Mayu's Stepfather

The mother and step-father of Mayu, one of the main characters in the manga and anime series Elfen Lied, are among the only Humans in the series who are neither super-human nor specially equipped. Yet for all that, they do a horrendous amount of damage to a well-liked character. While not the absolute worst parents in all of manga or anime, they likely will always rank among the very worst.

Mayu is a young girl, roughly twelve when we are introduced to her. She is homeless, staying in a woodpile shelter on the beach at Kamakura, in the company of her only friend, a small dog she names Wanta. As her life begins to cross paths with those of Nyu, Kouta and Yuka, she is offered better accomodations at Maple House, a former restaurant and inn where they all stay. As she fled them partly out of mistrust, she recalled her past.

The fate of her birth father is never revealed or hinted at. Her mother marries a man who quickly begins to sexually abuse Mayu, sometimes to the point of sodomy. When she could bear no more of this, Mayu finally broke down and told her mother. Her mother revealed depths of coldness and detachment that shocked Mayu, and told her she now regarded her as an obstacle to her marriage, and that if she were to disappear, no one would care. During the next rape attempt by her step-father, a despondent Mayu fled with only the clothes on her back, making her way to the Kamakura Beach area by Enoshima Park. It was there she found Wanta, as well as a kind merchant who gave her what scraps of food she could.

In one savage stroke, the beach, the food scraps and Wanta were all taken from her as options to live the miserable but reliable life she had. In despair, she went to those at Maple House, and was not only greeted warmly, but got Wanta back, the small dog having fled a woman who claimed to be its true owner in order to be with Mayu. After some reluctance, Mayu allowed Kouta and Yuka to contact her mother, who signed her custody over to the college-age couple without blinking, an act that made them suspicious, but as a courtesy to Mayu, they asked no more of it.

The characters are never seen in full in either version, and have only a few lines of dialogue, most of it repugnant. After Mayu's backstory is told, they are not seen nor heard from again, except for one horrific flashback late in the series. It is unknown if their marriage survived the departure of Mayu. This seeming Karma Houdini status has made the un-happy, un-fun couple a frequent target of revenge-based fanfiction, with either Lucy or Bando  dispatching them in a brutal manner. While viewers/readers despise both of them, the greater hatred seems to rest on Mayu's mother, as her villainy is a true and deep betrayal, not to mention pettiness, selfishness, childishness, and reasonlessness in its stunning jealousy of her own daughter, dismissing her plight altogether.