YMMV / Hell Girl

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• Awesome Music: Enough to warrant its own page.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: Enma Ai is what most people remember about this series. Many years later art with Ai is more known than a synopsis or someone else from her team.
• Bizarro Episode: The third episode of the fourth season is so full of Crosses the Line Twice and Narm Charm that it's one of the craziest and most unusual episodes of the show. It also sparked a discussion about whether it is a shame of the series, or one of its best moments.
• Broken Base: Although in general the fourth season was met very positively by critics and fans, opinions about the violence in it were divided. On the one hand, part of the audience was pretty much satisfied how much the show became darker, brutal and rude, while the other considered this a deterioration of quality in the direction of depicting villains as too flat and banal jerks.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • Admit it- you do feel some karma once the string is pulled and Ai and her band torment the dreg of the episode before sending them to Hell.
  • In episode 5 of the second season, not only the resident Hate Sink bully earned his one-way express ticket to Hell in the most karmic way possible, the true Victim of the Week doesn't even have to condemn himself to Hell after death.
• Complete Monster: In the 2019 film, Honda Takaaki, aka Maki, a controversial music producer and band leader, is a man who worships death. Desiring nothing less than the end of humanity and the world he deems rotten, Maki cultivates a Doomsday Cult under the guise of a Boy Band, seducing children with prospects of money and addictive drugs to brainwash them into his ideals. Through his evil, Maki hopes to appease a perceived demonic entity so that it may end all life on Earth, even offering up young girls as human sacrifices to do so.
• Contested Sequel: In sharp contrast to Futakomori, the third season Mitsuganae has historically been seen as polarizing at best, subject to Fanon Discontinuity at worst. While its existence was already confirmed in The Stinger for Futakomori, many questioned the need to continue the series when the second season resolved Ai's story, provided an exploration of all of her servant's histories, and had a plethora of memorable one-off episodes. However, Mitsuganae itself was criticized for more than extending Ai's story: many of its episodes were seen as derivative of previous season clients, having many composite characters and expies that are Darker and Edgier. There is a massive uptick in immoral clients and Ai and her team are also portrayed as exponentially more villainous for Black Comedy; whereas previous seasons explored their sheer grievances over innocents being banished to Hell, this time around they're often not above tormenting complete innocents before consigning them to Hell.
• Cliché Storm: The show so abuses its own catchphrase and other cliches that in the end it starts to seem that Mamiko Noto can just record once all of its cues and no longer appear in the episodes. For example, almost every time the "villain" of the episode will be a monster, the Woobie-protagonist will eventually untie the ribbon, and in the end, in an inexplicable way, it turns out that the villain's crimes became known to everyone.
• Crosses the Line Twice: In the third episode of the fourth season, members of the Big, Screwed-Up Family are so pathetic or insane or such jerks that it turns into Black Comedy. It even includes a character with three cousins, two female and one male. He is in a relationship with the first, tries to rape the second (who is in elementary school), while beating his aunt and uncle along with the third. Even the main characters are shocked by this, saying that this family is worse than hell, and its members are worse than real demons. After all this, the main The Reveal of the episode, will make you think, is the writer trying to troll you?
• Cult Classic: Despite the fact that in the technical sense of the show it is very outdated and has a very monotonous structure, in the long run it received four sequels, a live-action adaptation and a manga adaptation and is still considered a classic of anime horror, not least thanks to the very memorable main character.
• Epileptic Trees: Contrary to popular expectations derived from a Mythology Gag, Gilles de L'Enfer does not make an appearance in Mitsuganae. At all. The Other Wiki's article spent a good few months setting him up to return as the main villain, but then...
• Growing the Beard: Each series starts off with the Once an Episode someone going to hell thing, until the main story picks up midway through the series.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Mamiko Noto as Emotionless Girl hell girl Enma Ai. If you watch this show in the tenth years, then it can be very difficult to take her seriously in this role, knowing that now this seiyuu specializes in the roles of mature soft women and Large Ham mad villains.
  • Jun Fukuyama plays a young Large Ham guy who can inspire illusions with the help of a look. By next year, he's about to get his Star-Making Role as a character with very similar abilities and personality.
