YMMV / Thou Shalt Not Die

• Angst? What Angst?: Mizukaki took getting his penis blown off by a sniper relatively well. While he might be coping by being a Boisterous Weakling, that's still miles better than any of the other kids shown who seems one bad day away from killing themselves.
• Anvilicious: French extremists wanting to wipe out immigrants because of a terrorist attack isn't exactly subtle. The story itself isn't shy about how it perceives war politics.
• Awesome Art: Daisuke Moriyama has come a long, long way ever since Chrono Crusade. Bonus points for the uniform design by Kurahana Chinatsu.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: In-story. Kuroi doesn't give a damn that he gets weird stares from everyone every time he rants about how much he loves Mashiro. After some chapters, it seems like everyone just chose to ignore him. Probably for the best since the only person who teased him about Mashiro got Psychic-Assisted Suicide.
• Complete Monster: Seijiro Miyata is the founder of the Miyata Company and the posthumous mind behind Project Shirotae. Deeply afraid of his own mortality, Miyata ordered his scientists to experiment on embryos and unaware pregnant woman like Principal Rokusho to discover immortality, only succeeding in awakening the powers of the future Special Students. Miyata also ordered the murder of independent researchers and regretful scientists who revealed that Miyata oversaw the creation of bioweapons. Eventually dying of old age, Miyata would create multiple clones of himself to continue his research, with the Miyata clones participating in the exploitation of the Special Students and even supporting a military coup and an American intervention meant to exterminate them.
• Dancing Bear: Mention Thou Shalt Not Die and you may not get a lot of reactions.... Until you mention Yoko Taro, then someone will pick it up.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: Going to war armed with just a katana and psychic powers? The story goes on about how much of a terrible idea this is, but it doesn't stop it from looking damn cool.
• Funny Moments:
  • As the students are told that they are going to France for a mission, they are told that they are going to be split into two groups. This leads to Kuroi going into full Yandere mode as he wasn't put in the same group as Mashiro. Then their leader tells them that the other group has already left. Cue everyone having a case of escalating "what"s, starting with a Flat "What" and ending with a Big "WHAT?!".
• Iron Woobie: Mashiro. The series doesn't have a lot of volumes yet, but she has gone through so much trauma already that is amazing she keeps going.
• Jerkass Woobie: Most of the violent kids like Kuroi and Yanagi have a lot of emotional baggage to explain their way, and being turned into expendable weapons doesn't help at all.
• Magnificent Bastard: Principal Rokusho of the Special Abilities Private High School is a ruthless woman who sends the Special Students on a mission in France by lying to them about their objective, causing a student to be permanently paralyzed and triggering Mashiro's berserker transformation, something she considers a success. Later revealed to be a victim of Project Shirotae seeking revenge, Rokusho reveals that she's working alongside the murderous Tokiwa to give her students a chance to survive an attempted massacre at the hands of the JDSF and the American Army. Having learned and even bragged about hiding the truth of Project Shirotae from the general public to keep her cover, Rokusho aids in the plan to reveal the truth and unleashes her trump card, a Special Student and her newborn baby, who Rokusho saved to use their combined power to have a chance of victory. Successfully giving a future to her surviving students, Rokusho works with Kuroi and Tokiwa to find the clones of Miyata and kill all of them—except for the children—being successful at dismantling Miyata's horrible legacy.
• Mind Game Ship: Kuroi and Mashiro. It isn't so much that Kuroi is interested in breaking her, but he enjoys watching her reactions when put into difficult situations.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • It's implied that Tokiwa Mashiyoshi probably already crossed it before the series even began, but when he reveals his Depopulation Bomb, everything radically goes downhill from there as he repeatedly crosses the line almost every other chapter thereafter with a smug confidence.
  • The politicians and military of Japan, and even the school board governing the protagonists, have already crossed this when the entire operation that starts off the manga and resulted in the deaths of several dozen teens on the battlefield was implied to be nothing more than a test of their capabilities under false pretenses the entire time. Like above, it only gets worse the more that's revealed about them, as almost no adults on Japan's side have shown any empathetic side to them to say they haven't crossed this.
• Nausea Fuel: Any scene where Mashiro beats someone up in strange, cruel ways, but most recently Mashiro's arm being disfigured as the psy-res blade invades her body.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • While the opening chapters are pretty disturbing stuff in their sheer brutality, they culminate with Mashiro's breakdown, turning The Heart into The Berserker who can't tell friend from foe.
  • Then there is Kuroi, a perpetually-smiling psychopath with hypnotic abilities who seems completely unfazed by all the carnage going on around him, with the sole exception of when Mashiro went nuts... except instead of being disturbed, he instead proclaimed his love for the mayhem she caused.
    • The nightmares with this guy doesn't stop there. A couple of chapters later it becomes clear that he is a very unstable Yandere. He can and will kill you if he thinks you pose even the slightest threat to his relationship with Mashiro. This is best displayed when he uses his hypnosis powers to make a girl jump out of a window to her death as she wears a teary smile and proclaims everything's okay.
  • Tokiwa is the first true villain of the story if you don't count the school that use the Child Soldier: A Mad Scientist who at experimented on the children to understand the psychic abilities better and develop bioweapon from them. He is gleeful at the idea of testing his ethnic cleansing virus on French soil, nonchalantly inject a soldier with a Psycho Serum knowing in thiry minutes his brain will melt and shoot his human shield to press the people into letting him go before she bleeds out. Even worse is that unlike Kuroi or the other children whose power turned into psychos Tokiwa has nothing special, he is just a sociopath who believes the age of terrorism and espionage out dates conventional warfare and psychic children raised as weapon is the way forward.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: While it is per usual for a Yoko Taro story, this is one of his bleakest works since the original Drakengard and its sheer bleakness and brutality can make it hard for readers to sympathize with the characters and really care for them when they die in the droves.
• The Woobie: Pretty much every single kid in the school. They're considered nothing more than potential walking weapons of mass destruction by the world, with mortality rates on operations they have to undertake being merely a loss of assets rather than anything concerning to their higher-ups. Even worse, other nations and even guerrilla terrorist units are entirely willing to kill them left and right with brutality and efficiency down to the last person without any sense of hesitation, even before taking anyone's powers into account. They're essentially forced to kill so they can survive, despite having no training whatsoever and only armed with blades so that the Japanese can't be held accountable for breaking treaties by arming anyone with firearms - which only dooms them even more.