WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! It’s rated 19 for a reason! It will give you a huge trauma! This anime is violent and is inappropriate for people that are repulsed easily by gruesome scenes! Please, if you are one of those people, don’t read this post and sue me, because I warned you!
I don’t remember, but it was club time when I first saw this anime (shhhhhh, it’s supposed to be a secret, but the chess club was so boring! I had nothing to do and I had to keep myself awake and I only watched one episode….). Actually, my friend was watching it and I asked him what anime it was. He answered me “Elfen Lied.” At first, I was like “what?” because Elfen Lied is actually German. It means ‘the song of the elves.’ Frankly, I don’t see how this anime can be called “the song of the elves” since it’s really violent, gruesome, and gory.
Well.. There are scenes such as this….
and this…
and this…
So, why is it called “Elfen Lied?” Well, the main characters are all ‘diclonius.’ Diclonius is a new species that looks like a human, but has horns on their head. They are very violent and has special powers, like having multiple arms and legs.
Lucy is one of the main characters, who is a diclonius. She escapes from the laboratory and while she does that, her head is wounded and her personality splits into two (DUALITY! Makes me thinks of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for some reason….), which is Lucy and Nu.
Nu is the good version and Lucy is the violent version. The reason why Lucy is so violent is because she was excluded from everybody because of her physical appearance when she was a child.
However, the other main character, Kouga, was very nice to her and treated her like a normal person. Lucy began to open up to him, but there was this one incident where Kouga lied to Lucy.
This made her very angry and she killed Kouga’s family and traumatizes Kouga, making him lose his memory.
The background of Lucy is very complex, as well as the origin of her violent personality. Elfen Lied is very philisophical that it deals with the duality of a person (or diclonius I should say…) and the violence of human beings.
The immoral side of human beings is shown with the people in the laboratory, who are experimenting with dicloniuses to find out their abilities and the level of violence.
Also, we can see the violence of the diclonius and the duality that people possess through Lucy’s violent actions.
Elfen Lied ranks one of the top animes I’ve watched in my life, and I really hope you watch it! It could be quite repulsive for those of you that don’t like to watch other people’s head falling off….. HAHA : )
P.S. Here are some more gruesome scenes if you want to get a sense of how bloody the anime is …. But I doubt any of you would want to watch it… 😛
Animation Contemplation 