Manga / Kill Me Baby

Despite the disturbing title, Kill Me Baby (or Baby, please kill me depending on the translator, though the anime adaptation uses the former as the main title, and both in the eyecatches), is a Yonkoma gag strip created by Kaduho and serialized in Manga Time Kirara Carat since 2008, revolving mostly around slapstick humor.

Yasuna Oribe is an airheaded high school girl who tries to greet a new student one day, only to discover that she's brutally efficient at twisting her arm, putting her in a chokehold, and using other painful methods of submission. She later learns that the girl's name is Sonya, and she works for an unnamed organization as an assassin. As the manga continues, Yasuna fluctuates between trying to warm Sonya up to living the life of a normal schoolgirl and occasionally trying to one-up her in various tests of skill. Both methods often end in failure, but it doesn't stop Yasuna from trying.

An anime adaptation started airing on January 5, 2012.

Everybody who is a fan of dark slapstick comedy should check this out.

Sentai Filmworks acquired the licensing rights for the show and released an English dub.

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Tropes presented by the series:

• Action Girl: Sonya and Agiri. In the manga, Yasuna attempts to be this too.
• Alleged Lookalikes: An audio variant in episode 4. One of the fake Yasunas looks exactly like the original, but definitely doesn't SOUND like her. Sonya still has trouble telling her apart from the other two.
• All Just a Dream: Chapter 89, heavily implied to be Or Was It a Dream?
• Alternate Universe: All the volume prologues are this. So far they've parodied Magical Girl shows, Momotaro, Dracula, The Western, The Wizard of Oz and the Space Opera genre.
• Amusing Injuries: A LOT. 99% of them fall on Yasuna. The few times Sonya does get hurt though, Yasuna tends to laugh. Which then gets Sonya mad, and she further punishes Yasuna for it. And in the manga they can become outright deadly (by the show's standards, that is).
  • Instant Bandages: And as a result she usually is found with these by the next panel, or even during a punch. They are also seen falling off as if they are just oversized pieces of paper.
• Artistic License – Medicine: In the Japanese version of Chapter 75 of the manga Sonya loses her voice due to a canker sore. The translations have changed this to a sore throat.
• Assassin Outclassin':
  • Sonya and Yasuna escape from an assassin in episode 4. The assassin is then stopped with the help of Agiri.
  • They run into another one in episode 9, while looking for a "hammer spawn", a type of legendary snake. Yasuna then accidentally trips and hits a camouflaged man, who happens to be using said name. Sonya however manages to stop him after he chases after Yasuna for being annoying and falling into one of the latter's traps.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Huge versions of Yasuna and Sonya appear in episode 4 as eye catches.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Sonya and Yasuna have a few moments like these (like in the last episode of the anime), and their rarity only adds to their sweetness.
• Batman Gambit: In episode 8 Yasuna actually manages to pull one on Sonya when she convinces her to play darts by making hitting the inner circle a failure.
  • Yasuna also tricked Sonya at one point into dodging a shot from a water gun...because she was intentionally aiming for Sonya's lunch.
• Beach Episode: Chapter 10 (episode 5 in the anime), absent fanservice.
• Bears Are Bad News: Chapter 9 (Episode 2 in the anime), a bear escapes from the zoo and makes trouble for Yasuna and Sonya.
• Black Comedy: The show runs on this, as any violence depicted is Played for Laughs. And the manga can get quite gruesome at times.
• Blank White Eyes: Displayed on Sonya and Yasuna from time to time. Specially Yasuna.
• Blue with Shock: Both Sonya and Yasuna have this look occasionally.
• Boke and Tsukkomi Routine: Most of the chapters involving Sonya and Yasuna usually play out like this.
• Brain Bleach:
  • Sonya and Yasuna's expressions after opening Agiri's boxes in the wrong order in the last episode. Agiri is shown to have recovered the end of the last segment.
  • Chapter 89.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Upon hearing a bear has escaped from the zoo and may be lurking nearby:
  Sonya: Ah!! I just had a really bad feeling! Some idiot just activated some really bad flags!
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Yasuna thanks to her stupid antics which irritate Sonya to no end, and promptly gets hit for it.
  • The unused character in the anime, who complains she doesn't even have a name, vows revenge on Sonya and Yasuna, then keeps missing the two when she tries to approach them at school in episode 3.
• Cat Girl: The second Yasuna puppet in episode 5.
• Cast of Expies:
  • The main duo act as superficial lookalikes to the leads of Lyrical Nanoha. Not only does Sonya look almost exactly like a Super-Deformed version of Fate, her background and relationship with Yasuna also mirror Fate's ones with Nanoha in a tongue-in-cheek way. Yasuna is clearly meant to be the Nanoha to Sonya's Fate, although not as dramatically similar in design and personality (she still shares her brown hair, simpler hairdo, sweet personality and role in the plot, however).
    • Following the Lyrical Nanoha line, Agiri's character design and absurdly calm personality make her resemble an exaggerated, stoner-like version of Suzuka. Even her status as a ninja might be a reference to Suzuka's astonishing athleticism in the Nanoha A's manga.
