Anime / Corrector Yui

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After Kia Asamiya created Steam Detectives for his son, he looked yet again into an unfamiliar genre, this time for his daughter, who was a fan of Magical Girls. He came up with a story that brought the typical wand-waving, miniskirt-wearing junior high girl 20 Minutes into the Future by making her a regular girl in the real world and a magical girl online.

Fourteen-year-old Yui Kasuga is perky, creative, daydreamy... and at a complete disadvantage for someone that lives twenty years in the future: she's so computer-illiterate that she thinks "delete" is a snack food. Luckily for her, her best friend Haruna Kisaragi is a famous computer expert, taught by her father and her uncle. However, Haruna ain't stupid and Yui has to do her own homework, even though the rest of her friends are off to a virtual theme park. Yui puts the homework disk into her computer and manages to screw up so badly that a virtual creature hidden inside it is awakened by just the right key combination. Thinking he's stumbled upon a super-genius, the creature, I.R., commands Yui to load her consciousness onto the "Com-Net" (internet) and become a virtual magical girl.

Yui immediately jumps at the chance to fight viruses and wear cute outfits (and one of the first people threatened by the Big Bad is her father), but as she finds out, there's more to the story than this. Eight sentient programs, of which I.R. is one, have been created by one Professor Inukai, who is comatose after another program named Grosser rebelled against him and overrode his car. Grosser is after these programs, which uphold the very existence of Com-Net (and, since Everything Is Online, the real world too); presumably, he wants to corrupt everything for some unknown goal. Yui is commissioned to gather all eight and combine their powers with her own to delete Grosser.

Yui might turn to cliche once in a while, but in other respects, it's very different. The title character actually wants to be a magical girl, and has dreamed about it and written like stories for a long time. She has a few basic powers with her Fairy Elemental Suit, but each Corrector Program can grant her a different Elemental Suit with different powers, varying the battle tactics. And though the plot might seem straightforward, never fear: Grosser and his Corruptor Programs aren't simple Card Carrying Villains, Inukai's not such a saint himself, the Correctors have their own personalities and quirks, and both Yui and Haruna might not be what they think they are either.

With Grosser's threat gone in the second season, the Correctors stumble upon a new threat in the form of a mysterious virus called Boggles that heavily corrupts anything that touches that's apparently connected to a virtual little girl wandering the net. As the chaos of this virus occurs, a mysterious human Corrector named Ai fends off the threat, having her own agenda to achieve...

This program provides examples of:

• 11th-Hour Superpower: The Tie Suit in the manga which serves to reboot Grosser, and the Ultimate Elemental Suit in the anime's finale. Both are released when Yui is on her own (while losing faith and hope) to defeat both Big Bads.
• Always a Child to Parent: Shin'ichi Kasuga, Yui's dad, is a Doting Parent, who likes to treat his daughter as if she was a kid.
• Affectionate Nickname: Yui likes to call War Wolf as "Doggie" without any intention of teasing (he doesn't like it, though) but because she couldn't remember his name. It eventually gets carried on when Synchro returns to his Fearsome Four physical appearance during the second season, something that he initially didn’t like it either, since it made him remember his time as a villain.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The ComNet computer host, Grosser, not only rebels against his creator's original purposes, but he is also obsessed in wondering what was the meaning of life and what were "human emotions".
• Androids Are People, Too: Or rather, internet software is. As far as Yui is concerned, the corrector software and the world they live in is as just as important and worth protecting as any human. Grosser's primary desire is to live, but Yui explains that he is capable of feeling sadness, joy, and pain, and that's proof that he's already alive.
• Any Last Words?: In the second season, Virus has Yui trapped and at his mercy, and asks if she has any last words. Yui decides to ask him a question her teacher had asked her earlier in the episode, and asks whether he knows the answer. Virus gladly explains it to her, stalling him just long enough for I.R. to show up and free Yui. (This wasn't a stalling tactic on Yui's part - she genuinely wanted to know the answer.)
• Artificial Human: Both Correctors and Corruptors were created with feelings and unique personalities and aesthetics, similar to the humans.
• Ascended Fangirl: Yui, after she jumps at the call.
• Batman Gambit: How Grosser manipulates Haruna to separate Yui from her Corrector friends and then controlling her. The planner knew their mark would do it to keep Yui out of danger.
