Do not be fooled by the series' distinct Puni Plush aesthetic. Made In Abyss is in fact a high-octane tour de force of Lovecraftian horror, boasting a caliber of Gorn, Body Horror, and ultra-violence that puts it shoulder-to-shoulder with the likes of Berserk, Now and Then, Here and There, and Warhammer 40,000 (the significantly more optimistic worldview compared to those three and the lack of wholly evil villains devoid of redeemable qualities notwithstanding). Yeah, it's that kind of show.
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In General/Pre-Idofront
- The Abyss itself, for a multitude of reasons. It's a strange Eldritch Location that causes all sorts of phenomena to occur by virtue of its sheer proximity. Time seems to move strangely in the depths and trying to ascend causes potentially life-threatening symptoms. No one knows what it is or where it came from. And all of that is without mentioning the way that towards the bottom, the Abyss stops looking like a pit in the ground, and starts looking more and more like a living being, with eyes and teeth.
- And there's also the simple fact that, even if you put aside the strange phenomena, the Abyss itself is insanely deep. The latest official map sets the Seventh Layer starting at a depth of 15.5 kilometers down, with the deepest point theorized to be more than 20 kilometers. To give you an idea, the lowest point on Earth - the very bottom of the Marianas Trench - is 10,924 meters below sea level, barely half of the Abyss' depth. And bear in mind, those seven Layers are just the regions that people know about and have explored, with the very bottom still nowhere in sight. Makes you wonder to yourself: How far down 'does'' this thing go?
- One of the most subtle, but ever-present, horrors of the Abyss is one of sheer compulsion. Everyone knows the Abyss is basically a Death World with all manner of dangerous creatures lurking down there. Everyone knows about the Curse. Hell, every single Delver is expected to die down there, to the point that a delver's "Last Dive" is seen as a natural conclusion that is celebrated... and it's probably no mistake that orphans are trained as delvers, rather than kids with blood family who will miss them. Yet people just won't stop diving into the Abyss. No delver is shown deciding "nope, that was too close for comfort, I'm taking my profits and opening a bakery." They cannot resist going deeper into that rabbit hole until the Abyss finally takes their life. The pull of the Abyss cares not about friendship, family, maternal instincts, or even self-preservation.
- To add to this, the way exploring the Abyss and Delvers are romanticized by Orth. They hold delving up as heroic, noble and adventurous, and even death is celebrated as if it's an achievement. But there's nothing glorious about bleeding from every orifice, being turned into an unkillable and perpetually suffering blob of flesh (by another delver, nonetheless), or slowly being eaten alive by parasitic larvae.
- The imagery and the themes of the whole series plays constantly with Does This Remind You of Anything? and child abuse. It's indirect, similar to the likes of Alien, but the imagery still manages to tiptoe between lines so frequently that unfortunate people looking for official manga chapters online found them on hentai sites!!
- In the very first scene, you learn that severe punishment by an orphan isn't being sent to bed without dinner or even spanking. It's being strung up naked (essentially, crucifixion without the nails), and this is confirmed via a clip in the Episode 2 montage. Ossen also casually mentions her apprentice being strung up, meaning this is a normal practice. The orphanage also has a full torture chamber with a functioning electric chair. These are the morally white people, by the way.
- Reg is violated by Riko with a ruler. Molested by a Black Whistle (though that was partly due to him being a robot). Experiences guro at the hands of Bondrewd.
- Mitty’s transformation is highly reminiscent of female puberty. The transformation starts out with blood (period), includes pain, much like menstruation, and the imagery takes the extreme by having her head look like vagina dentata (vagina with teeth. Later on, while she’s hanging out on top of an unconscious Riko’s face... at the time of the scene, both were victimized by something or someone else).
- Riko, when she loses her senses in Bondrewd’s area, she has flashbacks of that event later, which make it ambiguous whether or not the girl she was with, took advantage of the situation, similar to date rape.
