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.