• Beach Episode: Counting itself as a Breather Episode stuffed between the Wham Arc and the first season climax. Control and the other correctors take a break as an excuse to determine and prepare a plan to attack Grosser, while also looking for his whereabouts.
• Bluff the Impostor: A villainous version occurs in one episode. When Virus has Yui cornered, Follow tries to help her out by disguising himself as Freeze and telling Virus to retreat. Virus, suspecting that something is fishy, tricks Follow into outing himself by claiming they don't refer to Grosser as "Grosser-sama" like he just did.
  Follow: I didn't know that.
  Virus: You fell for it. We always call him "Grosser-sama".
• Bodyguard Crush: It's hinted through the anime (especially during the second season) that Synchro might be in love with Yui.
• Body Horror: Kurokawa passes through this as a reaction to the reveal that he was Dead All Along, when the Boggles virus corrupts his avatar (mind) data transforming him into a gruesome monster.
• Brainwashed and Crazy:
  • Synchro as War Wolf during the first series, as his program got corrupted by Grosser.
  • Haruna was under the influence of Grosser in the first season's climax, after convincing her she was the one and only human leader of the Corrector software programs.
  • Grosser also manipulates Shun before the big battle in the first season (and then he possesses him).
  • The Boggles Virus often manages to modify the sites' NPCs calm personalities to aggressive ones (to the point of also making them into monsters). Same can go for the humans that would get trapped in the infected sites, since they aren't immune, either. Freeze not only falls once but twice (the latter being by a Mind-Control Device, making her more dangerous than her original corruptor-self).
• Broken Bird: Ai Shinozaki is shown as a loner who doesn't have any friends, especially since her father died. She was more closer to her mother, though, because her dad was a workaholic, so she wanted to pull an act that that she could be "happy" and "strong" for her mom... No one has to wonder how much her mom's sudden coma affected her.
• By the Power of Grayskull!: A two-stage version. To be able to transform inside ComNet in the first place, she needs to enter by uttering "Corrector Yui, Enter!" into her ComCon - entering through any other means won't let her transform. Then, in order to actually transform, she (or in the first season, IR) needs to issue the verbal command, "Element Suit: Download! ComNet memory, run!"
• Catfishing: Discussed in one Season 2 episode, after Yui develops a crush on a man she met in ComNet. Her male classmates all caution that he may be altering his avatar to make himself look more attractive than he actually is, especially after Yui admits that he's refused to meet with her in real life. It turns out he is deceiving her, but not in the way they assume: he's an athlete who suffered a potentially Career-Ending Injury and is using ComNet as a form of escapism. He actually looks exactly the same in real life, just in a wheelchair.
• Chekhov's Gun: In one episode, it's established that Correctors cannot be photographed as an anti-copying measure, as any photos of them come out blurry. This foils Yui's attempt to prove that Ai is Corrector Ai (as the latter's photos are too blurry for a meaningful comparison), but comes into play a short time later when they find a magazine with a non-blurry photograph of Peace, cluing them in that the Peace in the photograph must be an impostor.
• Chickification: Played straight with Freeze, who goes from a legitimate threat in Season 1 to a completely useless klutz in Season 2.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Chiaki, from Asamiya's retelling, is a girl who Shun is tutoring, and she is slightly jealous of his attention to Yui.
• Comic-Book Adaptation: Not only one, but two, actually. The first is the companion manga series (drawn by Keiko Okamoto) that was released by NHK Publishing (and partly by Tokyopop in the US) simultaneously with the anime series. The second one, drawn by Asamiya, is the retelling of the events of the first season released not so long after it finished.
• Dark Magical Girl:
  • Haruna, when controlled by Grosser. In Okamoto's manga, it is even implied that Grosser seduced her to the idea of reclaiming her original role as corrector, because she was actually jealous of Yui.
  • Ai has a "selfish" motive to be a corrector. The mysterious girl's bear asked her personally to help him to initialize the little girl, since her program code was infected with a virus mutation.
• Dark Reprise: In the final episode of Season 1, Grosser succeeds in destroying ComNet, leaving Yui trapped, alone, and unable to transform or return to reality. In a desperate attempt to do something, she starts tearfully singing "Eien to iu Basho". It then becomes a Triumphant Reprise when Prof. Inukai and Haruka hear her and the latter joins in, with their singing allowing Yui to transform once more and restore everything that was lost.
