Foregone conclusions and wasted time: the anime
Story:
This story is ham-fisted, all the conflict is senseless melodrama that utilize nothing but cliche and doesn't gel together. All evil is stupid cartoon evil and the rest is stupid misunderstanding bullshit. Everyone voluntarily loses all brain cells so that the plot can wring out that sweet sweet melodrama.
Filler is everywhere, mostly in the form of bargain bin humanizing a disposable character before killing them off in a torturously long and repetitive foregone conclusion.
Art:
The art is okay, but before every disposable character dies there's a long-ass fucking tracking shot that lasts up to 30 seconds. Again, to drag out the fucking runtime. Worthless.
Sound:
The Lilium theme is played so often in its base form and various reprises it becomes irritating. The rest of the soundtrack has all the subtlety of a Hallmark Original. Horrible music. Also there's exactly one sound effect used for the breaking of bodies, which usually isn't an issue, but this show thinks that if a guy's head flying shocked and aroused a few 13 year olds in the first three minutes it would surely work for another 800 times with the exact same water hose sound effect.
Character:
The characters are so pathetic it's insane. There are four good characters, Nana, Arakawa, Yuka (the only character to act like an idiot WITHIN REASON) and Mayu.
Arakawa is the only sympathetic minor character to survive the show and thus deserves a round of applause. Also delivers the best line of the show, a self-deprecating one-liner in the face of death.
Yuka is your dumb childhood friend and while nothing mind-blowing, is pretty much the only reasonably stereotypical character in this show.
Mayu is the precious child character and thus has absolutely zero agency bar a Rickert-tier slap to a seriously irritating character (this show has a lot of that).
In Nana, however:
everything wrong with the show is evident.
Lucy and Mariko, the two irritating pink-haired snots I'm supposed to feel bad for, are wholly unsympathetic. They are unreasonably sociopathic. It takes about three cuts for Lucy to go from sad bullied loner to gleefully massacring entire families, plotting the destruction of the human race, and toying with terrified law enforcement. There's character arcs and there are character cliffs. This is not development, this is castrating a character arc so the cute girl has a reason to rip people's heads off. Also, it's really cool that in your entire time of being conscious hidden within Nyu and clearly observing people not being dickheads you still have to kill every single non-malicious human being even though you're supposed to be undergoing character growth. Because melodraaaaaaaaaaaaama.
Mariko is Lucy but 10 times worse, always in an irritating as shit "I like playing XDXDXD but my playing is actually killing hahah" mode until the obligatory moment where I'm supposed to feel bad for her. I don't. She is a cartoon caricature of a sociopath through and through and there are no attempts to make her even remotely real.
I cannot stress this enough: nowhere are they actually childlike or even realistically sociopathic. It's all cartoonishly cliched.
The show seems to imply that this is due to some fundamental, genetic or upbringing reason that makes all of the diclonius cartoonishly gleeful and willing to commit violence (but only on humans! because sociopaths and traumatized victim-turned-aggressors are known to love animals). This is shot in the foot by the aforementioned Nana: a diclonius who is constantly subjected to torture similar to Lucy's and much more than Mariko's. She has a body count of precisely zero and acts like an actual kid her age (albeit much less traumatized than she should be). She is a pleasing character and delivers some surprisingly good comedic moments. Unfortunately, her mere existence casts Mariko and Lucy's struggles (which the former has the good sense to scream in your ear how she suffered at length) into doubt. It's rare that a show's good side characters actually sabotage the main characters, but Elfen Lied manages.
Enjoyment:
I wouldn't go through the effort of writing such a review for your everyday shit show. But 13 full length episodes of this drives me up a wall. I took a two month break and I dreaded every moment I returned to the show. If you can overlook the irritating music, the weak characters, the story's pathetically juvenile attempts to bludgeon empathy out of the viewer, the filler is still going to grate. The same old violence over and over and over and over and over again. Same sound effect, same instant gore splatters, and it keeps going on and on as if one wouldn't get tired of it. There is not a single episode where the gore felt satisfying, terrifying, shocking, or even arousing. It just exists to waste my time.
Overall:
I'm pretty fucking jaded to this shit. There's nothing deep about this. There's no substance underneath. I had a break, read Thomas Bernhard, Kafka, Dazai and Akutagawa. This show is obviously not to the level of literature greats; however, it can't even conjure up the angst of an obligatory drama episode in a slice of life series. If you like gore, just watch something adapted from an Uziga comic or something -- it'll be arousing, it won't pretend to be deeper than it is, and it would actually have some organs and meat underneath the ketchup splatters. For everyone else: there's no value to the story here. There's nothing to be discovered underneath the middling and dated art. You'll even be sick of the Lillium theme by episode 3.
Avoid at all costs.
