Mind Screw/Anime and Manga


 * Three words: Neon Genesis Evangelion. Forever the anime Trope Codifier. Don't even start on how much controversy this provoked.
 * While the actual series is majorly mind-screwy, it's End of Evangelion that truly takes trope and flings it out the window into unexplored territory. For the two of you out there who haven't seen it, I'll just give you one quick example-
 * Post any segment of End of Evangelion at or past Lilith's rise for other people to watch and a good portion of reviews will ask "What the **** did I just watch!?!"
 * Disclaimer:
 * And that said Aliens may or may not actually be
 * Disclaimer to the above Disclaimer: The above Disclaimer, while based on some statements and implications from the show, is at least partly conjecture. See, Evangelion is a series that, as far as plot is concerned, spells out roughly jack and shit.
 * And Jack's left town.
 * Yet another Disclaimer but I'm too bothered to identity how many we've gone through: The less you try to understand what's going on from a literal standpoint, the more sense it makes. Therefore, applying the belief that everything is symbolic is the only way to prevent the logical side of your brain from imploding on itself.
 * Gainax actually has made fun of this in FLCL with Kamon, where they take pot-shots at fans for overanalyzing it.
 * Just don't even bother trying to figure it out, you'll only get extremely depressed Which is appropriate, in that the creator was extremely depressed and possibly literally crazy at the time he came up with it.
 * Actually, at the time he was going through therapy for his depression and other issues. What we see is the creator dredging up all his deep-seated issues and uncertainties, rather than just the minor impact of a depressed writer. The remake, made years after therapy and with him now married and happy, has a decidedly different tone.
 * Yes, the change in tone and divergent Character Development enables even the familiar fanbase to hold out hope for that last minute save, the unambiguously happy ending -- oh wait, did you see Rebuild 2.0 yet?
 * If you think Eva is confusing, watch RahXephon and cry your brains out. Over half of the series is spent Contemplating Our Navels and the backstory is revealed almost completely without exposition; it's so hardcore that it's nigh-impossible to piece it all together. Special mention goes to figuring out all the connections between Ayato and the rest of the cast. The Movie is clearer but not by much.
 * The Black Rock Shooter OVA. Hands up, everyone, if you went "What was THAT?" when it ended.
 * Surprisingly for an episodic Science Fiction Film Noir anime that's packed with pop culture references and driven entirely by its music, Cowboy Bebop loves this. This is especially apparent in Pierrot Le Fou and Brain Scratch.
 * The movie of Ghost in the Shell is cramped with obscure symbols, random quotes, and and lots of philosophical discussions that come out of nowhere and are over as suddenly as they came. The second movie is nothing but 96 minutes of obscure symbols, random quotes, and philosophical discussions, from the beginning of the opening to the end of the credits. And this is Mamoru Oshii, after all.
 * Melody of Oblivion, also by Gainax, is a good example of this.
 * Serial Experiments Lain. We dare you to try to make sense out of it without help. Or... well, even with help.
 * FLCL. It may take you two or three viewings to understand just the plot,  Fridge Brilliance ftw! Wait, there's a PLOT?!
 * The manga is even worse about it. Good luck!
 * On those two notes, pretty much anything by Studio Gainax will have at least some traces of Mind Screw...even Petite Princess Yucie.
 * Angel's Egg, an animated "tone poem" that was seminal for this sort of work in anime.
 * Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei is pretty much one of the most amusing Mind Screw type series ever.
 * Zetsubou's Spiritual Successor, Bakemonogatari, is equally good as an amusing Mind Screw, but it also has a plot.
 * Uzumaki starts getting weird within the first 10 pages. Then things are constantly getting worse, and it's not until the very last page that things are starting to make sense again.
 * Although it's not really for the best...
 * The Big O, though it wasn't entirely intentional: the planned third season was apparently supposed to explain things in a more straightforward manner, it's just that they didn't get to.
 * Revolutionary Girl Utena. Utena's director Ikuhara has expressed particular, almost sadistic, delight in the despair fans have shown over figuring things out. Some of his more famous replies to fans have been "Miki keeps timing things because his watch contains the secret of the universe" and "The reason Utena turns into a car in the movie is because I really wanted to turn a cute girl into a car."
 * Mawaru Penguindrum, also by Kunihiko Ikuhara, has elements of this.
 * Perfect Blue by Satoshi Kon.
 * Paranoia Agent: In the end, In between, a smiling lad on golden rollerskates who may or may not be real, magic or just a metaphor goes around bashing people's heads in, except when he doesn't. This was also directed by Satoshi Kon.
 * Dead Leaves takes this Up to Eleven. It begins with a guy who looks like Canti from FLCL and a girl with a weird eye marking waking up naked in the middle of nowhere, and ends with a super-intelligent (?) baby coming out of the girl's panties with Guns Akimbo, putting enough dakka in the air to kill a bull elephant, and flying off into space to kill a giant worm. Retro, the Canti Expy, frequently comments along the lines of "This is so screwed up."
