Perhaps it’s not meant to be deep but rather different in how it represents itself?

If anything I think the author wrote a story he would want to read. It was actually a pretty cool idea. Like I said in the actual article he started out with minor conflicts. He had all of these characters stressed out by their normal lives and then threw a real problem at them and everything changed. If anything he wanted to weave together a bunch of characters who were ultimately changed by the monster (and thus forced to chase the monster). In doing that he was slowly able to unravel how society created someone so terrible (and reiterate the message that we create our own monsters) and how that terrible force can become the somewhat negative focus of our lives. Unfortunately none of the characters were really able to break that chain so I can’t say it’s wonderful.

It might be deep to some people now that I think about it. I guess it all depends on whether or not you’re ready for that message at that time in your life. When I was in high school I was obsessed with the idea of society creating its own monster (and even drafted a book on it) only to get tired of the idea later (since it is somewhat overused). I think with the setup of the novel they could have accomplished a lot more. It seems like only the monster was an interesting character while the rest of them were somewhat similar and eventually boring. The fact that you could almost point to characters and say “good guy” “bad guy” based on the fact they all seemed to share some kind of overreaching moral principal made it almost annoying as a reader. I guess I would say there’s really no depth because the author seemed to think he had everything figured out and was absolutely right… I don’t know if that makes sense.

In which case I would say that the author was trying to be deep, but his failure kind of made it hard for me as a reader. There were some cool ideas and some of the elements were brilliant (including the representation), but in the end a lot of the story will be pretty forgettable.

I think you’ll enjoy it though… Maybe (though I don’t know whether it will have the elements that normally draw you).

The characters in this stay pretty two-dimensional. They don’t really grow or develop into something different. I was vastly disappointed that Nina’s (Anna) only role in this anime seemed to be fainting after remembering a small piece of her past at convenient times. The deepest part of this show actually came from the children’s stories written by the mysterious guy who had lots of pen names. They took a theme and expressed it in an interesting, almost artistic way. Almost all of the other elements of this series I could tell you where they ripped it from. It’s definitely a show that anime doesn’t normally represent, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call that depth. I don’t know why I feel the need to disagree so adamantly with your friend; I just don’t want to give undeserved credit where it isn’t due. It’s good, but not that good .