Saikano

"This is perhaps one of the most emotionally flaying anime series I have ever seen."

"Every time I watch the last episode of Saikano, I feel like I'll never be happy ever again. The world could end, and I wouldn't notice because I'd be too busy feeling the after effects..."

—Shelf Life

a.k.a. Saishuu Heiki Kanojo; She, the Ultimate Weapon; My Girlfriend, the Ultimate Weapon. In the French translation, Larme Ultime, a pun on "the ultimate weapon" (l'arme ultime) and "ultimate tear".

The tentative budding relationship between petite Chise and bitter, emotionally distant Shuji becomes a little more complicated when Shuji discovers that Chise has been converted into a living weapon of mass destruction by the JSDF.

Sound like the setup for many an anime featuring a troubled young man and his extraordinarily empowered girlfriend? Brace yourself, because despite the trappings of the genre, this isn't your creepy bachelor uncle's Magical Girlfriend series. The series is subtitled "The Last Love Song On This Little Planet" and they don't pull any punches in delivering on the bittersweet tone implied by that line.

This is a love story where the love is complex and unidealized; it's a war story where the war is distant and, if portrayed at all, done so in brief, brutal vignettes. If you are at all emotional, be prepared to be gobsmacked repeatedly by the savagings inflicted on the protagonists by the world and by each other.

You'll likely need a box of tissues for this series... though again, not in the same way your creepy uncle might.

Originally a manga series by Shin Takahashi, it was adapted into a 13-episode anime in 2002. An OAV side-story was released in 2005, Saikano: Another Love Song, as well as a live-action movie in 2006. All of these, apart from the live-action film, are licensed by Viz Media.

Tropes used in Saikano include:

• Action Girl—Chise
• Adaptation Distillation—The anime removes some of the extreme Mood Whiplash present in the manga. It also adds some characters and scenes to fill in the parts with long monologues.
• And I Must Scream:
  • Shuji's fate in the anime is to walk an empty earth, with nothing at his side but an Ax Crazy energy being who "loves" him too much to end his suffering. It's strongly implied that said energy being gave him immortality, which makes the situation much worse.
  • Subverted in the manga. Shuji and Chise somehow leave the Earth in Chise, who has become some kind of spaceship....but Chise forgot humans need to eat.
• Anyone Can Die—A regular theme of this series, with most of the deaths being pretty senseless.
• Apocalypse How—Class 0 or 1 (at the beginning of the series.)
• Art Major Biology
• Art Major Physics
• Artistic Age
• Ax Crazy—"YOU IDIOTS, shoot if you dare. Sorry, you're all going to die."
• Baker's Dozen
• Barbie Doll Anatomy: Done in a few scenes involving more nudity than just some exposed undergarments.
• Black Comedy—Along with Gallows Humor below, there's a sequence in the manga where after Chise and Shuji run away and start hitchhiking, they eventually get picked up by a military truck. Chise says off-handedly that everyone that knows what she actually is is already dead. The punch line to this is that the soldiers on the truck DO recognize Chise and know what she is and have a collective Oh Crap in their thought bubbles.
• Blessed with Suck
• Body Horror—Chise's uncanny body.
• Broken Bird—Fuyumi.
• Cerebus Syndrome—The show is mildly optimistic for all of one episode or so. It goes downhill very, very fast after that.
• Character Development—Arguably the main draw of the show.
• Chewing the Scenery
• Child Soldiers:
  • Chise
  • The teen boys in the Japanese army.
• Clothing Damage—Chise. So. Much.
• Cloudcuckoolander—Chise. Also partly a case of Obfuscating Stupidity when she acts like an ordinary schoolgirl.
• Creepy Child—Chise's Super-Powered Evil Side plays with this trope.
• Crucified Hero Shot
• Deconstructor Fleet: If you like angelic-looking super-powered girls and cyborgs with cool weapons and high-school-aged war heroes, this series has got all of that in abundance; but the very point of this whole story seems to be that all of these things would take a terrible psychological toll on their users, and that you would not be so enamored of them if you were on the receiving end of all the senseless death and destruction they would cause.
• Determinator—One of the main themes is people's amazing will to survive even though they know they're doomed.
• Deus Angst Machina—It can always get much worse.
• Dojikko
• Downer Ending
• Driven to Suicide—The nervous, sweaty middle-age man who oversees Chise's transformation.
• Dying Declaration of Love—Akemi
• Dying Like Animals
• Dysfunction Junction
• Emotionless Girl—Subverted. Near the end, Chise does have emotions, but she doesn't quite understand them.
• The End of the World as We Know It—Set Just Before the End.
• Face Fault
• Fan Disservice—Usually involves Chise's scars and lack of control over her transformation.
• Fan Service: Chise's transformations cause plenty of Clothing Damage if you're not too busy crying buckets of tears to notice (or care).
• Femme Fatale—Fuyumi.
• Gallows Humour—Where do we start? Pretty much the whole series is this, particularly when the focus shifts to the military men.
• Gratuitous French:
  • Random lines of it appear in the opening sequence. It's all correct, apart from suspect pronoun usage.
  • Some of the soldiers Chise kills in the manga are Francophones and speak pretty good French in the text.
• Hammerspace—Chise has to have something like this. That or she fabricates the things on the spot.
• Half-Human Hybrid—If "half human, half killing machine" fits into this trope.
• Hannibal Lecture—Chise occasionally gives this to soldiers. Sometimes from her own side.
• Hell Seeker—Tetsu wants to go to hell because he thinks that's where he'd go after death and that death is the only way out of his misery.
• Heroic RROD
• Hot for Student—Fuyumi, in flashbacks.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Shuji and Chise are both supposed to be roughly the same age, and Chise is explicitly stated to be 17 in the anime, but Shuji looks tall and mature enough to be in college, while Chise is short and underdeveloped enough to look like she ought to be in junior high.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters—Not played entirely straight, but the show makes it clear that everyone is guilty to some extent. At the same time, some passages sing the beauty of human life and the merit of committing to memory the fact that humans existed.
• I Just Want to Be Normal
• It Got Worse—repeatedly
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold—Shuji. He gets better.
• Just Before the End
• Kill'Em All—This series gives Space Runaway Ideon a run for its money in a quarter of the episodes.
• Light Is Not Good: When Chise uses her abilities, she starts to glow a bright white, looking almost angelic. Unfortunately, this is usually followed by lots and lots of people dying.
• Live Action Adaptation
• Love Dodecahedron
• Made of Iron
• Magical Girlfriend—Deconstructed in a horrifically mean-spirited way.
• Manly Tears—Especially Shuji.
• Meaningful Name:
  • In both the anime and the manga, one character mentions that "Chise" means "the hearth" or "home" in the Ainu language.
  • Tetsu ("iron") might be another case.
• Mercy Kill:
  • Tetsu to another soldier.
  • Chise to the entire human race.
• Mix and Match—School life (a bit on the Moe side) + war/mecha + Magical Girlfriend + pure horror with a side of Tear Jerker
• Mood Whiplash—Probably one of the most egregious and extreme cases in manga. Ordinarily happens several time on the same page.