• Dead All Along: The Big Bad of the second season, Ryo Kurokawa... died in the accident from six months prior, and only his mind has continued existing in the ComNet.
• Debut Queue: The first half of Series 1 revolved around Yui and IR tracking down the other seven software programs. Each one of them has their introductory episode, showing where were they hiding (websites that they adopted according to their personalities and quirks) and what kind of abilities they had.
• Diegetic Soundtrack Usage:
  • The first opening theme, "Eien to iu Basho (A Place Called Eternity)", gets this three different ways:
    • It's first composed by Shun as a song for Yui and her friends to sing at the School Festival, and they're shown practicing it several times, often with Yui and/or Haruna missing it due to their Corrector duties.
    • After Grosser corrupts Haruna and leaves her Brainwashed and Crazy, Yui singing the song to her is what breaks her brainwashing.
    • In the season finale, Yui tearfully starts to sing it after ComNet is destroyed, leaving her trapped and alone. Haruna hears her and joins in, giving her the power to transform back into Corrector Yui and undo the damage.
  • 'Mirai (Future)', the first ending, is also thrown as well (sung by Control), when the correctors are having their last relaxing moments before the fight with Grosser in the first season.
• Doing In the Wizard: The "magic" is actually a part of Dr. Inukai's Corrector software to counter and reverse Grosser's influence.
• Dungeon Bypass: One Season 2 episode has the Boggles virus mutate the Missing Persons Net into a massive maze that constantly changes layout. When Yui locates the core, Ai warns her that the layout will shift before she can reach it, so Yui just blasts a path straight through the walls.
• Enemy Mine:
  • Yui teams up with War Wolf not once, but twice during the first season, either to save their own skins or other people’s. This foreshadows the fact that War Wolf isn't like his teammates, who want to cause chaos and destruction, and that he's secretly a Brainwashed and Crazy Synchro.
  • When Yui initially considers Ai to be an enemy due to their clashing personalities, Ai's mysterious motives, and her theft of Yui's new ComCon, both team up repeatedly to fight the Boggles virus before eventually becoming allies.
• Everything Is Online: Rather literally. This is a world and age where everything (schools, traffic, medical machinery and even some domestic work) depends on the internet (or computer networks) to be functioning, and it's the job of the correctors to stabilize it.
• Evil Costume Switch: When normal, Corrector Haruna's white, turquoise, and pink suit makes her look like an angel, white bird wings included. When she's under control of Grosser, it becomes red and black, with devil-bat wings and a devil's tail.
• Exact Time to Failure: In Episode 42, Yui is turned to stone by a Boggles-infested insect while inside ComNet. It's stated that she has twenty virtual hours (just under five real-world minutes) before this starts to affect her body in the real world, and Haruna sets a countdown on her Com Con to show her how long Yui has left.
• Eye Catch: Rather than using some simple bump cards, the eye catches simulate 4-Panel manga (as if they were drawn by Yui) that sometimes comically reflect the events of the episode. In the episode where Yui is Taken for Granite, Haruna takes over the feature. When the show came back from commercials in Japan, it featured Fan Art sent by the viewers.
• Falling Tree of Doom: When War Wolf attacks a virtual nature park, he causes a number of burning trees to fall down. One almost lands on the park's caretaker before Netti takes the blow, receiving a nasty burn to her back but saving the caretaker from certain death. Later, another nearly falls on Yui before Eco pushes her out of the way; he's badly injured but recovers.
• Florence Nightingale Effect: In one episode, Yui develops a crush on Kousuke, a college student she met in ComNet. It turns out that he's a soccer player who was injured in an accident and is scared he may have lost his ability to play, and that his nurse, Megumi, has a crush on him. By the end of the episode, they're a couple, and it's implied that they were already a couple before he even met Yui.
• Forced Transformation: War Wolf is actually the Corrector Synchro corrupted by Grosser. While he's been freed of Grosser's influence by the start of Season 2, he's then corrupted back into War Wolf by the Boggles virus.
• Foreshadowing:
  • A two-part arc midway through the season has Grosser go after a virtual whale named Feena - seemingly just For the Evulz, until it turns out that Feena's singing is in some way repulsive to him. Near the end of the season, it's revealed that the timbre of Feena's singing is Grosser's one weakness, and Professor Inukai initially chose Haruna to fulfil the role of Corrector because she could sing at that timbre as well.
