YMMV / Inuyashiki

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Something of a plot point regarding the Inuyashiki family and whether or not they would miss him if he was gone, especially when you consider that his eventual death was a Heroic Sacrifice and not in some deathbed from cancer like he thought.
• Anvilicious: Kids don't respect their elders and that's bad, m'kay?
• Awesome Moments: When Inuyashiki stands up to the teen gang for the hobo, with no clue about the full extent of his abilities or whether or not he'd even survive a second time. This is the moment that seals him as a hero.
• Awesome Music:
  • The opening, My Hero by Man With a Mission really pumps up the viewer for a wild ride.
  • Man With A Mission also did the theme song for the live-action movie version, "Take Me Under", which really pumps up the adrenaline.
• Better on DVD: The manga is really fast-paced to the point where full manga volumes were fit into a single episode of the anime without too much being lost. The reader will get more out of binging it.
• Catharsis Factor
  • There's a reason why Shishigami's killing spree against the internet trolls is such a memorable scene.
  • Inuyashiki unleashing a Curb-Stomp Battle against Samejima and his gangsters is also this, as there is quite literally nothing to like about that man, as not only is he a serial rapist who kills his victims too, he even rapes his own henchmen too.
• Complete Monster: Samejima, from the "Yakuza" arc, is a Yakuza boss who regularly abducts, drugs, rapes, and kills women. He is first introduced leering over the corpse of a woman he violated before forcing one of his underlings to give him a blow job. His next target, a woman named Fumino, manages to escape him before he could do anything to her. Determined to get Fumino, he tracks down her mother, who it is heavily implied he tortured to get Fumino's whereabouts before killing her. He orders his men to grab Fumino while he strangles her fiancé, Satoru, to death (but is thankfully revived by Inuyashiki) and seemingly kills Inuyashiki when he tries to stop him. Before Inuyashiki confronts him, it's heavily implied that he got what he wanted from Fumino. Samejima orders his men to shoot Inuyashiki in retaliation for beating him up. Even Inuyashiki, who loves nothing more than helping others, decides that Samejima is beyond redemption, blinding and crippling him.
• Cry for the Devil: It's hard not to feel bad for Shishigami as he breaks down crying over the loss of his mother, in spite of him being a deranged, murderous, manchild, as we see just how much she meant to him due to how heartbroken he is at his loss, and it makes his revenge against the trolls who drove her to suicide completely understandable.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Shishigami. Which is ironic because it is also the case in-universe - many misguided young women found him very attractive in spite of him being a serial killer, and created fanclubs for him. This is chillingly reminiscent of online communities of young women who idolize various mass shooters.
• Evil Is Cool: Hiro Shishigami runs on this. The series is most famous for him being the guy who kills with a telekinetic finger gun.
• Funny Moments:
  • There's something darkly comical about the fact that the plot is kicked off by aliens crashing to Earth out of nowhere, who then go into a panic trying to cover up the accident as if they had crashed their parents' car without damaging it too noticeably. One suggests they blow up the whole planet, but instead they quickly build robot bodies for the two people they killed, before they GTFO and never show up again, almost like a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment.
  • After the yakuza episode, Ando reasons that there's someone else out there with all of Shishigami's powers down to the Super-Senses, and the best idea he has to reach out to this person is Crying Wolf in his own room. Cue Inuyashiki showing up at the doorstep faster than any Uber.
  "Umm... is there someone here who needs help?"
  • The training sessions with Ando involve Inuyashiki putting a finger on a laptop, which apparently causes his inner mechanics to adapt to human technology, causing a USB port to sprout from his finger, very reminiscent of Nano from Nichijou.
    • After figuring out how to receive phone calls in his head, Inuyashiki starts testing the extent of his jet thrust by going straight up - he marvels at being above an airliner, and later freaks out upon seeing something even bigger. Cut to Inuyashiki hovering next to the International Space Station, in full view of an astronaut who literally can't even.
  • Mari finds out by accident that Inuyashiki has been spending a lot of time with Ando, and we get one Imagine Spot after another, and a rare insight into what kind of manga Mari might end up writing:
  "Yes, this is my illegitimate son..."
  "I actually like younger men..."
  • Inuyashiki himself is apparently such an unmemorable person that even after he's seen plain as day on national and international TV using his powers to rescue and heal people, none of his coworkers recognized him. Even his family is baffled.