• Nuclear Weapons Taboo—Chise practically is one, given her relentlessness and growing reputation for total destruction.
• Only One Name—According to Word of God, this was in order to create an atmosphere of familiarity with the characters.
• Oracular Urchin—Chise's cybernetics gradually develop augmented predictive and sensory abilities that give her something like premonitions of approaching disasters like earthquakes in addition to predicting the enemy's imminent attacks.
• Out-of-Clothes Experience—Happens to Chise at the very end of the manga.
• Painful Transformation
• Panty Shot
• Person of Mass Destruction
• Pettanko—Chise; young Fuyumi.
• Pet the Dog—Chise and Shuji love kitties. They die horribly.
• Plot Hole—Could be said to be voluntary. That we never learn who's at war with whom and the identity of the Big Bad strengthens the status of Saikano as an allegory about war at large. Similarly, knowing how come Chise is chosen to become the ultimate weapon and how on earth that actually works isn't quite the point. See The Un-Reveal.
• Poor Communication Kills—Double subversion we learn fairly early on that some soldiers speak English. Then Tetsu meets up with soldiers and tries to talk them down in English. They don't understand English.
• Raging Stiffie—Manga-only; Shuji.
• Rape as Drama—In a recent volume of canon stories happening in the universe of Saikano, one story focuses on the relationship between a teen soldier and a girl who got raped by soldiers from the other side. Particularly jarring since he waited for them to be finished before he killed them because he knew they'd be "spent" (and therefore easier to dispatch) after sex. Once they supposedly fall in love, he convinces the girl to have sex with him when she doesn't really want to.
• Rule of Cool—Let's face it, a moe with tech wings is cool.
• Schrodingers Cat—In the manga, one of Shuji's friends goes deaf during the first bombing. In the anime, said friend bites it (though from how little he gets featured in the manga, he might as well have died).
• Seinen—In the small Afterward in the manga, Word of God stated this was for young adult boys to adult men. This is also how he got away with including a rather graphic sex sequence.
• Shadow Archetype
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog
• Shotacon—Fuyumi's tryst with Shuji when he was 13 is a borderline example. (The line between pedophilia and hebephilia is typically drawn between the youngster's being 12 and 13 years of age. Of course, any way one looks at it, she was abusing her authority as a teacher and he was severely underage jail bait.)
• Shower of Angst
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism—the meter's reading Hard-Cynicism on this one, people.
• Small Girl, Big Gun: Tiny Chise's mechanical strength must be very impressive indeed, as a full-grown body-builder would have trouble hefting a gun that big.
• Snicket Warning Label—Besides the Episode 10 fansub, there is a warning in the manga in volume 2 that it WILL get worse and you are in the MIDDLE of volume 2.
• Split Personality Takeover—Gradually happens to Chise.
• Star-Crossed Lovers
• Stepford Smiler—Chise; Shuji to a lesser extent; Fuyumi; Tetsu.
• Super-Deformed—The manga does this a lot in the most inappropriate places.
• Super-Powered Evil Side—Though Chise's superpowered side isn't evil per se, it certainly is sadistic and creepy.
• Super Soldier
• Surprisingly Good English—The most noticeable use of English was from invading soldiers, who spoke passable (if noticeably accented) American English.
• Ten-Minute Retirement—When Chise dies.
• There Are No Therapists
• There Is No Higher Court - Girl changed into weapon without her knowledge or consent. No one bats an eye.
• Thirteen Episode Anime
• Trailers Always Spoil: The trailer for the live-action version shows the very ending of the end of the world even though it doesn't make sense by itself.
• Transformation Trauma
• Trickster—Chise (debatable).
• Tsundere—Akemi.
• Unlucky Childhood Friend—Akemi
• The Un-Reveal—For example, why and how was Chise chosen as the ultimate weapon? What actually happens to the earth at the end? Who were the enemies?
  • The second bit isn't outright stated, but pretty much made obvious. The Earth will eventually die, and Shuji is confined to a Fate Worse Than Death due to energy-being Chise's "kindness".
  • The best we get for the former in one of the OVAs is she, and only she, just so happened to fit the criteria to be the ultimate weapon. It's even mentioned that it could've been anyone and they would've used him/her.
  • A few enemies we get to see in person are speaking English, and one of the OVAs refers to enemy forces as "the Alliance"—which doesn't leave us knowing a whole lot more than we did before, however.
• Ultimate Lifeform: Chise is the ultimate weapon, and it's not hard to see why.
• War Is Hell: This story's entire thesis, freely seasoned with popular Japanese science fiction tropes.
• Wave Motion Gun—Kind of.
  • At least, it results in a Sphere of Destruction.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?
• Where I Was Born and Razed—Spectacularly averted: Chise's hometown not only doesn't get destroyed by her as one could expect, but it's in fact one of the only "safe" places on the earth due to Chise protecting it, to such an extent that it gets dubbed "Chise's town" and people flock to it in a desperate effort to find refuge. However, she eventually decides that when the time comes, she'll destroy it herself rather than let everybody die painfully.
  • In the manga she does. In the anime, she's convinced not to. The manga has the good ending.
• Winged Humanoid
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds—Who do you think?
• Yandere—While Chise technically isn't one, her characterization certainly plays with this trope.