    • Unused Character is a solid one of Vita: a short-tempered, redhead girl with a braid and an Idiot Hair who intrudes as a rival later into the plot (well, she tries) and definitely doesn't like not to be taken seriously.
• Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Yasuna (see above). Agiri, oh is she ever.
• Cluster F-Bomb: A somewhat mild form happens when Yasuna gets frustrated.
  Yasuna: "Kuso! Kuso!"
• Color Failure: Yasuna and Sonya in the first episode after they look at a picture taken in the abandoned classroom, and spot some ghosts in the picture.
• Company Cross References: In the magical girl parody, Yasuna uses a "Carat Max Forward Miracle" magic spell. Individually, these words are the names of the Manga Time Kirara magazines other than the main subtitle-less one that serializes this manga.
• Confronting Your Imposter: Subverted. Yasuna actually joins forces with her imposters!
• Continuity Nod: After Yasuna wakes up from a nightmare about Sonya assassinating her stuffed rabbit Pyonsuke, we see that Pyonsuke is still tied up in a knot from when Sonya messed around with him chapters before.
• Cranial Eruption: Comes with a majority of Yasuna's Amusing Injuries.
• Cross-Popping Veins: Displayed from time to time, mostly on Sonya when reacting to something idiotic Yasuna says or does.
• Dancing Theme: The anime's ending theme features Yasuna and Sonya doing dance moves in their gym uniforms that come straight out of the manga. Many of these are physically impossible to pull off in real life.
• Dead-Hand Shot: In the original manga version of Killtaro, we see a dead unused character's hand, as well as a pool of blood, showing that Sonya killed her. This got Adapted Out of the anime.
• Delayed Reaction: One occurs in episode 9 while looking for a legendary snake known as the "Hammer Spawn". Yasuna instead finds a pit viper, and it takes her and Sonya a few seconds to realize it's a dangerous snake and run off.
• Demoted to Extra: At the end of the first volume, the manga's creator mentioned that Yasuna was initially supposed to play the "straight" girl to contrast with Sonya's Hair-Trigger Temper, and a third unnamed child assassin with braided hair and a Chinese fighting style was going to play The Ditz. However, Yasuna eventually absorbed the third girl's personality and became the crazy girl to Sonya's relatively "straight" role, while the other girl was relegated to the extra material outside of the story. She instead becomes a rarely appearing Mauve Shirt in the anime, due to being voiced by Rie Kugimiya. And all of her appearances are Played for Laughs while utilizing this trope.
• Dream Episode: All of the parody segments in Episode 11 act as these, since they are soon after revealed to be New Year's dreams Yasuna had.
• Dual Wielding: The Volume 1 cover shows Sonya wielding 2 pistols and Yasuna wielding an eggplant and a banana.
• Dumbass Has a Point: For all of Yasuna's incorrect assumptions, her inquiry about Sonya hurting the wrong people if they so much as innocently touch her has some merit to it since Yasuna herself was the victim of her reflexes, even when she wasn't trying to prank her or get on her nerves. A Halloween chapter also shows Sonya almost hurting a trick-or-treater because they got too close to her.
• Epic Fail:
  • In episode 2, Sonya tosses a volleyball at Yasuna after the latter laughs at her when some crows steal their lunch. However, the latter dodges it, and the ball bounces off the wall, smacking Sonya in the head. Yasuna then accidentally trips on the nunchuks she brought to school.
  • And in a later skit in the same episode, Sonya throws some small knives at a baseball, although it doesn't stop it from hitting her. As Yasuna laughs at her and saying she would've just dodged it, a soccer ball hits her in the head.
• Every Episode Ending: While the manga chapters end wherever they feel the joke should end, the anime's episodes (with the exception of Episode 12) always end with Yasuna and Sonya coming home from school.
• Eyes Always Shut: Zigzagged with Agiri. She does open them from time to time, though her default expression is the closed eyes look.
• Faceless Masses: Used liberally in the anime, heavily enforcing the Minimalist Cast.
• Festival Episode: Chapter 24/Episode 5, where they stumble upon a street festival on the way home.
• Fleeting Passionate Hobbies: Yasuna has a tendency to go and buy the latest thing she sees on TV, or the latest fads she sees, such as attempting to perform psychic acts after watching one on TV.
• Fractured Fairytale:
  • The Wonderful Wizard of Kill, which parodies The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
  • One chapter covers a parody of The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, with Yasuna in the role of the Cutter and Sonya in the role of Princess Kaguya. The story ends before it can even properly begin, since the Bamboo Cutter marvels over the glowing bamboo before losing interest and only recalling it to a friend (played by Agiri) a year later. Meanwhile, poor Kaguya is stuck in the bamboo shoot, having grown to adult proportions.
  • A retelling of Momotarō has the titular character (renamed Killtaro) kill the Dog for being annoying, eschew the Pheasant's assistance, and ignore the Monkey completely. Killtaro also takes the place of several other Japanese folktale characters on the way to Onigashima, such as Urashima Tarou and Isshun-bosshi, before becoming the reason Onigashima is named such after killing the entirely benign human population of the island for condemning his theft of one of the island's peaches. Sakata Kintoki is among the humans Killtarou slaughters.
• The Gadfly: Agiri, who tends to have Yasuna do or buy silly things whenever she shows up.
  • Yasuna herself enjoys constantly getting on Sonya's nerves one way or another.

