TW: Sexual Assault, Rape

As a preface, this is pretty much the first time i’ve done a proper review for anything outside of like idk school book reports so expect thoughts to be scattered lol. Also, yeah this will be pretty Spoiler Heavy in case you didn’t expect that. The first 3 paragraphs are pretty spoiler free, only covering to about episode 5 of the show but the rest has some late in the show spoilers.

Elfen Lied is a… well, strange beast. It’s heavily derivative of other pieces of media, flat-out gross, exploitative, and just overall extremely uneven. Yet, for some reason, despite absolutely hating it, I think about it far too often. I’m writing this review to try and piece my thoughts together on why exactly this show has stuck with me far longer than other anime I’ve seen, and to try and explain why you should avoid it despite it being honestly pretty important for the medium as a whole.

Elfen Lied, at its core, is a muddy mystery. It feels like it wants to be intellectually higher than the capabilities of the writers, but in that way nails a overbearing feeling of unease and genuine tension because you really have no clue of anyone’s motivations, outside of the main character, Kouta. The story follows him, a college student who moves near his cousin, Yuka’s, house to study at a college. The show is very vague about most of Kouta’s backstory until later on, with most of the show’s mystery being tied to him and his relationship to the other main character, Lucy.

The show opens with a pink haired woman, codenamed Lucy, breaking out of what seems to be a high tech prison facility, slaughtering most if not all in her way. It is a very striking mood setter for the show, perfectly underlining the theming and overall vibe the series will take in its 13 episode run. She is inexplicably naked in captivity, aside from a metal helmet placed on her head. This is never elaborated upon. As she makes her way out of the prison, it’s revealed to be an island, and as Lucy is about to make her final escape she gets shot in the head. The shot pierces her helmet, and she reverts to a split personality. She is found on a beach by Kouta and Yuka, who decide to take her home and clothe her since she is all on her own. At this point she can only say Nyu, so they decide to nickname her that. Before this it’s revealed that Kouta had a little sister who he claims to have died from an “illness” many years ago. However, when talking about it with Yuka she visibly is shocked by his account, implying that something doesn’t quite add up.

I’m not going to go through this episode by episode but I felt like listing off the plot of the first episode was a good place to start since it establishes basic character traits and motives. As the show goes on, the organization that imprisoned Lucy sends a (certifiably insane, because of course) trained military officer to try and recapture her, feelings begin to develop between Yuka and Kouta (yeah they’re still cousins, i’ll get to that later), and Yuka and Kouta find a homeless girl living on the beach and take her in to live with them. As this is going on it’s revealed there are multiple types of Lucy’s species, revealed to be named Diclonius, and that they have another (later on revealed to have MULTIPLE) Diclonius in their captivity. After the military assassin, Bando, fails (in a very bloody way, staying true to the show’s ethos) the first time to recapture Lucy, the organization sends another Diclonius named Nana after Lucy.

Let’s cut through the shit though, now. If you could not tell by the opening to this, I really hated this series. From the very beginning, it is clear that the people behind this series focused solely on pushing the envelope for the sake of controversy rather than telling an actual gripping story, one that could be grounded by how violent and dark the themes of the show become. I think this is perfectly illustrated in the story arc of Mayu. Mayu is the girl I mentioned earlier on who was homeless and later taken in by Kouta and Yuka, after she runs away from home because of family issues. In episode 5 it is revealed what exactly those family issues were, and they’re probably the darkest this show veers story wise. Mayu’s mother had remarried a man who sexually assaults Mayu every night, which the show does not shy away from guresomely depicting. Rather than feeling like a very brutal and real depiction of something like this actually happening, it just feels gratuitous with the shots of Mayu during these sequences, as if, they want the audience to enjoy this. And that’s how a lot of the show feels. It feels like they expect you to, I don’t know, get off to all this shit going on during the series. Every scene it feels like has to have some sort of sexual edge to it in an effort to make the audience feel like they’re not wasting their time. This sequence especially I think is exemplary of what this show wants to be, that it sticks with you because of how fucked up it is but also how realistic it can be on top of the weird sci-fi elements. The issue is that the writers are just flat out incapable of that, there’s no tact in any scenes that need it, the characters are either incredibly braindead or do absolutely nothing. Not to mention, the plot threads that never get any follow up (what the hell happened with the director? Did that entire plan just dry up after Lucy gets killed in the final episode?) Despite how good the show is at building foreboding tension there is no real gut-punching payoff. There’s no moment you really reflect on what’s going on and the gravity of how fucked up the situations in this show are, because there’s multiple episodes with the most gratuitous violence and sexual content that mar any scene that could be taken seriously. At best it feels like justification for the intense shit that happens, and at worst leads into situations like Mayu’s rape feeling gratuitous for the sake of titilation. It’s an impossible balancing act. Furthermore, they hardly show Mayu’s reaction to any of these events outside of the episode that it's featured in, throwing away any emotional weight it could have carried. Even when it is addressed, all we get is her trying to convince her mother about what her stepfather is doing, and that’s it. Outside of her running away from home, we get no insight to her thoughts and the show offers no real empathy for her, despite how blatantly horrible the situation is. Mayu deserves better. This was honestly the hardest part of the review to write, and at the moment of writing this sentence is probably the 5th or 6th rewrite it has gone through, because I’m just not properly equipped to put to words why the fuck this episode is just abhorrent and awful in every conceivable way. At the very least, I just hope that someone out there has done some sort of writing up or similar thing about why the fuck this sequence is awful because it really needs to be shown.

