Elfen Lied - A review

Nyuuu?

Elfen Lied
Anime, Horror/Drama/Romance
Heavy violence, plus nudity(fanservice)



Yep, anime. One dark and stormy night (literally) I was debating between watching Code Geass or watching Elfen Lied.

Code Geass's first episode: Epic story opening! dun dun dunnnn! Mechas invading Japan osht nooo we lost our freedom I WILL DESTROY BRITTANIA but first lets play chess omg lol car chase boom omg ur terrorist i'll STOP YOU WAIT WUT ur childhood fren o hai thar SOLDIERS DEY SHOOTING AT US BANG zomg magical girl now I has the POWER TO CHANGE TEH WORLD!!!!!!!!!!!111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

I picked Elfen Lied. First few minutes of anime was scary naked anime chick with helmet rampaging through top secret facility mincing redshirt guards with invisible hands. So anyway, in the middle of her rampage, there's a quick cut to this girl chatting with her friends, in true weeabo fashion: "lol im clumsy lol" then it's back to the bloodbath, where there's a line of troopers aiming at the scary buzzsaw hands chick. In comes the clumsy girl, dropping her shit. The commander and director of the troopers are like "GET THE FUCK OUTTA THERE" and she's like "lol wut" and then her head gets decapitated at the neck, held in midair. So naturally everyone's like "OPEN FIRE" and the scary chick brings up the headless body of the girl and uses it to deflect gunfire while a pen errily hovers up beside her and drives itself like a missile through the commander's head. Fap fap fap.

Sadly, that was the best part of it. What is Elfen Lied? It's an anime supposedly supposed to preach the shittiness of discrimination, and family. What it is, however, is an ultimately bland and unsatisfying plate of white rice. Don't get me wrong, rice can be kool. What bugs me about Elfen Lied is that it pretends to be an exquisite buffet. It's not.

One of the reasons why many people like Elfen Lied is because it's supposedly a visceral experience, supposed to hit you hard in the gut with sadness! Well, actually, I suspect it's just the violence. I've got nothing wrong with violence. You're talking to the guy who wanted to play Demonophobia (DONT SEARCH IT) so you wanna throw violent shit at me? kool. But ultimately all the violence is just a shocker gimmick for the weepy pussies out there. OH LOOK ITS THE MATURE SHOW THAT HAS VIOLENCE IN IT

So naturally you'll get moments like when they want to show discrimination, a group of bullies (obviously male) grab the victim and taunt her. Then they find her little puppy and kill it. I saw that coming a mile away. It didn't have the "oh no oh no oh no" feel, it didn't have the "wait WTF WHAT" feel, it had the "lol lets kill puppies now" feel. Tacked-on.

Not to mention is sexist by itself. All truly evil villians are male. We have like four magical girls and see three of them naked? The male lead is surrounded by a bunch of chicks in his house, two of them with superpowers. It plays out like some guy's fantasy. Guess nobody in Japan gives a shit about sexual equality.

And one of the characters is a girl called Mayu. In a flashback we see her sexually abused by her foster father. That's okay, except that besides that scene we NEVER delve deeper into it and it's never brought up again. It's just a device for viewers to say, aw how sad, this is a really mature show! Wikipedia says it has "serious thematic material". In case you haven't noticed, just because your show has a rape scene in it doesn't mean it has mature themes, it means it has a mature rape scene. Which can be milked for anything from shock value to fanservice (here it's mainly the former). For a show supposed to showcase the complex, painful problem that is discrimination and bigotry, it sure falls short into a shallow puddle and stays there, wriggling out tacky gore scenes.

Oh, and the show is even afraid to cut up its main characters into pieces. Shivering soldiers begging for mercy get bisected, but main characters just get punched. Even when in mortal danger they punch each other and cut off replaceable stuff like fingers. After watching Battlestar Galactica's ruthless realism, I just can't forgive Elfen Lied.

Speaking of fanservice, there's a lot of it. Needless supposedly "comedic" scenes include the female lead peeing the floor, having her wet clothes changed by a guy, and squeezing another character's boobs. Two characters kiss, the girl falls, exposing her panties, and shortly smacks the guy for seeing them. Maybe the first one was a little funny, but the others... fail fail fail. Elfen Lied gave me a bad impression of Japanese humour. Romantic element is reduced to "do u think about squeezing my boobs?" and mostly repeating variations of that. Plus the cliched oh its raining we're cold lets huddle together crap. Can this show get any more formulaic? Oh wait, the puppy-killing scene. The police telling protagonists outright "DONT SAY ANYTHIN". The evil female lead having a vendetta against people because her love interest didn't tell her that his cousin was a girl. Elfen Lied has all the hallmarks of a B-anime: shit romance, shit humour, shit-for-brains. Maybe the creator thought mixing all the different kinds of shit together was funny. It wasn't.

Still, I almost shed a tear. Though in retrospect it could have been due to the excellent theme music.

Elfen Lied is a borderline childish show with an impure, dressed-up message about discrimination against people who are different. It should be shown to children, except for the gore that it abuses to make itself look special. 6/10