• Giving Up the Ghost: Yasuna in episode 2 after Sonya puts her to sleep to help her get rid of her hiccups. It happens numerous other times across the series.
• Gory Discretion Shot: Agiri has a trio of boxes that are meant to be stacked in a particular order. When they are, they open and a person will appear. When Yasuna's birthday happens, Agiri gives her a second stack of these boxes, but Yasuna messes the order up and gets...something...gruesome in the box instead. Thankfully, the audience doesn't get to see what it is.
• Gratuitous English: Kill Me Baby and Baby, please kill me, of course. The anime has many other instances too.
• Gratuitous Foreign Language: Yasuna, in the anime, particularly in the opening scene as a form of Couch Gag for the first three episodes.
  Yasuna: Guten morgen!
  Yasuna: Danke schön!
  Yasuna: ¡Buenos días!
  Yasuna: Nihao!
• Hand Puppet: Yasuna makes some for chapter 25/episode 5. They were intended to be used in a children's performance, but Yasuna's usual antics leads to Sonya destroying one and keeping another.
• Hates Being Touched: Sonya. Yasuna repeatedly fails to remember this.
• Helium Speech: One of the gifts Sonya and Agiri give Sonya at her party. They use it to do tongue twisters. The Unused Character finds it later and does the same.
• Highly-Visible Ninja: Ridiculed. During Sonya's not-birthday, Agiri (a genuine ninja) gives her a present of a very stereotypical ninja outfit that she outright admits she got from a party shop (think Final Fantasy Tactics Ninja class). Yasuna then mocks and laughs at Sonya's costume, calling it something straight out of a Western comic book. Things obviously end painfully for Yasuna.
• Hypocritical Humor: Yasuna, in a rare display of not using any trickery, decides to throw a Christmas party for her friends. Sonya, the assassin who regularly takes out dangerous weapons in and outside of the classroom, chastises her for setting up a hotpot when those aren't allowed on school grounds.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: The anime's episode names feature three or four things ("A, B, and C" or "A, B, C, and D") that relate to the episode which, when written in Japanese, are all in 12-character hiragana.
• Idiot Crows: The crows that steal Yasuna's lunch. One says Baka and the other says Aho as they swoop in.
• Instant Bandages: Yasuna often has these on after getting hit by Sonya. Sometimes the bandages fall right off in the next scene after she gets over whatever injury she just suffered.
• Japanese Ranguage: The dub occasionally has an overly deep voice read off the eye catch cards in this manner. It's probably on purpose.
• Jerkass With A Heart Of Gold: Sonya. Yasuna can be quite a passive-aggressive jerk too.
  • Other than the knee-jerk reactions to being touched, most of Sonya's asskickings are warranted.
• Kick the Dog: Yasuna left her stuffed rabbit on Sonya's desk to teach her to be nicer. When she returned, Sonya had it twisted into a ball.
• Kill Us Both: Parodied. Sonya does this not out of desperation, but because she's sick of Yasuna's antics and didn't care that she was in her way.
• Klingon Promotion: Yasuna suggests that Sonya kill her superiors in order to escape from her life of being an assassin. Sonya calls her out before she finishes the thought.
• Lame Pun Reaction: You can count on one hand the amount of times Sonya hasn't throttled Yasuna for making bad puns:
  • When Yasuna realizes she doesn't have enough snow to make a full snowman, she fashions it into a daruma instead. Feeling proud of herself, she cheerfully states that it's a real snowman now (in Japanese, they are called yuki-daruma), which makes Sonya destroy it in bad pun-fueled anger.
  • Yasuna asks Sonya what she herself is holding, and the latter answers a kite (tako, which sounds like octopus). Yasuna laughs and says it's actually a squid (ika), then proceeds to call her a fool (ikame, corrupted from bakame) for it.
• Limited Animation: Frequently throughout the anime, though it's generally for comedic effect.
• Magic Skirt: It's actually one of Agiri's ninja techniques. It applies to her hair, too^note Actually, it's inverted for her hair.
• Magical Girl: Yasuna (Cute Witch variant) in the Volume 2 omake (Episode 11 in the anime).
