YMMV / Dandadan

• Adorkable: For all he talks down on himself, Okarun's a pretty decent kid with a good heart.
• Awesome Ego: Jiji (Ayase's childhood friend and first crush) poses like he moved in from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and flirts with every pretty lady he sees, but he does so with an endearing kind of sincerity.
• Awesome Art: One thing that any fan will tell you about the series is that Yukinobu Tatsu's artwork is consistently high-quality and filled to the brim with detail. Despite Dandadan being a weekly series, its artwork is oftentimes compared to monthly series.
• Fan Nickname: "Turbo Ken" for Okarun's Turbo Granny form.
• Fandom Rivalry: With Kaiju No. 8. A number of Dandadan fans state that this manga has better Kaiju fights than the actual Kaiju manga, and lambast the latter as being too predictable, too cliche, and badly paced with disappointing Kaiju fights.
• Fridge Horror: In chapter 49, Jiji has stated that he was worried for both Momo and Okarun. This might imply that whenever he's being possessed, he's in a constant state of powerless awareness.
• Friendly Fandoms: With Chainsaw Man. This is partly because author Yukinobu Tatsu is a former assistant of Chainsaw Man author Tatsuki Fujimoto, and partially because the two stories share an extremely weird setting and a lot of tone-shifting (though Dandadan is generally a lot less cynical).
• Heartwarming Moments: In chapter 118, Reiko Kashima annihilates the Space Globalist fleet and then turns her sights to Momo. Okarun steps in, trying to protect Momo. This sight reminds Reiko of her lover in life, so she wordlessly turns away and spares them.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: This isn't the first time a person's genitalia are a central part of the plot (though in the older series it was just the right testicle).
• Jerkass Woobie: The series does a good job at making you feel bad for a lot of the antagonists.
  • The Acrobatic Silky was a struggling single mother who turned to prostitution in order to provide for her daughter. One day, her daughter was kidnapped by human traffickers, causing her to take her own life in despair. When her soul became a Yokai, she convinced herself that Aira was her own daughter after a chance encounter until eventually her need to validate herself as Aira's mother slowly drove her insane.
  • The Evil Eye was a victim of the Kito Family since childhood. Isolated from the rest of the community, he spent his life in a cage where he was raised as cattle to be offered as a sacrifice to the Tsuchinoko. After dying a painful death as a sacrifice, his spirit became a yokai that simply wanted to find the friendship he was deprived of throughout his mortal life. He came upon a family that was set to be another of the cult's victims, but accidentally caused the parents to commit suicide and for the son to be sacrificed just as he was. The ensuing hatred for the Kito Family corroded his mind and caused him to seek the destruction of all humans. Given that he's still mentally a child, this is really just his way of expressing his desire to play games with other kids.
  • The Slit-Mouthed Woman is heavily implied to have been a civilian caught in the Tokyo firebombings who lost her legs and her family in the destruction.
  • The Ombusman, Mai Kawabanga, latched on to her deep regret for not apologizing to her best friend Rin.
• Quirky Work: A Conspiracy Kitchen Sink where the female protagonist is abducted by aliens, which unlocks her Psychic Powers, and the male protagonist's genitals are stolen by a Yōkai called "Turbo-Granny", which then possesses him and becomes his Superpowered Evil Side. And that's just the first chapter.
• Realism-Induced Horror: Dandadan is unashamedly insane and off-the-wall, but it can occasionally catch the reader off-guard with some surprisingly heavy subject matter. The Acrobatic Silky's backstory, for example, shows that she was a struggling single mother who turned to prostitution to provide for her daughter. One day, human traffickers stormed into her apartment and kidnapped her daughter, causing her to mentally break down and take her own life in despair.
• The Woobie:
  • Vamola was seriously dealt a bad hand in life. She spent her childhood in hiding while her race was suffering a genocide at the hands of the Space Globalists. She was eventually able to make it to Earth, but none of her loved ones were able to make it with her. She was eventually able to find friends despite the language barrier, but she unintentionally caused them to get hurt due to her connection to the Space Globalists.
  • Rin Sawaki, a.k.a. Class Rep, had to shoulder her father's death when she was a child, helping her working mother take care of the house and her aging grandmother, and her best friend's death in a traffic collision after they had heated argument, all while still in primary school. Mundane? Yes. Easy? No.

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