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If you liked Claymore add

...then you might like Mahou Shoujo Madoka★Magica add

A bit odd one at first glance - what could a dark fantasy story and a magical girl anime have in common? Well, in this case, plenty. By now Madoka Magica is widely famous for being an unconventional, dark deconstruction of the magical girl genre, and it shares many similarities with Claymore. The two stories are very dark and mature both in their presentation and themes, and share many tropes like the "Despair Event Horizon", being set in a gloomy, crapsack world and having an all-female cast of characters. Both shows have great artwork ( although Madoka is clearly on a whole different level ) and feature virtually no fan service whatsoever. Both are heavily character-driven and tragic, and both stand out in their respective genres for subverting, averting or inverting many of the established tropes. While Claymore and Madoka are birds of a feather in sharing dark and mature themes, their main difference is in their respective narrative forms; Madoka being a brilliant example of a modern tragedy, and Claymore being a drama. The basic difference between these two narrative forms is that a drama puts the heroes in control, and they are defined by their saving graces, while a tragedy toys cruelly with its characters, who fall because of their one glaring flaw. Both Claymore and Madoka are tragic, but only one of them is a *tragedy*.

If you liked Koukaku Kidoutai add

...then you might like Serial Experiments Lain add

Ghost in the Shell and Lain are essentially a parent work and its child, and they complement each other extremely well. It's very visible that Lain was thematically heavily inspired by Ghost in the Shell, and it certainly does an excellent job on expanding upon the basic ideas and concepts. Much longer running time than GITS allowed Lain to explore the implications of a connected and computerised world to a much further degree than GITS managed to do in its way too short feature length. GITS sacrificed a thorough explanation of its themes in order to achieve a little bit more conventional enjoyment (plot, action, etc) while Lain is an uncompromising avaunt-garde trip into the rabbit hole of personal identity in a connected world. GITS is a work that carefully balances standard cinematic execution against its underlying ideas; Lain takes those ideas to their logical extremes, using some pretty unconventional narrative and artistic methods in the process. They're both excellent works of art in their own right.