YMMV / Elfen Lied

• Adaptation Displacement: For American fans at least, the anime is far better known than the manga it's based off of. Though this is mostly because the manga was not licensed in the U.S. until 2019.
• Adorkable: When Lucy is a child, her reaction to zoo animals is similar to a child in a candy store.
• Alas, Poor Scrappy: Despite the anime dialing up Yuka's Clingy Jealous Girl tendencies, her breakdown in the last episode, where she admits how selfish she's been, can make it hard not to feel for her.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Practically every single character is left slightly insane from their troubled pasts, or completely evil. Often it's very hard to keep them apart.
  • The theme that Humans Are the Real Monsters needs to be taken with at least a grain of salt. The researchers and staff on the island definitely call their essential Humanity into serious question, but the vast majority of people in Japan and on Earth had no say in how these girls were treated, and never even heard of them until the war Kouta describes in the manga finale took place. As has been pointed out elsewhere, the age these girls get their powers makes their misuse inevitable. So, while prejudice must be condemned, the first time people even hear about Diclonii is when their neighbors' three-year olds kill them. Much like in X-Men or the various Devilman series, ordinary Humans aren't offered a lot of choice on how to view their potential replacements. This said, many non-Kakuzawa-employed Humans in the series do not acquit themselves terribly well.
  • Even some of the researchers get called into question. Several signed up because the Diiclonius births killed family, or rendered them unable to bear children. Some go For Science!, like Nousou, and quite a few don't want to disappoint The Director. The Operative at the end clearly hates Lucy for killing those near to him.
  • Saito in the Manga, did she really love Mariko? She manipulated her into thinking her father hated her, but before that, she repeatedly expressed excitement over finally seeing her, after speaking to her for years and helping to raise and educate her, she admits to feeling a sort of bond with the girl.
  • The Other Facility, because we know so little about it. Of the Four characters we meet from there, only Shirakawa is named, The Agent and the two Operatives go unnamed. We know its purpose is vector research, and they're monitored more closely by the Japanese Government, but we don't know if they have an agenda, want to save the world, or solve the problem to prevent Japan's implication in dooming the planet.
  • Is Big Bad Director Kakuzawa truly meant to be seen as a brilliant manipulator with tons of gambits running to his favor? Or is he meant to be seen as a parody/deconstruction of this, since his plans involve letting his enemies know he's doing it without covering every angle someone could use to undo them, taunting his 'Queen' with how he raped her long-lost mother who it turned out always loved her, and creating a replacement race that was 99.9% sterile, among other things? Were these plotholes, or does the depths of his evil and the successes he does have fool the reader/viewer into thinking he's all that?
  • At the end of the manga, Lucy's extremely misanthropic hidden personality takes over her body as it breaks down, attempting to have its now global-spanning vectors take out humanity before it dies. When Kouta can't bring himself to shoot her, despite both Lucy and Nyu's personalities begging him to do so, the DNA Voice suddenly stops, puts the gun back in Kouta's hands, and asks for a Mercy Kill. Was it really just in too much pain to continue its genocide, or did it rethink its view on humanity upon seeing that Kouta wouldn't shoot her even when she was trying to eradicate the human species? Or did the other two personalities join together to force her hand?
  • In response to his Trauma-Induced Amnesia, is Kouta a good kid that honestly doesn't believe that Nyu could harm anyone or someone who goes past the point of believable denial and refuses to see the obvious evidence?
• Base-Breaking Character: Lucy. The divide comes down to how sympathetic she is versus how much the manga wants the reader to sympathize with her. Her fans either view her as one of the best examples of a Jerkass Woobie whose harsh life and trauma are played against all of her atrocities while detractors feel that the manga tries to wring out much more sympathy for her than she deserves.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Seriously, who didn't figure out Lucy killed Kouta's father and sister before it was revealed?
• Catharsis Factor:
  • While it leads to her Start of Darkness, witnessing Lucy gruesomely massacre her evil classmates for beating her dog to death is immensely satisfying.