  • When Haruna briefly assumes the mantle of Corrector from Yui, Grosser asks the Corrupters to delete her. They promptly remark to each other that he's never asked them to delete Yui. It turns out that Grosser's ultimate plan is to pull a Grand Theft Me on Yui, for which he obviously needs her alive.
  • Throughout Season 2, Freeze frequently just happens to show up in the same places as the girl she's been chasing after, occasionally while wondering what brought her there in the first place (especially the hotter climes). While this initially just seems to be for the sake of comedy, it's revealed late in the season that unbeknownst to Freeze, she has the ability to detect viruses, and she was unconsciously using it to track the girl, who is the source of the Boggles infections.
• Elite Four: The Fearsome Four are known as the Shitennou or "Four Heavenly Kings" in Japanese.
• Green Aesop: Eco is an extremist protector of nature who will hold people hostage or attempt to kill them for littering in a virtual national park. He mellows out once Yui sets him straight, but you can bet that the people he terrorized aren't going to litter anymore, whether it be on the internet or not.
• A Glitch in the Matrix: One Season 2 episode has Yui trapped in a Lotus-Eater Machine by the Buggles virus, in which all her dreams come true. While she repeatedly notes how it all feels Too Good to Be True, she only realises something's wrong when she tries to contact IR and he shows up in person; as a virtual program, he shouldn't be able to manifest in reality, causing Yui to realise she's been trapped in ComNet the whole time.
• Gratuitous English: The "Boggles" virus is actually called "Bugrus" in Japanese, being a Portmanteau of "Bug" and "Virus".
• Happily Married:
  • Yui's parents, Shin'ichi and Sakura, have a formidable marriage, even if Shin'ichi acts like a childish Doting Parent.
  • It is implied that Azusa and Shintaro Shinozaki were quite happy together when he was still alive, even more since they shared the same scientific interests, and it was also reflected on Ai's childhood. Heck, Azusa defended her husband's work against their old colleague, Ryo Kurokawa.
• Harmless Freezing:
  • Averted in Episode 8. Freeze encases Yui's arm in ice, and even after she breaks the ice off, her arm is still frozen. It takes Rescue's healing power before she can use it again.
  • Played straight in Episode 32 when the Buggles Virus creates a snowstorm that buries dozens of people (including Haruna and Takashi) in snow, then freezes Synchro and Freeze solid. All of them are perfectly fine once they've been thawed out.
• Heroic BSoD: Yui has three short ones in the first season:
  • The first is when she discovers that she wasn't The Chosen One.
  • The second is when Haruna is revealed to be Brainwashed and Crazy.
  • And the third is after Grosser reveals his Evil Plan and the reasons behind it to her.
• I Just Want to Be You: It is revealed that Grosser wants to be Yui.
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: Yui applies this to Haruna, who was under Grosser's influence because she didn't want to hurt her in any way and to Shun, who later becomes possessed by Grosser.
• Improbably Quick Coma Recovery: For most of the second half, resident Dark Magical Girl, Ai Shinozaki's mother, Azusa was in a coma, thanks to some shenanigans involving the Big Bad. In the final episode, she woke up from her coma and she's shown to be able to move around just as quickly, in real life this woman would be in a wheelchair.
• Inside a Computer System: The main setting of the series is ComNet, a full-dive virtual reality world consisting of dozens of websites with a variety of themes and contents.
• In the Name of the Moon: At first, the eponymous protaogonist finds it hard to think up a pre-battle catchphrase that has to do with deleting things off a computer; she decides on "You'll go in the recycle bin and be empty, empty, emptied!" Lampshaded in one episode:
  Virus: What does that even mean?
  Yui: It has no meaning!
• Is It Something You Eat?: The impossibly computer-illiterate title character initially mistakes "delete" for "dessert" and wonders where the food is. (Asamiya Kia's rewrite of the manga has her think it's "Doritos", but it leads to the same thing.) This kicks off a Running Gag of her mistaking "delete" for any similar-sounding words.
• Jumped at the Call: Yui was just a bit too eager to become a Magical Girl. The same goes to Haruna and Ai, but for very different reasons.
• Light Feminine and Dark Feminine: Yui is the light and Ai is the dark.
