I disagree.
Elfen Lied uses a shoujo art style typically intended for an audience of young girls to tell a horror story where committing war crimes doesn't automatically make the character one of the irredeemable "bad guys".
... Using that art style for horror was done well before Elden Lied, and adult shows using standard anime art styles is... standard.
Daily reminder that anime has a huge adult audience in Japan, and the art styles of adult oriented anime are usually not too far from the art style of regular anime.
Probably not anymore, because old, but it absolutely used to be at the top of everyone's list of shows any aspiring otaku just had to watch. As for it sucking, yeah, it does, but I'm not going to get into it again because I've already written multiple reviews of it. The pattern I tend to see is that the people who like the show and its protagonist tend to identify with him.
NGE is a great metaphor for what happens to depressed and lonely males in a society without healthy male role models; Shinji is not a role model or a good person.
But just because the story doesn't deal with masculine men like TTGL doesn't make it a bad anime.
This just makes me think you must've hung out in very different corners of the fandom than I did. Elfen Lied was absolutely seen as infamous, not only because of the graphic violence, but because of its graphic nudity, and how often those things tended to overlap. It and something like Higurashi were quite the shock to a lot of fans, at least of my generation and younger, who missed out on the stuff that was honestly way more graphic that had come out earlier. Incidentally, I have problems with this show, too, which don't really have much to do with any of that, but it is selling that show short to claim it wasn't infamous in any kind of way.
I only ever read the Higurashi VN, but overall I found it tame. Higurashi's anime is generally considered a bad adaptation though.
I'm fairly young for this forum (young enough I didn't grow up watching Dragonball at all) and it didn't shock me.
Elfen Lied is absolutely worthy of infamy. And it's another one of those shows that was fairly huge in its own time, but seems to have dropped off the face of the Earth. Unlike Eva, which is supposedly over but could always come back after the universe ends like Future Diary.
Oh wait.
Future Diary.
Yeah...
I'd say Future Diary is right inside the line for true infamy. There's a lot of heinous things going on, but there's always a character around to have some moral indignation or "do the right thing" in reply. As opposed to Elfen Lied, where we're supposed to sit back and accept Lucy's present state of excess violence as righteous payback for abuses in her past, and as relatively sane and humane when compared to the other Diclonius.
No, we are not supposed to sit back and accept Lucy's excess violence, someone didn't read the manga and finish the story.
Forgot about that one.
Yuno Gasai: "Absolutely batshit axe crazy, complete with axe."
Lucy had an excuse and showed at least some restraint. Yuno ... not so much.
Someone hasn't had a bipolar mother. I'm not surprised Yuno went insane at all.
Also the idea of a crazy ride or die bitch is kinda hot to some people. That doesn't mean I'd want to date someone that insane and extreme in real life, but its functionally no different than having a main girl in a show that's some other exaggeration of a type.
That reminds me, we need to list almost everything made by Gainax:
FLCL
P&S
Kill la Kill.
Darling in the FRANXXX.
All infamous for different reasons, from acid trip, to total random over the top insanity, to giant robots one would actually like to bang.
Excluding Kill la Kill, none of those are good.
But I feel like calling them infamous is stretching the definition.
Like, is NGE or FLCL really INFAMOUS in the same way that Bible Black or Boku no Pico is? The idea is ridiculous on the face of it.