I Knew What Takopi's Original Sin Was Going To Be About, and I Still Watched it

The first anime I ever watched was Death Note. I was ten and a friend told me about this super cool, edgy show with a hot genius boy who killed criminals using a notebook. It probably wasn’t the most age-appropriate content, what with the God complexes, philosophical debates about justice, and a mountain of corpses.

In retrospect, Death Note isn't even that graphic. Thematically mature? Sure. But it's not abstract or hard to follow, so that's probably why it was serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump right next to Naruto. Still, the fact that I gravitated toward it instead of being like every other kid watching Disney Channel made me feel special. And from there, I kept chasing darker and darker media. It became a kind of game of seeing how far I could go before I said, "This is too much."

Even though Death Note is a hard show to top, it certainly cemented my craving for similar media. To ramp up the splatter-punk horror aspect, I moved on to Elfen Lied and Higurashi. By the time I hit adulthood, I wasn’t just watching "dark" content for shock value anymore. I wanted to believe I had taste—that I could tell the difference between something mature for the sake of maturity, and something that actually had something to say. I thought I was refined. I thought I was elite. Little did I know that the very stuff I thought made me unique was being obsessively consumed by millions of other fans with the same emotional hunger.

Turns out, I wasn’t special for liking Goodnight Punpun. I was just another passenger on the Sad Normie Anime Express. That realization was both humbling and frustrating. I mean, what does it say about me, or any of us, that we seek out these emotionally devastating stories and then brag about how destroyed we are by them? Why do I, and so many others, flock toward anime that looks like it’s for kids but ends up covering themes like abuse, depression, and suicide?

Enter: Takopi’s Original Sin. The manga by Taizan 5 has already finished, but the anime adaptation just dropped, and the buzz is real. I knew what I was walking into. The title screen includes a warning about suicide, and the cover features a squishy, smiling alien octopus. A classic bait-and-switch. I didn’t hesitate. In fact, I was excited.

I wanted it to hurt me.

The first episode introduces Takopi, a happy alien from the planet Happy, who crash-lands on Earth and meets Shizuka, an elementary school girl who feeds him and lets him stay with her. But Shizuka is... not okay. She’s relentlessly bullied. Her mother is a sex worker who’s barely ever home. Her father is gone. And it’s clear from the start that she’s deeply depressed and having suicidal thoughts. Takopi’s innocent, clueless attempts to cheer her up only make everything feel worse. He’s the stand-in for the viewer who wants to believe everything can be fixed with kindness. The contrast between cutesy visuals and devastating themes isn’t new in Japanese media. Madoka Magica is infamous for luring viewers in with pastel magical girls before crushing their spirits three episodes in. Made in Abyss disguises itself with chibi aesthetics, only to feature children being dismembered, tortured, and psychologically broken. And of course, Punpun, with its deceptively simple bird-doodle protagonist, spirals into horrifying nihilism.

This duality has even been studied. In a 2018 paper titled "Kawaii and Horror: The Intersection of Cute and Grotesque in Japanese Pop Culture," researchers pointed out that the juxtaposition between soft and dark allows creators to explore taboo topics while keeping audiences emotionally engaged. In other words, the cute aesthetic lowers your defences and then warps your expectations with sudden, often violent, emotional whiplash. This kind of violence becomes even more impactful when it’s done to children, women, or otherwise vulnerable characters, who are usually the victims in these stories. Unlike in Hollywood, where there are limits to how much violence can be inflicted on children, anime, being entirely animated, faces far fewer restrictions. No real actors, no ethical barriers, just drawings. That lack of limitation means there’s virtually no ceiling for how far the horror can go.

There’s this trend, especially online, of people posting manga panels or anime screenshots with captions like, "This ruined me," or "I’ll never recover." Most of the time, the art is deceptively wholesome, a character smiling or doing something mundane, but the context is soul-crushing. It’s performative devastation, and I’ve definitely done it myself. We treat emotional wreckage like a badge of honour. Like, "Look at me. I’m so deep and emotionally complex, I watch anime that breaks people." It becomes part of an identity. And it makes you wonder, are we actually relating to these stories, or just using them to look superior? We’re measuring the quality of media not by how insightful it is, but by how much emotional damage it inflicts.

So why do we watch this stuff?

There are a few reasons. I’ll even bring statistics into it, so bear with me

Safe Distance: As dark as these stories get, they’re still fiction. You’re not living through the abuse or trauma; you’re watching someone else go through it. That buffer makes the content feel manageable, even when it’s horrifying.

Aesthetic Sadness: The internet rewards a specific type of curated sadness. You know the vibe: tragic moments paired with soft visuals, a sad piano soundtrack, and maybe a Tumblr quote about feeling empty. Even if you didn’t feel anything real, the performance of sadness still gets you likes.

Maturity Signalling: Consuming dark media is like social proof. It says, "I’m not just watching Demon Slayer, I’m reading Punpun and processing existential dread." It becomes a way to signal that you’re emotionally complex, cultured, or just tougher than the average viewer.

Anime is one of the few kinds of animation that really pushes how mature content can get. So what does that say about Japanese society?

Emotionally intense media like Takopi’s Original Sin is so popular in Japan because of both culture and circumstance. Japanese society places a high value on emotional restraint and social harmony, which means people, especially youth, often don’t have a healthy outlet for expressing pain, fear, or anger. In that kind of environment, fiction becomes a space where those feelings can live. There’s also a long artistic tradition of embracing melancholy. The concept of mono no aware, or the beauty in sadness and impermanence shows up in everything from The Tale of Genji to Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human. So when you pair that emotional openness with a cute art style, it hits harder. The more innocent it looks, the more shocking it feels when things get dark.

At the same time, Japan’s younger generations are dealing with serious mental health challenges. Youth anxiety, isolation, and disillusionment are widespread. Suicide remains one of the leading causes of death for teens and young adults. So when a story like Takopi, Made in Abyss, or Punpun shows children grappling with despair, instead of exaggeration, it feels honest. Add in the way internet culture rewards emotional openness, and it becomes clear that these stories aren’t just entertainment. They’re a kind of emotional currency. They let people process pain or show that they’re “deep enough” to carry someone else’s.

But does that mean it's bad?

Not necessarily.

Just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s hollow. Takopi’s Original Sin actually does something powerful with its premise. It doesn’t use trauma as a prop. Takopi himself is a tragic character in the making. His naive belief in happiness and his complete lack of understanding of human pain only make Shizuka’s suffering stand out more. He has the power to grant wishes, but no idea how to fix what’s really broken. Still, we should ask ourselves why we like this stuff. Is it because it speaks to our wounds? Or because we want to look like the kind of person who has wounds?

The truth is, I watched Takopi’s Original Sin knowing exactly what I was getting into. There’s something addictive about it. The worse the story makes you feel, the more powerful it seems. Like it must be important if it hurts this much. The show doesn’t exist to shock, but rather to reveal, and for me, that’s what separates the good from the gratuitous.