YMMV / Gunslinger Girl

• Adaptation Displacement: To the point where many don't even know Teatrino's art style emulates the manga's early style, though it's still more brightly toned and moe than the manga.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Is Rico The Pollyanna or a Stepford Smiler? In her introductory anime episode witness her Troubled Fetal Position, the blank-faced expression as she kills her assigned targets followed by panic as she has to give one the Coup de Grâce (suggesting she's retreating into herself mentally rather than just being conditioned), and her sad smile when she kills Emilio; all imply she's in denial over how happy she is at the Agency.
• Angst? What Angst?:
  • Most cyborgs have their memories or their pre-Agency lives erased in order to remove the pain of past traumas (or make them easier to control, if you're cynical). Rico is unique in that she has full recollection of her time before she was given over to the Agency - which was not in itself a happy experience, with years crippled by birth defects and beset by quarrelling parents - and is not at all troubled by years wasted in a hospital bed or being possessed by the Agency.
  • It's justified in that Rico views the gift of mobility that the Agency has given her as well worth any suffering she has to put up with.
• Awesome Music:
  • The opening theme to season one, "Light Before We Land", introduced many viewers to Scottish band The Delgados.
  • The thunderous TEMA IV, which plays when Henrietta blasts the hell out of the roomful of bad guys in Episode 1.
  • The ending credits music, Apres un Reve by Gabriel Fauré.
• Broken Base: Is Gunslinger Girl Teatrino a good anime or is it a horrible sequel? A good portion of the hate is due to Adaptation Displacement as Teatrino is Truer to the Text than the original. However, many manga fans also hate it. It has very different characterization from the first anime, a completely different (and moe) art-style, and less accurate guns. It also brought back Angelica despite the first anime heavily implying she died at the end. For those who consider it a sequel instead of a second adaptation, that change completely ruined the tragedy of the ending.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: While Henrietta is ostensibly the focus character and the Henrietta-Guiseppe-Jean-MemoryOfEnrica plotline is the main narrative thrust of the work, fans at large have noticed over the years that the emotional impact, narrative depth, and generalized awesomeness of the series tends to get turned up to 11 any time Triela is involved in a scene or plotline. It's worth noting, Triela is the first of the girls we see "on the job". In season 2 of the anime, Triela is promoted to the lead.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception:
  • The title is "Gunslinger Girl", as in a singular child. It doesn't matter if there are several main girls.
  • Several cyborgs may look like boys but there officially are no male cyborgs.
• Fanon:
  • Even if the girls were to live into adulthood they wouldn't appear any older than they did when they were Conditioned; their growth is stunted.
  • Male children either don't have the emotional/mental capabilities to handle Conditioning or they're not allowed since people sympathize with little girls easier (for example, during a mission a boy going through stuff or being somewhere strange would be seen as up to no good or deemed suspicious).
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • The work of the some of the SWA staff prior to being recruited into the Agency.
  • Some fanfic writers tend to have original fratello teams in their stories to interact with those from canon.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: In America, the first season was a modest success on DVD. In Japan, it was sold as a pack-in bonus for the licensed video game.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The earlier deaths of Elsa and Lauro helped foreshadow the deaths of Henrietta and Jose.
  • Lega Nord's relevance in the early 2010s due to the refugee crisis from Africa/Middle East.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Olga's comments about how the girls would make excellent ballerinas, after Petra joins the team.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Averted. When Pinocchio decides to kill Aurora for walking in on his affairs once too many (and given that he's falling in with some pretty shady people, he had every right to be concerned), Franca orders him to not pull the trigger, thus preventing Pino from actually crossing the MEH.
  • Played straight by Ski Mask Guy in chapter 83, who crosses it just by showing up in front of Henrietta. The poor girl had lost her family to a couple of guys in ski masks, and just his appearance brought back those troubling memories and indirectly led to both her and Jose's deaths.
  • Dante was already established as a very bad man, but his personal MEH was orchestrating Sophie's death by car bomb, which also claimed everyone in the Croce family that wasn't named Jose or Jean.
• Narm: From Il Teatrino:
  Triela: I'M CYBERNETIC!!! And I was beaten by HUMAN HANDS!!!
• Paranoia Fuel: Two examples:
  • The Agency is trying to develop conditioning so it works safely and cheaply on adults. Do they intend using it for widespread civilian control in a country currently torn by violent internal divisions?
  • In Real Life, the Italian people have an intense hatred for terrorism and after the sudden end of the Years of Lead, (the terrorism emergency that caused said hatred), their law enforcement has a perfect success rate against terrorists.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: There exists a video game trilogy based on the anime for the Playstation 2, and neither of them are well-received or anywhere close to the source material's quality, what with their stiff animation, Cut and Paste Environments repeated a few dozen times in the same few levels, cookie-cutter enemy designs countable on one hand in each game (mooks are either wearing sunglasses, brown suits, or black suits) and mind-numbingly repetitive and generic gameplay. The game more or less feels like a fifth-rate Time Crisis clone, but in third person, but at least they used the awesome music from the anime.
• The Scrappy: Allesandro and Petra in the eyes of some fans, due to the Teacher/Student Romance aspect of their relationship.
• Spiritual Successor: The basic background of Lycoris Recoil is almost directly lifted from Gunslinger Girl: Orphaned girls are trained from a very young age to be assassins for a secret police force handling counter terrorism. Lycoris isn't as grim due to the cheerfulness of its main character.
• Values Dissonance: The story takes place in Italy, but any Italian would find all of the relationships unspeakably cold and distant since the author, in a classic case of cultural projection, has depicted the characters with Japanese reserve instead of Italian brio — even to the extent of them bowing on occasion. This becomes a bit of Fridge Brilliance for the relationships between the girls and the handlers/staff because it represents just how uncomfortable everyone is around these walking killing machines. And the distance between Giuseppe and Jean is part of the point, though many of the more background characters are straight examples.
• The Woobie: Several, even by the standards of the series depicting girls who suffered horrible acts even before being cyborgised:
  • As a consequence of being ill, Angelica excites a great deal of sympathy from many readers - to the extent that many were actually dissatisfied with her appearance in Il Teatrino. Although Angelica was alive at the equivalent point in the manga, the first series of the anime ended with her implied death and many considered her reintroduction to have spoiled a beautiful tragedy.
  • Elsa de Sica, who was so heavily conditioned that her love-alike feelings (which all of the girls share towards their respective handlers) became so strong as to turn into a straight-up obsession, with her handler Raulo being the centre of her everything. At the same time, Raulo is a jerk who pays no attention to the poor girl outside of the required minimum during their jobs. This Parental Neglect eventually caused Elsa to completely snap and first kill Raulo, then herself while walking in the park she was named after.

---