I’ve always been vaguely aware of Elfen Lied as a show that the denizens of 4chan, in their questionable taste, were excited about when it came out. It was, apparently, yet another story about a hapless male lead who suddenly has a supernatural woman drop into his life. (This impression may be extremely inaccurate, of course.) The novel/interesting thing about it was, again from my impression, that it was extremely, graphically violent.
I didn’t know quite how violent. Quoth the Wonderduck:
Look, there’s no easier way for me to describe the show’s violence level than to tell a story from the Duck U. Anime Club. The Club receives monthly screener DVDs from ADVocates, the ADV club group, and one month had the first episode of EL on it. Nobody having heard of the show, we sat down to run it.
ADV throws up a black screen over nudity and extreme violence on their screener DVDs, and the FIRST EIGHT MINUTES were nothing more than black screen and subtitles (except for brief flashes of non-graphic animation).
I can only say wow. Well, that and question the sanity of the ADV PR person who, given that policy, decided to stick Elfen Lied on the screener DVD.
Or perhaps I should stand in awe of that PR person’s marketing genius. Who knows?
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To be fair to the ADVocates folks, they put an episode or two of whatever they happen to be releasing that month. Heck, when they released the Platinum Edition Boxset for Neon Genesis Evangelion, there was an episode on the screener DVD.
So they were just doing what they always do with EL… for fair or ill.
And, for what it’s worth, distilled to the basics, the “hapless male lead/supernatural woman” plotline is that of EL. There’s more to it than that, of course… otherwise EL, Ah My Goddess! and Clubbed-to-Death-Angel Dokuro-chan could all be said to have the same plot, not to mention dozens (hundreds?) of others.
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Hundreds, most likely. It’s indeed a fairly broad brushstroke, and I’d never suggest that all the shows that can be described by it are the same.
They just tend to look that way from a great distance. :)
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