At our local anime club, one of the best shows this semester is Boogiepop Phantom. It’s a lot like Lain, only with more blood, the weirdness turned up five times, and the timeline put through a blender. In short, it’s awesome.

It’s extremely dark and depressing, with suicide and death and killing all over the place. In one story, a kinda nice loser who likes dating games is given a drug that screws up his mind until he starts confusing reality (specifically, a girl who works with him) and his games. It ends with his mind being totally destroyed. And this is one of the less depressing stories (don’t even get me started on what they do with the Pied Piper arc). With all this emphasis on messed up mental problems, I figure that I just have to get this series and put it to some grossly innapropriate music. I’m thinking that if I get all the footage of deranged smiles, I can make a really nasty AMV to “Happy Boys and Girls.”