YMMV / Blattodea

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• Angst? What Angst?: Both Setsuna and Chiyuri suffer from some traumatizing events on the day of the outbreak, but in a deliberate contrast to Alice, after a year-long time skip they're doing just fine despite the apocalypse only getting worse and Chiyuri hasn't stopped loving being homeless one bit. However, it is shown Chiyuri still misses Yamato a lot and has no hope that she can find Alice and put an end to the outbreak.
• Ass Pull:
  • Chiyuri is retconned into being Dinoponera's first friend since some hours before the Arachnid Hunt, so Dinopo can make a dramatic return and team up with her to mirror the spider-and-roach duo from Arachnid. While not outright stated, it was heavily implied in Arachnid that Dinoponera was truly all alone in the world; so this does clash with some of her scenes and characterization from back then.
  • The story makes up a way for Sasori to have survived both getting hanged by Alice and seemingly injecting lethal venom on herself, as it would be a waste to leave one of Alice's worst and most personal enemies for dead.
  • Alice's mother Ayana shows up apparently alive as an Organization hitwoman from out of nowhere, just for an also sudden reveal that she is actually Alice's distant and previously unknown aunt.
  • Following a Sequel Hook from Caterpillar that had next to no foreshadowing to go with it, a foreign Shadow Dictator who happens to be an alternate universe version of Serena Cervantes from Himenospia is the real Big Bad and Yoriko was just her slave all along. So much for letting Japan get nuked on purpose to make the USA feel inferior by comparison...
• Badass Decay: By reading Blattodea on its own you wouldn't know Dinoponera was an apparently Invincible Villain back in Arachnid, as it skips all her fights except for the Humiliation Conga she eventually suffered and there's a tendency to portray her as frail and insecure due to trauma and her half zombiefication. Imomushi easily settles the score with her while calling back to a retcon from Caterpillar where she took back her opinion that Dinopo might be stronger than her father Paraponera. The author justified this to a fan on Twitter in his usual style by reminding that "ants are more vulnerable to environmental degradation than caterpillars and cockroaches". Chapters 21 and 22 begin letting Dino perform a good show again, with characters noting she's is very dangerous but was trying to play nice around Chiyuri.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • The resolution of Dinoponera being raped and infected by the army ant zombies in chapter 50 of Arachnid, published back in January 2014, was more suspenseful than anything involving either Alice or Chiyuri in the early chapters. Particularly because the spinoff Caterpillar alluded to her multiple times in the interim with a disturbing subtext tying her to characters losing their limbs, on top of Blattodea quickly focusing on her and making her a more tragic character who had befriended Chiyuri. Due to a Contrived Coincidence she gets to heal on her own and save Chiyuri from the zombies instead of being saved herself, in what's a genuinely awesome and heartwarming moment for her.
  • After spending over a year's worth of chapters acting uncharacteristically weak and suffering from The Worf Effect over and over, the story allows Dinoponera to look cool again when she incapacitates Hebitonbo from out of nowhere with her poison. She runs off thirsting for the spotlight and lets loose on a crowd of rapist prisoners sent on her by Gokiburi, slaughtering many of them in the way she wishes she could've done to the zombies back when she was paralyzed by Sasori.
• Continuity Lockout:
  • The prologue is a Immediate Sequel of sorts to Arachnid and gives near-zero context of what is going on to new readers, some of which might not even realize it is a sequel to a 2009-2016 manga and its spinoff. The next chapter switches the point of view to newcomer Chiyuri right before the Arachnid Hunt, but also prominently features Dinoponera, whose fate was one of the plot points Left Hanging in Arachnid.
  • The Big Bad is an alternate universe counterpart to Serena Cervantes from Himenospia, mirroring how that series was partly a reimagining of Arachnid. So it takes being familiar with "Himenoland" to get the intended reaction of wondering where the two versions of the character differ, if at all given how Blattodea!Serena looks exactly the same as the previous one — complete with an identical introduction.
• Crosses the Line Twice: There's a lot of Black Comedy Rape bits, especially at Dinoponera's expense as several gags allude to her having been raped and temporarily turned into a zombie.
  • The marketing for the series on the Japanese Twitter profile for the Manga UP! app makes the prominence of rape scenes in the first handful of chapters a major selling point, which sure is honest of them. Better than the global version of the app barely advertising any series! In fact, closure on Dinoponera's horrible fate in the Arachnid Hunt was a significant reason for many readers to want a sequel to Arachnid in the first place. They later posted the scene of Alice nearly turning into a school shooter back in Arachnid with app benefits for getting it retweeted several thousand times.