• Living with the Villain: While not being exactly a villain, Ai moves next door to Yui. They aren't just neighbors, but their schools also co-joined in a stage play showcase. At some point, Ai finds out on her own that Yui is Corrector Yui, and Yui also realizes that Corrector Ai and her are the same person.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: Episode 35 sees Yui trapped in one by the Buggles virus, in which all her dreams come true. She repeatedly notes how it all feels Too Good to Be True, but doesn't realise what's going on until she tries to contact IR and he shows up in person, which shouldn't be possible outside of ComNet.
• Magical Girl: Corrector Yui puts an interesting spin on this in that Yui (and later, Haruna and Ai) are only able to transform within ComNet, via Magic from Technology, and are utterly powerless in the real world.
• Magic Countdown: During one Season 2 episode, Yui is Taken for Granite, and Professor Inukai calculates that they only have twenty hours before this starts affecting her body in the real world. The countdown jumps forward erratically throughout the episode, but most egregiously during the climactic battle, during which it jumps from 30 minutes to 10 minutes in less than two real-time minutes without any obvious Time Skips.
• Magic from Technology: The magic in this show is a part of Dr. Inukai's Corrector Software system which is designed to counter and reverse viruses, bugs and other bad issues on the net.
• Magic Music: It's established that Grosser is weak to music of a certain wavelength. Yui uses this against a Brainwashed and Crazy Haruna, and later to defeat Grosser himself.
• Minion Shipping: Jaggy seems to care too much about Freeze. She even trusts him more than Virus, and he knows some of her secrets, as well. He is also the first one to defend her when it looked like she went "bad" again.
• Missed the Call:
  • Played straight at first; Haruna was supposed to become the first Corrector, but that went to Yui instead.
  • Subverted later; when given the "second call", Haruna accepts it to spare Yui from danger, but it's all an Evil Plan to make her a prime target for Grosser's brainwashing.
  • And in the third call... well, she got to fight side-by-side with Ai and Yui.
• Missing Mom: Azusa Shinozaki is there in body, but not in mind for most of the series, thanks to her Convenient Coma, though by the end of the series, her consciousness is freed from ComNet and thus she recovers from her coma.
• Most Gamers Are Male: In a certain episode, Yui joins an online space adventure game, only to have virtually every male character she comes across dismiss her for being a girl.
• Music for Courage: At the end of the first season, Haruna invokes the trope by singing to Yui in the Real World when she's about to lose her Magic Music-laced fight against the Big Bad Grosser in the Net. Upon hearing Haruna's voice, Yui recovers her spirit and starts fighting again, ultimately winning.
• Mysterious Waif: The mysterious little girl, whose real identity is part of the main plot of the second season. She is actually Shintaro Shinozaki's creation based on a character her wife created, originally developed as a mail program. And she is the Boggles' holder.
• Nature Clean-Up: Played with in one episode in which Yui and her classmates go on a field trip to a virtual-reality nature reserve, only to find litter lying everywhere, as tourists keep assuming there's nothing wrong with littering there since it's not real. Yui ends up spending the entire field trip helping her friends, and the park's caretaker program, to clean up the litter.
• No Ontological Inertia: A major plot point in the final two episodes of Season 2 is that Initializing the Boggles Virus' host will cure every infected network at once, eradicating the virus once and for all and saving the Correctors from having to keep playing whack-a-mole with each infected network.
• Now You Tell Me?: Early in Season 2, Yui receives a message from IR informing her of an emergency in ComNet. By the time she's managed to excuse herself from class and find somewhere she can yell her By the Power of Grayskull! phrase in private, IR contacts her to inform her that Corrector Ai has already beaten her to the punch. Only after she complains about having to find somewhere to transform in private does IR reveal that her upgraded ComCon has a more sensitive microphone and she could have gotten away with just whispering.
  Yui: You should tell me these things earlier...
• Once More, with Clarity:
  • The same sequence of flashbacks that reveals War Wolf used to be Synchro also revisits the car crash in the first episode that left Prof. Inukai comatose, revealing that Synchro pulled Inukai's consciousness into ComNet in the nick of time, hence why the professor ended up wandering ComNet while his body lay comatose in hospital.
  • A flashback towards the end of Season 1 shows that Yui first met Shun when he helped her up after she crashed her bicycle. The final episode of Season 1 has a flashback of a young Yui crying over her father throwing out his obsolete PC, with her compassion at that moment being what drives Grosser's actions going forward. This seems to be unrelated, but then Yui rides off on her bike... and crashes, leading to her meeting with Shun.