• Masochism Tango: Sonya and Yasuna. They seem to be the only people willing to put up with each other, not counting Agiri.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Agiri. Maybe the greatest ninja ever to walk the Earth... or just a good con artist. Most definitely The Gadfly. But if you look at the entry for Ninja, note comparisons with Highly-Visible Ninja—Not knowing whether it's magic or sleight-of-hand IS Ninjutsu!
• Minimalist Cast: Sonya, Yasuna, Agiri and the Unused Character make for a very small cast that never expands. Even the latter two don't appear that much.
  • In the anime, any walk-on roles are played by the same old man and woman, and even those are few in number. Two other schoolgirls have been shown onscreen but their appearances are very brief.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • The last third of the Season Finale - What starts out as a regular gag sketch of Yasuna trying to disrupt one of Sonya's assassination assignments ends with her stuck in a pit tearfully begging Sonya not to leave, because she's terrified for the safety of one of her only friends. Cue Sonya helping her out of the pit and claiming her mission was cancelled due to a "change of plans".
  • Chapter 89's ending can be considered as outright terrifying.
• Mundane Utility: Sonya's killer reflexes are great for opening bottles.
• New Year Has Come: Yasuna, Sonya and Agiri use the first school day after New Year to hold a combined New Year, Christmas and Halloween Party.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Yasuna throws a stick at a balloon stuck in a tree in episode 2 in an attempt to bring it down. Unfortunately it just causes the balloon to fly into the sky.
• Ninja: Agiri Goshiki, the only other named character so far in the story.
• No Name Given: The "unused character".
• Non-Lethal K.O.: Despite the title and Sonya's abilities as an assassin, we never see anyone actually die. Even when assassins from rival groups target her, she only incapacitates them like she would Yasuna.
• On the Next: Episode previews are announced in the style of poetry, with two 12-character lines devoted to one word in the next episode's title. These poems, save for the one for Episode 13, end with the catchphrase "Now, what will you do, Yasuna Oribe?" (the last instead says "The answer lies within you").
• Paper Fan of Doom: Yasuna gives Sonya one in episode 2, expecting her to use it. Instead Sonya just punches her.
• Phenotype Stereotype: Sonya has blonde hair and blue eyes, signaling that she's from... wherever she's from.
• Please, Don't Leave Me: Yasuna begs Sonya not to go on her latest mission in episode 13 after being left in the big hole trap they were stuck in. Sonya doesn't seem to care at first, until Yasuna starts saying she may get killed on the job, and then she'd be really lonely without her. Sonya ends up bringing a rope to bring her out, then says her mission was postponed.
• Puni Plush: The characters are supposed to be teenage girls in high school, but they're drawn with exaggeratedly short proportions and round faces that make them look much younger. Notably, Kaduho's other big work Kagaku Chop and his doujin comics often have more regulated proportions.
• Purple Is the New Black: Agiri's hair is black in the coloured pages of the manga, but was changed to a deep purple in the anime.
• Right Behind Me: After Yasuna tells Sonya about an escaped bear, the latter freaks out as said bear is standing right behind the former.
• Schmuck Bait: Agiri tends to make Yasuna buy or do silly things, such as telling her she caught freshwater clams in the ocean, while hiding a grocery bag behind her in episode 5. The narrator then points out that said clams actually live in rivers and lakes as Yasuna attempts to find some by the beach.
• Shout-Out:
  • In Episode 3, Yasuna (using two spoons) and Sonya (imitating the transformation pose) give one to Ultraman. Yasuna does it again (with a mask) in Chapter 24.
  • From the magical girl parody, we have Sonya's gym owner character dressed as Danpei Tange when she acts as Yasuna's boxing coach.
  • Yasuna attempts the "Sheeeh!" pose with a straw dummy at one point.
  • The aliens from the opening look almost identical to the Mars People.
• Single Malt Vision: How Agiri's "clone jutsu" actually works.
