The Vision of Escaflowne/YMMV

""Seriously? She could be the queen of a magical kingdom, and instead she goes back to high school, subway molestation, and a glass ceiling as an OL?""
 * Americans Hate Tingle: Hitomi... The Italian Escaflowne fandom doesn't like her very much. The Latin-American fandom, on the other hand, worships her like a goddess.
 * Americans Love Escaflowne
 * The TV series bombed in the ratings during its run in Japan. It actually achieved much more mainstream success abroad. However, many, many Japanese manga and anime artists have cited it as a major influence.
 * This is more a case of Koreans Love Escaflowne, because of the success that the series saw in that particular country, it even influenced several moments in the Big Damn Movie, the clothing that Hitomi wears in the beastman village is called a chima, part of traditional korean garb.
 * Broken Base: Over the manga and The Movie. Many fans claim both are completely unnecessary. Others enjoy the lighter interpretation provided by the manga or the much, much darker, angstier and more emotionally jarring experience of the film.
 * Cliché Storm: Humongous Mecha? Check. Transforming Mecha? Check. Hot-Blooded pilot? Check. Catgirl? Check. Magical Girl? Check. Yet somehow, playing all this dead straight, it works. It works so awesomely.
 * Continuity Lock Out: Despite only being a twenty-six episode anime, the plot is so fast-paced and non-episodic that viewers who miss so much as one or two episodes are liable to find themselves confused. This may be one reason it did so poorly during its initial TV airing in Japan.
 * Crowning Music of Awesome: It's Yoko Kanno, what do you expect?
 * Die for Our Ship
 * Surprisingly, though the Clingy Jealous Girl does gets pot shots thrown at her by fans... the Casanova is actually the most bashed for getting in between The Hero and the Ordinary High School Student.
 * Millerna is an interesting inversion. This troper has met several fans who admit that they only don't hate her because she gets in between Allen and Hitomi.
 * Draco in Leather Pants: Dilandau, Folken. It doesn't help that both have tragic backstories and woobiness.
 * Fandom Gank: Some viewers had this kind of reaction to the ending:


 * Fridge Horror:
 * But given that we see, it's certainly implied to be so.
 * Jerkass Woobie: Dilandau Albatou
 * Macekre
 * The Escaflowne dub on FOX Kids.
 * Averted when The Movie aired on Adult Swim.
 * Mary Sue: Subverted. Hitomi starts off as an athletic fortune-telling cutie who is thrown into a fantasy world, obviously for purposes of ass-kicking and bringing forth a Love Dodecahedron... and then she spends half the series . And, as if that's not enough, she  in the end,.
 * Memetic Sex God: Everyone's a screaming, teenage fangirl for Allen.
 * Narm: There are times when Dilandau seems to have a Master's degree in this.
 * Peripheral Demographic: Escaflowne is officially a shoujo-targeted series, but the pedigree of Shoji Kawamori meant it was bound to attract quite a few male mecha fans.
 * Stoic Woobie: Folken
 * They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Did you expect to have any effect on the plot? Sorry. Aside from a couple mentions later on, it means nothing. This is just one example.
 * Too Cool to Live: Because if Balgus did survive, he'd probably solo the Escaflowne universe Master Asia style.
 * Values Dissonance: Allen's father neglected his wife and family because he fell in Love At First Sight with Hitomi's grandmother (or thought of her as his non-romatic soulmate) when she was briefly transported to Gaia, and doesn't realize he really loved his wife until he was dying in the snow. Fair enough, it's a classic tragic love story... except the object of his obsession was probably not fully out of puberty when he met her. Later, Allen proposes to 16-year-old Hitomi partly to resolve the Love Triangle with 14-year-old Millerna. In both cases the story treats this as "He's focusing on the wrong girl," not "Wait, she's how old?!"
 * It's a Justified Trope when we consider that Gaia's set of values are close to the mindset reigning in the Renaissance, where high-class women were expected to be already married by Hitomi and Millerna's age.
 * The Woobie: Hitomi, Van, and many others.