• Paint It Black: The Angel and Devil Suits might be separate, but their user's alignment summons one or the other, rather than the switch being intentional.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: None of the villains can tell Corrector Yui from her civilian identity, even after seeing her de-transform. The fact she looks, sounds, and has the same name in both identities notwithstanding. It later extends to Corrector Ai.
• Parental Abandonment:
  • Haruna's parents are implied to be workaholics who aren't usually at home. Little is known about them, even though Haruna's dad was with her on the "Princess Net" site as her prince, and he didn't appeared in the episode. It's much more noticeable in the manga though, when Haruna reveals to Yui that her parents even bought her a big computer just for her and that she is alone almost the entire time at home, and they do appear when Haruna falls into a coma because Grosser took her as "hostage".
  • Ai's father died when she was a child. Her mom is comatose for most of the series, so her aunt is seen as her ward and caretaker.
• Pastel Chalk Freeze Frame: Several occur in quick succession at the end of episode 48 as Corrector Ai's ComCon shatters, de-powering her and causing her to collapse.
• Proscenium Reveal: One Season 2 episode has Yui and Ai starring together in a play put on by their schools, only for Yui to have trouble learning her lines. After getting help from the other Correctors, the scene cuts to Ai telling Yui "I didn't think you could do it", and Yui assuring her she can do anything she puts her mind to. It looks like they're discussing Yui learning her lines, until it's revealed they're actually mid-rehearsal and in-character; the fact you can't tell neatly showcases just how much better Yui's acting has gotten.
• Put on a Bus: Shun is sent to America to continue his medical studies in the second anime season. This, however, gets averted in Okamoto’s adaptation since he still plays a very important role in Ver .2.
• Recap Episode: Episode 13 of the first season recaps everything that had happened up to that point.
• Redemption Demotion: Freeze come from a ruthless, most dangerous and competent enemy among Grosser's henchmen into a bumbling chick who can't do anything right. Since she's a program specifically designed to be bad, when she starts something good it goes badly.
• Ridiculously Human Robots: Not just humans, there are also animals, monsters, and many other softwares on the ComNet that act ridiculously realistic, despite being programs.
• Role Called: The title refers to the protagonist Yui and her role as Corrector.
• Sadistic Choice: At one point in Season 2, Yui is faced with the choice of either Initializing an out-of-control Freeze, and freezing to death herself in the process, or deleting Freeze with a full-strength Flame Bomber. When Yui refuses to kill Freeze, the latter's tears manage to short out the Boggles infection that's caused her powers to go out-of-control, allowing Yui to safely Initialize her.
• School Uniforms are the New Black: Yui, Ai and Haruna are often seen in uniforms outside of school.
• Shout-Out: The Villain of the Week of Episode 7 of Season 2, upon being exposed by Freeze, riffs off Sailor Moon's iconic In the Name of the Moon speech and even pulls the same pose while doing so.
  "Those who ignore my sublime divinations... In the name of this net, I'll punish you!"
• Silk Hiding Steel: Haruna. A corrector (i.e. virus basher) who eventually overcomes her Shrinking Violet tendencies and becomes a semi Team Mom.
• Something Only They Would Say: This is how Yui ultimately realises that Ai is Corrector Ai. While asking Ai for help improving her typing skills, Yui likens Ai's computer-filled room to a fortress and her own situation to being trapped in a cage. After her newly-improved typing skills help to save the day, Corrector Ai congratulates Corrector Yui by remarking, "You managed to get out of the cage". Since Yui had been trapped in a literal cage moments before, she doesn't make the connection, but when she thanks Ai for helping her learn and Ai responds with the exact same phrase, Yui does make the connection... seemingly. By the following day, she's shrugged it off as coincidence, and it takes her several more episodes to realise that Ai and Corrector Ai are indeed the same person.
• Spoiler Opening: The opening for Season 2 prominently features Corrector Haruna alongside Corrector Yui and Corrector Ai, spoiling that she'll be taking up the mantle again. It takes 16 episodes (out of 26) for this to actually happen.
• Stock Footage: A lot of it, particularly the attack animations, which are practically the same each time. They're even reused in both opening themes.
• Story Arc: There are two, one per season:
  • In the first, Yui's first priority is to reunite all Correctors and then eliminate the viruses originated from the Big Bad, Grosser.
  • The second season introduces a new villain, Bogles, as well as a new Corrector who is first introduced as an Anti-Villain.
