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.