| abstract
| - The most obvious in-series example of this sort of hateful thinking comes in the virtual dismissal of Diclonius people like Lucy, Nana, and other Silpelits, and, looking back in history, the treatment given to the Kakuzawas' ancestors. Kaede/Lucy's life was touched by prejudice from almost her first moments on Earth, as her father left her to die of exposure in a forest when she was an infant, all because she was born with horns. This abandonment led to her placement in the Kamakura area orphanage. The orphans existed in a world of being looked down upon themselves, and, at least in the case of Japan's culture, stood almost no chance of being adopted. This seeming trap results from a situation where the same relatives who may not have elected to take them in also frequently vetoed their being adopted by other families because their adoption would be an insult to the family name. Although, this idea is puzzling if the orphans have no known parents and thus no clear next of kin. For the workers there, the assignment was not a choice one, and so a cycle of societal glares looking down upon each layer of the orphanage's existence began with Lucy at the dead bottom, the most unwanted of the unwanted, and made to feel ever more miserable for this reason alone. Lucy's defense against all this was to shut down, which led to her being judged on yet another level, this time as being freakishly unemotional. Barely-hidden words and gestures of contempt from the caretakers fed that of the children, in turn, making it seem to some like Lucy was fair game for any number of cruel pranks and taunts. While at least some of these cruelties met with punishment, the very persistence of the prejudice and hatred itself never being addressed only seemed to escalate matters, until the pranks became routine and Lucy's complaints so much background noise. Whether or not the young girl who seemingly befriended and may have betrayed Lucy ever actually thought that hurting her was not the same as hurting 'a real person,' it seems inevitable that some, if not most, at the orphanage thought exactly that. To fans, the death of her beloved puppy ranks as the catalyst for Lucy's breakdown and slaughter of other people. In fact, this cruelty was merely a confirmation that she was forever 'othered' in the eyes of those around her, and could not ever escape a judgment no action of hers had ever played a part in causing. This feeling would pervade Lucy's life forever after. It prevented her from fully trusting Kouta at first, and then to assume the worst of him when she thought he betrayed her. At the fateful festival, in a crowd bustling and unsympathetic to her obvious pain in her mental breakdown, Lucy notably chose to kill a woman offering aid, now automatically judging all Humans as betrayers waiting for her to drop her guard. Nor would life at the Diclonius Research Institute assist her in stopping this. Her first hours there were met with the sad news of Aiko Takada's fate and a searing lecture from a somewhat hypocritical Kurama about how Diclonius were the ones rejecting peaceful co-existence with Humans. Sadly, he had based this lecture, which hardened Lucy's heart still further, on his sad history. He seemed in this instance to forget how he had once objected to the experimentation on the Diclonii girls at the facility, and, astonishingly for a scientist, to neglect to see the Diclonius he, in essence, cited as evidence got their vectors at an age well below that of reason. Kurama merely judged Lucy as the source of all he had suffered, seeing her as a complete monster instead of a then emotionally unstable teenager, rather than even bothering to question her for insight into the beings he saw as his foes. Like most prejudice, Kurama's feelings were a mixture of real and verifiable information plus extrapolations and leaps in logic driven by pain, fear, and in his case, grief. Perhaps saddest, while the Kakuzawas remembered well and frequently cited the discrimination and persecution their horned ancestors received, this gave them no insight at all into the wrongness of such prejudice. Besides the 'Humans' (and they were Humans, their beliefs aside), they also looked down upon the Silpelit population as disposable worker drones, to be experimented on, harvested for parts, or abused in hideous ways. This treatment persisted, despite the fact that, according to the Chief's stated plans, the children born from the world-wide infection he caused would almost certainly be Silpelits. Worse still, painted by their government as experts on the subject, the Kakuzawas were able to confirm the genocidal course the government wanted, eliminating even the outside chance of peace with the Diclonius race. It is unknown if mangaka/creator Lynn Okamoto was aware of the history of horns' assignment to one ethnic group or another by those prejudiced against them. The prime example of those targeted by this is people of Jewish descent, who are to this day believed by some misguided, misinformed souls to have horns. This lie is an old bigotry reawakened and magnified by the racial beliefs of the Nazis in Germany during their heyday.
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