Your Guide To Feel-Bad-Anime Summer

The summer 2025 anime lineup is an embarrassment of riches. While many of its catalog is top-heavy with big marquee shonen series like Dan Da Dan, Gachiakuta, Sakamoto Days, and Kaiju No. 8, what impresses me most about this new lineup is how my basket of cherry-picked, must-watch shows feels heavier than it has in previous years. Two series that I’ve become utterly captivated by are Takopi’s Original Sin and The Summer Hikaru Died because they evoke the fleeting, nihilistic, and disturbing vibes of compelling anime from the aughts.

When I say these two anime evoke a vibe of disturbing anime from yesteryear, I mean the kind of fatalistic, dark anime that doesn’t seem to be made anymore: your Higurashi (When They Cry) or Assassination Classroom. Despite being on opposite ends of the spectrum—one being oppressively bleak and the other an absurdist riot—both anime feature big ideas wrapped in cutesy packaging with an unsettling, violent thematic throughline that would get them banned in schools. These shows were iconic at the time and still stand out in retrospect because they are so visceral. The same is true for The Summer Hikaru Died and Takopi’s Original Sin, which, despite their source material being from 2021, feel so deeply connected to a more daring era of anime history that they surpass the rest of the summer 2025 shows as nostalgic, novel, and refreshingly dark takes on horror.

Let’s start with Crunchyroll’s six-episode limited series, Takopi’s Original Sin. 

Created by Taizan 5 and animated by studio Enishiya, Takopi’s Original Sin is a blend of the normal, human cruelty of Higurashi with the zany mascot of Assassination Classroom. The series follows Takopi, an alien on Earth on a mission to spread happiness. He’s from a planet called Happy Planet and has various "Happy Tools"—magical-girl-style items like a Happy Camera that resets its subjects to the moment a photo was taken, a Reconciliation Ribbon, a red string of fate meant to make people friends instantly, and a Transformation Palette that allows Takopi to impersonate others. Takopi ends up meeting Shizuka, a lonely fourth grader. After befriending Shizuka, Takopi takes on a Smiling Friends mission to improve her life. The series also contains viewer advisories for suicide helpline links, adult themes, profanity, and violence, which it earns.

Typically, overly cutesy shows like Takopi is a warning sign that Takopi might be an evil agent meant to worsen Shizuka’s life, similar to Puella Magi Madoka Magica. While Takopi is indeed an unreliable narrator with a bubbly, naive view of Shizuka’s intense bullying by classmate Marina Kirarazaka, Takopi ends up acting like a desperate visual novel player trying to save a doomed protagonist from a bad ending. Watching Takopi’s pure optimism corrupted by Shizuka and Marina’s respective perils can’t be solved by a wave of a magic wand, in tandem with the extraterrestrial ball of hope getting ground down by how Shizuka willfully rejects the idea that an eye for an eye isn’t a viable solution, is wildly captivating to watch. Like Madoka Magica, Takopi is a deconstruction of the magical girl anime trope that situates its instigator on the back foot as he realizes that magic can’t fix a Higurashi-coded visual novel tragedy. You start feeling for the little chibi guy whenever disaster strikes, and, instead of being met with admonishment for his misplaced meddling, he’s flashed with a glittery smile as Shizuka enlists Takopi to Weekend at Bernie's folks that’ve made her life a living hell. 

Now let’s dive into Netflix’s adaptation of The Summer Hikaru Died. 

While Dan Da Dan explores horror, The Summer Hikaru Died is an anime series deeply immersed in the macabre. Additionally, it's a boys' love story crackling with sensual, creepy energy that both arouses and disgusts equally. Created by mangaka Mokumokuren and animated by Cyangames Pictures (famous for Uma Musume), The Summer Hikaru Died is set in a familiar horror setting: a quiet rural village in the mountains. The series follows Yoshiki, a high school student mourning his childhood friend Hikaru, who mysteriously died in the mountains. However, as the title hints, Hikaru isn’t actually dead and a mysterious, menacing entity has taken root beneath his friend's skin. 

Hikaru wises up to the facade early in the show’s first episode, but what happens next is much more interesting than if the show had gone with a traditional body-snatching mystery like The Thing. “Hikaru,” now a mixture of memories and affection fermenting inside his host, doesn’t just ask to keep pretending to be human; he asks Yoshiki’s permission to keep living as his best friend. To Yoshiki’s horror, he agrees—and opens the door to his small town’s occult mysteries.  

Aside from The Summer Hikaru Died’s impressive feature film-quality animation and composition, one of the most remarkable aspects of the anime is its clear queer narrative between its leads. While people are sure to debate online over whether they’re “just friends” who explicitly say they love each other, supporters of this view can argue with their mommas because The Summer Hikaru Died being “yaoi-coded” doesn’t start to describe it accurately. 

Deadass, there’s a scene in its second episode, “Suspicion,” where “Hikaru” asks Yoshiki to reach into his chest cavity to learn first-hand how he dispensed of a yokai that was stalking him. This leads to an overtly sensual and disturbing scene where the former shudders, muttering shit like “Yeah, that’s the spot!” prompting Yoshiki to ask “This feels good?” and “Hikaru” responding, saying “Feels just like a good pat on the head. Nobody’s ever touched me here before” between moans. 

While “Hikaru” protests to Yoshiki (who visibly enjoyed their chest fingering despite how scary it was) for wiping his hand off on his shirt, Yoshiki blushes and looks away after “Hikaru” tells him to get a good look at his abs. The scene is hilariously capped off by Yoshiki describing his tactile chest fingering, describing it like a touching marinated chicken. A remark the anime capitalizes on with a frame of marinated chicken (which the staff later enjoyed as karage). 

While other horror works like Junji Ito’s manga set the gold standard for stomach-churning horror, their anime adaptations often lose their edge. However, anime like Takopi’s Original Sin and The Summer Hikaru Died go beyond those shortcomings. They’re darker, sharper, and messier in ways that feel more authentic to emotional horror, resisting genre polish and pushing boundaries with every frame. They focus less on jump scares and more on existential decay, replacing loud panic with quiet unraveling. These qualities don’t just honor a past era of anime; they make them stand out amid today’s streaming riches and serve as exciting reminders of the wonder anime can still create.