl with a history of almost ritualized family abuse. Uses Teika as a mount.

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In addition to those character types, KKN uses the following tropes:

• Accidental Misnaming: "Pierre". In a bit of a subversion, Pierre reveals to Ouka later on that he doesn't mind the name. Since Kyouka assigned it, not like there's much room to challenge it anyhow. Also played straight with Yuka's classmate Yamaguchi. No matter how much she tries, she just can't get his name right.
• A-Cup Angst: Kyouka lacks a chest, much to her dismay.
• A God Am I: Kyouka constantly refers to herself as a goddess to be worshiped and obeyed without question. Constantly. But that's just her ego talking.
• Anime Theme Song: Starring Kyouka and her mini-clones.
• Attention Whore: Kyouka big time. She sees herself as a God and you will give her the attention that one deserves. The opening really reflects this.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Kyouka and Ouka, to adorable proportions.
• Bad Santa: Black Santa, who's actually Santa's granddaughter.
• Badass Santa
• Balloon Belly: Kyouka in episode 2.
• Beach Episode: Also a prelude to the beach episode involving antics with the travel agency.
• Berserk Button: Kyouka gets absolutely furious if anyone dares to mess with her family or flirt with her husband.
• Berserker Tears: Hyouka during his backstory that he inadvertently killed the girl he considers his only friend and doesn't take it well.
• Big Damn Heroes: Dekamelon
• Butt-Monkey: Episode 19 gives us the Klutz Devil, who we immediately sympathize with and who promptly gets Killed Off for Real simply by virtue of A) being involved in a death prophecy and B) not being a main character.
• Catchphrase: As a most wonderful fact, I, Kyouka-sama, am omniscient and omnipotent!
• Cat Girl: Milcatopy of the episode 12 side story, in addition to (and more legitimately than) Kyouka. When Kyouka herself encounters another Cat Girl, she gets rather upset:
  That's not the problem here! You're copying my character setting! You're violating copyright law! And violating one's right to one's likeness, too!
• Censor Box: A black bar covering the eyes on the Mona Lisa.
• Cheeky Mouth: Virtually the entire cast either has no mouth or no jaw movement. And now you know why Teika doesn't get very many lines.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Hiratsuka Raichou
• Civil War: Within the Paranormal Agency there is a split between those in favor of Operation Cozy Family and those that just want to kill those with Enka DNA.
• Color Failure: Teika, out of shock/surprise.
• Crapsaccharine World: Despite it being a colorful anime filled with zanny characters, there is a lot of dark aspects such as a evil family brutalizing the youngest child as a stress release.
• Credits Jukebox: There are eight endings, one for each member of the family. These are randomly shuffled around the various stations broadcasting the show.
• Daddy's Girl: Yuuka adores her father.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Most of the characters.
• Dynamic Entry: Kyouka, whenever possible. Her tendency to kick down doors has gotten the family banned from all but one of the restaurants in their district.
  • In the final episode, Kyouka pulls off three or four dynamic kicks in less than a minute while discussing the potential marriage issues with her children.
• Dysfunctional Family: Subverted, even though the household is its own Dysfunction Junction and they all have their individual issues, everyone has the other's back.
• Dysfunction Junction: Everyone comes with a dark past, as Kyouka and Ouka discuss when Ouka starts looking over the backgrounds of his new children.
• Engaging Conversation: Raichou, after tasting a dessert Pierre made.
• The End of the World as We Know It: The whole point of the show is to avert this with The Power of Love by creating a family, albeit an inevitably very, very weird one.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Raichou is seen in the background in every episode up to 13.
• Expy: Senko, as a Suigintou wannabe, before losing the Gothic outfit and becoming Chika. You are now imagining her calling Yuuka "junk".
• The Faceless: Million's face is never clearly seen. Either its just her lower half with the upper half covered in shadow or we see her from behind.
• "Fantastic Voyage" Plot: In an attempt to cure Ouka of ancient nanomachines, everyone but Yuka shrinks down and travels inside his body to fight them off. Ginka goes Guns Akimbo while in there.
• Forced Transformation: Formulas that cause people to change into random animals appear more than once.
• Formula-Breaking Episode:
  • Episode 12, "Picked up a Cat on Monday" plays like something out of an eroge, with only Ginka and Kyouka making appearances...and Ginka's in drag the whole time.
  • Episode 20, "The Forest of Vitamin C" is a complete and total Mind Screw from start to finish.
• Generic Cuteness: Shiruku isn't much worse off than most of the rest of the cast.
• Giving Someone the Pointer Finger: Kyouka loves to do this.
