Not in every vampire fiction can you see Dracula adopting a child and taking on a fatherly role. Not in every vampire fiction can you see Dracula being raped as a child. Not in any other vampire fiction can you see Dracula transform into a girl. XD
Alucard in HELLSING ULTIMATE is a character with great depth. His sadistic and powerful yet loyal personality is explored thoroughly and he is bad-ass and dangerous - all the while makes it extremely entertaining to watch.
Part of what makes him interesting is his unbreakable spirit. When you think about it: The Ottoman sultan raped Alucard not for sex (maybe there's a little of it) but to send the message that the Ottomans had absolute power over Wallachia, and to break Alucard's spirit. What was his response? Instead of whining and blaming his kins for not coming to his help, he rose to power and led an army to fight the Ottoman Empire and killed his rapist.
VAN HELLSING:
What makes this scene brilliant is that you actually feel sorry for THE Dracula. When Van Hellsing told him, "You have nothing, Count! Nothing!" as he drove the stake into his heart, you forget it's the evil Dracula for a moment. It's just someone who had been utterly defeated. Van Hellsing knew Alucard wanted to die but he chose to bind him to his family which would be the greatest punishment. We see Alucard cry remembering that moment when he almost found peace in his life, and the words Abraham said, "You have nothing" which speaks close to home considering Alucard's past and the reason he became what he is: because he lost everything. I really wish the author would have shown us more of Alucard's past (and Integra's past) instead of The Dawn. The Dawn is pretty good but not showing what went down between the Hellsings and Alucard is kind of an important thing to skim over.
We are never offered insights into Alucard's life as Dracula, and I don't like extrapolating from Bram Stoker's Dracula because they aren't the same characters. Every novel depicts Dracula as extremely evil and vicious (eg, he steals a baby from its mom in Transylvania to feed to his brides and when the mom comes sobbing and screaming at the gates of the castle, he calls his wolves to eat her. He devours every last crew member on the Demeter ship that takes him to England, except the captain, who ties himself to the steering wheel with a crucifix and dies of exposure. When he gets to England, he scares an old man to death just because he’s passing by. He takes his sweet time draining Lucy when she has 3 men devotedly in love with her, and turns her into a vampire that eats small children. He accidentally scares Lucy’s mom to death as well while he’s draining Lucy). Anyway, that is Dracula in other works and I would like to think that "they" are different entities from Hellsing's because they just come across so differently. And Alucard is simply just…not that bad? He’s a monstrous fucker but…not to that extent? Also, Hellsing's Alucard holds certain viewpoints that are vastly different from any other Dracula version, namely, his respect for people who have overcome great adversities in life, his repulsion for mindless killings (eg, a vampire kills when it doesn't need to feed itself), his self-hatred, self-reflection, etc. Alucard is only interested in humans who are persevering despite everything, because that’s what he considers the defining (and best) trait of humanity. And that's what makes his character so relatable.
Alucard maybe a monster, blood-thirsty and battle-crazy, but he is honest about who and what he is. You may not like a person like Alucard, but you can respect a person who is honest about himself. I think Alucard is ready to return to the light when he tells Anderson, ".... until my past is overshadowed by the greatness of my future". The affections he has for Integra and Seras are neither fake nor shallow. Here we see a vampire who has an infinite strong will and values, who treasures real emotional bonds with the two humans (who waited 30 years for his return!). What did he do that earns this kind of loyalty from these humans? Besides the fact that they both owed him their lives, he treats these two with genuine kindness. This being had lost everything in his previous life and once again had everything taken from him by Abraham Van Hellsing 100 years ago, has finally found a belonging place with the two humans who likewise have found a home in him. This is real family bond that transcends bloodlines, species, and time. With these people, in the present time, he has found everything he could never find as Dracula. By the end of Hellsing Ultimate, he ends up with an adorable Master and a loyal Servant. Things he sought as Dracula and could never find.
Capable of such destruction, reveling in the carnage of war, yet somehow able to admire innocence and revere goodness, protecting it where he can, transmuting it to power as he sees fit (Seras). He is not the Dracula in Bram Stoker's novel or any other Dracula. For one, we see so much of his inner world. His will and his spirit have proven unbreakable, but he is not untouched by regret... or desire, or hope.
What really captures the essence of Alucard is the moment in the last episode when he is about to vanish: When he turns to the light of the rising sun and reminisces about his previous deaths, he is not sad or bothered by his imminent death but instead he's admiring the Sun, "And each time I think... how lovely that sunlight, which I forsook so many centuries ago..." He still finds beauty in the world, in life itself, even when his life is at its bleakest moment. Other things, like the way he places his hand over Seras' when she was pulling the blade out of him in OVA 9, really communicate the emotion inside him. He's not just a monster. He's not a hero, either. Alucard is incredibly compelling and complex. He still has much humanity in him, whether or not he wants to embrace it. (More on "humanity" in my next post).
PS: I forgot about [this interview](http://hiranomoe.com/r/read/hellsing_guidebook/en/0/1/page/5). Kouta Hirano, in regards to how Alucard became a vampire, said: "He turned into a vampire by his own power. Not because someone turned him, or that he was a natural born vampire or anything like that. He turned into a vampire by his own will." hahaha.. Only in Hellsing do you see an atheistic take on Dracula. I LOVE IT!
No comments:
Post a Comment