FLCL/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Alternate Character Interpretation: Naota's older brother. Is he a giant asshole that left everything just so he could be a baseball player? Or is he a nice guy who just isn't good with people?
  • Crazy Awesome: Everyone and everything, but especially Haruko.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome / Ear Worm: Much of the music due to the driving guitars and hyper-catchy refrains used, respectively.
    • "Ride on Shooting Star".
    • "I Think I Can" qualifies as well, helped along by being the song played during the last episode's climax.
    • "Hybrid Rainbow"
    • "Blues Drive Monster"
    • "Little Busters"
    • Really, Adult Swim commented during the show they believe FLCL has the best soundtracks of all their shows.
    • The fact that The Pillows accounted for almost the entirety of the show's soundtrack is probably a Crowning Moment for them.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Kitsurubami is very popular in the fandom for her minimal screen-time.
  • Faux Symbolism: A minor example, but the gigantic hand has a hole straight through its palm during episode 5 and the first half of 6, as if it had been nailed to a cross.
  • Freud Was Right:
    • Canti's gun, Naota's 'protrusions'... there's more phallic imagery than some hentai.
    • Haruko's reactions to her electric massage.
    • The manga adaptation was even more explicit about it.
  • Gateway Series: The soundtrack acts as the perfect gateway to The Pillows. As a gateway series to anime however, FLCL isn't exactly the best choice.
  • HSQ:
    • Episode 5: Haruko surfing on (in midair) and using a bass guitar to take down a multi-story five-armed gunman robot that's actually a giant hand (each "arm" is a finger) - while wearing a Playboy Bunny suit. That's not something you see every day, folks. The end of the series counts too.
    • Haruko wearing a Playboy Bunny suit during that batshit insane battle is actually a reference to one of the opening videos a group of amateur animators made for DAICON in 1982 and 1983 before they later formed Gainax. To drive the point home, Haruko even shouts "Daicon!" in that scene.
    • When Amarao opens fire on her in the barbershop, Haruko wields a razor and slices each and every bullet perfectly in half without effort. Cue dozens of Men in Black with machine guns storming the place, and Haruko proceeds to defeat all of them without breaking a sweat.

Amarao: ...you can't be real.

    • Episode 4: Naota saves the city from a hand-shaped robot satellite that falls from orbit and pitches a gigantic baseball-shaped bomb at the city, using an electric guitar that Haruko pulls from his head to bat it. Yeah.
    • Let's be honest: the entire series has an absurdly high HSQ.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Haruko feeding Naota to the Terminal Core, probably expecting that it would kill him, and knowing for certain that doing so could result in the demolition of the entire planet, all so she could "get what I want." It's worse in hindsight - she abandoned Naota like Amarao when she thought she had successfully extracted his power into Canti, and only returned when it became obvious that this wasn't the case.
  • Most Wonderful Sound: The 'BRNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGGG when Haruko's bass guitar hits something.
  • Nightmare Fuel: The scene with the (fake) Kamon corpse. "Sometimes you're the cat, sometimes you're the mouse."
  • This Is Your Premise on Drugs: The show does have its share of batshit insanity. And like a drug trip, you can find some nuggets of true brilliance while your housekeeper with a chainsaw engine powered guitar and robot that popped out of your head join you magic adventures.
  • Too Good to Last:
    • Only six episodes?
    • Invoked, In Japan it was supposed to be just a movie.
  • Toy Ship : Naota and Ninamori. At the very end, it's implied that they'll probably get together eventually if not almost immediately. It helps that it's definitely the healthiest male-female relationship on the show, and Ninamori herself always had the most sincere affection for Naota. In a Ship Tease, Ninamori rigs the play just so she and Naota get certain parts. Also the fact that she unashamedly reveals this to Naota while holding his hand.
  • Woolseyism: A significant portion of the dialogue had to be replaced for the English version, since the jokes would only make sense in Japanese, and they were replaced by comparable Western jokes and references. One example is the mention of Crystal Pepsi. In the Japanese version this was "Cherio Pop", a gimmicky Japanese soda that similarly sold terribly.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/FLCL/YMMV?oldid=1439472"