This anime was just about everything you could do to screw over a little girl's life x.x. The girls were beaten physically, spiritually, mentally, the whole nine yards, and though I enjoyed the conveyed message, I was a bit disgusted at the lack of tact portraying it. This show didn't need a ton of nudity, fetishes, and violence to portray the inhumane treatment and their fucked up existence. Good story telling and proper allusions can adequately set the mind up to paint a more vivid picture. Instead the story has large segments of people just getting ripped about and then switches back to these extended arcs of innocence, which would have been more powerful without the excessive violence.
Past a certain point, the tons of blood and decapitations just make the idea seem zanny and cartoony, almost like a thirteen year old seeing how much he could get away with. It's kinda like what the SAW Franchise did with the torture traps. The first few did a stellar job at portraying the tense harrowing horror of being faced with your own demise, but after recycling it multiple times, with half a dozen entries the effect lost that verbose ring viewers got when they saw it. It doesn't take Elfen Lied to long to lose that actually. Honestly at one point I thought the author was just seeing how much shit could ironically happen to the same group of people just to fuck with me.
All in all though, its not a bad anime, short and simple just like this idea should have been. I wish the blood and over the top manslaughter was replaced with powerful allusions and symbolism, I feel someone had to get a kick out of the torture so maybe this wasn't for me. Though the anime covered some common and other powerful tropes, I can't earnestly say I'd recommend it x.x, there are just so many other animes that don't need vulgar scenes to produce a strong idea.