- The effect of the ascension curse on the Fifth Layer is that you lose all sensations. It sounds easy enough to deal with, one would imagine, except it isn't. Riko climbing a set of stairs ended up with her biting her own teeth so hard that she snapped her molars in half without realizing it, cut her own arm, and lost her sense of self. The resulting wounds had to be stitched back together by Prushka. Without anesthesia.
- The Forbidden Flower Garden. The insects infesting it not only cripple Delvers, but they use their eye sockets as living feed for their young while hiding the victims in what appears to be a flower garden. Once they get to the head, the hosts can do nothing. And they're not even native to the Fourth Layer; they've somehow migrated from the Sixth Layer and completely overrun the ecosystem, to the point where the entire field had to be burned down to stop their spread.
- There's a unique behavior trait to them that is... chilling. Adults would occasionally force themselves into the victim's mouth to feed them, extending the shelf life of the larval bed. A unique method of cultivation, indeed.
- They can also be weaponized. Reg, Riko, and Nanachi used them in an attempt to take down Bondrewd on the Fifth Layer by shooting him with a crossbow loaded with larvae. And then they tried to put him through the Sixth Layer's Curse to deal with him.
- All the navel penetration close-ups and the characters' reactions. My goodness, you better have Brain Bleach on hand, because you will need it. Prushka's reaction was probably the worst one, as she let out sudden painful yelp amidst her broken affectionate monologue.
- Reg ends up being nearly dissected on the Fifth Layer by Bondrewd and his men. Not only are a variety of tests conducted, such as examining his urine, tearing off an arm, and causing him pain. It was planned on removing a leg too until Riko and Nanachi come in and stop it. And then there's whatever he mutates into when he took in the power of the Idofront.
- Ozen's random habits between being hunched over and standing up straight get taken to their logical conclusion when the anime shows her transition between the two stances. The sound of her bones and spine snapping is borderline Nausea Fuel.
- The page image here is taken from Ozen's Secret Test of Character that she administers to Riko. Make no mistake, this is still one of her more benign moments with the intention seeming to be to make sure she's capable of surviving the psychological horrors of the Abyss, but it's still very frightening to see. If she fails, well, then Ozen hasn't wasted her own time on someone who would have gone mad and lost her humanity sooner or later anyway.
- Ozen's description of what happened to her scalp, in a flashback to a talk that she had with Lyza. She says that she styled her hair that way to cover her scars that formed on her scalp due to having spent so much being exposed to the Abyss's forcefield over the decades.
- Ozen gets her extreme strength from artifacts called Thousand-Men Pins, which are small pins with sharp, painful-looking barbs. She has about 120 of them. While fighting Reg, part of her sleeve tears off, revealing her arm with several of these pins embedded in it. Her muscles and tendons are clearly defined through her skin, which looks practically necrotic.
- When Reg fights Ozen, she easily throws him all over the place and nearly kills him in bloody detail. Much later on, when he duels with Nishagora, she gets transformed by Srajo's White Whistle and overwhelms him with immense power, and Reg compares it to that moment. Nishagora's response? That's nothing compared to what she saw when she fought her, and the Thousand-Men Pins were not even the greatest extent of what she's capable of. The implication is that when she fought Reg, Ozen claims that she was going serious, but in reality, she was still holding back and she could actually get worse than that.
- The origin of the White Whistles:
- In order to create a White Whistle you need a human sacrifice. The person who dies must die from the curse of the abyss while praying for someone else. If the abyss deems the sacrifice just, they become a Life-Reverberating Stone from which a White Whistle is made. There are six White Whistles known to exist as of writing and only one whose genesis we see.
- We know the story behind another's genesis and surprisingly, given who it is, it's actually less horrifying. Bondrewd's White Whistle was created by sacrificing himself to become the whistle after obtaining an Artifact called the Zoaholic, which makes Voldemort's Horcruxes look like child's play in comparison. He copies his mind into multiple "Prayers", which are too numerous to count, are deemed impossible to entirely kill all of them even with Reg's powerful Incinerator, and with which Bondrewd can basically transfer his mind and respawn. He sacrificed himself so the White Whistle can now be used by all of his reincarnations since he prayed for himself.
