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Dismiss this series at your own peril. The characters have depth. Lots of it. It is easy to dismiss as yet another harem, but the saying that is used to describe female lead Aoi Sakuruba is one that could be used for this entire series : There is steel beneath those long sleeves.

Her devotion to her betrothed, male lead Kaoru Hanabishi, can seem off-putting and the sign of a meek fantasy woman, but in fact her devotion is ferocious and awesome. In short, her devotion to him is so strong it short-circuits the perfect obedient Japanese wife - Yamato Nadeshiko - she has been raised ... to be. By pursuing him when his hellish family life causes him to flee, she is both spurning and yet obeying her family's wishes. In love with him since childhood, and also raised with the idea of devotion to him alone since she was small, she cannot simply shift gears when the arranged engagement hits the skids. Aoi perhaps is perfect, but it is perfection achieved and fought for, not merely granted.

Kaoru himself can seem a simplistic stereotype, but he is not that at all. Beaten by his strict wealthy grandfather regularly, his 'crime' in the old man's eyes is also the reason he truly leaves. While the abuse was by no means any less cruel than it seemed, what his grandfather truly wanted was for Kaoru to relinquish all ties to and memories of his vanished mother, and it was this continued demand that drove Kaoru to flee, refusing to dishonor his mother by spurning her memory. Alone, he is clearly miserable and struggling, and welcoming Aoi back into his life begins the long slow process of healing his scars on all levels. In a short time, he is not merely willing to die or kill for her, he is willing to die rather than ever see her hurt or sad. While this eventually sways Aoi's guardian Miyabi to his side, their deal is almost never a settled one.

A tenuous arrangement is made with Aoi's parents, one of whom fiercely wants her to accept a new fiance now that Kaoru is by choice heir to nothing. The two will live on a property with two houses, one a mansion, and one a small boarding house. Whether this would have eventually swayed Aoi's father is rendered moot when girls Kaoru knows from college make their way into the boarding house as tenants, with the rules of the premise deal keeping the couple quiet on who they are to each other.

The other girls could be annoying, but each are unique in their own way, and for the most part, end up just as devoted to Aoi as Kaoru. They commit plot-driving faux pas after faux pas, but its never the Gilligan syndrome, and one refreshing change comes as Kaoru is one of the few harem leads to have awkward encounters with the ladies around him and yet never get struck or labeled pervert for it (there is one moment, but it is a huge subversion). The one most people seem to remember is American Tina Foster, who while being very Texan, also manages to avoid nearly every stereotype of Texans and Americans. Some very beautiful but sad moments emanate from her character.

One moment that might be too much involves the young character Chika and her same-aged friends, but it is played well. This series excels in not only showing what happens to the characters, but why it does and where it all leads to. There is almost no filler or throwaway moments. Even two of the arguable villains of the piece are given depth.

Ai Yori Aoshi is a fairy tale, but its the raw version of the fairy tale you knew as a child, re-read as an adult in its original form. Fans of earn your happy ending, please apply here.

"Her name was Lucy. She was gifted with tremendous power, and cursed with it as well. She was a dangerous enemy, and a good friend."

Ok, so that quote is not from Elfen Lied, and her name was Terra, not Lucy. But then again, Lucy's name wasn't Lucy or Nyu, either--but I digress.

How do you have sympathy for, let alone like, someone who does the things she so often and so casually does? I think its because not only do we get to see how she got that way, but how this isn't always an excuse. She can be an utter asshole in both her ... main personas, and to be fair, her childhood method for trying to avoid becoming openly angry was neither healthy nor practical. Humankind may have started young Lucy off, but she followed through with some spectacular errors that mark her off as being all too Human. She is so badly alienated from Humanity she may as well be an alien, but quoth the Possum, We Have Met The Enemy And He Is Us.

Only in the sheltered universe of a run-down former restaurant do we find Humanity at its best. Flawed, but caring. The male lead is dense about feelings. The secondary female lead knows why the male lead is dense, and that he has a damned good reason to be so, but she still chastises him for it. The tortured innocent they take in spends a lot of time being wrongly suspicious of her new host while seeking the affections of the one man who may be as violent as Lucy herself. A girl with horns like Lucy pines for the makeshift father who permitted her to spend her life as a lab rat. Another girl is crushed spiritually and made weak by her father's efforts to save her from a danger he doesn't tell her of till she stands up to him - an act which so enraged him years before this, it started the whole cycle.

Then there is our anti-heroine. Before the first half of the series is done, we have seen her murder many, as Angelus said to Buffy, with a song in her heart and a smile on her face. Two of those permanently ensure that the one she loves will be out of reach. What she does to a complete innocent in the first chapter is wrong on so many levels, it can't be counted.

Yet the dense one gave both the murderer and the tsundere the best memories of their childhoods, and is a genuinely nice guy who always tries his best. The tsundere gives all she has as well, and treasures all those who live with her, even her bloody rival. The tortured innocent not only gets past her suspicions, but is successful in reaching the violent man's better nature. The other girl with horns redeems her fallen 'Papa' and is a joy to read. The crushed girl refuses to stay so, despite more than one setback--including a squicky assault by the hero/villain's good side.

Our hero/villain had the option to make better choices : she simply didn't have a lot of them, and she lacked any social tools to make them with. One small betrayal - really done to protect her fragile feelings - reads the same as a much larger, more deliberately hurtful one, and suddenly, her hopes of easy redemption are lost to her own fury and instability. She becomes a monster because we told her to be one, but then she herself runs with the ball, this Lucy becoming her own Charlie Brown, making the same bad choices over and over again, despite knowing better.

