Elfen Lied is Wholesome Actually

I've watched the show a second time now and it holds up on the rewatch.  On some level I feel bad about waiting so long to watch it because of how so many people made it sound.  But on the other hand maybe it's good given the nature of the discourse around this show that I can provide the perspective of someone who didn't watch the show at all till I was already 37 in 2023.

Right now everyone who's made Youtube videos on the show either never liked it or are expressing some kind of shame that they liked this edgy shock value show when they were an edgy nihilistic teenager.  I'm old enough now that I'm not only well past whatever Edgelord phase I ever had but also past the following phase of feeling the need to go in the opposite direction to make up for it.

Elfen Lied isn't a 10/10 Masterpiece, it is often a lot darker then the baseline of what I usually want from Anime and I don't always like what I think it's trying to say.  I wouldn't recommend it to anyone without heavy qualifications.

But there is another side to this show being left out of most of the online discourse about it.  There is a strong Found Family theme that gives the story some real Heart and makes it outright Wholesome at times, and that does provide Hope, a meaningful ray of light in all that darkness.  

And it is also sometimes just really funny, but not in an MCU way. Especially the scenes between Nana and Mayu.

I'm not sure why I personally value Found Family stories so much.  My own family background is a normative Nuclear Family and both my parents were good parents, I never wanted to run away or anything, and my extended Family is filled with some pretty cool people too.  I think it's tied to how I understand The Gospel, how it's partly about Gentiles being Adopted into the Family of Israel.

The show is visually Edgy mainly in it's over the top Violence.  There is a lot of Nudity but it's never actually framed as Erotic.  The flashback sequence providing Mayu's backstory is pretty tame actually, they are ambiguous about even if things went any further then what we saw.  And what little we saw is purely framed as being disturbing not as fanservice.

The show also has genuinely good misdirection sometimes, completely unlike Rian Johnson style "Subversions".

And the Dark content is justified. It acknowledges how Ugly the world can be but with a cast of protagonists who don't succumb to it.

The elaborate opening sequence of the Naked Girl escaping her prison and easily bloodily massacring all the gun wielding soldiers absolutely can work as a Female Power Fantasy.  As does what they keep doing with Bando, they set him up as this hyper violent misogynistic sociopathic pure avatar of Toxic Masculinity, and then proceeds to have three little girls, Lucy, Mayu and Nana each completely Humiliate him.  It's magnificent.

At anyrate I'll leave you with this Meme I made.

Penny Dreadful on Showtime

Now that Showtime is on Paramount+ I'm finally checking this show out, 4 episodes in at the moment.

In my repeated discussions of the Anime Community's Three Episode Rule I've at least once said that it maybe shouldn't even be limited Anime, that many Western shows also have Pilots that aren't exactly their best episode.  In the case of Penny Dreadful though I definitely see it even fitting the YGG's observation that it is often 3 episodes for a show's Premise to be clear.  In this case it takes 3 episodes for the main protagonists to officially form their little pact, and episode 3's take on The Creature managed to be both unique and surprisingly respectful to the original novel at the same time.

I was aware of this show as it aired, seeing some conversations about it on the old IMDB Boards.  I was annoyed that it named itself for this obscure medium of 19th Century Entertainment but then took it's characters from the usual 19th Century Novels, I wanted to see Varney The Vampyre finally get some Hollywood spotlight.

I also remember hearing that The Creature was using the name Caliban from The Tempest, so watching this soon after finishing The Witch Form Mercury is amusing

I'm not sure how much of it I'm gonna watch.  Sometimes it's been pretty Entertaining, sometimes it's boring.

Update: Episode 6 really draws my attention to how The Creature is kind of an Incel.

Tedium doesn't bother me as much as it does other Gamers

 At least people who make YouTube videos about Video Games.

Take for example discourse about The Water Temple in The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time.  When I first discovered that online group think considered it the hardest Dungeon that made sense to me, it was the one that I remember taking the longest to figure out, but I never felt it was bad design, I always saw it as a difficult puzzle that was rewarding to figure out, I didn't need this modern genre of Zelda Dungeon Design breakdown videos to convince me it had a good design, I always knew.

What shocked me was when I learned a large part of why so many people were allegedly frustrated by The Water Temple was that they hated needing to go into the item menu every time they put the Iron Boots on or took them off.  Because that never bothered me at all, I just did it without even thinking about it all that much.

There is a limit to how much Tedium I can take however.  In Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door I hate how much back tracking I have to do in Chapter 4 specifically, that is the worst part of the game as far as I'm concerned.  But it's the only place where it really bugged me that much, in Online Discourse I've found even fans of TTYD tend to criticize it as a game almsot defined by excessive backtracking.  Not only does most of it in other chapters not bother me but I also genuinely love the entire General White Joke in chapter 7, it's the kind of genre self parody that I love the Mario RPGs for.

And I've noticed many other examples of this watching YouTube reviews of Video Games, the reviewer expresses annoyance at something being Tedious that doesn't bother me at all.  I don't specifically remember all of them right now but I know it's happened a lot.

But there is one more thing I want to comment on that perhaps isn't actually the same as all this but I feel is related.

YouTube Reviews of Video Games love to treat Cut Scenes not being skippable as an Unforgiveable Sin.  But to me allowing them to be skippable would be the Sin.

Number 1. I would almsot certainly sometimes skip a scene by accident.

Number 2. No matter how little you value the story parts of a video game they are part of the experience for any Game that has them.  Many artists put a lot of work into making those Cut Scenes they deserve to be watched.

Number 3. To those who maybe only want to skip them after they've been seen them once and don't want to see the same pre Boss Battle scene over and over and over again.  Get Gud and stop losing.