By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
For a generation, Elfen Lied was an introduction to the world of anime,mostly because if you can get through the gore, violence, and fanservice in this series, you can get through almost every other mainstream anime series. The cute box art and character designs conceal the edginess and self-seriousness found within that has, let’s be honest, not aged well at all. The show’s influence has gone beyond the world of anime, with the murderous Lucy cited by The Duffer brothers as directly influencing the design of Stranger Things Eleven.
Telekinetic Girl Meets Naive Boy
Once you hear that the telekinetic Lucy, who was so traumatized by her experience in a secret facility where she, along with other Dicloniuses….Dicloniusi?….a mutant species that has started to emerge and presents a growing threat to normal humans, has been studied for years. Lucy’s escape in Elfen Lied is noticeably more violent than Eleven’s in Stranger Things Season 1, with significantly more blood and more dead bodies used as shields, but each of them ends up being rescued by a well-meaning young boy who develops a crush on the girl that could kill him with the power of her mind.
Elfen Lied quickly settles down after the lab escape and soon finds a rhythm that sustains it for the course of 13 episodes. Lucy, who loves killing humans and takes a sadistic glee in doing so, is replaced by a different personality, Nyu, for the majority of the show’s runtime. As Nyu, Lucy is friendly and innocent, and she doesn’t want to hurt anyone with her telekinetic powers, which manifest as invisible arms, dubbed “Vectors,” though she retains the potential to destroy all of humanity.
It’s a remarkable feat that Elfen Lied is able to go between a heartfelt drama, a coming-of-age romance, and an ultraviolent slaughter-fest over the course of a single episode. Certain parts haven’t aged well over the years, namely the fanservice and at times, gore for the sake of gore, but others, including the surprisingly deep characterizations for what looks like a schlock fest on the surface, remain relevant today. You just have to get past the bloodshed to find human emotion, even in the inhuman Dicloniuses characters.
Elfen Lied Is Not For Everyone
Stranger Things pulled from lots of media, particularly 80s classics, including Akira, the seminal sci-fi anime that redefined an entire branch of entertainment, so Elfen Lied, a 2004 release serving as the blueprint for one of the biggest breakouts of the last decade is a bit surprising. Then again, there’s still nothing quite like the anime’s unique combination of genres, which is it’s both such a great introduction to anime, and also a very horrible introduction, all at the same time. Needless to say, it’s absolutely not for kids, no matter how cute the DVD box art looks.
Elfen Lied wasn’t my introduction to anime; that was the Toonami block on Cartoon Network a decade earlier, but it was one of the first that I watched when I picked up the medium again. By then, I was used to the grim darkness and self-seriousness of mainstream comics in the 90s, which made the bizarre mixture of the setting of a harem anime, Berserk-style bloodshed, and overly cute characters the exact sort of weird I needed at the time. It also helps that the music, especially Lilium, is an absolute banger, and every time it plays you’ll find the motivation to keep going for another episode.
Elfen Lied is available to stream on Amazon Prime.