  • Dinoponera getting raped again right after she left Shouran High disgraced as a rape-zombie, with all that wooonderful descriptive detail of what doing her feels like is disheartening. On the other hand, her going into a frenzy with fire on her eyes and fucking her assailant and his two friends into oblivion is portrayed as Black Comedy Rape and afterwards she repeatedly relapses into a cutesy and goofy half-zombie who Chiyuri has to knock some sense into. The story exaggerates Rape Portrayed as Redemption to such an extent the fate of the world revolves around what happened to the poor girl, as she was forcibly turned into a Living MacGuffin to end the zombie outbreak.
  • In chapter 4, Chiyuri gets terribly molested by zombified middle-aged hobos while they rant about how they wanted this from her all along. Despite Chiyuri being obviously terrified at this point, her gasping a Big "WHAT?!" from actually getting penetrated on-panel somehow wraps the scene into Black Comedy Rape out of sheer shock value. Then Chiyuri is dramatically saved by a recovered Dinoponera in an epic yet so very NSFW page as she flying kicks the guy off Chiyuri. See, Dinopo truly is a good girl who did nothing wrong... and all it took to prove that is the Audience Surrogate character being raped in the butt for a second...
  • Also in chapter 4, several distracting shots of Dinopo's bare crotch and butt are meant as a twisted Brick Joke to how she used to be portrayed with a Magic Skirt before being raped. The ending scene with Chiyuri muttering "ไม่มีทาง..." ("no way...") when even Dinoponera is afraid of the zombie hordes is worthy of an Iris Out cut.
  • Chapter 26 involves a resentful Imomushi threatening to rape Hanakamakiri sooner or later if that's what it takes to get the boy for herself, and him answering they can do it as much as possible after his mission because he loves her too. Imomushi is immediately flattered and Alice, who thought a fight to the death could break out at any moment, imagines them as bride and groom. Their flaws and age gap aside, Imomushi and Hanakamakiri becoming the series' Official Couple really is one of the few nice things that ever happened in its bleak Crapsack World.
• Draco in Leather Pants:
  • Setsuna was always made to be dotted on regardless of how much she misbehaves, but the story goes so out of its way to put her through intense distress and portray her as a helpless moeblob that one might as well say she did in fact never do anything wrong in her whole life to deserve all that.
  • Then there's Megumi who's acting like a Nazisploitation villainesses and letting civilian girls get used as sex slaves in a prison, on top of unleashing over a hundred inmates to try to rape Setsuna to death as revenge for what Alice endured in the previous year. Since, like Setsuna, Megumi is a Cute Girl, endearingly evil and a Living Emotional Crutch to her Love Interest, nobody wants to see her also suffering from Karmic Rape or worse and tends to downplay or brush her evil actions aside. Funnily enough, she gets betrayed and comically kicked out of her Arc Villain role in such an uncerimonious way, before she actually gets to do anything, that it makes one wonder why she was even given the role of prison director in the first place.
• Fan Nickname:
  • "Hoboroach" for Chiyuri, or "Roach 2.0" as she is Megumi's junior in roachery. Peharps 5.0, if you count Eruza in Killing Bites and Nagisa in Himenospia for their shared traits and also the blue-haired Megumi in Choubu no Shinobi.
  • Dino, Dinopo, Dinopotato for Setsuna Dinoponera. Ironically, Setsuna is rarely called by her given name even though it's been established to make her more humanized and sympathetic. After all, how would fans be able to make her hijack Google results for her namesake ant like that?
• Fridge Brilliance: Kabutomushi randomly appearing as a WcDonald's "worker" with no mention of her duty to find and protect Alice over the past year actually makes sense because she's always been a slacker. In the original series, she took a long time to go meet and protect Alice at Kumo's request for no explained reason despite it being important to her. In one afterword the author even joked about that plot hole.
• Fridge Horror: The eternal afternoon from Arachnid is juxtaposed with a countdown to Kuramoto's death triggering the zombie apocalypse. While Dinoponera's rape isn't shown, it is inferred that it lasted for just over two hours...
• Genius Bonus: Dinoponera is spared from being a crazed zombie because of her own ponerine ant venom, which in real life is a subject of medical research. The Megaponera analis trivia about them being a rare animal aside from humans who nurses their wounded back on their feet is from 2017, demonstrating the author kept up his bug research since Arachnid ended.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • It sure is nice to see Dinoponera hugging Chiyuri in chapter 2 and having a completely normal, friendly conversation with her... even if returning readers can tell it is ironic buildup for her getting zombified later that day...
