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The Original Diclonii were the first horned people on Earth in the Elfen Lied series. According to Chief of The National Institute On Human Evolution Kakuzawa, his family had descended from a separate species of Hominid that once thrived in feudal Japan. This species was marked off by horn-like protrusions atop of their foreheads and supposedly, pyschokinetic abilities that inspired the legends of demons and gods. Being outwardly very different from the Homo Sapiens (modern humans), they were hunted and discriminated against by the human race with the intentions to exterminate them. Stories passed down to him stated that they were powerful people who were strong enough to 'cut through mountains'.

HistoryEdit

Ancient times - GenocideEdit

After their bloodline had become diluted through intermarriage with regular humans, they were driven off their land and hunted down by non-horned humans, a situation that Kakuzawa linked to the fate of the Neanderthals.

In order to survive,

they migrated to an underground cave, at the bottom of a small island, situated off the coast of the actual city of Kamakura in Kanagawa Prefecture. This cave, under several kilometers of Earth, was highly radioactive, which severely shortened their life spans and caused further and more radical mutations in their offspring.

The site became a holy land, where they prayed for the arrival of a Messiah - a pure blood demon who would restore the mighty power of the Kakuzawas. The hopes to produce this Messiah from their own bloodline had proven to be fruitless because of the intense radiation, which caused most of their offspring to be born with multiple eyes and hands. Despite the deformities, they still continued to reproduce, since they wished to preserve their bloodline.

As time went by, some weren't born with any obvious and extreme abnormalities. Since then, the offspring continued to procreate, with each passing generation becoming more and more resistant to radiation, with only their vestigial horns remaining of the once-frequent mutations. Apart from that, they increasingly became identical to Homo Sapiens. It is at this time, the species was believed to have lost its superhuman powers and abilities completely.

Modern times - The "Messiah's" arrivalEdit

By means not made clear in the series, the Kakuzawas, most notably Chief Kakuzawa, gained great political, economical and social power in the modern world, in one instance making use of special forces usually only deployable by the Prime Minister. His son, Professor Kakuzawa, had great standing (although it's a loathsome personal reputation) in the scientific community, and was the first to tell Lucy of this history, just before she killed him, also revealing that the Kakuzawa family name translates as 'Horn Dale', or 'Valley Of The Horned Ones'.

After the appearance of a powerful horned race in modern times, Kakuzawa thought that he now had absolute proof regarding the stories about his ancestors. Completely believing this race was the same as his, he used the term, "Homo Diclonius" (Two Horn), to describe both. He founded, with some government aid (it is unclear the extent to which the government of Japan aided or had control over him; but they were anxious to hide it) a project meant to study and control Diclonii, in particular the bloodline that produced the girl he named Lucy, who he concluded was the long awaited Messiah of his kind. He built the Diclonius Research Institute on the island that once hid and housed his persecuted ancestors.

When his rape of Lucy's mother produced a son, he believed that he was soon to reunite the two lines of this race (through later mating Lucy with her half-brother to keep the line pure). He named this effort after a Nazi experiment in eugenics - the Lebensborn Project.

The end of the KakuzawasEdit

In actuality, these two peoples were completely unrelated and the old stories were just myths. Lucy forcefully told him (and Anna, who later confirmed this as well) that his family mistook a minor genetic mutation for being part of another race, when perhaps even Diclonii like herself were actually human beings. In any event, Diclonii like her were a recent evolution, not an ancient one.

Suspicion abounded on all levels, and the spying done by Shirakawa and another agent led to the realization of Chief Kakuzawa's true agenda. This, in turn, caused the Japanese government to move against the island fortress near the end of the manga. It seems that out of all the Kakuzawa family members, only Lucy's half-brother was a true Diclonius, and only Anna survived at the end of the story.

Known Kakuzawas:Edit

Chief Kakuzawa
Professor Kakuzawa - sometimes known as Yu
Anna Kakuzawa
A possible member is the Unknown Man, who referred to the new Diclonius race as "We" and who fought to protect Lucy when it seemed she would be executed by Bando.
Kaede's Half-brother
Anna's Grandmother

Beliefs and intelligenceEdit

Due to their horns, they were regarded as demons, and so it was believed that they possessed demonic powers, and reversing the hatred heaped upon them, believed that non-horned people needed to be exterminated and that intermarriage with regular humans cost their offspring those powers.

The stories of demonic origin and powers were passed down in the Kakuzawa family, leaving most members with a deep hatred of humans, considering themselves superior to all other people. In order to prove and demonstrate their supposed superiority, they worked hard to surpass all in intelligence and culture, wielding great economic power, and having wide political and social power in the modern world.
While the Kakuzawas revered their "Messiah" - Lucy, the Queen Diclonius - they considered the Diclonius Silpelits inferior, treating them as "trash", often calling them useless, and seeing the Silpelits as slaves, with the sole purpose to serve them by clearing the world of humans. Only fully-reproductive Diclonius like Lucy and her half-brother were of any worth in this view.

Note: The use of 'Diclonii' here is to differentiate whole large categories of Diclonius, as opposed to merely describing instances of more than one, or even the whole species. Except for these groups, one Diclonius or multiple should be referred to as Diclonius.

TriviaEdit

The Kakuzawas were merely a human family/clan burdened with the mutation of having horns in an ignorant and superstitious era. Even in the Elfen Lied universe, their population must have been relatively small. In the real world, remains of clans with minor mutations have been found, but never to the extent described by Chief Kakuzawa and his elder son.
Just as some ancient peoples believed their legendary heroes and villains to have been nearly giants, past generations of Kakuzawas thought that their kind or clan once possessed supernatural powers. As a defense against the hate mounted against them, they began to believe in the tales of terrible powers invented by the same people who discriminated against them. In a time and place where the words of elders would never be challenged, these stories were passed down verbatim, until the modern Kakuzawa family tried to make them reality.

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Original Diclonii

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