YMMV / Texhnolyze

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Given the nature of the series, it's difficult to assess the motives of the characters, particularly since many of the characters, Ichise and Ran in particular, are given to introversion, and the show's style means that we get little insight into the characters' thought processes except when they interact with each other. For example:
  • Is the affection from Doc to Ichise mutual or one-sided on her part? Is the relationship akin to lovers, siblings or mother and son? Bit of each, or none of the above? Does Ichise leave Doc on the surface because he never really cared, or because he realized he couldn't get her out of her funk no matter how hard he tried?
  • Ran is technically the Big Good of the show, but given that she can see the future, and Yoshii flat out asked her about it, it's all but outright stated that she knew what Yoshii was and still let him loose on Lux. Did she believe that You Can't Fight Fate as her village believed? Did she believe Yoshii was necessary to Lux's preservation in some way? Again hard to say.
  • Yoshii. A monster who brought a city to its knees over a delusional desire to see everyone at each other's throats? Given his willingness to murder a prostitute and her pimp in cold blood for no pragmatic reason, and his demands towards Onishii, it's certainly a likely portrait of his character. Or in fact, a Well-Intentioned Extremist who saw what an ugly mess Lux was, and sought to help the people of Lux through extreme yet possibly necessary methods? Given his general politeness, his willingness to protect Ran at his life's risk early in the series, and his Motive Rants towards Tatsuya, Shinji, and Onishii, it's an unusual, yet equally possible interpretation.
• Angst Aversion: The main reason why a lot of people don't end up watching this show. It contains brutal violence, no entirely sympathetic characters, pretty much no humor or lighter moments whatsoever, one of the most bleak and cynical views of humanity to ever be portrayed in an anime series, and unabashedly heads towards one of the biggest Shoot the Shaggy Dog endings without ever promising otherwise. It's no wonder that when people read up on it consisting of all of these things, they don't want to put themselves through it.
• Audience-Alienating Ending: Everyone just gives up and dies, something a lot of viewers saw coming a mile away.
• Cult Classic: The anime is little known on account of being one of the grimmest examples of anime, let alone fiction, ever put to screen, but it has remained a well appreciated series by those who have watched it precisely because it is so dark and unusual, and the unlikelihood of something similar appearing in the near future.
• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: Inevitable in a series this abstract. One theory among fandom holds that Kano is telling the truth when he claims that Lux exists only within his mind.
  • By the end, the series is so heavily saturated in Gnostic symbolism and ideology that you can hardly move for the paranoia, philosophical debate (or maybe "dog fight" would be a better word), and archetypal parallels. The fact that Kano actually thinks he's the demiurge does not help things.
• Ho Yay: Toyama is a walking source of Ho Yay in himself, but he seems to have a very particular relationship with Ichise.
• It Was His Sled: Everyone died. The end.
• Jerkass Woobie: Plenty of them, practically a whole cast in fact, on account of what they do to survive in this rotten place.
  • Ichise is a cold, deeply anti social individual with little interest in relating to or helping the people around him. This attitude however, stems from the quiet hell that is his life, having lost his parents at a young age, and growing up as an ostracised outsider with viscous pit fights being his only means of existence. Soon into the series, he is crippled for defending himself against a sadistic prostitute, and is forcibly Texhnolyzed to survive. By the end, he is forced to watch the people he has come to relate to either die, or become a broken shell of a human being, and having failed to save Ran from her fate, we last see him curled into a ball, bleeding out and with his texhnolyzed limbs running out of energy, calmly accepting his slow death as the last living human being in Lux.
  • Doc is a rapist who treats Ichise like a science experiment, but as we learn, she was a former member of the Class who rule Lux, and was forced out on account of her ideological differences with the new ruler. Her obsessive research into Texhnolyzation is ultimately a desire to prove her worth and regain a place amongst those she considers her equals. And when confronted with the reality that not only do her people have no interest in her research, but that the human race as we know it is effectively dead, she ultimately kills herself in the face of the pointlessness of her entire life.
• Moral Event Horizon: Kano leaps over it with what he does to Ran.
  • Toyama's father crosses it with his continuous sexual abuse of his son.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: Very few people have actually made it past the first three episodes, if not the pilot. It isn't until halfway through the first episode that the first line of dialogue is spoken.
• Squick: Everything about Kano.
  • Also Toyama and his father. No Yay indeed.
  • And the random member of the Racan who tells Ran he'll "show her a good time" while lustfully caressing her.
• Stoic Woobie: Ichise and Ran are both emotionally dead for the most part, but they both receive the cruelest fates in the whole series, with Ran locked into a horrific And I Must Scream scenario until Ichise mercy kills her, and Ichise outliving the rest of the human race before Dying Alone.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Due to the series having Evil Versus Evil it's kind of about this trope. Nothing the characters do has any hope of saving the world, as it turns out; and there are copious hints that this is the case; but the series is very tight-lipped about it, and up to the moment they turn into plants, it looks like the Shapes (that is, the bad guys) might have lives worth living. And we don't get confirmation of Ran's death until the last few minutes. So the first viewing becomes a sort of staring contest: How much do you care about these characters, and how much hopelessness are they worth to you?
• The Woobie: Any sympathetic character in this show. The main character Ichise may the worst though, as his suffering truly knows no bounds. Lelouch can't hold a candle to Ichise.

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