  • Dinoponera's feelings towards Chiyuri (and Alice forcing her to stab herself earlier) allow her to break free from the Queen's Rule and save the roach-girl from being infected by her caretakers, even making a Declaration of Protection while Chiyuri stares at her in awe. Although Dinopo is ashamed for killing people Chiyuri considered family, Chiyuri accepts her all the same with a big hug of her own. Even if the two are still comically surrounded by zombies afterwards, this is practically the first time in the series an act of kindness is sincere and isn't immediately followed by tragedy; and it proves Dinoponera does have a lovable side to her after all.
  • Hanakamakiri reconciles with an angry Imomushi in chapter 26 by confessing his love for her and promising they can "do it" as much as she wants once he's done with his mission.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Readers generally assumed Megumi Oki would be the new protagonist and wondered how she'd fare given she was the designated jobber of the previous stories (including her Sengoku Era counterpart in Choubu no Shinobi, and to a lesser extent her expy Eruza in Killing Bites), only for Chiyuri to show up instead. So Megumi ended up jobbing even as a cockroach. Furthermore, once Megumi shows up she's revealed to have turned super strong offscreen and subjects Chiyuri to The Worf Effect — all while Dinoponera of all characters is saddled with the Butt-Monkey role turned up to eleven.
  • In the first few panels Dinoponera had in Arachnid, she looked awfully ominous like she was no-nonsense or an Emotionless Girl only to turn out to be a Genki Girl, complete with a edited panel on the volume compilation making her seem smug when she met Imomushi. Her debut in Blattodea, which is her cheerfully bathing nude on a public fountain, is not only at odds with that but also with how she was never gratuitously sexualized back then. Even when portrayed in a bikini or bunnysuit on two pieces of official artwork, she was made to look deadpan instead of embarrassed like Alice or shameless like how Chiyuri finds her.
  • There's an illustration from the author's wife Sato depicting Dinoponera cosplaying as Cure Black, which she is kind of an expy of, with the Precure logo changed from "The Two of Us Are Pretty Cure" to "Alone I am Pretty Cure". As of this story, Dinopo finally has a friend to care for, and the nods to Precure get even more noticeable.
  • The notion of Dinoponera being a Spotlight-Stealing Squad in the previous installment is this, despite her getting dunked on that rape pit offscreen on the 2/3 mark. In Killing Bites there are multiple characters that can be argued to be influenced by her, the author highlighted her on his Twitter banner for years after getting asked to draw her and Alice as friends; Caterpillar, which had a palette swap of her for thematic reasons, skipped Imomushi's encounter with Alice to show her right away instead and now a whole new protagonist gets retconned into her backstory so she can have a shot at happiness. She went from being a random side antagonist to being the tritagonist of the story.
  • Kabutomushi was the other Spotlight-Stealing Squad in Arachnid and especially in Caterpillar where she had a little story arc of her own. Not only it was her who killed the Big Bad of the series, but then in chapter 5 of Blattodea it is her who casually knocks out Alice for her own good, after a dozen other people had failed despite beating the spider-girl silly. They might as well give the beetle the prize money for the Arachnid Hunt.
  • 2020 saw the discovery of a cockroach species with worker and queen castes.
  • Dinoponera had a cameo in the anime adaptation of Watamote instead of resident Tomoko expy Geji. When Geji is reintroduced here as "Momoko", complete with the "no matter how I look at it, it's your guys fault..." Catchphrase, the first thing she does is kick Dinoponera down and hold her at gunpoint.
  • Murata reused more and more elements from Arachnid's plot into Himenospia and the last chapters of that series were published concurrently with Blattodea, as if he was writting Arachnid twice at the same time. Now that Himenospia is finished, things went full cycle with its main villain Serena Cervantes being introduced in Blattodea.
• I Knew It!: Some fans thought that after the great damage suffered by Japan and the Organization in Arachnid, foreign crime syndicates would take advantage of the situation. And with Serena Cervantes from Himenospia as their leader, knowing the author's liking for reusing plot points between stories. That is in fact what happens in Blattodea, as a Serena who looks the same as she did in that story turns out to have been the real real real Big Bad all along.