 * Boogiepop Phantom. Compared to this, the last two episodes of Evangelion are about as confusing as See Spot Run.
 * It doesn't help that it's a sequel to a novel, which it completely fails to mention. If you've seen that, it becomes a lot easier to comprehend, though still heavily in the Mind Screw department.
 * It also, unlike Evangelion, starts out confusing and gets more understandable (slightly) as it goes along.
 * The hentai/horror anime Urotsukidouji (Legend of the Overfiend), the Naughty Tentacles Trope Maker, does this to the point of incoherence.
 * What, its fans care for the plot?
 * Texhnolyze is another big recent example, with a lot of symbolism that will require several viewings in order to fully understand everything.
 * As a matter of fact, this is rather expected, since Texhnolyze has a lot of the original staff from Serial Experiments Lain.
 * The "Land of Books" episode of Kino's Journey.
 * The ending of Akira is considered by many to be an example of this. (The Movie, at any rate. The original manga ending is a lot less confusing.)
 * Paprika by Satoshi Kon, notice a trend?
 * Relatedly, the director Satoshi Kon has been much kinder than most and explained the movie as "following dream logic" and that we should just go with it.
 * Ergo Proxy: Lain with shotguns. Full of mind-screw situations - especially when and . The group also has other weird experiences, like . When compared to the rest of the tone of the series, it's no wonder most of the cast are near-crazed by the end.
 * Brain Powerd. Okay, so there's a monster that employs people to help it absorb all Life Energy on Earth so it can fly into space, and it produces robots with cockpits in their crotches, except that there are other crotch-piloted robots fighting against them, and all the robots are built from giant killer Lego disks. The robots may or may not be metaphors for children, and somehow every episode is about incredibly screwed-up family issues, except the ones where they toss around the word "organic" way too much. Um... Yeah, no idea. And that's just the premise. The last several episodes are a downward spiral of nonstop epic WTF-just-happened-itude.
 * If you think that's something, you should see what happens when Mamoru Nagano, BP's mecha designer, writes his own manga...
 * Ghost Hound. = Psychological conditions + I can't tell what's real and what's a dream + awesome, creepy ambient music + the supernatural + I can see your butt.
 * Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle. So ambiguous and convoluted at times that official translators admit in the notes that they're basically making a guess and winging it. Unofficial translators do not say such in the notes only because that takes up space better filled by actively and profusely cursing at CLAMP.
 * While not quite as bad, its sister series xxxHolic definitely has its moments.
 * Making a timeline for this series is practically impossible. And don't even think about trying to create a character chart.
 * Even the characters are baffled by some of what's going on.
 * Among the characters that have expressed a great deal of confusion is The Chessmaster Big Bad. AKA, the man who planned a decent chunk of the confusing events.
 * And believe or not, in a Crowning Moment of Funny, now that the Holic has ended, even Word of God has admitted that they too are rather confused over how everything turned out and want to re-read it.
 * Genocyber, because there's a totally unexplained Time Skip between the first and second arcs, compounded by the fact that the first arc has No Ending.
 * Suzumiya Haruhi. The Anachronic Order will mess you up, since you cannot relate half of the stuff being said. Furthermore, it gets hard to follow in the 4th novel Disappearance and its continuance in another novel, where time traveling is combined with alternate universes. It may take you 2 times to read just to understand how they actually managed to solve it. The 9th (current) novel features two realities, for no apparent reason, in which different stuff happens. And it ends with a Cliff Hanger, so we still don't know what's going on.
 * To be fair, the more surreal of the two phone calls in the 9th novel is obviously made by someone who knows more than they really should, and as it's the first point of difference, it's likely the cause of the split. Who they are and what they want is, of course, unclear.
 * And in the tenth novel it solved out to be
 * And don't forget about the time where we enter an endless recursion of time. Reading/watching Endless Eight for the first time will have just about anyone trying to figure out what in the world is actually going on.
 * Earth Maiden Arjuna. On one hand, the general theme of letting the earth be and saving the environment from unnatural influences is pretty clear. On the other hand, the details of the plot are rather surreal, to say nothing of the presentation...
 * Chaos;Head is one right from the beginning. The viewer is forced to pay attention to everything that goes on, not knowing if it's simply a delusion or possibly real. Even when things get cleared up, there's still another layer of mystery beneath that.
 * Being the spiritual successor to Chaos;Head, Steins;Gate proves to be a massive Mind Screw, but inverts it because everything is solved or explained by the end.
 * Soul Taker is what happens when you take Devilman and mix it with Neon Genesis Evangelion. The seventh episode's screwy enough that it will make you realize how easy it is to understand Evangelion.
