Elfen Lied

One thing I really enjoyed was how Lucy got her happy ending without being a Karma Houdini. That's not something you often see.

In RWBY, every girl is Best Girl.

So is the EL anime like the Trigun anime ie. a much more condensed and less interesting story but still good?

I was considering giving it a shot but then Wikipedia said it only ran like 13 episodes. For a 12 volume manga series, they must have really dumbed it down.

Also how is the English dub?

edited 3rd Jul '14 5:42:01 PM by Nikkolas

The English dub's pretty bad. I wasn't a huge fan of the anime's story, but it has really good sound design and use of music.

The dub was perfectly fine. The story itself was also okay, though the ending was a tad better in the manga, regardless.

the dub was fine,too bad the OVA dub replaced half of the cast,including Kira-Vincent Davis

I wasn't even aware the OVA was dubbed.

The anime doesn't really have much of an ending actually, the story is rather stopped like a third-way through the manga I think? At least I remember the end to be very open.

The voice acting in Elfen Lied is pretty bad in both languages. They were obviously running on a low budget. The story has its ups and downs in both versions. The anime is simpler, shorter, does not have Nozomi who is worthless and cuts out a lot of the awkward fanservice, but it makes Lucy a bit too sympathetic and I didn't find her final confrontation with Kouta believable. The manga ties up more loose ends and actually explores the characters more, but some points get too convoluted and some Heel Face Turns were...weird.

But, the anime is worth seeing for the theme song alone. Seriously, it's one of the most beautiful pieces of music to ever grace anime.

edited 5th Jul '14 1:44:20 PM by lu127

"If you aren't him, then you apparently got your brain from the same discount retailer, so..." - Fighteer

Update : The Wiki now has a summary of the manga extra included in the Japanese Blu-Ray release : http://elfen-lied.wikia.com/wiki/Elfen_Lied_Special_Side_Story_%28Bonus_Story%29

Also, an oddity confirmed. Despite vast internet lists of seiyu/voice actors being available for every anime you can name, no one anywhere seems to have a listing for the seiyu for Mayu's cold mother - the English Voice Actor is listed, but not the Japanese seiyu. Maybe she chose not to be identified, because of the hateful role?

Agreed, that's a gorgeous song.

New article on the wiki : http://elfen-lied.wikia.com/wiki/Alternate_Anime_Finale_Storylines_%28Unused%29

Basically, the ending of EL anime was changed in some ways both subtle and broad, and this article chronicles What Could Have Been, including a much more decisive conclusion to some of the events shown in the broadcast script.

So now we have this : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4036718/

The claim is, a movie of the series in 2017. The description is damned odd : A young woman believes that humans have telekinetic powers that manipulates and cuts objects.

So, I'm of at least two trains of thought here :

1 - Phony as a three-dollar bill

2 - Real, but set to devolve into DB Evolution with blood and boobs.

This is the net, and anybody can claim just about anything, but that can also make us too apt to dismiss. Any thoughts?

The summary sounds like a part is missing in the middle… fishy.

With a director named Lucy to boot. That doesn't sound very legit to me. And that would be reaaally hard to pull off.

How bizarre that nobody seems to like the artwork in this series. I kind of liked it. But then, I also really didn't like Nyu in most of the first half, and pretty much kept waiting around for the next time that Lucy would start wrecking bodies.

Lucy/Kouta. Note the special emphasis on Lucy, as in, not Nyu. I really couldn't stand Nyu up until after the timeskip. Then she was adorable.

Beyond that... I actually kind of liked Bando/Mayu and Nana/Kurama. Are those ships messed the fuck up? Yeah, they kinda are. Do I like 'em anyway? Yeah, I kinda do.

I don't remember it well enough to comment, but I do remember Bando probably being my favorite male character (mostly for his dialog - "WHAT THE FUCK DOES THE FATE OF THE WORLD HAVE TO DO WITH THE FATE OF MY BALLS?!"), so I was very relieved that he wasn't dead.

the thing about Bando is something I never got: Sure,I can accept he survived because he's badass and he has become literally a half-cyborg,I can buy that in fiction,however,it's hinted Kurama helped him rebulding his body,but how did he do it?By that point,Kurama suffered a major breakdown after losing Mariko,left the laboratory and Kakuzawa for good and was living like a hobo.Never mind the fact he had no mental conditions to help Bando,how did he get the resources to help him?