• Something Only They Would Say: Parodied in episode 4. Sonya asks the three Yasunas what they had for lunch that day. They're all too dumb to remember.
• Spot the Imposter: In anime episode 4, two enemy assassins from different groups target Sonya and coincidentally disguised themselves as Yasuna. Their disguises are perfect, down to her stupidity—neither of them actually manage to attack her. The real Yasuna finds them in the spare classroom, and she inexplicably joins them and taunts with them that Sonya can't attack any of them since she can't tell which one is real. They fail to realize that Sonya doesn't care much for Yasuna's safety, so she just attacks them all at once, rightly guessing that the real one would just shake it off.
• Status Quo Is God: Yasuna can be rendered unconscious, be buried alive, have her wrist broken, and smash her head into ice causing her to bleed, and you can bet your socks off she'll be back in the next chapter!
• Stealth Hi/Bye: Agiri has a tendency to pop up out of nowhere.
• Talking Is a Free Action: Agiri averts this in chapter 12 (anime episode 4), much to her target's distress.
• Tempting Fate: Yasuna is constantly doing this. In one example, during episode 2, she sees a newspaper article about an escaped bear from the zoo. Naturally she tells Sonya about it, and sure enough the bear shows up behind her.
• Teru-Teru Bōzu: Yasuna attempts to end a typhoon by stringing a chain of these together. The wind snaps it off the line and the old man mistakes it for a dragon god flying in the sky.
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: For assassins and spies, Sonya and Agiri (and apparently the Unused Character) barely do any work onscreen. Even when trouble follows her home, Sonya is never actually shown killing/beating anyone besides Yasuna. Lampshaded in one chapter where Sonya outright asks Yasuna if she forgot that she's an assassin.
  • It's later narrowly Averted, we see Sonya returning from an underwater mission in episode 5. She also leaves on a mission in episode 13, much to Yasuna's despair.
• Three Shorts: Every episode of the anime has three to four segments, which are said in the title.
• They Killed Kenny Again: Becomes a Running Gag in the manga as it goes on. And while Yasuna is the most common victim, the truth is that no one is safe.
• Title Drop:
  • The 13th and final episode of the anime is appropriately named "Kill, Me, and Baby".
  • The volume prologues always include some part of the title in it.
• Title Theme Tune
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: No one at school aside from Yasuna seems to bat an eye that Sonya is bringing knives to school. Nor do they seem to care that she casually tosses them at Yasuna from time to time.
• Vague Age: They're probably in high school.
• The Wild West: Wasteland Kill Me, the prologue for Volume 6.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?:
  • Despite being a supposed hardcore assassin, Sonya seems to be afraid of some things, like roaches, stray dogs (she's not good with animals in general) and ghosts.
  • They run into a literal one during episode 9. Yasuna says that it's just a pit viper, instead of the "Hammer Spawn" legendary snake she was attempting to catch. After a beat, they then realize the danger that creature poses, and promptly run off.
• With Friends Like These...: Yasuna would have to be very lonely to keep coming back to Sonya, who in turn would have to be likewise to not only put up with her for so long, but even rescue her from alien octopuses in the opening sequence.
• Working Through the Cold: Played for Laughs in chapter 32 (episode 10 in the anime).
• Wrong Genre Savvy:
  • Agiri exploits this by throwing things other than shuriken to subvert other people's stereotypical image of ninjas, such as throwing a boomerang in episode 4 to take out the assassin targeting Sonya.
  • Subverted in the Zombie Baby chapter, which has Yasuna use herself as a distraction to clear out some zombies, but the weapons she takes with her (a wooden stake, a garland of garlic, and a Christian cross) all correspond to vampires rather than zombies. She somehow was correct in that all of the zombies burn away in sunlight, just like vampires.

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