- Lyza's white whistle has to be her husband, who died for her and his child in a heroic sacrifice. Given that it must be a willing and necessary sacrifice, it's still not as bad as it seems.
- Lyza's White Whistle came from someone named Doni, who is possibly a former apprentice or maybe an old friend of hers. Since Lyza already possessed her White Whistle when she first met and knew her husband.
- Nanachi is implied to hunt the Delvers who reach the Fourth Layer, and to experiment on them to devise the way to Mercy Kill Mitty. Those whistles in their home and posts at the lawn behind it — well, connect the dots.
- The sinking realization that lady luck had it merciful on Riko and Reg and they're essentially going through the Abyss on easy mode. Ozen was at least merciful to adjust how much she can go in front of some kids compared to a full-grown cat-woman like Nishagora, they ran into Nanachi just when Riko was about to be killed by the Orb Piercer's venom and they didn't decide to kill her like what they're implied to do with the other delvers, Bondrewd just happened to be recovering from a huge-scale conflict before Riko and Reg even get involved with him and according to a Word of God statement on Twitter, they avoided contracting the Mockwater that killed all of Ganja Corps without knowing it (the parasite seems to only show up in larger bodies of water that Riko's fleet never take water from). As a result, they managed to run all the way to near the seventh layer without suffering any losses they cannot recover from despite being just two kids who are underequipped and understaffed even when compared to the Ganja Suicide Corps who were all expected to die. Long story short, even if all we see is a horrific gorefest, it can actually go infinitely worse, and if they were any less lucky than that, they would be annihilated even earlier.
- Orth seems to be affected by some sort of eccentric supernatural power/influence with it sitting around the mouth of the Abyss — There's apparently something called the "Birthday-Death Disease" where a child will become mysteriously ill exactly during their birthday and die at the end of that day. And no, There Is No Cure for this, with only one known survivor, who had to be taken off the island entirely to recover. Much later on, we learn from Ozen that every thirty years, a twin will be born in Orth, and they're all named "Sherumi and Menae". There's no apparent reason for this, their parents just "somehow" named them like that. Just what is going on??
Idofront Arc
- Bondrewd, the Lord of Dawn, is easily one of the most horrific characters possible in a piece of manga. To put it very mildly, this man takes Human Resources to the next level and it only goes worse from there.
- The most defining moment of his terror is when he experiments on Nanachi and Mitty, with all of the consequences laid bare on page/screen for everyone to see. Bondrewd tells Mitty and Nanachi that he will send them down there and then back up again to learn more about how the Curse of the Abyss works. When he sends them down, we see dozens of blob-like things looking just like Mitty but with different colored eyes. When they're brought back up, we see Mitty take the Curse as she is screaming in physical pain filled with Body Horror and gore as Nanachi is trapped in the elevator, unable to do anything but be Forced to Watch as their best friend winds up eating the Sixth Layer's Curse twofold. It's as soul-crushing as it is horrifying. Later on, Bondrewd tries to destroy Mitty's organs as an experiment to see her new powers which constantly inflicts obscene amounts of pain on Mitty as she regenerates and is virtually indestructible. Worse still, he often forced Nanachi to do those experiments. How do you think they got those surgery skills?
- The scene before the elevator's descent. You can feel Mitty and Nanachi's rising panic, and it's horrific to imagine being in their situation: you're helpless, trapped, and your captor (who up until now has been your savior) is calmly outlining your predicted, horrifying fate. As Bondrewd speaks to the two terrified children, he informs Mitty that she will bear the Curse, and politely asks that she "try to endure it." He acts and speaks as if he's telling her to be brave at the dentist as opposed to subjecting her to an inescapable fate worse than death itself, and he definitely' meant the former.