  • After Bando's vicious Breaking Speech towards Nana in Episode 7, seeing her kick his ass with the same look that Lucy normally has is pretty therapeutic.
• Complete Monster: The unnamed hitman is a sadistic, pedophilic monster hunter. To find Lucy, the hitman mutilates, then rapes, a Silpelit Diclonius, leaving her powerless and without her vocal cords to be used as a radar system. Hunting for Lucy, the hitman tries to rape her human friend, the defenseless teenage girl, Mayu, disgusting even his fellow Blood Knight hitman, Bando.
• Creepy Awesome: Lucy and Mariko are utterly vicious, but that's why they're so effective.
• Critical Dissonance: Critics generally give this series negative reviews, and mixed ones at best, citing excessive gore and nudity which they regard as exploitive and criticizing some of the characters as being highly simplistic, bland, and/or hard to relate with. The closest any professional critic has ever come to giving Elfen Lied a positive review was as being So Bad, It's Good. However, as one can tell under the Cult Classic and Germans Love David Hasselhoff entries, audiences view it far more favorably.
  • On the other hand Rotten Tomatoes critic rating is actually 100% (as of 24th of may 2022) but only based on 5 reviews
• Crossover Ship: Lucy is paired with Alex Mercer in multiple fan arts. Probably due to their similar powers and personalities, they could make it work.
• Cult Classic: In Japan at least. In America, it's one of the most well-known anime series, being called one of the "classics" by several people.
• Die for Our Ship:
  • The Lucy hatedom can get pretty rabid, but how much of this is Die for Our Ship and how much is simply hating Lucy because she's a villain is completely impossible to determine.
  • Yuka gets this from Kouta/Lucy shippers in the mean time.
• Draco in Leather Pants: While Lucy is one of the most sympathetic mass murderers in anime history, based on how certain fans describe her, you'd think that she had never done anything wrong and just needed a hug to be turned into an angel of sweetness and light, never mind the fact that she started off the series freely killing any human except for Kouta who ever crossed her path. Her romantic rival, Yuka's Clingy Jealous Girl tendencies are Flanderized to the point that the Lucy fandom often gleefully wish for Lucy to dismember Yuka. While Yuka has her issues, Lucy is the real Yandere, who slaughtered a carnival full of innocent people when Kouta snubbed her, as well as wanting to eradicate mankind.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: You'd think such a series has no fan favorite character, considering everyone is either mentally broken or outright villainous but nope, one of the most popular characters outside the main cast is Kurama. Surprisingly, about as much liked is his daughter. Yes, the psychotic tragic villain Mariko.
• Esoteric Happy Ending:
  • The final chapter of the manga clearly states that the World Health Organization "forbade" the birth of Diclonii worldwide until they discovered a vaccine capable of preventing their conception. Red tape and technobabble aside, the term for this is genocide.
  • Likewise, the anime ends rather positively, because it adds a new ending before the manga crosses the Despair Event Horizon. Subsequently, the manga's ending is iffy - the Diclonii will be completely eliminated within a generation. Their powers are too dangerous to allow them to continue to exist, but they're not all bad people, and their extermination is at best a necessary evil.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception: The "lied" in the title is pronounced "leed"^note Phonetic spelling for the German word meaning "song", not "layhd"^note Phonetic spelling for the English word meaning "a deceptive false statement (past tense)". The fact that Kouta and Lucy's backstory involves the former lying to the latter about his little sister's gender—which ends up being important to the plot—doesn't exactly help matters.
• Fan Nickname: For reference, two names are not official. "The Unknown Man" is the name given by fans since he never gives his name nor anyone else does in the three chapters that he's featured. Also, the term "diclonii" is just the catch-all term given by fans since it is strange to say "dicloniuses" (only "diclonius" has been given officially) and it is the common suffix change, so the name mutated.
• Fanon:
  • The Unknown Man is thought to be a Kakuzawa and thus is related to the Director. They do know each other, and the Unknown man does seem to know and support the Director's agenda. However, they are never confirmed to be related, and it's unknown if the Unknown man wears a Hairpiece to disguise little horns on his head.