• Giver of Lame Names: Kyouka, not that she thinks they are lame. She believes one should be proud of the name a god like herself gives someone.
• Hot Springs Episode
• I Am Spartacus: Done in the final episode when Kyouka is possessed by Water. Everyone claims to be the true Great Destroyer. Even Chika tries to get in on it even though she definitely isn't the true child of Enka.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Kyouka, to a T. Immature and selfish one moment, wise Mama Bear the next.
• Karma Houdini: Dr. Gebok, a cyborg Mad Scientist who Crossed The Line in Hyouka's backstory (bringing in a girl to be his one and only friend and then tricking Hyouka into killing her to break him of his pacifism) and wrecks all kinds of havoc in the present, is treated as a comical figure and never gets off worse than being blasted off like Team Rocket.
  • Chika also has some of this, since she does get off rather well for torturing Yuka for most of her life. This is a downplayed example because if she does go back to torturing Yuka, Gekka will kill her.
• Kill Sat: Fueled by The Power of Love and activated by a magical girl wand with a motor.
• Lethal Chef: Kyouka's horrifying creations talk back and everyone who eats it gets poisoned. Except for Yuka, who's endured far worse tortures than a lousy bowl of Montezuma's Revenge.
  • Subverted in one episode with an assassin-turned-Chinese chef whose food sends everyone to the hospital, in the end discovered to be because his food is so good that the human mind is overloaded.
• Love Bubbles: Kyouka has the habit of provoking those.
• Love Freak: Apparently One-Shot Character Klutz Devil, who immediately supports the relationship between Hyouka and Kiriko.
• Magical Girl:
  • Raichou (self-proclaimed). She's also a beautiful electric butterfly! Yay yay!
  • Raichou also helps Kyouka become a Magical Girl for an episode to punish Ouka for forgetting their wedding anniversary (turns out he didn't forget it). Kyouka gets to wear frilly clothes with bared midriff, uses Teika as her mascot and has a heart-shaped staff that shoots lasers from space.
• Man, I Feel Like a Woman: Ginka's personality.
• Mars Needs Women: Episode 11 tells the story of Hyouka falling in love with a human girl.
• Maybe Ever After: At the end of the series, Ginka and Chika appear to be on a date.
• Minion with an F in Evil: DojiDevil, who's both a softy and very incompetent at the whole devil thing.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Kyouka's Jerkass attitude turn Mujaki from a nice pirate into a ruthless one.
• The Noseless: Partially-averted.
• Not Blood Siblings: Chika's love for Ginka.
• Nothing Is Scarier: When Chika was the Solitary Doll of her family, the only member that did not abuse her was Million. This only made Chika absolutely terrified of her as she assumed she was trying to get her to let her guard down to hurt her worse than she could imagine. Unaware Million was actually just trying to be a good sister.
• Nurse with Good Intentions: Kyouka. Her nursing's about as good as her cooking.
• Official Couple: Kyouka and Ouka, of course. Takes them as few as 5 episodes.
  Ouka: And I do like you. Did you not see that?
  Kyouka: *blushing* Of course I did. I just got a little worried is all...
  • After various episodes where they're seen sleeping in separate rooms, episode 25 has them sleeping in the same bed, for once.
• Off the Chart: The sales quota on a bar graph for a specific branch of a travel agency has surpassed all others, going off the chart, onto the wall, and then onto the ceiling.
• Ojou Ringlets: Million has massive ones.
• Only Six Faces
• People's Republic of Tyranny: Or not, but the People's Republic of Kyouka deserves a mention, even if it's populated by monkeys.
• Pet the Dog: Kyouka shows a soft side periodically to keep from looking like a total jerkass.
• Physical God: Gouyokuou and Gekka. Both are apparently ageless alien beings of great power. The former requires a Power Limiter just so he doesn't pulverize Earth into dust by complete accident. The latter has a whole set of ill-defined powers that include Mind Rape, cosmic scale teleportation, Voluntary Shapeshifting and energy blasts.
• Pirates: Episode 10, led by Mujakky, a pirate captain who looks like an elementary schooler. They seem to function more like fishermen, though, and profess a code of love and peace, to Ouka's confusion.
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: Massively, massively subverted, one episode has a pirate captain girl who doesn't want to kill or steal. It turns out her "rival" was actually fulfilling her father's last wish by tricking her to kill him; thus ensuring that she would either be a pirate; or else quit. She embraces her new self with relish.
• The Power of Love: Or so they hope.
• Puni Plush: 'Cellphone' controlled Kyouka-sama avatars!
• Quirky Household: Pretty apparent, given the motley "backgrounds" of the family members.
