Choubu no Shinobi: Lepidoptera is a Fighting Series manga written by Murata Shinya and illustrated by Hayami Tokisada, who previously worked with him on Caterpillar.
In Japan during the Sengoku Period, one year after Oda Nobunaga's death, a samurai known as Hanza prepares for an important task that several of his late comrades were unable to fulfill for themselves: getting laid. However, as he enters a brothel little does he expect that Rin, the courtesan inside, is Nobunaga's murderer and that two rival ninja clans are out to capture her and claim the late shogun's head which she supposedly holds.
The manga was serialized in Gangan Joker from 2017 to 2019 for 25 chapters, and compiled into five volumes. It takes place in the same setting of Jackals and Arachnid.
This manga features the following tropes:
- Actually A Doom Bot: The Iroha who attacks Hanza and is cut in half by Rin turns out to be a construct. The second who gets killed, however, was the real deal, as her corpse doesn't dissolve.
- Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: Megumi and Ran are reused designs (ancestors?) from Arachnid but they're enemies instead of student and teacher, respectively. And they don't even interact until the end, when Ran knocks Megumi out.
- Advancing Wall of Doom: At one point Rin is imprisoned for torture in a room with a grate separating her from what are essentially the ant-like rape zombies previously featured in Arachnid, who similarly to Allomerus decemarticulatus ants push the grate foward to try to molest and smash her against it. Fortunately, Hanza breaks through one of the walls to save Rin in the nick of time.
- Animal-Themed Superbeing: All the ninjas have insect-themed superpowers, but unlike Arachnid this is far enough on the fantasy side of the scale that readers shouldn't need to call fridge logic on every little thing.
- Ascended Extra: The tiger beetle motif had been used in Arachnid for a throwaway character. In this story, it belongs to the male protagonist.
- Author Appeal: Yet more bug trivia from Murata. Also, his profile on his old "Japan Onany Network" H-doujin circle website read that he really likes ear-cleaning, and he openly explains in the omake for the first volume why the protagonist is a courtesan who does just that.
- Back for the Dead: Subverted; Megumi survives getting hit by a poison dart in the neck and sits out of the entire conflict, only showing up in the very end to sabotage the protagonists. Then Ran appears behind Megumi and knocks her out.
- Belly Mouth: The lanternfly ninja is a youkai creature (or just a really misshapen guy) whose actual face is on his chest. He puts on oddly convincing fake heads and kills people with a backstab after pretending to die from headshots.
- Bloodier and Gorier: The story is far more violent than Arachnid despite also being published in a shonen magazine, particularly considering that story was once forced to censor a graphic scene of dissected corpses.
- Brainwashed and Crazy: Hanza is hypnotized by Akari into believing he's caring for a distraught Rin, and in this state he's reduced to being a harmless puppet and gets repeatedly raped by her. Rin later gets Hanza back to his senses by performing erotic ear-cleaning on him.
- Butt-Monkey: Gokikaburi fares as well as her counterpart in Arachnid, actually surviving to the end but getting beaten up all the time and not being able to achieve much throughout the story. Goki's last scene has her getting tossed around by Ran, and then lying unconscious with her bare butt left exposed.
- Continuity Nod:
- Caterpillar once had the narrator explain that insect-themed superpowered assassins had existed in the setting since ancient times. The same group shot panel from that scene is reused by the narrator in this story, though the samurai character in it got retconned to a different design. This is rather odd, because this samurai never appeared in either Arachnid or Caterpillar...
- The ending makes mention of how a certain ageless parasitic girl will begin brewing trouble in Japan some centuries later in Arachnid.
- Distressed Damsel: Hanza regrets selling Rin out to one of the clans and rescues her. In turn, Rin also saves him twice, from being captured and later from being brainwashed.
- Darker and Edgier: The story is more violent than that of Arachnid and has a way higher death count.
- Developing Doomed Characters: Any secondary character in this actually getting a Dark and Troubled Past flashback is just a sign of their impending death.
- Distressed Dude: Hanza is tied up in spider strings by Ayano for his betrayal and spends a couple of battles stuck on the background until Rin saves him. Later on he also gets brainwashed by Akari and has to be saved by Rin again.
- Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: Akari, the Koga clan leader who has the appearance of a child despite being over 100 years old thanks to the neoteny traits of fireflies, not only brainwashes and rapes Hanza several times in a straighfowarded fanservice scene but also gets away with it.
- Drop Dead Gorgeous:
- Iroha is Killed Offscreen and her half-naked corpse is shown from an angle that draws attention to her exposed breast and her terrified expression. Ironically, she's left and shown less naked than she was while attempting to capture the Big Bad.
- Ayano is sliced from the top of her shoulder while she's naked, and then she dies with eyes wide open while a horrified Hiyori mourns her.
- Sarasa is violently sliced in half and collapses dead before a panel frames her Navel-Deep Neckline and her wide-eyed face with her tongue rolled out.
- Hiyori is brutally sliced in half and her stripped upper body flies into the air before she dies.
- Et Tu, Brute?: Hanza betrays Rin for his clan early on, but regrets it and saves her later. She doesn't forgive Hanza and rejects him for a while after repaying the favor, but they do end the story as Fire-Forged Friends.
- Half the Man He Used to Be:
- Rin slices Iroha in half, but she was some kind of clone construct.
- Hanza flips Sarasa in the air and cuts her in half.
- Tengyuu executes a wounded Hiyori by chopping her in half.
