I’m not afraid to admit that Elfen Lied was one of the first anime that I saw before “officially watching anime”. What? I was 14 with Netflix on my 3DS and nothing better to do while pretending to sleep, why wouldn’t I check out something with this poster? I only saw the first 2 episodes before putting it down, and I hadn’t watched those two episodes again until doing the AWC challenge. Regardless of AWC, I was going to watch Elfen Lied either this month or the next. I found out recently that on MyAnimeList, Elfen Lied is the most popular anime that ended before 2007. Hell, besides Naruto, One Piece and Bleach, it’s the most popular anime that started before 2006. Once I found this out, I knew the time was right to finally watch Elfen Lied.

Elfen Lied is a very polarizing and controversial show, Google Image search it and you’ll immediately see why. It was made by ARMS, who at the time made hentai. This is important to bring up because Elfen Lied is the reason they stopped making hentai. With a big success like Elfen Lied, ARMS was able to escape the hellscape that is the hentai industry. Which is a shame because ARMS made great hentai. Front Innocent is probably my favorite hentai and don’t let anyone guilt you into thinking that it’s not a masterpiece of pornography. But they absolutely made the right choice to stop making hentai in favor of something that can make money. This way, they were able to live off of Elfen Lied and Ikki Tousen money until the time of this review.

But let’s get down to business, did I like Elfen Lied? For the most part, yeah. But it’s hard for me to really explain why. Is it violent? As a matter of fact it’s one of the most violent shows I’ve ever seen. Is it sexual? Past some classic anime tropes, none of the nudity is sexual. Is it edgy? I guess. But I’m biased because of recent shows that bring new meaning to edgy. There are scenes in Elfen Lied that I’d call edgy, if only for showing more than they needed to, but I’ve seen edgier. Disturbing is the word that I would use to describe Elfen Lied. That being said, only one scene really made me look away and shut my eyes in response to what was being shown on-screen (and anyone familiar with the series will know what scene I’m referring to). In regards to other aspects of Elfen Lied, there’s the visual aspect. If someone asked me what anime character designs in the 2000s looked like, I would show them these designs. Some may call it generic, but I find them to be more iconic instead. But really, I think the best part of Elfen Lied is the directing. The show never feels comedic, any “light-hearted moments” feel significantly more awkward than humorous. The content is graphic, but the actual directing is great. It makes me wish Mamoru Kanbe directed more shows in-between this and The Promised Neverland. Simply put, it’s just a surreal yet fascinating anime that’s practically an endurance test of “how far can a show go before it feels like you’re watching the anime equivalent of a snuff film” (the answer is the scene I was talking about earlier by the way). Whenever it’s not shoving genuinely gruesome violence or naked chicks in your face, Elfen Lied feels like a fever dream.

So when I found out that Elfen Lied is one of the most popular pre-2000s anime of all time (I mean I knew it was popular but not THAT popular), I began to think of why this would be the case. And the main reason is simple: Elfen Lied is one of the most important and defining anime of the 2000s. For a lot of people, its extreme content influenced how they viewed “mature anime”. That’s not to say that I think Elfen Lied is a “mature anime”, it’s about as mature as a slasher horror movie, and just as dumb. But it certainly made one hell of a statement in how brutal it is despite how good it looks.

My biggest problem with Elfen Lied is that it takes way too long to try to take itself seriously. It took until Episode 9 for me to start thinking if the show was trying to be about the origin of a serial killer or lore revolving around the Diclonius. I’m sorry, but when your first 8 episodes are about as “deep” as a cheesy horror movie, it’s gonna be difficult to suddenly start taking the show seriously. Basically, when the show REALLY wants you to take it seriously, it starts to really fumble. The reason is because the Diclonius lore IS interesting. Done right, Elfen Lied could have been an NC-17-rated anime version of X-Men. But it isn’t told right. The anime doesn’t dive deep into the lore until it’s too late for anyone to care. And man, once the series starts to ditch the horror elements that made me appreciate it in the first place and goes full-blown action, I just give so much less of a shit. God, the last few episodes are when I really start to lose interest in the show. From the overabundance of flashbacks to conflicting tones, it drops the ball that was already pretty low to the ground.

And yet, despite everything, I’m still going to give Elfen Lied a positive score.

What stops me from really disliking Elfen Lied is the fact that I couldn’t stop watching it. A show like this should have bored me, and I completely understand how it can bore other people. But even when it wasn’t showing off its extreme content, it was still entertaining because the direction gave every scene some sort of uneasy feel to it, no matter if the scene is supposed to be dark or light-hearted. Otherwise, there’s no way I would have been able to binge all of it in a day. A true fever dream that, mostly, is a guilty pleasure for me.

Also the ED sounded way too much like Avril Lavigne's Complicated for me to take it seriously in comparison to the legendary OP.