10 Worst Anime Adaptations

3. Pupa

Tokyo Ghoul
Studio Deen

Pupa - both the manga and anime adaptation - has one of the best premises for a horror story I've heard in a long time. The story revolves around siblings Utsutsu and Yume Hasegawa, who find themselves infected with the Pupa virus.

While the former gains Deadpool levels of regenerative abilities, the latter turns into a voracious cannibalistic hell beast who can only be sated by human flesh. So Utsutsu must protect his sister from the outside world while also protecting the outside world from his sister. Good thing he can grow back any limb he loses, because he'll have to feed himself to Yume to keep her sated.

Considering you probably haven't even heard of this if you're an anime only guy, needless to say that the book is better. The manga is legitimately terrifying, with gruesome twists and turns that'll make you wonder why you can't put this book down.

The anime meanwhile is not only a terrible adaptation, failing to bring much of the manga to life in any capacity, but you don't even get any good gore out of it. The anime is censored to hell and back, leaving the best bits off screen. And not even in a "what's scarier is what you don't see" but in a "leaving the audience unsatisfied by cutting out the payoff entirely" kind of way.

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John Tibbetts is a novelist in theory, a Whatculture contributor in practice, and a nerd all around who loves talking about movies, TV, anime, and video games more than he loves breathing. Which might be a problem in the long term, but eh, who can think that far ahead?