Gunslinger Girl -Il Teatrino- | 2008 | 13eps + 2ovas | ??/10
I've seen a lot of screwed up anime in my life. Sometimes willingly, sometimes accidentally. But I've got to say, the Gunslinger Girl series has to be the most disturbing anime I've subjected my punching bag of a psyche to. I watched the original first season back in 2008, and I remember now, almost a decade later, being abhorred at the premise of Gunslinger Girl. I planned then to watch the second season directly after, but got distracted I guess. So here we are nearly in 2017, and I finally got around to it. Guess what? I find this show just as fucked up now as I did back then.
So here's the setup; Italy's government has seen fit to abduct prepubescent girls and turn them into slave assassins. These girls are brainwashed to forget their past, hypnotized to always obey their handlers, have most of their bodies' bones and muscles replaced with cybernetic enhancements, and trained relentlessly to handle firearms often bigger then they are. They are forced to kill with no free will, acting as cold calculating death lolis, and conditioned to never feel remorse for their actions. If anything, they are neurologically patterned to enjoy murder. And yet when the girls aren't killing, they tend to act like normal kids. The dichotomy is never less than surreal.
These little girls are directed by "handlers", men who are in their 30s apparently. Handlers typically treat their cyborg girls barely better than dogs. Commanding them to train relentlessly, assassinate without question, and to suppress their emotions. Occasionally some handlers develop a slight father-daughter complex with their girl... which to me came across as further psychological subterfuge to subvert their free will. Most disturbing of all, is when a girl starts to develop a crush on their handler... and some handlers are not above exploiting those feelings to exert ever more dominance.
Why would the Italian government sanction such a program? The idea is simply young girls make better secret assassins then a more obvious adult would. In reality the attraction for the demographic (seinen viewers) is to simultaneously get their loli fetish fulfilled while also drinking in the violence. However the ecchi factor here is almost non-existent, no panty shots or nipple slips, thankfully, considering the girls here are kids and all. But the vague idea that the handlers sometimes molest or sexually exploit their girls is insinuated once in a while.
I suppose that myself being a father to a daughter makes Gunslinger Girl's concept more reprehensible to me than someone who wasn't. But no matter how you slice it, a secret government program about turning little girls into murder machines to fight terrorists or rebels is just disgusting. And the fact that an actual anime studio produced not one, but two series of this crazy shit, proves that there was a callous demographic large enough to lucratively sustain this absurdity without qualms. Maybe it's just me, but I find so many aspects of Gunslinger Girl disturbing on multiple levels, that I can't even properly rate this series. I only watched it out of pure masochistic curiosity, on much the same level as say watching a documentary on war crimes would provide.