  • Some of the Diclonii eventually survived the year; The twins' ethnicity at the end of the manga is left ambiguous.
  • One piece of Jossed Fanon is Nana being the younger sister of Number 3, the Diclonius who infected Kurama; this appears to be misinformation repeated verbatim across the net, and unsupported by either version of the series.
• Friendly Fandoms: With Stranger Things after the Duffer Brothers cited the anime as an inspiration for the show.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The show didn't get very far in Japan (partly due to being hardcore enough that it couldn't be broadcast on-air even in Japan), but was a major Sleeper Hit in America through DVD sales. Same for the actual Germans and especially for Mexicans, to the grade a full orchestration of the anime's OST was performed in Mexico City.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Kisaragi, the Cloudcuckoolander and Kurama's assistant, says to her colleagues "I just don't lose my head". Less than 10 minutes later, she gets decapitated by sadistic Lucy.
  • The prospect of Lucy massacring citizens left and right became more heartbreaking after the Akihabara massacre occurred in 2008.
• Hollywood Homely: When Mayu is first introduced, she is described as looking like the homeless child she has been for perhaps several weeks at that point. Problem is, virtually nothing about her physical appearance suggests this.
• Hype Backlash: While this series had a huge cult following at first in America, the general tone of anime fandom has changed pretty heavily over the years, and the type of series has largely fallen out of favor. As a result, while older anime fans tend to be at least okay with the series, younger fans and those who have discovered anime more recently tend to hate this show with every fiber of their being and treat it as emblematic of everything wrong with anime (similarly to series such as Goblin Slayer and The Rising of the Shield Hero, but considered somewhat less inflammatory than those shows due to its relative age).
• Iron Woobie:
  • Kouta. Despite living with the woman that killed his family, he still goes on with his life and doesn't leave anyone behind for whom he feels responsible for.
  • In a series full of woobies, Nana takes the cake. Everyone loves Nana. She gets pushed around so much, yet she still keeps on going. There's a doujinshi dedicated to making her even more of a Woobie.
  • Considering her crappy and downright hellish upbringing, Mayu's a surprisingly collected and insightful girl. She quickly found her will to live after her chance encounter with Wanta and then the residents of Maple House. She even has the guts to calm Lucy down in spite of their earlier encounter, which easily could've proven fatal to her.
• It Was His Sled: Lucy killed Kouta's family.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Mariko. On one hand, her Freudian Excuse is pretty good, on the other, she's damn sadistic.
  • Be ready to feel the urge to sock her in the face... just before giving her a hug. That's Lucy in a nutshell.
  • Bando is an asshole, yeah. But he still manages to come up as more decent than others assholes here, which makes some of what he gets put through thanks to the other assholes rather difficult to watch.
• Love to Hate: Manga only. Director Kakuzawa is a fairly despicable character but undeniably a darn good villain.
• Memetic Mutation: Using this show as a refutation against the Animation Age Ghetto is popular.
• Moe:
  • Nyu is innocent and nice and friendly, and gets additional points for her being a cute mute. All of these traits are underscored by her contrast with Lucy. She loses some of these traits in the manga when she learns to speak and behave properly, but remains adorable.
  • Nana too, in her own way, is cute as a button even with less childishness than Nyu.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Lucy's bullies crosses it when they murder her dog. Lucy crossed it when she murders Kouta's family. Mayu's stepfather crosses this when he sexually harassed her. Her mother crossed it when she didn't stop him. Anything Kakuzawa and the Unknown Man do.
  • While fans are split on whether or not Lucy herself crosses it, everyone agrees that her DNA Voice personality crossed it when she manipulated a broken Lucy into the aforementioned atrocities she commits. If that wasn't enough, then it attempts to destroy the planet in her dying breath out of spite that she won't get to rule a Diclonii-only world.
• Narm:
  • Due to the over-the-top art, a lot of the gory scenes end up looking more cartoony than intended. Less so in the anime, but it compensates by making the blood spatters that much more over-the-top.
  • The constant nudity and Fanservice can turn otherwise serious scenes into this.