 * Make that Devilman meets Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Akiyuki Shinbo, and as we all know most of the stuff he directs is pretty much mind screw, even Pani Poni Dash! to an extent
 * Alien Nine. Even if you read the entire manga and watch the anime more than three times, all keeping the coming-of-age metaphors in mind, you are still most likely to be left scratching your head at something.
 * Tekkon Kinkreet starts out pretty straightforwardly. The ending, on the other hand...
 * Haibane Renmei is a much gentler version of this; while the plot itself isn't all that ridiculous, the Backstory and setting are never explained.
 * It, Lain, and Texhnolyze all have one thing in common: Yoshitoshi Abe. Thankfully, this is probably his gentlest work. Most of the mind screwing is in the nature of little mysteries left unexplained to everyone...including the characters, making it less of a shock and more of a curiosity that accentuates the surreal setting.
 * Mononoke, particularly the "Noppera-bou" story.
 * You have Azumanga Daioh, a slice-of-life anime. The concept seems normal. Then they bring in a giant, floating cat that hates the color red and is voiced by Norio freakin' Wakamoto! Though Chiyo-chichi only exists in one character's dreams/daydreams. The other characters are appropriately weirded out when she mentions it in real life, besides Osaka, who saw him once as well, after Sakaki already made some hints about it. She is just screwed up enough to put everything together, but she did give Chiyo-chan the stuffed animal.
 * Night on the Galactic Railroad is a rare example of when all the mind screw, that has been thrown at you during the movie, is... mostly explained at the end.
 * Ouran High School Host Club, of all things, has hints of this, though you'd have to look really, really closely to notice them. Things like showing a shot of a character looking out of an empty window, turning the camera away for a moment, then turning back to the window, only this time the pink-tinted clock tower seen throughout the series is visible through it. Hey, it's made by the same guys as Utena, what did you expect?
 * In the first episode, clips of light bulbs turning on are shown as more of the characters realize Haruhi's secret. In the last episode, during an interaction between Éclair Tonnerre and Haruhi, a shot of an unlit light bulb is shown. (Which then turns on once she discovers Haruhi's secret as well. Problem solved.)
 * Yu-Gi-Oh! GX Season 4. Those three seasons that made it look like your typical Gaming and Sports Anime And Manga were just deceiving you.
 * The fun starts in Season 3, when suddenly the main enemy is a severely psychologically damaged Eldritch Abomination intent on proving their affection by putting the through horrendous trauma. That's the straightforward part.
 * Once they start talking about the Coralians in Eureka Seven, get ready to not understand ANYTHING.
 * A mild version at the end of the Lucky Star OVA, to give a brief synopsis; everyone turns into frogs and Shiraishi flies around singing. The scene was possibly another Shout-Out to End of Evangelion as well as the Urusei Yatsura movie Beautiful Dreamer (a legendary Mind Screw itself); Shiraishi is actually wearing one of the character's outfits.
 * Higurashi no Naku Koro ni.
 * The sequel, Umineko no Naku Koro ni, is even worse. The plot (at first) is basically about the main character trying to argue that magic does not exist... to an apparently very real witch. Who claims to have killed him.
 * When They Cry in general is a huge Mind Screw because of Well, that and the whole issue with cranking Unreliable Narrator Up to Eleven. It's now official that you can't trust anything but  of Umineko, and Higurashi had entire arcs narrated by people who were hallucinating.
 * Baccano! has one in the very first episode (even before the immortals and the plot getting REALLY confusing): Carol has a flashback to a conversation between her and the Vice President on a train. The VP is sitting at the table reading a newspaper and embarking on an mild mind screw speech, talking about how the description of any event changes wildly given the perspective at which it is viewed. Carol gets snapped out of her flashback by the VP hitting a fly with a folded piece of newspaper: the exact same one he just finished folding in flashback.
 * Wasn't that just a set of match cuts? He picks up a newspaper in the office, and it cuts to her reminiscing and then it cuts back when he hits the fly. It's implied that he was folding the paper from the office as she was remembering.
 * Baccano! can be very straightforward. The only reason why it's confusing is because they squeezed three plot arcs into 13 episodes. This means quickly moving from one scene of an arc to another scene of an arc. It's really confusing in the beginning, but around the middle of the anime it starts making sense. The first episode is a spoiler, but of course we don't know that. There's not much of Mind Screw, really.
 * Darker than Black has a lot of weird Techno Babble concerning the Gate, and some fairly critical things are never really explained. The last episode of the first season gets special points, given that it includes a segment inspired by Evangelion's Gainax Ending (specifically the "Congratulations" scene). The second season has even more of a "reach for the aspirin" ending. And another Eva Shout-Out for good measure.