- His sheer charisma only adds to his nightmarish nature. He's so incredibly, impossibly silver-tongued that his Umbra Hands, who not only partake in his atrocities but function as his Body Backup Drive and can be callously "killed" by him at any time if he needs a new vessel, chose to join him willingly knowing what could happen to them and what would be asked of them as his assistants. Their ranks even include bounty hunters and Black Whistles specifically sent there to kill him. He's simply that convincing.
- What makes this even worse is Bondrewd isn't evil in the conventional meanings of the word, nor is he self-serving, uncaring, or even insane for that matter. He is just something... else than what one could call human, either physically or psychologically. On some level, that is far more disturbing than it would have been were he simply an uncaring asshole faking genuine emotion, because at least that would have given him a label and a motivation comprehensible to the human mind. Unlike other White Whistles, he's also just a soul who travels between multiple lackeys thanks to literally selling his own soul to become a White Whistle, effectively making him immortal and making sure that even someone wants to go out of their way to stop and kill him, they can't. And there's how he still remembers the names and personalities of each and every child he has horrifically mutilated, turned into an abomination, or stuffed into a container to repel the Curse of the Abyss proves that he feels genuine love for his victims and for whatever reason cannot make sense of why putting them through a Fate Worse than Death For Science! is immoral.
- Children aren't the only things that Bondrewd wants to put on his experimental table. Srajo tells Riko and Reg that she and her Hail Hex fleet ran into him in the Fifth Layer and he roadblocked her and asked her to file an application to the Delver's Guild and wait a week before he lets her into the Sixth. This is where things get creepy — he asks Srajo to hand her fellow Hail Hex corp members for research because they are rejected people who should be thrown away after birth and he's curious about them. Of course, considering what kind of horror Bondrewd will unleash upon anyone he gets his hands on, Srajo doesn't let him get his way. The man not only experiments on children, but also openly and casually discusses about experimenting on vagrants as well. The casual smooth-talking coming from him trying to convince Srajo to throw away her own men that she cared for dearly seems completely and utterly wrong and a large part of it is because he can't see what's the problem.
- This also makes it possible that Riko and Reg's run-in with him is no one-off case but something that he's infamous for. One only wonders did he actually killed other Delvers who reached that far, assuming if the Abyss hasn't killed them yet.
- Another pressing question is how powerful he really is. Srajo and her fellow delvers ran into and fought Bondrewd right before Riko and Reg got involved with him and actually won, meaning that by then he was recovering from a wholesale assault from an organized delver fleet led by a White Whistle. And as we all know, the fight between them and Bondrewd is still an uphill, climatic battle. Imagine what happens if Srajo's fleet didn't run into him prior.
- Last but not least? Bondrewd is still at large. Riko's party didn't actually defeat him, Bondrewd simply decided that they're allowed to let go to the sixth layer and they accepted it. There's no indication that he will stop trying his awful experiments on whatever kid or vagrant he can lay his arms on, either.
- If you thought that was bad, then there's the effects of the ascension curse coming from the Sixth Layer. Nanachi has what is essentially the lightest case because their friend Mitty was used as a means of essentially soaking the worst of it up. Poor Mitty's painfully turned into a misshapen blob that can't die, but suffers constantly and must be taken care of by Nanachi, who's desperately seeking a way to free their friend via Mercy Kill before time runs out.
- Worse, Riko wakes up and explains from her point of view what Mitty was going through, based on a nightmare she had. It was like being trapped in a shrinking cavity, forgetting everything including how to speak. Mitty's soul was essentially trapped in an undying mass of flesh, barely able to interact with anyone around her.
- Reg having to put Mitty out of her misery. Mitty even seems scared in spite of knowing this will be the end of her suffering, Nanachi stops Reg in order to say one last goodbye, and then Reg has to vaporize Mitty. It's just as horrifying as it is heartbreaking.
