Earth Maiden Arjuna/YMMV

• Awesome Music: The whole soundtrack is amazing. Unexpected thing, because the soundtrack was made by Yoko Freakin' Kanno, but when "Kakusei" comes on during episode 8, well damn.
• Harsher in Hindsight: This anime was created at the turn of the millennium, and it makes a lot of dramatised and allegorical predictions about the kind of effect mankind has had on the earth coupled with the supposition of how natural disasters and destruction will become more prevalent in the future as nature attempts to "correct the imbalance". Despite the obviously fictional context, the suggestion of the potential of human suffering at the hands of natural disasters cuts very close to the bone, particularly in the wake of hurricane Katrina, the tidal wave in Haiti, the hurricane in Chille, cyclone Yasi, and, as of 2011, the earthquake and subsequent tidal wave and nuclear instability in Japan. It is fairly obvious from the outset that this anime isn't based on a pointedly cautionary warning or a "We told you so" type underlay - it more draws on a discussion of naturalistic ethics and principles in an existential context, looking at the place of the human body and mind within the harmony of nature rather than anything else (with some very long Author Tracts and Character Filibusters to that effect) - but from 2011 looking back, it does gain a far harsher backlighting in retrospect.