• Restraining Bolt: Gouyokuou wears control rods on his back. If you see one fall off, it's already too late to run.
• Santa Claus: For all of five seconds before Kyouka shoots him down with a homing missile. He gets better, though, and challenges Kyouka to an epic martial arts duel. And loses.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Since the End of the World is at stake, Operation Cozy Family seems to have a bottomless budget. To the point that Kyouka thought it was too bothersome to go to the airport she had the airport come to them, as in the neighborhood in front of the house was changed into an airport overnight just for their one plane. Then after Kyouka crashed said airplane on an uninhabited island, they built an entire 5 Star Hotel just for them on it in the span of an afternoon.
• Secret Project Refugee Family: The premise of the show, more or less.
• Series Continuity Error: May or may not be a result of the anime adaption, but Kyouka complains to Ouka that he never told her about something as amazing as christmas and, more to the point, getting presents. However this comes up after an episode where Ouka and Kyouka were already officially married for one year, which means they somehow skipped another Christmas entirely for this to make sense.
• Serious Business: Kyouka really takes her role as a mother and wife quite seriously. She is willing to destroy anything that might threaten her children and studies romance films to try to be more of a wife to Ouka.
• Shinigami: Ouka has one as an Unlucky Childhood Friend. She also has sisters. This seems to be a title for Monster Slayers in Ouka's organization. Specifically individuals who have slain a thousand monsters earn the title of "Shinigami" and the right to wear the hanya mask that signifies that status.
• Shipper on Deck: It's natural that Kyouka and Ouka are shipped by their 'children'. Yuuka especially. This varies from making sure that daddy isn't cheating to leaving the two alone for their anniversary dinner.
• Ship Tease: Kyouka and Ouka are pretty much the Official Couple, Hyouka and Kiriko blush around each other frequently, Yamaguchi has an obvious crush on Yuuka, Madara is in love with Teika, the cat girl and waiter have kissed, and Chika and Ginka were last seen in a very date-like atmosphere.
• Shout-Out:
  • Quite a few Western movies, for example, the pirate episode had Gekka turning giant, singing a nursery rhyme, and pulling a ship down in an obvious rendition of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest.
  • There is also a blatant one to Maria Watches Over Us, complete with girls calling Chika "onee-sama".
  • Kyouka last-resort to defeat Santa is feline martial-arts.
• Something We Forgot: Since Gekka is a silent jellyfish, the family has from time to time forgotten her during chaotic moments.
• Supreme Chef: Pierre's cooking is constantly praised with how good it is, with Raichou trying to force him to marry her just to always have his cooking.
  • An assassin-turned-chef's cooking is so good it knocks out anyone who eats it. Because of this reaction said chef thought he was a Lethal Chef.
• Super Window Jump: Ouka and Kyouka jump through a window in their hurry to get to the balcony.
• Sweet Tooth: Raichou has one, which makes her the victim of one of the show's running gags.
• Talking Animal: Teika, a talking lion.
• Theme Naming: All of the main characters have names ending in "ka". Including some supposed non-candidates, suspiciously.
  • Somewhat justified: Everyone but Ouka and Kyouka (and Enka) were renamed by Kyouka when they entered the family. Probably because she noticed the similarity.
• Third-Person Person: "You are in the presence of the great Kyouka-sama!"
• Tomboy: Madara, to the point Teika never realized she was a girl until she flat out told him.
• Too Kinky to Torture: Ginka.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Gekka really loves sushi.
• Tsundere: Kyouka has some of this toward Ouka, although her "tsun" side prevails throughout most of the series.
• The Unintelligible: Gekka, except during Mind Rape.
• Wave-Motion Gun: Hyouka is armed with a really, really big one that comes in quite handy.
• Wham Shot: The first episode ends with Yuka getting out of the bath to reveal she is Covered in Scars.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The revelation that "Kyouka" is actually from a race of animal ears that possess people brings up some uncomfortable implications about the girl stuck as her host, but this is never addressed.
• What Is This Thing You Call "Love"?: It's the question Oasis came to Earth to find out. Chika and Madara end up giving her the completely wrong impression of what love is. And then there's Kyouka's tendency to base her "love" on whatever she sees in TV and manga...
• Whip of Dominance: Chika, in her continuing attempts to get Ginka to act manly, pulls out a whip. He likes it.
• Wholesome Crossdresser: Madara, though with that voice alone it hardly comes as a surprise to the viewer or anyone who's seen the Image Song album. Also, Pierre looks quite happy to save Chika in volume 2 while wearing the girls' school uniform. Ginka doesn't really count, drag or no drag.

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