- And to make matters even worse, Mitty's fate is one shared by dozens of children Bondrewd left at the bottom of the Sixth Layer, all of them failures.
- Episode 10 of the anime takes the infamous Body Horror scene of the manga and it makes it even worse. You can see Riko's hallucinations through her eyes, and hear her scream as the medically inexperienced Reg breaks her horribly swollen arm and begins to cut it off. Not to mention she's bleeding from every orifice, including her eye sockets.
The Village of Iruburu
- The balance of value that happens in the Sixth Layer, the Capital of the Unreturned. If caught stealing or damaging something of value, everything you hold dear is subject to being taken to even out the balance. If the value of items is high enough the perpetrator can find themselves being ripped apart to be used as an item of value.
- The Sixth Layer was proven to be a much more dangerous place than initially thought as Riko is guided to a number of big, highly mutated Hollow who attempt to rape her. Fortunately, the previously seen "balanced" Hollow (now known as Maa-san) is still alive and manages to rescue Riko. Although, it's all but implied he was rescuing Meinya and not her. The balancing then comes for the attempted rapists.
- A more subtle example is in the opening shot of the Capital of the Unreturned. The land tilts steeply to one side. Of all the buildings shown, all of them are upside down and none have an opening where someone could enter the "bottom" and go upstairs. Bridges are all angled with the ground, and some even have odd inverted arches, where it seems easy to climb down and to go with the general tilt of the structure, but near impossible to go back up. Capping it all off, instead of the sky, there's a wall of water that forms the bottom of the Sea of Corpses. It gives one very clear impression. This is a landscape where there is only one way you can travel: down.
- The Ganja Corps get to the sixth layer and are promptly curb-stomped by the environment en mass, in many horrible ways. Oh look, someone got snatched up by a monster, will our heroes stage a resc— forget what I just said, they've already mutated and popped like a giant blood balloon into a mishapen mess.
- Belaf, one of the Three Sages of Iruburu. A massive snake-like creature which two sharp-teethed mouths replacing their eye sockets and it speaks through them. Oh and this creature used to be a person.
- Faputa violently ripping off one of her arms and her right ear to allow Reg to recover Nanachi. Both the gruesome details how sudden the action is, as well as the fact that she later tells Reg to "eradicate them all" (referring to the Hollows of Iruburu), makes this more unsetting.
- The Mockwater that caused the Ganja Corp's descent into madness is one of the more horrifying creatures of the Abyss. Despite its name, it is not a material or a liquid, but a very dangerous and alive parasite that camouflages itself as water to lure and kill victims. Constant pain and bouts of diarrhea are the least of your problems; the thing causes people's extremities to calcify and twist into horrid shapes, described as "if lead had melted and then solidified again". The poor people stuck there are now trapped between a horrible disease or dying of thirst because there are no clean water sources otherwise. Even native animals are not exempt from this, as the Ganja Corps found out that the massive "rock" next to the puddle of Mockwater is no rock but the carcass of a large creature petrified by it. Oh and according to Word of God, There Is No Cure and people don't even know it exists; if you drink it on accident, unless you are (un)fortunate enough to eat Irumyuui's children, you will die, and Riko and Reg "just happened" to avoid them by taking water exclusively from flowing streams where the parasite seemingly can't reproduce in. The point of this statement is that the fleet of underequipped and underprepared children would be turned into parasite chow if not for some dumb luck on their end.