 * Casshern Sins is kind of hard to understand in general, but you can tend to take all the symbolism in stride. Episode 18, however, just kicks your brains out. It seems a fairly standard episode of Lyuze, who is trying to kill the robot who killed her sister, but actually loves him too. She dreams of her sister telling her not to forget her. But in the middle of all that, we have random photographs of a woman. No, I mean... PHOTOGRAPHS. As in of a human, not an anime character.
 * Yakuza Girl. So much. Starts off as a standard tits-n-gore Seinen sort of manga, and just spirals into "WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN" territory. When a psychic preventing the bombing of Hiroshima by freezing the plane in time (and midair) for 50+ years isn't even the strangest part of the series, you know you've got a Mind Screw series on your hands...
 * Cat Soup is one extreme 30-minute instance of this trope.
 * Key the Metal Idol, commonly described as the strangest anime ever made when it was released.
 * Kurozuka
 * Urasawa's Twentieth Century Boys is mostly just confusing because of overlapping crazy gambits and...stuff...but it's also stuffed with symbolism everywhere, all the time, and when the 'flashback' scenes start to overlap with the 'present time' scenes through a virtual reality simulation of the main characters' neighborhood in the Showa era created by the Big Bad, which various characters enter to find out what really happened, and  it has crossed the line. Especially since you have to read the companion series ''Twenty-first Century Boys' just to find out the ending.
 * Billy Bat, also by Urasawa, is doing well with the Mind Screw aspects, what with the timeline shenanigans, future-predicting/altering cartoon characters, ancient conspiracies, and real-life events smashing into each other.
 * In PicoxCocoXChico, Tokyo is almost completely uninhabited, cell phones seem to be sentient, and apparently the city's energy is controlled by a cross-dressing boy.
 * Some episodes of Mushishi
 * The manga version of Chrono Crusade has elements of this, thanks to its Gainax Ending. For the most part It Makes Sense in Context, but finding out that really throws most readers for a loop.
 * Excel Saga is mind screw incarnate. Particularly the anime. The entire series is built on this premise (no joke). However, if you presume that the entire series is a mind screw, and then look at it in the context of being a mind screw, the specific mind screw episodes start to make sense as contributing to a plot and setting which is mind screw which are in turn metaphors for the mind screw symbolism of a post-modern society ... Wait...
 * Fullmetal Alchemist relies heavily on Hermetic symbolism..
 * The second-to-last episode of the 2003 anime adaptation has strong elements of this.
 * Bobobo-Bo Bo-bobo, in which a man with a blond afro with extra-long nose hairs goes around trying to stop an empire based on the premise of destroying all hair in the world. Joining him is a...THING that looks like the sun, and a living block of jelly. These people have abilities called the Fist, and their abilities are stored in a personal MacGuffin called a Hair Ball, and you die if you lose it.
 * Urusei Yatsura. (Especially the second movie, Beautiful Dreamer, which before Evangelion could possibly have been called the gold standard for anime Mind Screw.) The fact that most of the first half of the TV series was directed by Mamoru Oshii should raise some flags. Again, a lot of their Mind Screw moments were Shout Outs (especially to Star Wars) or just Big Lipped Alligator Moments.
 * Digimon Tamers. It may be a kids series, but since the main writer (who is not new to Mind Screw) relies on realistic dialog, often just with quick comments explaining what's happening, often the meaning behind the dialog is lost by the audience. One needs to really pay attention or rewatch it several times to appreciate it.
 * Gregory Horror Show can and will leave you wondering what the hell just happened in the span of a two-minute long episode. And not just for the viewer, either--in the first two series, the main character (whose eyes are you seeing the action through) doesn't understand what's going on or why, and in the third series we find that not even the lord of the freaky place is immune to it.
 * Betterman on several occasions...
 * Tenshi ni Narumon
 * Pandora Hearts. The series as a whole. With Alice in Wonderland as its template, this isn't all too surprising.
 * Not only that, it's getting worse as the series progresses...
 * Noein is based (loosely) on quantum mechanics and the plot revolves very heavily around The Multiverse. The main character's Reality Warper powers allow her to jump freely between the many dimensions, and since a new dimension is created whenever somebody makes a decision, there are a lot of them, with outcomes ranging from slightly off to outright dystopian. Also there's a lot of interaction between characters from the present dimension and dimensions in the future. Naturally, the series gets confusing.
 * The King of Thorn movie. You know an anime is a mind screw when the latter parts of it completely invalidate what we were shown in the earlier part.
 * After School Nightmare is rather hard to explain. At first it seems like a normal manga with an intersexed protagonist.. Then it quickly changes into a psychological manga full of Freudian influence, similar to Evangelion.
 * Genjutsu (illusion techniques) in Naruto deliberately invoke this trope in universe. Once you're caught in one, you'll be begging for Evangelion.
 * Genjutsu (illusion techniques) in Naruto deliberately invoke this trope in universe. Once you're caught in one, you'll be begging for Evangelion.