Woo... I guess you sort of missed my point, ne? If I was watching the anime while thinking about rights and wrongs and laws and morals and rules and all those other stuff, then of course Lucy deserves to be punished, anybody who watched the anime would agree. However, there's this little thing called
suspension of disbelief. We watch animes for it's engrossing story, and for it's interesting characters, we're meant to watch it stripped down to our basic emotions: anger, sadness, joy, fear, sympathy, etc. too. Without all those real life implications burdening us.
I sympathize with Lucy because of her past experiences, enough for me so that I can find myself reasonably justify what she did. And as such, while I recognize what she did was wrong, I *don't* want to see her meet a sad end to her already sad life. Soft, maybe, but as a Crim major and worked with police and social workers, I've already seen hundreds of sick and twisted real life cases out there, so I enjoy being soft for a fictional character that I sympathize with.
Anyways, I don't feel like giving another long winded response (already getting long), I'm dropping this now, everyone's free to express their own opinions, but getting into a serious argument is just kinda silly.