• Like You Would Really Do It: Geji appears alive and well from out of nowhere in chapter 12, after being assumed by Gokiburi to have been caught by the zombies back in the ending of Arachnid. Considering she's designed after Tomoko from WataMote, which is also published by Gangan Comics, and it was heavily implied Murata marrying Sato in 2012 had something to do with her creation in that year (Geji's side chapter was written by Sato and they share anniversary dates), Geji actually getting raped was thought to be too tasteless even for this series.
• Memetic Loser: Blattodea makes Setsuna Dinoponera a tritagonist after Chiyuri and Alice but ironically relegates her to the Butt-Monkey role Megumi held in previous installments. Originally a Memetic Badass who effortlessly handed Imomushi's, Kabutomushi's, Kamadouma's and Riokku's asses to them, Setsuna is portrayed as a harmless and clumsy love interest at minimum and as a walking rape fanservice joke character at worst. It's an actual plot point that her role in the Arachnid Hunt was just to get raped. With Imomushi's opinion of her already being retconned away by Caterpillar, once Kamadouma showed up looking all threatening and Setsuna had already been knocked out by Chiyuri for being too clingy, readers figured Blattodea was the cast's fix fic to avenge their previous humiliation at her hands.
• Moe:
  • Alice is a Shrinking Violet with who's all lost in life and surrounded by people either trying to harm her or overhyping her as a mass murderer in the works. It's hard to not feel sorry when she gets the snot beaten out of her by Hanakamakiri while admitting the previous few days were too peaceful to be true and that she'll never get another break from violence for the rest of her life.
  • Chiyuri is an innocent and very polite homeless girl who tries to stay cheerful with her only friend in the apocalypse, when she's actually hurt from the loss of her adoptive father and the lack of confidence that she can put an end to the outbreak.
  • Setsuna is a Cute But Psycho Sailor Moon fangirl who's looking for friends. Despite the cruel things she did to Alice out of a misplaced grudge, she turns unbearably pitiful anytime she gets punished too badly and being gangraped and turned into a braindead zombie was nothing less than a Karmic Overkill. The story really leans into the "moé by helplessness" angle for Setsuna after she mostly recovers, outright turning her into a cuddly and clumsy moeblob who unlike Alice and Chiyuri can't even seem to fight in her own defense. Even when she tries to rape Chiyuri while under the virus' influence she's just too adorable to get upset at.
• Narm: It's the charm of an Arachnid sequel after all.
• Replacement Scrappy: A lot of people assumed Megumi was the new "blattodea" protagonist and got annoyed when newcomer Chiyuri showed up instead, while others praised the Trolling Creator for the twist. Fortunately, it's not like Megumi is going away (she's a major antagonist to Chiyuri, in fact), and Chiyuri is a likeable dorky yet tough girl that readers who care for Dinoponera have to count on.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: The prologue is very slow-paced to fit with how hopeless Alice's life has been. After it is shown she'll be forced to become the next Boss, expanding the previous story's open ending that shafted most of the supporting cast becomes a priority: time is turned back to the point of view of Chiyuri, a newcomer seemingly unrelated to that whole mess until it turns out her existence in the narrative is a roundabout way to bring Dinoponera back from that abrupt Fate Worse than Death she suffered. By the end of the first volume, the role of those two dorks in the grand scale of things isn't known, and on Alice's side the eternal Arachnid Hunt is even extended with Sasori turning up alive after Yoriko was killed by Kabutomushi. The story only begins for real on chapter 8, which even mirrors the prologue for ironic effect.
• Spoiled by the Format: In this silly series, each character is only as good as the bug funfacts they get and therefore the protagonists represent multiple kinds of a bug rather than a single species. So what really cements Setsuna's promotion to tritagonist after Chiyuri and Alice is the narrator giving her the traits of more ponerine ants than just Dinoponera.
• Squick:
  • Pretty much everything involving the "rape zombies". One of the first pages alone has a zombified nude quadruple amputee covered in cockroaches squirming on the floor and begging for sex despite her gruesome injuries.
  • Chiyuri and Setsuna being awed by bottles of cold water and drinking them up is an amusing and cute sight until they learn the water is spiked with lust-inducing hormones secreted by a sleazy monk named Juzuhigemushi who turned a bunch of girls into overly-busty sex slaves. It is also said that Chiyuri, who's barely affected by the drink, has such a good immune system due to being a super-hobo that she is used to eating spoiled food with no ill effects.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The confirmation that Dinoponera did get raped and zombified back in Arachnid is further made tragic despite her misdeeds by her actually making friends with Chiyuri prior to that. Even as an Empty Shell, Dinopo weakly cries out her name...