Another scene that shows this is one that happens while Lucy is wandering around town, where there is a woman walking home from work talking on her cell phone about her day. She mentions that her boss is a creep and keeps staring at her butt and that he wishes he would stop. She accidentally walks into Lucy, who retaliates by decapitating her, and as her body falls down, there is a very long shot of her body, with the camera pointed directly at her butt, as her head falls onto the ground. It just feels gross. It makes me want to turn off my television constantly because the creators are just doing this for the sake of being edgy. Lied feels a lot like it wants to have both of its feet in the exploitative, shlocky 80s horror style of horror while also having its foot in the down to earth very real side of horror a la something like Get Out, and it just does not work at all. I’m sure a balancing act like that could, and probably has, been done but Lied fails spectacularly at this.

In episode 10, we finally learn the backstory of Kurama, one of the researchers in the cultivation of the Diclonius. We learn that he was hand picked by a classmate in college to participate in the organization's experiments when one of the first modern Diclonius is captured by a SWAT team. He is very reluctant when first shown examining the Diclonius, only named “Number 3” during her brief on screen appearances. And this is where another main issue comes in, any time that any Diclonius is shown on screen in the organization's headquarters, they are naked. For no reason, they are just stark nude, in what I can only assume is a cheap attempt to shove fanservice into the show. I’m not going to sit here and argue against or on behalf of nudity as fanservice in anime and media as a whole, but it is fucking disgusting that there is so much fanservice of actual children featured in this series. Most of the “fanservice” featured in this show not related to guro is of actual ass children and frankly, that’s just disgusting as hell. The show goes to great lengths to insert fanservice into scenes where it has no place, a crude attempt to appeal to people who like this gross-ass shit.

On the other hand, I think that this show has good aspects which is why I feel conflicted. There are signs of a good horror show buried in there. I think it is genuinely eerie and has an overwhelming sense of dread that perpetuates throughout every scene early on, and the way the show slowly reveals its mysteries is very well done. The world of Lied is so unnaturally bleak and depressing in a way few horror movies and old school tragedy stories are. Nobody makes it out of this unscathed and because of that there is a pervasive sense of dread leaking into even the happiest scenes in the show, largely due to the soundtrack. I hope the composers of this show went on to do something far more deserving of their talent, as the soundtrack was consistently the strongest part of the series. There is a world where I could see Lied becoming an instant classic with the right editors, directors, and overall talent behind it. It obviously takes a huge inspiration from stuff like Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, but unlike those it is not one of the firsts of its kind, nor is it refined enough to really stand out aside from the timing of its release in the mid 2000s. At the very least, Lied had me guessing through the end, with the reveal that Lucy killed Kouta’s little sister when they were kids, and the ensuing sequence with the revelation Kouta has (minus the weird 3 minutes of reusing footage we’ve already seen) is honestly done so well, especially the scene where Lucy sings Lilium to Kouta.

Lied was also responsible for a large shift for a brief period in the mid 2000s in anime towards more horror and exploitative entries into the medium, with adaptations of games like Higurashi and School Days which carry similar themes of mystery, horror, and gratuitous violence. The creators of Stranger Things have even gone on record saying that they were influenced by Elfen Lied when they were originally coming up with the main character, Eleven, and her power set and general character traits. Clearly the effect the show had on its viewers was a net positive. But I also don’t think that absolves this show of its issues.

For years I’ve been hearing vague whispers about Elfen Lied, from friends, from internet personalities, from just various posts about how edgy it was, how it was this experience you’d never forget. In a lot of ways, they were right on the money. But I also think that hyping it up like that is a disservice to viewers. I think the show gets away with far too much considering its status as a very influential piece of animation. It deserves to be criticized properly. I’ve had a couple of very close friends say to me “oh the manga’s better”, or “anime wouldn’t be the same without it”, and while yes, that is 100% true, I think that it’s important to make that distinction that it's not without fault. I think there are plenty of pieces of both anime and western media that have done what Lied tried to do but better and less offensively, and more tactfully. Stranger Things season 1 holds up very well, and the same friends who have praised Lied to me have stated that Higurashi does a lot of the mystery/horror vibe better than Lied does. I would absolutely love to see someone who is a better reviewer than I am (or, frankly, smarter) take a crack at Lied’s positives and negatives to try and get a better grasp on why everything feels so uneven in this series. Honestly, even after writing this, there is still this nagging feeling that I should really read the manga to see how wildly different it plays out, but idk. After hearing the manga’s author’s other series, Byrnhildir, was just kind of Lied again but about witches and wizards I think that whatever level of intrigue or genuine writing talent that author could’ve had was just a stroke of luck. Regardless of that, I don’t think I'll be writing any reviews after this unless there is something I want to get the word out about, or if I come across something like Lied that I feel strongly about. Thanks for reading!

Note: These are just my opinions and i’m just some dumb ass on the internet who barely knows what he’s talking about, if this made you mad I genuinely apologize (unless you’re defending the child nudity then get the fuck outta here)