Its possible that even with his mind blown, Kurama's instinctive scientist mentality kicked in when he saw Bando dying, managing to contact Saseba to fetch Bando and them using the tech that kept poor # 28 alive to aid Bando.

BTW, I just realized. The listed director of this supposed film has changed from originally being 'Lauren Wong', who was also the daughter of a show business couple.

I bow to no one in my love of this series. So why a fan would feel the need to lie about a project all EL fans would like to at least see attempted is flatly beyond me.

It seems now it was a fan-film that someone associated with it tried to give cred by posting to IMDB.

Things I am not even slightly surprised about: This.

So, I updated a thing I'm working on.

Anyone care to read it, maybe tell me what they think in a review?

Incidentally. Chapter 1 is really kind of lighthearted, second chapter takes itself more seriously, third chapter gets steadily closer to Original Flavor...

There's quite a bit of Fridge Horror involved in the story as well. In MOST of the world, an orphanage like the one where Lucy was "raised" would be a criminal aberration. A true house of horrors that would be shut down, and fast, the moment a single government inspector (and orphanages ARE inspected by local governments) or a news outlet heard about it. In Japan, however, orphanages like where Lucy had her Start of Darkness, ARE THE NORM. This was true at the time the story was written, and is STILL true even in 2015. Numerous articles in various sources (Just check the links referenced in Captain Earth), list horror stories about large groups of children left unsupervised, with the few caretakers who ACTUALLY CARE being completely overwhelmed, while the rest just see those children as paychecks, and do the bare minimum to keep them alive and throw them to the streets at age 18 (when they can't legally house them anymore) with no social or marketable skills since orphanages get paid based only on the number of children they house, not on the quality of care. Further horror comes into play because even though it became legal for children in orphanages to be adopted those who are not relatives, orphanages still discourage the practice, not just because of the pay schedule, but because Japan's culture LOATHES change. It takes massive external pressure to force a change, and then even when the pressure is removed, no matter how much resentment exists for the new society, it won't change back, because that would be another "change."

The orphanage workers may well have lied to Lucy's mother about Lucy being there. As well as lying about Lucy being abandoned. So we can say Okamato was also blasting his own culture. "My country, tis of thee I sting."

Furthermore, as to those experiments we saw being performed on Diclonii, during WWII, Japan did that and worse (including Bio-weapons tests, like anthrax, and Cerin Gas) on PO Ws and civilians their armed forces captured. This is coming out, the relatives are screaming for restitution, and Japan refuses to pay because the Japanese Government STILL CLAIMS IT DID NOTHING WRONG. (As do the scientists who carried out this "research.")

Since this last message didn't seem to translate well to audiences in Elfen Lied, it's coming back in his latest work, Brynhildr in the Darkness.

Good Points.

But I believe it was always legal for non-relatives to adopt. The Catch-22 was, a relative who did not take the child in could still veto the adoption, and often did, feeling that allowing the child to take another name was a disgrace. I think that's what been amended, although intransigence in this doesn't surprise me.

BTW, at least according to the manga, Lucy definitely was abandoned — by her father. Her mother learned of this only after he had dumped her, and then never stopped searching for her, till she was captured by Chief Kakuzawa, raped and forced to bear a son by him.

I'm looking for a trope related to Lucy's first battle with Bando. She's about to finish him off, when she feels an object in her hand, stares at it, and then reverts to Nyu. It later turns out to be the seashell she got for Kouta to replace the one she broke (a last gift from his Dead Little Sister). Is there a trope for this kind of sudden overwhelming object-driven memory trigger? The only other instance I can recall is from Somewhere In Time. The page of that film lists the object as Something We Forgot, but I don't if the instance in Elfen Lied matches up with that.

Prior to sometime in the mid 1970s, 1976 I believe, it was actually illegal to adopt a child from an orphanage in Japan that you were not related to.

Now, it is merely "discouraged."

I had read that the orphans resulting from the 2011 quake and related disasters had some of that being rethought, but it was tough. Resistance runs deep.

Does anyone know if Okamoto is friends with Hiromu Arakawa of FMA? I'd read that he names characters for his friends, and given the amount of morally-challenged or worse (Tucker, you slime. You make Chief K look good) researchers in any version of FMA, I wonder if EL's Arakawa was named for her, though it is a very common name. Anyone hear anything?