Cannon God Exaxxion/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Cliché Storm: The story starts out looking like one. Alien Invasion, a teen with a Super Robot and a Mad Scientist grandfather... characters even lampshade the fact that "it seems like an anime". By the halfway point, though, people in-story are wishing it was more like those anime shows...
  • Everybody Remembers the Stripper: The manga really does have some important things to say about the nature of heroism and the truth. All anyone seems to talk and/or complain about are various scenes involving Akane, though.
  • Fan Dumb: The edits to a rather infamous scene in the Dark Horse English version inspired a fair amount of this, even though the original was seriously unpublishable in the States, especially with the tizzies about "child porn". DH probably needs to be commended for making that bit work at all while preserving its (fairly important) place in the narrative.
  • It Gets Better: Especially in light of the occasional review like this, it perhaps does need to be said that the start can come off as very cliche. That's sort of the point; it needs to line up all the pins so it can start knocking 'em down one by one. It only begins to play with the expected tropes in the last parts of the first graphic novel volume, and only in the second volume do all of the old cliches start to fly apart messily.[1]
  • Magnificent Bastard / Manipulative Bastard: Hosuke and Shesh'ka duel to be the king of this trope. In the end, Hoichi beats them both.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Although not all Riofaldians are bad, the Riofaldian government as a whole crosses this very early into the series (particularly Shes'ka, who doesn't even care about his subordinates). Hosuke himself also crosses it, as well as a bunch of secondary characters. In fact, you could say the heroes are only good because they don't cross the line like everyone else.
  • Narm: Hoichi and Akane's sex scene. "Oh my god! He's that big!? He's like a porn star!" Pfffftttt.
  • Squick: It's a Sonoda manga. Though there's nothing too terribly explicit, there's a lot of (topless) nudity and some pretty freaky stuff is going on with Hosuke and the Bridge Bunnies. Then there's the violence, which, while usually not too gratuitous, is rendered very realistically. And let's not even get started on the Processing Plants...
  • Trapped by Mountain Lions: The Hino family outside of Akane and Murata & Kin'ba eventually enter this territory, as there doesn't seem to be much of a point to the Hinos after they get rescued (despite something like a plot still getting dangled), and the whole Murata-Kin'ba thing doesn't really go anywhere, possibly due to Sonoda ending the manga a bit early and ditching extended plans for them. Most obviously, Murata gets a Cannon Glove and Suit... and then proceeds to do fuckall with it. He doesn't even appear again until the denouement.
  • Unfortunate Implications: Hosuke explains that it'd be quite easy to use nanomachines to create and control whatever woman Hoichi wanted, even Akane. This makes the unusual 'harem' of the Bridge Bunnies quite disturbing when you wonder why so many young and beautiful women swoon over a man old enough to be their father. Not to mention how Hosuke described how he got his wife - "Hey, she was a babe with brains, laddie. I had to take her for myself."
    • Also, Hoichi's mother cheerfully explains to Akane that they're going to use Exaxxion to rule the world and change whatever laws they want - including marriage laws.
    • In light of all this, Akane's proclaimation that she is 'Hoichi's woman' after they have sex for the first time comes off as a little skeevy, no matter how innocently she meant it.
  1. Where he gets the whole "foreigners weasel their way into society!" bit is beyond us, though. The Riofaldians are about colonialism and government power, not a racial analogue.