- Fan Disservice: Three female ninjas die half-naked. One dies from offscreen Bloodless Carnage, but the others all get sliced. Regarding how the volume releases have uncensored nudity, the artist actually made their death scenes a selling point on Twitter.
- Fanservice: As a risqué Feudal Japan story, there are several Honey Trap female assassins who strip naked before fighting, including the protagonist Rin.
- Guns Are Worthless: The Iga clan leader kills two characters offscreen, and in the second-to-last chapter is revealed to have done that with a pair of guns. Seeing this, Rin uses a spray of volatile powder to detonate the entire room when he shoots, making his Healing Factor moot at the same time.
- Harmful to Minors: Several children die either during the story proper or in flashbacks, though all the surviving antagonists are the youngest in their clans.
- Hotter and Sexier: There are far more fully naked Ms. Fanservice characters in the story than either in Arachnid or the seinen spinoff Caterpillar, with uncensored breasts in the volume versions of certain chapters.
- Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Every chapter is named "Shinobi of" something, contrary to how chapters in other Arachnid installments are character quotes.
- Improbable Weapon User:
- Megumi carries a giant bowl around to hide under or throw at people.
- Iroha the spittlebug assassin lady can excrete a ton of bubbly slime which she attempts to use as blockades and hazards. More plainly, she can also harden her hair and stab people with it.
- Inexplicably Awesome: In the setting, many people are born with supernatural abilities themed after arthropods but the reasons for this aren't ever explored.
- Intimate Healing: Rin is able to heal Hanza from brainwashing towards the end by performing erotic ear cleaning on him.
- Japanese Ranguage: "Lepidoptera" goes with an "r", and not an "l" like it says on the cover for some magazine chapters and the volumes. They keep switching between the two for some reason.
- Kick the Dog:
- The body snatcher from the beginning raped and killed Rin's little sister, establishing him as a sick bastard.
- One flashback shows some male ninjas raping a woman and a girl on-panel. To their side is a child whom they killed by impaling her in the navel and crotch, showing how bleak the war between the ninja clans is.
- Late-Arrival Spoiler: This is a distant prequel to Arachnid, and yet it directly references the true antagonist of that story by name during the closing narration for the ending. Just for the heck of it.
- MacGuffin: The Iga and Koga ninjas attempt to obtain a box that contains the severed head of Oda Nobunaga.
- Master of Threads: Ayano summons threads around her to trap and garrote enemies. Unlike Turis and Alice, she does it without any kind of tool.
- Men Are the Expendable Gender: Averted, as most of the ladies in the story meet gruesome ends.
- Mythology Gag: Ran meeting Megumi at the very end and walloping her is amusing and ironic because of the teacher-student relationship their counterparts in Arachnid have. The ending also states Ran grows up to train the next generation of Iga ninjas while Megumi resented her for the rest of their lives.
- Ninja: The story features ninjas with supernatural abilities and establishes the assassins seen throughout the rest of the series are simply the modern equivalent.
- Nipple and Dimed: Female nipples are usually conveniently hidden under hair or something else, but some of those instances are uncensored in the volume releases. This makes the manga Hotter and Sexier compared to its predecessor Arachnid.
- Not Distracted by the Sexy: Iroha and Ayano bare their breasts to get the jump on distracted male opponents, but this just gets the two killed like chumps when both men don't faint or die from their wounds as expected.
- Older Than She Looks: Akari looks like a child but is over 100 years old because of her bug powers involving neoteny, like the Boss from Arachnid. Oddly, the epilogue states she still died of old age 5 years later.
- Quest for Sex: Hanza really wants to catch some tails but is out of luck and when he does it is by being repeatedly raped while brainwashed. Fortunately for him, once everything is done with he does gets together with Rin.
- R-Rated Opening: In the beginning when Rin is interrogating a paralyzed Hanza over his intentions because she fears he's after her head, her little sister comes up behind her and turns out to be dead and possessed by a body snatcher who, as he bursts off her corpse, brags about having raped the child before he killed her.
- Reused Character Design: Some character designs from Arachnid reappear here.
- "Gokikaburi" Megumi is just Megumi "Gokiburi" Oki but blue.
- "Scarab" Ran looks and acts like Ran "Kabutomushi" Kabuto did as a child in Caterpillar.
- Ayano is named after Alice Fujii's mother Ayana and fills the spider assassin role. Her friend Hiyori is closer in looks and personality to Alice herself, like Pure Inui and Himeno Endou.
- Another character who makes a brief appearance is designed after Hanakamakiri from Caterpillar.
- Same Story, Different Names: It reads like Arachnid as a dark fantasy story set in Feudal Japan. Hanza being stuck in the middle of the ninja clan war calls back to premise of Jackals, the original installment in the series.
- Shown Their Work: As usual, battles are juxtaposed with trivia about the bugs the characters represent that is often taken from research papers read by the author.
- Surprisingly Happy Ending: In comparison to the bittersweet endings of the previous installments Jackals, Arachnid and Caterpillar. After so much bloodshed, Rin and Hanza both survive and start a family.
- We Hardly Knew Ye: Everyone who's not either protagonist or the clan leaders gets killed in battle like two chapters after being introduced and without getting to do much of anything. Some even die offscreen.
- Weapon-Based Characterization: Some of the ninjas wield weapons that match their bug motif, like how Sarasa the scorpion kunoichi wields a whip.
- "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: The story has some narration at the end about what happened to the five surviving assassins.
- Wild Card: Hanza helps, betrays and rescues Rin in the first few chapters alone. He ends up teaming up with and fighting people from both opposing clans to ensure his own survival.