- The revelation of how the Village of Iruburu was formed, namely that the whole structure is Irumyuui's mutated body. To sum up, when the corps drank the Mockwater on accident and were about to be annihilated by the vicious parasite, Irumyuui was given a Cradle of Desire by the other Ganja Corps members in the hopes she could use it to help the infected. She instead used it to cure her infertility, which made her able to create life but all of her resulting offspring were deformed and fragile, with all of them dying just a day after birth, which broke the girl emotionally. Then said offspring were used as emergency food rations that miraculously also cured the Mockwater infection. Seeing her "children" being taken away from her, regardless of whether they were dead or alive, completely broke her and this, combined with the painful physical transformation she was going through, turned her into a screeching beast. She eventually grew bigger and more deformed until she becomes a completely unrecognizable, self-aware giant flesh structure that is constantly decomposing and regenerating, incessantly in pain but unable to die when the Ganja Corps decide to become Hollows. By the time Riko and company find them, Irumyuui has spent a century and a half as this immobile mass of flesh with seemingly only Vueko's neural impulses for company, which almost undoubtedly broke whatever sanity was remaining. Her last act as Irumyuui the girl was to give birth to Faputa to put an end to her misery.
- Wazukyan is another very disturbing character like Bondrewd. This guy cares about nothing save for his corp's survival, and this includes giving the Cradle of Desire to Irumuyuui (thus causing her to mutate) and proposing eating her kids, sometimes even taking them straight from her arms. Sure, this really does solve the hunger, thirst and Mockwater infections, but at what price? The worst is unlike Bondrewd who really only went out there after he renounced his humanity to the White Whistle, Wazukyan did most of the damage before he even became hollow.
- Belaf's descent into madness when he finds out that he ate Irumyuui's offspring to cure his Mockwater infection, to the extent that he willingly became the first inhabitant of the Village as atonement.
- Faputa's drastic switch in tone in the anime when she declared her mass genocide of the villagers, making it downright terrifying. The voices are so different that you swore they hired another voice actor for it.
- It was a bit difficult to comprehend what was going on in the manga due to the heavy amount of stylish inking, but the anime does a very good job depicting just how gory, brutal, and overall disturbing Faputa's slaughter of the village was, where numerous Hollows who have done nothing wrong besides using the Hollow-transformed Irumyuui as a home experience horrific Cruel and Unusual Death, everything from being torn to shreds to experiencing Kill It Through Its Stomach, all the while many of the Hollows watch in utter terror while hoping they aren't next.
- And then she does the same thing to Reg when he tries to stop her, with only her subconscious love for him preventing her from going all the way. She "only" shoved her entire arm inside him before flailing him around, with the poor robot's muffled screaming being barely heard over the sound of her arm rupturing his insides. He was only able to get free due to another Hollow crashing into her.
- Then there are the results of when the beasts of the Abyss make it into the village. Now all that happened during Faputa's rampage is dialed up even more as helpless Hollows are ganged up on and devoured alive, not even Faputa herself is spared this as she is unable to deal with such a high number of foes and is systematically torn apart. At that point, she is left a mangled suffering mess but alive due to her immortality before some of the villagers allowed her to eat them so she can recover.
The final stretch
- We finally get our first proper look at the Seventh Layer and it's... a sight. The walls look almost like hanging strips of skin and have what look like huge pimple-like growths in places. The characters' vantage point gives then a view straight down onto a fleshy-looking eye... fetus... cochlea... thing embedded in the far wall with the rock formations spiraling in toward it. It emanates of this idea that the Abyss itself has some life of its own.
- Srajo's Nightmare Face at the end of her infodump about Juusou, when she calls them "the disgrace of Delver history" considering Hollows are instantly executed whenever they surface. Just look at it.
◊ Even worse is unlike when Ozen makes it, this is not a Secret Test of Character, the Delvers were only having an information exchange at that time, and they're nowhere near any sort of danger. It can come across as gratuitous and nightmarish for the sake of in a volume which is largely devoid of any direct horror. - Srajo drops some new information on Riko and company. The Curse of the Seventh Layer being certain death? Knowledge of it is based on one death that happened more than 200 years ago. We don't actually know if it's like that in all cases. Given what the Sixth Layer's Curse does to people, let alone when said Curse gets inflicted on you twofold (i.e. Mitty) it's safe to say we very much don't want to know what the Curse actually does here. We'll probably find out anyway. Besides, someone will inevitably make the tiniest mistake and it is not going to be pretty.
