Elfen Lied Thoughts

This semi-obscure series has the honor of being mentioned as an inspiration for Stranger Things, in its narrative use of interpersonal relationships versus sinister research facilities, tied into mysterious superpowers.

Elfen Lied follows the amnesiac Lucy, a tragic superpowered mass-murderer, as she is found and taken in by the taciturn Kouta and his cousin Yuta. Lucy has reverted to an infantile personality, only calling herself "Nyu". The cast grows to have Kurama, a well-intentioned scientist at the mysterious facility Lucy escaped from, Mayu, an abused girl who also comes to live with Kouta and Yuta, and Nana, a happy child with the same powers as Lucy. The story expands.

SPOILER:

It's revealed that Lucy was Kouta's childhood friend. His trauma comes from the mysterious death of his family and his repressed memories surrounding the event. It turns out that she was the one who brutally murdered Kouta's sister and father in front of him, in an extremely disturbing scene, because she felt abandoned. The petty innocence and delusions of a child killed two people and scarred the other two for life.

Elfen Lied is a transgressive series. I found the main character of that series, Lucy, and her conflicts, extremely compelling. I’m not sure exactly what it was. She was a tragedy, with some moments of happiness. She was someone socially alienated; disconnected from the rest of society. She ends up balancing the line between villain and victim; she had extreme power and subsequently and understandably made mistakes, though she regrets few of them. And then she has to live with it. She’s someone who can’t go back. She is alone. Her mental illness blinds her and binds her. Additionally, she suffers from a kind of DID, combined with a biological inclination to target humanity. She was bullied and this evolves into persecution of her superpowered being as she matures. She is a “Yandere” archetype, seen in other series, most notably being Deadman Wonderland and Future Diary.

Lynn Okamoto has another manga work “Brynhildr in the Darkness”, a colossal failure with plot-threads that were either abandoned or went nowhere, doesn’t come close to the successes of Elfen Lied, the most notable of them being Lucy’s character. However, this not to forget Elfen Lied's unfortunate copious problems. Many of the other characters and supporting cast are simply undeveloped, including the ultimate antagonist of the series. The violence is considered gratuitous by some; I find it a commentary about the naked horrors of this world.

There's also the additional question of nature vs. nurture. Lucy is extremely misanthropic, caused by both intense bullying as a child and persecution while older. Her only friends were Kouta and a dog she befriended before it was beaten to death in front of her. She has intense anger against the world, which is how nurture has made her. However, she's also a mysterious progenitor of this new subspecies of humanity possessing powers of seeming levitation and marked with horns. She feels a biological imperative to kill humanity to survive. In the manga, she experiences this internal voice telling her to kill and mistrust, akin to schizophrenia. The tragedy is that she's completely alone in her mental illness.