  • Dinoponera's tearful confession of her zombiefication to Yamato and Chiyuri, as well as Chiyuri being forced to leave her wounded father figure behind right afterward. A flashback of kid Chiyuri being taught about freedom and saying she likes Yamato even more than that further rubs salt in the wound.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Several readers still don't like Hayami Tokisada's artstyle as much as the one of the original Arachnid illustrator, Ifuji Shinsen. Hayami's art style is pretty light for the darker and more sexualized tone of the story, making all the female characters (even mature and lascivious ones like Sasori) look significantly more cutesy and same-faced. Furthermore, there's an inconsistence or even decline in quality compared to his previous work. Character faces are now unappealingly blocky and sharp most of the time, with anatomy that swerves from being noodle-like to detailed. There are frequent and noticeable errors like characters being drawn with the wrong costume or Chiyuri missing the antennae on top of her head, many scenes that really could use a background are left blank and the way flashbacks are portrayed as sketches for Stylistic Suck just feels like the illustrator cutting corners. They even have the gall of tracing artwork from Arachnid in certain flashbacks to annoy people further, and Murata reusing Serena and some scenes straight from Himenospia into the story brings comparisons with Yanai Nobuhiko's art style as well.
  • Dinoponera, as Chiyuri puts it, "had her personality destroyed in a single day" when she got humiliated and gangraped at the Arachnid Hunt. Although her being alive and learning to be kind and less violent are certainly positive things, the smug psycho-ditz she used to be is sorely missed by her fans. But it doesn't stop at that: the story pulls every single Character Derailment trope it can and even uses retcons to portray her as completely inoffensive and incompetent while Chiyuri does all the weight lifting, further alienating everyone who liked the ant-girl. Chapter 21 seems to begin portraying her as a tough fighter again, though...
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: This sequel to Arachnid remains a very bleak story with even more constant and graphic rape going on, with Alice being roped into the Organization to help end the Zombie Apocalypse that they themselves created and being implied to be slipping into evil little by little. With most of the characters being irrationally hostile to each other or just gratuitously evil even before Serena gets involved, most of the levity that the story does have comes from Chiyuri and Setsuna's brighter and comical personalities.
• Too Cool to Live: Yamato Mitsuda is an expy of Leiji Matsumoto who can tear zombies apart with little effort and comes across like a good father figure to Chiyuri as well as the most level headed, good natured assassin in the setting. So then, much like Kumo in Arachnid, of course he soon seemingly dies preventing a horde of zombies from getting to Chiyuri and Setsuna.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Hanakamakiri attempts to force Alice to act as the Organization Boss and plots to murder Setsuna to prevent the end of the zombie apocalypse because he's trying to make sure Imomushi won't have a prize on her head again. However, nobody besides the zombies are ever seen threatening Imomushi with anything at all. She's just chilling outside Hibarigaoka Prison as a guard and nobody cares. This makes Hanakamakiri seem like he's becoming villainous for no real reason, particularly when he betrays Alice, beats her up and causes the girl to become more bitter about life than ever.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Released on the shonen Gangan Joker magazine like the original, but female nudity is uncensored on the volume releases and the gore and rape scenes tend to be both more frequent and more graphic than even those featured in the Caterpillar spinoff that was published on the Young Gangan seinen magazine.
• The Woobie:
  • Alice is still a traumatized mess a year after the ending of Arachnid, and her being forced to be the next Boss of the Organization is hardly good news. We then learn she's deluded herself into thinking she's killed Yoriko and that, to add insult to injury, Sasori survived getting hanged and came to pick another fight with her right after everything was thought to be said and done in the Ouran Highschool. She can only keep moving foward, even as she's obviously in danger of being used as a pawn by the bug assassins yet again.
  • Chiyuri is an abandoned child who escaped from Kabutomushi's harsh training and later lost her adoptive family to the zombie outbreak. She earns a friend in Dinoponera, still enjoys her homelessness and appears optimistic on the outside but deeply misses Yamato and feels hopeless about resolving the zombie outbreak.
  • Dinoponera is portrayed more sympathetically than before and sincerely wants to build a friendship with Chiyuri, turning her from a Jerkass Woobie to this. After her defeat, rape and zombiefication, she barely holds herself together while saving Chiyuri and has a breakdown upon recounting what happened to Chiyuri and Yamato. Even a year later, she's suffering from PTSD, is still affected by the virus to some extent and keeps getting beaten and humiliated during fights. She gets brought so low and is portrayed as being so hopelessly wimpy that she is forced to train under her own indirect rapist Sasori to become stronger.

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