So that is why I see Elfen Lied as a masterpiece, its not-so-hot art aside. It is a warts-and-all kind of story, and nobody has any business being perfect. The moral are flawed, the amoral are forced to care, and the master villains make logistically dicey choices that bite back hard on them. And as an aside for EL-Anime viewers : Almost every WTF? moment will be filled in if you read through. There are one or two dropped storylines at the very end, and not all characters are given true final fates. But then again, if Elfen Lied is a masterpiece, no masterpiece is ever truly perfect.

This series should get a 10 overall, but the final 'big' adventure (not the grand finale) left a bad taste in my mouth. I won't say more than that it involved visiting the home of one of the mains, and it seemed rushed (perhaps by the mangaka's work on then-new Negi) and made me resent even the very sweetest character, something I thought impossible.

There are times you can adapt, and there are times you so need the full story. One example is the later seasons of M*A*S*H*. These were already weaker stories than the earlier seasons, and syndicated cuts bled them harder than most shows. ... Another example is Denethor. If LOTR proved to be filmable, Steward Denethor may have been the exception. How could a film not devoted to him alone successfully show how he is a dark counterpoint to Aragorn and Faramir, the embodied flaws of the Great Race Of Numenor while still being magnificent in those flaws?

Love Hina is that for the manga versus the anime, perhaps more so than any other mainstream series. Do you want to know why this guy stuck around, and why the ladies allowed him to? Do you want a Naru and Motoko who don't seem to channel 90's/2000's US sitcom wives, or conversely a Keitaro who doesn't seem to channel their idiot man-child husbands? Do you want actual sexual tension between Keitaro and his youngest harem members (without crossing any bad lines)? Yes, this Keitaro takes beat-downs, a good many of them unfair, but he doesn't seem a worthless wimp while his (evolving) suitors aren't always smash-smash pervert-pervert baka-baka witches. Even at their most tense, the characters all have genuine affection for each other. Only Kitsune really suffers, never getting her own arc and at times almost being to the exception to the 'more depth' defense. These ladies will annoy you and this guy will make you cringe. But they have normal days, and support each other, not merely when it counts, but pretty much anytime they can-and even the sweetest character has her flaws, some coming from her open affection for the male lead.

Until technology enables fan-authors to use the anime models for a full-on manga adaptation, the Flanderization and Up to 11 nature of the anime (which inspires most of the Naru-hate we know) leaves it looking like a pretty picture and not much more. Even those who dislike the ending and a certain coupling outcome will be at least shown why the mangaka went that way.

But as to the final big adventure, it was to me as bad as the anime on almost all fronts, at times incomprehensible, and made all but two harem members look like horrible jerks, even with the premise's built-in Karma Houdini for their actions. Myself, I wrote a fixfic, though I hope never a vicious one. The grand finale regains its footing, and then some. But I can't shake the bad incongruent taste of that last big adventure, and for me that dials a 10 down to a 9--9 and 1/2 if I had that option. You will love Love Hina, a series so strong, its mains were likely homaged/parodied/deconstructed for the mains in Elfen Lied.

How to explain the Elfen Lied anime?

There's an old (to most of you, ancient) Marx Brothers routine wherein Chico and Harpo (the mock-Italian-sounding and the silent curly-haired one) are spying on Groucho (the character model for Bugs Bunny) for a foreign ambassador. Naturally, they are doing this ineptly, as seen in this sequence :

Chico : Monday, we go to the ballgame, but he fool us, he no show up. Tuesday, he go to the ballgame, but we fool him--we no show up. Wednesday was a Double-Header - nobody show up. Thursday, it rained. There was no game, so we stayed home and listened ... to it over the radio.

Watching Elfen Lied, particularly without benefit of the manga's backstory and info, can be like trying to follow Chico's logic in that scene. It still manages to do a very good job within its limitations, but this kind of thing is the reason why a generation of SF/F fans became leery of committing to 'quest' shows - just as they get good, the cancellation notices go out. As someone who has spent a lot of time and effort nailing down the fine details, let it just be said that the overwhelming majority of the 'Huh?'', 'Who Is That?' and 'WTF?' moments are completely answered by the manga. But the manga is not the anime.

The series is gorgeous visually, and the music brings it home. This is a very dark story with pinpricks of brilliant light breaking through. It is very much not for everyone, and I say this as a very big fan of the series in both versions. As said elsewhere, those first ten minutes will decide what you do after, view it or spurn it. Love it though I do, the anime is not a masterpiece. Too much depends on info someone who doesn't read the manga (or the Series Wiki) can never have, and there are even blatant plotholes Roy Thomas couldn't cover (again showing my age). But so much is conveyed so well, and one of the first real character deaths in the series is a good example of defying viewer expectations. I recommend everyone watch it, but I cannot say that everyone will enjoy it, and for those with kids around, be it known that while the backstory of one of the Human characters is sadly realistic, it may actually be all the more brutal for its realism. Also, there are four characters you will likely hate beyond all measure in the protagonists' backstory. You'll know them when you see them.

BTW, for crit of Kouta/Yuka, let me offer up two non-spoiler bits : Cousin marriage is legal in Japan, while still being rare nowadays, and since the anime chooses to pick up every last hit Yuka gives Kouta from the manga but in a shortened timeframe, she can seem Naru-esque when she really isn't.

You don't have to love it, but I honestly can see no reason to hate it, and there is much to recommend here, so long as you prepare yourself. If you don't like it, then you're not dumb, and neither is the one who says its a masterpiece.