• Ho Yay:
  • The entirety of the fourth episode of Mitsuganae. Yukawa is clearly having a relationship with Nishida. The infamous 'speck of dust in the eye' scene all but practically confirms it.
  • Episode 20 of Futakomori, to the point that interpreting the relationship between Mari and Juri as mere friendship would actually sound less plausible.
  • The second episode in the fourth season is just overloaded by this, right up to the point that by the end of the episode you are no longer sure whether Nanako and Haru are a duet of actress comedians or a lesbian couple in conflict. And even if it was just a subtext, it is hard to consider Nanako's final speech as anything other than a declaration of love.
• Magnificent Bitch: Ai Emma is Hell Girl, the enigmatic girl behind Hell Correspondence. Formerly a village girl, when she and her family were sacrificed, Ai unleashed a curse which caught the attention of the Lord of Hell who took her parents' souls and threatened to keep them in Hell unless she serves him. Accepting the offer, Ai spends centuries granting people's vengeance to banish others to Hell in exchange for their own souls, until meeting Takuma who suffered a fate like hers. Not wanting to damn him, Ai pulled a gamble, resurrecting him and herself before having the mob after him kill her, knowing this would void her curse that gave the Lord control over her defying him. Saving her parents, Ai returns to execute one last plan: to save Yuzuki from taking her place, she makes a pact with the Lord to become Hell Girl for all of eternity so nobody else would, shouldering the burden of the damned all on her own forever.
• Mainstream Obscurity: Although Hell Girl is still recognized in Japanese pop culture - being huge for its heyday - it has long fallen into this in Western regions, having never been particularly popular, to begin with. This is in large part due to the lack of commercial availability, as the home releases are out of print and expensive; Crunchyroll originally held the rights for streaming the original three seasons but since lost them after 2017, leaving only Yoi no Togi, which cannot be watched without an understanding of the others.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Everything related to Enma Ai is this, especially her catchphrase.
  • The third episode of the fourth season, which can not be discussed without swear words.
• Narm:
  • Large Ham villains practically make this show Narm Charm.
  • Some of the third season's getting sent to Hell process falls into this territory.
  • The fourth season is overloaded with this due to a sharp increase in violence coupled with a sharply deteriorating quality of animation in some episodes. And of course, let's not forget about the third episode...
  • The manga adaptation is full of this, mostly due to the unfitting art style.
• Narm Charm: Hell Girl has a lot of this the surplus of Large Ham villains and regularly repeating the structure of the episodic nature of the series till later episodes
• Paranoia Fuel: You could be sent to Hell for anything, at any given time. Seriously, you might not even remember doing anything bad, you could not have done anything bad at all, but somehow, someone is pissed off at you. And you'll be minding your own business one minute, and being boated off to Hell in the next...
• Periphery Demographic: Downplayed. Although the series itself was clearly more focused on the girls than the guys, the lack of gender stereotypes in it and the growing number of male fans, led to the fact that by the next seasons the show had practically become gender neutral.
• Shipping: Ai is very frequently paired with Ichimoku Ren in fanarts, especially during the Season 2 run, where Ren had a lot more prominence.
• Spiritual Predecessor: To Helluva Boss.
• Strawman Has a Point: The victim of the fourth episode of season one, a veterinarian who allows several of the pets he treats to die because he sees them as nothing more than a paycheck, said before he was dragged off to hell said "Pet owners are no different than I am. Dressing them up in weird outfits and taking them to parties. They are just using them as status symbols." While it does not justify his actions and his actions are much worse, he does have a point that not all people view their pets as family members and that he is far from the only one guilty of thinking with this mentality. Yet he is not given a response from Ai other than the typical "you heard him".
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The series can easily elicit this kind of reaction as it goes on, especially the first season. The person with the doll is always going to pull the string and damn both themselves and their tormentor. Even the introduction of someone trying to put a stop to it doesn't help when he constantly fails at it. The only time this is ever averted is in the final episode.
• Values Dissonance: The fourth season goes even further, portraying Hell Girl almost naked in several opening scenes, despite taking the form of a young girl...
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: The manga is intended for 12-year-olds, despite the fact that the original show has a lot of cruel and adult scenes.