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.