• Genius Bonus: When Inuyashiki finds out he has terminal cancer and that no one in his life would care, he cries in a park while swinging and singing a nostalgic song to himself. It's a direct homage to one of the most famous scenes in the 1952 Japanese classic film Ikiru, in which the main character faces similar despair (terminally ill, unfulfilling life, uncaring family). The anime takes it one step further by recreating the scene almost shot-for-shot. While the film might be recognizable to some Japanese viewers (similar to Casablanca or The Godfather in Western cinema), most foreigners outside of movie buffs wouldn't even know about it.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The anime adaptation was made by MAPPA. In 2022, they'd also go on to make an adaptation of another series where a prominent villain uses a Finger Gun that kill people.
• Love to Hate: Hiro Shishigami is an absolute bastard who mass murders in cold blood, but at the same time he's just so compelling to watch.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The image of Shishigami crying as he says "One Piece is crazy good this week" tends to get traction every week Once Piece comes out with a new chapter. Some people also like to replace One Piece with whatever weekly show/manga they're keeping up with.
  • Shishigami's finger guns have been compared to those from Cuphead by many online.
  • A scene of then-current US President Donald Trump announcing the meteor strike also went somewhat viral in the US.
  • The scene where Shishigami enthusiastically talks to one of his victims about One Piece went viral on Tumblr.
  Girl: Are my father...and little brother dead too...?
  Shishigami: (Suddenly becoming very dark and cold) What does that matter? We were talking about One Piece.
• Moral Event Horizon: Shishigami crosses it in episode 2 when he casually slaughters a family, especially letting the father's corpse drown the son in the bathtub and killing the daughter because she didn't share his taste in manga.
  • Samejima crosses it as a hobby. Even Inuyashiki, who prefers non-violent methods of dealing with his foes, felt it was appropriate to give him a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown before blinding him and his syndicate.
• Narm: Shishigami mimicking the sounds of a machine gun while Finger Gunning. On the other hand, it’s a Narm Charm that demonstrates how even the strangest of teens can be monsters.
  • Shishigami talking casually with a girl about One Piece and asking her about her favorite character after killing her family in cold blood can be read as this depending on your perception.
• Narm Charm: While pretty much objectively hilarious, the fact that Hiro is more emotionally attached to characters in One Piece and casually asking a girl whose entire family he had just murdered who her favorite character is demonstrates how completely deranged he is.
• Older Than They Think: The idea of aliens rebuilding an Earthling into an unstoppable cyborg was already conceived in the 1980s manga, Atom Cat by Osamu Tezuka, except it was a cat, not an elderly man.
• Paranoia Fuel: Shishigami is an unstoppable, all-powerful, all-seeing cyborg with the power to kill anyone he wants effortlessly, and he doesn't even need to be in your vicinity to do it as long as there's anything with a digital camera nearby. He can remotely hijack vehicles, from cars to commercial airliners. And he's a sociopathic Serial Killer and eventually a full-blown Omnicidal Maniac out to kill every single person in Japan. Unless you're another godly-powerful robot like Inuyashiki, if Shishigami wants you dead, you're dead.
• Signature Scene:
  • Shishigami's first killing spree.
  • Inuyashiki flying for the first time while he sings the theme song to Astro Boy.
  • Inuyashiki's battle with the Yakuza.
  • Shishigami's killing spree against the 2channel users.
  • Inuyashiki and Shishigami fighting each other while they're both unconscious on autopilot.
• Squick: Drowning is already a terrible way to go. Drowning in a tub of water that's mixed with your dead father's blood is all kinds of messed up.
• Stoic Woobie: Inuyashiki himself, especially before his transformation. While he struggles to be a good husband and father, deep inside he suspects that the only creature that would miss him if he died is his dog.
• Tear Jerker:
  • When Inuyashiki finds that despite having a stomach cancer and only a few months left to live, his family may not miss him at all when he dies, he has a breakdown.
  • As Inuyashiki flies to the asteroid, his beloved dog futilely tries to chase after him.
  • Inuyashiki and Shishigami sacrifice themselves to destroy the asteroid heading to Earth. Prior to activating his self-destruct mechanism, Inuyashiki promised his family, pet dog and Ando that he will returned but fails to keep that promise as everyone he loves watch him performing the ultimate sacrifice. In the epilogue, his children continue to mourn him.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The aliens that made Inuyashiki and Shishigami into androids never appear again after the inciting incident.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The first few episodes contain back to back scenes of Shishigami murdering people for fun. While Inuyashiki does a few good deeds like saving a family from a fire and ressucitating a cat, they are overshadowed by Shishigami's gleeful spree of violence. Episode 4 opens with a Yakuza boss committing two acts of sexual assault before the theme song even starts.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Shishigami at the end is treated as redeeming himself by killing himself to stop the asteroid from destroying the earth. That doesn't change the fact that by the end of the series, he'd killed thousands of innocent people just for fun, and doesn't seem at all remorseful about it.