  • This whole series is supposed to be a sort-of lecture on how "Humans Are Bastards". Only that the "humans" (save for Kouta and his family, Mayu, Yuka, Nozomi, Arakawa, Kurama and later Bando, and in the past Hiromi), and by the end Anna Kakuzawa and possibly the Agent too, tend to be so obviously, ridiculously, flatly, and STUPIDLY evil that the emotional impact is completely gone. Nevertheless, this actually works a lot of the time, but it's still a bit hard to swallow that most of the human cast is this one-dimensionally villainous.
    • The most notable example of this is Tomoo and his gang during the infamous scene where they beat a dog to death. This was the cartoonishly psychotic behavior coming from a ten-year-old boy that often got spoofed in Jojos Bizarre Adventure, and yet was played completely straight here.
  • The subbed version of the anime goes for an overly literal translation, resulting in a lot of stilted lines. One example is Lucy saying to her puppy, "If it wasn't for you, I might have been discouraged long ago."
    • In both the subbed version and the manga, Kouta repeatedly says, "That's my line!" when responding to criticism. He says it multiple times, even in threatening situations (like Bando holding him at gunpoint in the manga). It tends to cause Mood Whiplash every time it happens.
  • It's impossible to see the early fight between Nana and Lucy and not immediately think of the Black Knight scene.
  • The attempt in the manga to build up the song the series takes its name from becomes this once one actually looks up what it's about: namely, it's a comedic poem about an elf who gets drunk, confuses some fireflies for a party, and bashes his head against a wall, full of silly turns of phrase and onomatopoeia. While it does have some relevance to the story's themes, nobody in the story seems to acknowledge it as anything less than a tragic masterwork. It's likely for this reason that the anime removed the scene of actually singing the poem.
• Narm Charm: The series' infamously over-the-top evilness of human characters is in fact a fairly realistic portrayal of what victims of marginalization face (albeit the manga does a somewhat better job by giving many characters Hidden Depths and Character Development). In fact, many fans who are survivors of abuse find this portrayal subdued.
• One-Scene Wonder: Tomoo has three minutes of screentime, but makes quite the impression.
  • The Orphanage Girl who has less screen time than Tomoo also counts, but whether she was involved or not is still discussed by fans until today.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: While violence is to be expected in a story about the persecution that an evolutionary species from humanity endure and their murderous vendetta against their persecutors, the sheer amount of gore (and nudity) on display is what this work is best known for.
• Rated M for Money: The Trope Codifier for anime and manga of this type. It probably helps that the controversy played a part in it selling well for ADV Films.
• Realism-Induced Horror: Mayu's mother and stepfather are relatively mundane people who appear only briefly, but are two of the most hated characters due to the damage they inflict on her. Her stepfather sexually abuses her, while her mother shows her no sympathy and blames Mayu for the abuse. Part of what makes them so disturbing is that people like them exist in real life, and children like Mayu do indeed suffer from their actions.
• Ron the Death Eater:
  • Lucy manages to be an odd case that's a victim of this, along with Draco in Leather Pants. Now, she clearly isn’t innocent by any measure. However, there are some that think of her as nothing but pure evil who would always kill others as soon as something goes wrong, just because. Now granted, she certainly shows this behavior early in the series, but as the story goes on, it's made plain that, yes, she does feel awful over what she's done, and does try her best to NOT kill anymore and would've been content to live with Kouta and her friends. However, the people of the Diclonius Research Facility always keep screwing her over and over, and forcing her back into killing people, making it difficult to nearly impossible for her to atone and any hope she can find in humanity and a better future grow dimmer each time. And she's being manipulated by a Split Personality that represents her innate Diclonius instincts, which she first tried to suppress. Seriously, the girl just can't win.
  • In some cases, Kouta himself gets this treatment due to fans who view the mistakes he made as a kid (mainly lying to Kaede about both his cousin's gender and that he'd go with said cousin to the festival, and especially slapping his little sister in anger) as Never Live It Down moments for him.
