Earth Maiden Arjuna

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Why do you have to kill?

Earth Maiden Arjuna (Earth Girl Arjuna) is an Anime written and directed by Shoji Kawamori and produced by Satelight and Bandai Visual. With a total of twelve episodes with an original run between January 9, 2001 ? March 27, 2001 on TV Tokyo. One additional episode was included on the DVD but was included in subsequent reruns.

The story follows Juna Ariyoshi, a Japanese high school girl chosen to be the Avatar of Time and entrusted with saving the dying Earth. Opening with her trip to the beach where an accident results in her death. As Juna's spirit leaves her body, Juna sees the dying Earth, the planet's suffering is visualized by worm-like creatures, the Raaja. A young boy named Chris appears before Juna and offers to save her life if she will help the planet, she agrees and is resurrected. The series chronicles Juna's attempts to save the planet with help from international organization SEED.

Think Captain Planet and the Planeteers crossed with an existential discourse on human's role in nature, An Inconvenient Truth and a lot of angst. And Taoism, lots of Taoism.

Tropes used in Earth Maiden Arjuna include:

• Author Filibuster: Chris has a checklist on Taoism and crosses subjects off the list everytime he opens his mouth.
• Author Tract: Word of God that this series expresses his ideas on several subjects, like, for example, natural farming and ecology.
• Berserk Button: it might be a good idea to not be in the vicinity when you're telling the girl with excessively powerful psychic powers that you're going to leave her country to die. Or at least, find a way not to be in the building when she levels it.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Don't mess with Chris.
• Bratty Half-Pint: Cindy
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Cindy towards Chris.
• Contemplate Our Navels: most of the series is an existential discourse on nature and humanity. What do you think?
• Crucified Hero Shot: Chris
• Cryptic Conversation: Chris
• Deconstruction: It looks like an average Magical Girl Warrior show... for an episode.
• Don't Touch It, You Idiot!: Don't experiment with the incredibly dangerous substances, please? You might bring about the end of the freaking world!
• Effortless Amazonian Lift: Arjuna can hold Tokio in her arms without even noticing the strain.
• Facial Markings: Arjuna's bindi
• Gaia's Lament
• Gaia's Vengeance: The Day of Reckoning is nigh!
• Hollywood Global Warming
• Green Aesop
• Harmony Versus Discipline: Actively changing Nature to solve problems with Science only causes bigger and bigger problems.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters
  • Befitting the Green Aesop, there are scenes where humanity at large is portrayed as either assholes or destructive ignoramuses.
  • Mostly jerkasses. Moral of the story: Don't try to use ridiculously unsafe and possibly malignant techniques to experiment with radioactive substances!
  • Towards the latter parts of the show, where Raaja-infested Japan is quarantined, it's hinted that the outside world eventually abandoned both the victims and the remnant government as a means for a cover-up. Of course, Arjuna isn't pleased at the slightest.
• Humongous Mecha: The Earth Guardian Ashra, near the end of the series it ends up moving somewhere faster than 16,000 miles an hour.
• In Harmony with Nature: the point of the series.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Cindy
• Let's Get Dangerous: SEED thought Juna was an incompetent high school girl who could be easily managed. And then they made her mad.
• Lonely Rich Kid: Tokio
• Magical Girl Warrior
• Mama Bear: don't threaten Juna's friends, family, or country. If you are alive after having completed the actual threat, you will live to regret it.
• Meganekko: Sayuri
• Messianic Archetype: Chris, then Juna
• Mysterious Waif: Chris
• Nature Spirit
• No Pregger Sex: Inverted with squicky results.
• Psychic Powers
• Rage Against the Mentor: Juna does this a lot due to Chris's love of being cryptic. It doesn't help that when she actually takes his statements at face value, he gets mad at her.
• Rule of Symbolism: The communion scene at the end after the Heroic Sacrifice, just to stress the religious parable. Funnily enough, the symbology is Christian, while the rest of the anime is a Taoist tract (with a heroine named after a Hindu hero and lots of Hindu imagery scattered across the series, for good measure).
• Science Is Bad: The wasteful, reckless science-driven modern thinking caused Japan being overrun by humongous worms. Makes a nice Fantastic Aesop, too.
• Sekaikei Genre
• Sink or Swim Mentor: Chris is rather tight-lipped on the subject of exactly what Juna's supposed to be doing or how she should accomplish it. He usually just chucks her into the action and tells her to figure it out herself, because that's the only way she will learn.
• Space Whale Aesop: If you screw up the environment, then giant worms will rise up from the ocean, rampage across the Earth, and... provide the starving people with an alternate food source.
• Squat's in a Name: All the Hinduist name dropping and symbolism it's just that: this Arjuna and the Hindu hero of the Baghavad Gita share nothing but being archers.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Sandwich: SO MANY TIMES! I'll have her Meriken burger, damnit!
• The Thing That Goes Doink
• Transformation Sequence: Complete with Stock Footage, although it only gets used a few times.
• Yoko Kanno
• Wrong Genetic Sex: One of the female ecology activists has this, with the implication that it was the result of the polluted environment.