• Sudden Soundtrack Stop:
  • In Episode 23, after Haruna resigns as Corrector and gives Yui the position back, Professor Inukai apologises for getting her involved without considering her feelings. Haruna reminds him that he'd warned her about the dangers Yui had been facing as Corrector... and the music comes to a dead stop as Inukai replies that he doesn't remember telling her that. Before anyone can piece together that the Inukai she'd met had been Grosser in disguise, Grosser reveals himself and corrupts Haruna into his minion.
  • In Episode 38, the soundtrack cuts out to underscore Yui's apparent realisation that Ai might be Corrector Ai.
• Superhero Speciation: In the anime and the Okamoto manga, the Corrector Program to Elemental Suit ratio was 2:1, although the powers varied (for example, Yui could get the wind suit from Ante and see the future, or she could get the same suit from Control and stop time). In the Asamiya manga, though, every program got their own suit.
• Super Window Jump: During Yui's first encounter with the Boggles Virus, the source is determined to be inside a mansion that has been mutated into a Sapient House. To get in, Yui dodges its attacks and crashes through a window.
• Taken for Granite: Yui and Freeze, among others, in an episode of the anime's second season. That triggers Haruna's return.
• Tanuki: I.R., one of the Corrector software who takes a form of a floating, yellow, robotic tanuki. He even gets mistaken as a one by Yui in the first chapter in Keiko Okamoto's manga, and he really hates the idea. Just like the tanuki in the folklore, I.R. is capable of shapeshifting in some episodes (notably in the first episode of Season 2), although he only shapeshifts into humanoid forms.
• Theme Music Power-Up: Double Subverted. When Reiko and Akiko's rehearsal of "Eien to Iu Basho" start to play over the top of Yui's "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight against Haruna, things don't start going any better for Yui, but when she gets the idea to start singing it herself, it's enough to free Haruna from her brainwashing and force Grosser to retreat.
• Toast of Tardiness: Unusually for this trope, this happens at the end of Episode 30, with Yui dashing off for school with a piece of toast hanging from her mouth. She then spots Ai coming out of the house next door and stops to greet her, and (in a sign of how she's slowly warming up to Yui) Ai greets her back.
• Transformation Exhilaration: The Transformation Sequences all feature the girls (Yui, Haruna, and Ai) making orgasmic faces as the chest jewel of their virtual costumes slots into place.
• Tsundere: Reiko is a Type B towards Ichitaro.
• 20 Minutes into the Future: A series made in the late 90s describing a possible Everything Is Online future in the year 2020.
• The Unchosen One: Haruna was originally meant to be The Chosen One, and Yui was chosen by mistake. When she learns this, she happily passes the torch to Haruna, but changes her mind and returns to duty just in time to rescue a Brainwashed and Crazy Haruna from Grosser's control.
• Unintended Destination: Throughout Season 2, a Running Gag involves Freeze inexplicably showing up in whichever network the Mysterious Waif is about to show up in, and on several occasions (particularly in the hotter networks) she outright wonders aloud how or why she ended up there. It's eventually revealed that she has the ability to subconsciously track viral infections like the one the waif has been spreading, and has been tracking her the whole time without knowing it.
  Jaggy: Okay, but explain to me why you came to this sandy dump?
  Freeze: I'm not sure, actually. Why am I here?
• Villain Episode: Episode 17, instead of focusing in Yui and her friends, focuses mostly on War Wolf and the other corruptors' relationship until an accident occurs. At the end, it makes it clear that War Wolf does worry about his comrades, no matter how many atrocities happen in between them.
• Villain-Possessed Bystander: The Boggles Virus corrupts any person that interacts with the little girl to the point of forgetting their persona and wrecking havoc.
• Wham Line: In the Season 2 finale, after Kurokawa reveals himself and announces his plan to destroy ComNet and make a new one, Professor Inukai drops one hell of a bombshell on him:
  Prof. Inukai: I'm telling you, it's not possible! Because you died a long time ago!
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: The second season establishes that time in ComNet passes 256 times faster than in real life, allowing people to do things in minutes that would take them hours or even days in real life. This explains why nobody's particularly worried about Yui whenever she heads into ComNet on a mission: from their perspective, she's just taking a short nap. Deconstructed in the finale, as this also allows the Boggles Virus to spread 256 times faster than normal; in order to slow its spread, Professor Inukai has to slow time within ComNet back down to normal speed.