YMMV / King of Thorn

• Ass Pull: In the manga, the revelation that Kasumi is a Medusa construct created by Shizuku comes basically from nowhere. As this was one of the most controversial points of the series, the movie utilized more Foreshadowing before revealing it.
• Awesome Music: Toshihiko Sahashi's soundtrack was acknowledged as one of the best points of the movie. The closing theme, "End of the World" by Misia, stands out.
• Broken Base: Most viewers and critics opined the King of Thorn anime adaptation was a great film in its own right, with some even pointing out that it resembled more a Hollywood flick than your typical anime movie. However, how it compares to the manga is a breaking point: while some think its synthesized plot is both faithful to and less erratic than the manga's, others believe it doesn't make the manga justice and ruins a few of its highlights by changing so many character backstories and fates.
• Complete Monster: Zeus, head of security for Venus Gate Labs, is a chaos-loving maniac who gleefully participates in the Venus Gate’s twisted human experiments to harness the power of Medusa. When Shizuku's powers go out of control, Zeus ensures said powers kill as many people as possible. Zeus then proceeds to turn himself into data, download part of his code into Shizuku, manipulate her powers to murder everyone on the island the Lab is located, then releases an army of monsters onto the Earth to destroy anything they come across. After his old rival, Marco Owens, confronts him, Zeus has him beaten to death and reveals he plans to turn most of humanity into his own "Zeus Race", and then kill any humans left. Zeus then captures Kasumi and forces her to watch as he painfully transforms her friends, one of which is a child, into more Zeus Race beasts.
• Critical Dissonance: Critics praised the movie in plenty, while casual audiences tend to consider it mostly So Okay, It's Average. This is coincidentally an echo from the original manga, which got some high reviews while never being overtly popular.
• Fridge Brilliance: At first the thought of a disease that infects your psyche seems quite weird. But consider the stuff you learn about every day. What about memes? What about celebrity or gossips? Or Ear Worms? How about viral videos? Oh boy. Aren't those basically stimuli which infect human mind and have real-life consequences? Of course some people are immune to certain kinds but nevertheless these thoughts drive many people to do what they do. And sometimes it's just not very healthy. Doesn't that make such thoughts kind of a disease?
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The movie was very well received at the Sitges Film Festival in Spain and got nominated at the 2010 Asia Pacific Screen Award for Best Animated Feature Film in Australia (although it lost to Piercing I).
• Inferred Holocaust: In the manga, the state of the world outside the island is left deliberately vague, though there is at least some hope: Marco points out that other people infected with Medusa would be able to create their own monsters to fight Zeus'.
• Narm:
  • From the manga, Katherine's transformation. A giant bird might have do it, and a full fledged harpy monster would have been Creepy Awesome. However, a giant bird with human breasts is pretty much impossible not to laugh at.
  • Zeus, the manga's Big Bad, spending all of his scenes wearing a Hawaiian shirt, shorts and flip-flops. His face being drawn in a rather strange style doesn't help.
  • In the movie, Marco's claim to belong to the "infantry military". Elites Are More Glamorous? Nah, just send a plain soldier to an infiltration mission to save the world.
• Nightmare Fuel: Copious amounts of Gorn, Cruel and Unusual Death, characters being chased by one Super-Persistent Predator after another and sometimes Eaten Alive, plus Kasumi's nightmares and suicidal tendencies. Then there's Medusa itself causing all kinds of Body Horror. And this is all within the first book!
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Most positive reviews of the film gave this note about Sunrise's animation (except by some of the vines, which were noted to be conspicuous CGI).
• The Woobie:
  • Kasumi.
  • Marco also qualifies, and Alice and Shizuku.