Yakitate!! Japan/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Arc Fatigue: The Yakitate 25 arc starts off decent enough, with some surprising plot points (like Azuma losing for the first time in the series,) but quickly falls into a strict formula so bad that the reader can actually start to predict how every single match will play out, right down to the basis of the gags.
  • Boring Invincible Hero: Azuma just sort of wanders from victory to victory with his massive natural talent, never really having to endure the hard work and study everyone else has to do to succeed. Most of the time when confronted by a strong opponent he just goes "Oh, I'll use Ja-Pan No. Whatthefuckever!" and breezes to the win. He never loses, despite being a complete idiot.
  • Complete Monster - While Yukino's done any number of truly monstrous things ( up to and including murder just to ensure her Karma Houdini), the one that probably has the most impact for the reader, and certainly the characters, is when she steals Tsukino's mother's ashes and flings them around at a withered dead tree, cackling with glee and shouting insults while a very young Tsukino sobs and begs her to stop. The series picks few bones about the fact that she's a literal psychopath who only finds joy in the suffering of others.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse "Kid".
  • Esoteric Happy Ending: Parodied and lampshaded repeatedly in the Yakitate 25 arc, where Azuma declares any victory a happy ending, ignoring the fact that most of his opponents have shapeshifted with no sign of changing back any time soon, and the occasional bad thing that happens to some other character (like Ken becoming a yazuka leader against his will, or Kuroyanagi suffering severe internal bleeding as a result of a reaction.)
  • Evil Is Sexy: As the manga goes on, Yukino wears less and less the more you learn of her evil. Culminating in chapters where she wears nothing at all.
    • One example: She is somehow able to wear this getup to a public playground and not get arrested.
  • Mary Sue: Kid, pretty much Played for Laughs though.
    • Kid is definitely a Parody Sue, based on American action movie hero stereotypes (he even looks a lot like Val Kilmer). Azuma's closer to a straight-up example.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Yuuichi Kirisaki returned home to his starving and dying kids while they were respectively 10 and 5 to eat a large bread right in front of them and denying them to eat any of it, all the while commenting on how delicious it was.
  • Woolseyism: The English translation of the manga does a pretty good job of translating the Japanese puns into English ones.
    • The Indonesian Translations on the other hand use a rather interesting way where the joke is kept and added a translator note. As a bonus, theres several reference to Indonesian culture that is added by the translator.