YMMV / RahXephon

• Awesome Music:
  • The entire soundtrack, composed by Ichiko Hashimoto. Yoko Kanno did the opening theme "Hemisphere", sung by Maaya Sakamoto. Here it is without the Moment of Awesome action drowning it out.
  • "Hemisphere", as heard in Super Robot Wars MX.
  • "The Garden of Everything", which is a sung as a duet between Maaya Sakamoto and Steve Conte, with the former actually singing in English alongside the latter, and also singing a hauntingly beautiful rendition of "Polovtsian Dances" as part of the main chorus.
• Complete Monster: Commander Masayoshi Kuki, the former superior of Jin Kunugi and the ruthless and heartless military leader of the Mu, is willing to kill thousands for power. Originally on the side of humanity, Commander Kuki forced his then-subordinate Kunugi to launch a nuclear strike against a Mu attack, knowing it would kill many innocent civilians, including Kunugi's daughter. He then defected to the Mu after getting trapped in Tokyo Jupiter when the Mu took over, becoming the military leader of the government. Spearheading the Dolem invasions, he was responsible of the many deaths from those invasions. When the Mu decided to go full-force against humanity, Kuki leads the initial charge, ordering everyone to surrender or face the military might of the Mu, using an unsuspecting city as an example by obliterating it and its citizens. He then leads the attack against the TERRA main base, where he found out that his former subordinate became its leader. Amused, Kuki decide to sadistically taunt Kunugi about his past sins, claiming he alone is responsible for the nuclear strike and belittling him as a weak and useless commander as he slowly destroys TERRA's defense system to kill Kunugi. Despite his minimal appearance, Kuki shows himself as a remorseless monster who would do anything for power.
• Faux Symbolism: Incredibly so. Some are:
  • The intro sequence to the show is done with the Overture to Die Meistersinger as the Background Music.
  • A recurring sequence (arguably a form of leitmotif) is, when Ayato meets Reika, she is in a higher place than he is with her back turned to him, wearing a yellow dress. She then turns towards him and smiles. This is sometimes coupled with a picture of wings behind her that makes it look like she has wings.
    • She's also wearing a scarf. When caught by the wind, it looks like wings.
• Genius Bonus: Things make more sense with knowledge of Mayan Mythology and concepts.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The Kabul Olympics line in Episode 3 in light of the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in August 2021.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: An offhand comment indicates that sometime by 2024 skateboarding became an Olympic sport. In real life, skateboarding made its Olympic debut during Tokyo 2020.
• Moe: Haruka displays shades of this at times.
• Narm: Sometimes, Ayato shouting "Rah Xephoooon!" at the top of his lungs isn't as impressive as it should be.
  • When he and Haruka fly into the room of Rah, Ayato fidgeting in his flight suit and yelling "I've gotta go" makes it sounds like his destination is somewhere other than the RahXephon.
  • Overlaps with the example for Suspiciously Similar Song - a whole bunch of fans (and trolls) raged back and forth about perceived similarities between RahXephon and Neon Genesis Evangelion. It turns out that The Chariot is a copy of Evangelion's battle music.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: The most common criticism of the show is that it's a "rip-off" of Neon Genesis Evangelion, which is unavoidable given the similarities. Even among people who like the show, its similarities to Evangelion are sometimes cited as a negative. The truth, of course, is a lot more complicated; it's essentially the Digimon to Evangelion's Pokemon.

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