Thank God, finally it’s over, or at least that’s what I keep telling myself.

I am genuinely tired after finishing the anime, wretched even, but I think that's alright. I never watched this show for some cute, happy feeling anyway. I knew what was coming, but man, it still hit bad. I'm not here to critique the show, honestly, so sorry about that. I just want to get my feelings out and talk about it, because this... this felt hard.

You go in thinking you're prepared. You see the cute, pink, Kirby-looking octopus alien and you know it's a trap. It’s like seeing Kyubey from Madoka Magica for the first time; a part of your brain, the part that’s been hurt by anime before, just screams ''RUN'' The show even gives you two content warnings at the start, which is basically the anime equivalent of a bouncer telling you, "You sure you want to go in there, pal?" But you do it anyway. Because you have to know, you want to know, you are already too deep.  

The whole thing starts as this twisted parody of Doraemon. You have the helpless kid, Shizuka, and the magical friend from the future, Takopi, with his pouch of 'Happy Gadgets' But this isn't about getting better grades or standing up to a neighborhood bully. This is a world of soul-deep neglect and abuse that feels so real it’s suffocating. And Takopi, with his simple, happy brain, just makes everything a million times worse. His attempts to help are pure chaos. He gives Shizuka a 'Happy Ribbon' to mend friendships, and she uses it to hang herself. The camera just stays on her, lifeless, and in that moment, the show looks you dead in the eye and tells you there are no easy fixes here. There is no magic that can patch over this kind of pain.  

From there, it just descends. It’s not a slow burn of psychological horror like Oyasumi Punpun; that story is a surgeon's scalpel, meticulously dissecting a soul.  

The whole environment is a non-stop barrage of misery that just keeps going, never giving you a moment to breathe. The visual style is a huge part of the pain. It’s this constant whiplash between Takopi’s original sin's soft, storybook world and the grim, dirty, dead reality the kids live in. It’s like if A24 decided to do a gritty, psychological reboot of Barney & Friends the dissonance is the point, and it makes the horror feel so much more violating.  

What really wrecks you is that there are no real monsters. Not among the kids, anyway. It’s like Lord of the Flies, but the island is generational trauma and the beast is the complete and utter failure of every single adult in their lives. You hate the bully, Marina, with a passion, but then you see her home life, and you realize her cruelty is just a distorted echo of the abuse she suffers from her own mother. You see the good boy Azuma, so starved for love that his mother making and then taking away his favorite pancakes because he didn't get a perfect score on a test is enough to break him. They’re all just children, hurting each other because they’ve been hurt, and it’s a cycle that feels impossible to escape. It’s a different kind of darkness than something fantastical like Berserk. That’s a nightmare you can wake up from. This feels like it could be happening down the street, and that’s what makes it so much harder to stomach.

9.5/10 will never watch again