• Ship-to-Ship Combat: Between the anime and the manga, if you can believe it. The manga all but explicitly states Kouta and Yuka are the Official Couple, but the anime seems to ship Kouta with Lucy. The anime also attempts to make Lucy more sympathetic by removing Lucy's tendency to laugh maniacally while killing people (which to be fair does remove a plot where she does an Evil Laugh and Kouta doesn't seem to notice) and Flanderizes Yuka's Clingy Jealous Girl moments.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The ending theme Be Your Girl could easily be mistaken for a cover of Avril Lavigne's Complicated
• Special Effect Failure: The vectors can sometimes bend very strangely and end up looking broken.
• Squick:
  • Nyu's face when groping arouses her. Likely due to the high amount of tears gushing out of her eyes, it makes the reader feel very uncomfortable.
  • For Western audiences, Yuka's infatuation with Kouta could certainly be this at times, as the two are established from the beginning to be cousins. Not helping the fact that the manga ends on a Time Skip, where they're married and have a daughter. It's an awkward case of Truth in Television and Values Dissonance as such relationships are not uncommon in Japan and elsewhere in Asia, but are typically frowned upon in the West. The anime hilariously lampshades this during their kiss scene by cutting away to the statues around them, which look disgusted.
  • This series has a reputation as one of the most gruesomely gory anime series in the medium's history. There is enough blood, dismembered limbs and guts to fill an ocean.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Kouta's lack of memories of his time with Yuka puts a damper on their potential of reaching a decent relationship, though Kouta has good reasons for it. Yet, when he eventually regains his memories of Lucy killing his sister and father in front of him, he focuses more on snapping at Lucy and simply telling her that he 'can't forgive her', when this could have been a great opportunity to also have Kouta remember his moments with Yuka, how he loved her since childhood and get the two of them to start something up. Perhaps the deadline of 108 chapters was closing in too fast, leaving no time...?
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Between the series' tendency to take Humans Are Bastards to almost cartoonish extremes and the Diclonii themselves not exactly being much better (what with the implication that they're genetically predisposed to wiping out the human race anyway), it's hard to really find any characters worth sympathizing with. And that's not even getting to the fact that most of them keep getting put through the emotional wringer over and over. That said, things do get a bit more optimistic by the end of the series, especially in the manga, where, in an aversion of the most moral characters dying in the end, Kouta, Mayu, Nana and Anna all survive until the end, despite being all "good" characters in a crapsack world. Whether or not this is enough to compensate the near pornographic amount of gorn and suffering that comes before this, however, is up to the viewer.
• Toy Ship: NanaxMayu to some fans, despite there being no hints of this in the main series.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • The Diclonii. The viewers are supposed to sympathize with them but it's easier said than done. Whatever Diclonii we see that's not in the Facility is going around randomly butchering people, and then there's the implications that they're genetically predisposed to wiping out the human race, which can make the intention of sympathizing with them develop the opposite result.
  • Lucy is played up as a Tragic Villain, but some find it hard to feel sorry for her when she murdered Kouta's family out of petty jealousy and was Easily Forgiven for it in the anime. It was also shown that before she met Kouta, she killed families just so she could stay at their houses at night. You could count with your fingers how many people she killed that actually deserved it.
  • We're supposed to see Nozomi's dad as a Well-Intentioned Extremist because he's willing to do anything to prevent Nozomi from getting the same voice defect her mother got (which caused her to commit suicide) by resorting to physically abusing her. However the fact that there were clearly other ways of protecting Nozomi (such as warning her about the voice defect, for Pete's sake!) only makes what he did very inexcusable to say the least, as well as making him come off as a cruel asshole rather than a protective father. It doesn't help either that it almost looks like he's grinning sadistically while abusing Nozomi.
• Viewer Pronunciation Confusion: To those who don't know German, it's easy to assume that the second part of the title is pronounced like the word "lied" as opposed to "leet".
• The Woobie: Many characters can be considered such, although the two most often cited are Nana, the token good Diclonii who suffers a lot but still keeps going, and Nyu, the innocent personality of Lucy who gets hurt because of her other personality's actions several times.
• Woobie Species: The Diclonii. Bonus points for the bulk of them going down the Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds road.

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