Parallelisms between Elfen Lied and Frankenstein (a very long part 2)

One would be mistaken, however, to label them through-and-through villains because Lucy and the Creature do vacillate between their moral extremes, and there is much to show for the good in them, however little left there may be at the conclusion of the novel and show. Lucy’s foil, Nyuu, who emerges after a critical gunshot injury to her head incurred from her escape from the Facility, marks a stark contrast to her heartless-killer persona whereas the Creature’s last deed of kindness- saving a girl from certain drowning, occurred right after the rejection by the DeLaceys. Moreover, however steeped in bloodshed they may be, the Creature and Lucy have certain people they will never kill- namely Victor (the creator) and Kouta (the first person to have shown prolonged care and concern for Lucy). The debt of gratitude that Lucy holds and the Creature’s inability to murder his father endues them with a sentience and humanity of sorts.

Ironically, it is also Victor and Kouta who are partially responsible for the misdeeds of the Creature and Lucy. Victor’s abandonment of the Creature when “the beauty of [his] dream (experiment) vanished” and his non-compliance to the reasonable request of providing a mate drives the Creature into an abyss of despair, which his marriage to Elizabeth only serves to aggravate, so much so that the Creature is determined to desolate Victor’s future and fill him with the same miseries he underwent. Similarly, Kouta’s benign lie to Lucy that about the gender of his festival companion, and Lucy’s surge of jealousy and wretchedness when she discovers otherwise, leads her to wrongly conclude that he had never liked her from the start and toyed with her as a person might an amusing, exotic animal. This extinguished her only source of hope and resurrected the malice she incubated upon the death of her pet—she murders Kouta’s father and sister in cold blood , and the psychological ripples return to haunt her and Kouta for years to come.

Revenge is a dominant theme in both works. Lucy gains a thirst for killing after Kouta’s act of betrayal in her eyes, as she finds herself no longer able to trust agents of the human world, and sets about to create the world in which she alone and her kind can live in peace, acquiescing to the suggestions that her devilish id (to borrow a Jungian term) presses upon her. She increasingly kills without hesitation, with greater efficiency and frequency when she comes to terms with her power to create pain and serves payback to humans for the torment she suffered in her formative years. The Creature, too, after his symbolic asphyxiation of William (Victor’s younger brother), discovers with devilish delight that “[he]… can create misery”, that man is as mortal as he is, maybe less, and proceeds to wreak havoc in his fiendish excess. Yet, just as Lucy is able to revert to Nyuu, her innocent child-like identity redolent of untainted past self, the Creature offers a pact of conciliation to Victor, to “quit the neighborhood of man” and cease being the scourge that he is, in return for a mate that Victor eventually refuses.

In a crude sum-up, Frankenstein and Elfen Lied portray separate but not dissimilar stories which offer a thought-provoking rebuke of man’s tendency to self-harm. Whether it be diabolical experiments that reek of unethical meddling and misguided hubris or the alienating xenophobia particular to an arrogant species named homo sapiens, readers are challenged to reconsider the tenuous assumption of man as ‘good’. Not always so, it seems. At times, it appears that man’s capacity for compassion is severely suspect—who’s to blame then, when works of evil return to plague their author? As the adage goes, treat others as you would have them reciprocate. If nothing else, at least take this away as a valuable lesson.

Parallelisms between Elfen Lied and Frankenstein (Part 1)

To detractors of anime who brand it as a childish field of theatre, who scorn at the supposed intellectual want of people hooked on it, who dismiss any said production as undeserving of inclusion in the great literary pantheon, Elfen Lied, and other works of worthy literary value proves otherwise. A thematic and clinical diagnosis of Elfen Lied and upheld classic ,Frankenstein, would throw up palpable similarities which resound through them– for so much are they alike . For one, they are very much Gothic productions, steeped in the same dark, grey constructs that characterize the genre, speckled with loss, pain and unhallowed inscrutability.

Thematic analogies abound. Social alienation is an evil that runs unchallenged in the works, shaping subsequent malevolence in the “villainous protagonist” who emerges as he/she is, not so much as an inherent by-condition of birth or existence, but the multitudinous social experiences that teach them to abhor the perpetrators. Physical traits differentiate Lucy and the Creature from their human counterparts; whereas in the case of the former, the distinction is minor enough to be cloaked, the Creature has no affordance of such ‘luxury’, his deformity being obtrusively conspicuous. Either way, revelation of their physical abnormalities evokes generally disgust and revulsion, socially conditioned responses that drive them to despair and eventually vengeance.

It is noteworthy that Lucy and the Creature begin as essentially benevolent characters, and it is society that instructs them in ways which eventually “plague [their] inventor (Macbeth)”. Lucy is a willing scapegoat who bears the brunt of the other children’s bullying and harassment at the orphanage, believing stoically that unhappy victims must require unhappier sufferers to efface and plaster over their own pain. The Creature’s first contacts with humankind resulted in his being grievously injured by projectiles and the like. Both protagonists/antagonists experience their fair share of social exclusion and marginalization, being outcasts and “abortions” that have no place on Earth, the Creature having no biological parent while Lucy’s were never shown, both accursed to wander kinless. The protagonists also undergo a snapping point in their transformation into cold-blooded antagonists- for the Creature, it is the ultimate act of rejection by the DeLaceys while for Lucy, it is the callous butchery of her pet.