#2021hellsingliveblog

[duhragonball]

Hellsing Liveblog Ch. 68-69 (nice)

This is the “Castlevania” arc.   It’s only two parts, but I want to slow down and take my time with this one.

Okay, so in the last chapter, Alucard was fighting Alexander Anderson, who used one of the nails from the True Cross to pierce his own heart, which transformed Anderson into some sort of miraculous creature made of thorny tendrils.   Then he struck a heavy blow on Alucard’s head, and just sort of kept on going down his neck and chest.  

And as far as we call tell, this is the most danger Alucard’s been in since the story began.  Anderson lopped off his head in their first encounter, and even that didn’t stop him.   Now, in this “holy monster” form, Anderson can grow back body parts just as easily as Alucard, and he seems to be able to hurt Alucard a lot more than ever before.  The irony is that Alucard might have been honored to lose to Anderson, but only when he was a human foe.  Now that Anderson has used the Nail of Helena to become something inhuman, Alucard feels that it diminishes their fight.   

Regardless, Alucard is in serious danger, or so it seems.   Even his horde of familiars are bursting into flames all around him, which I assume is a side-effect of Anderson’s attack.   As this happens, Alucard appears to lose consciousness, and flashes back to his childhood. 

This whole flashback seemed like a nonsequitur to me when I watched the Hellsing Ultimate OVA, but I think it makes a bit more sense this time around.  As a boy in the 1440′s, Vlad Tepes was something of a religious fantatic, much like Father Anderson in 1999.   He pledged to never ask God for anything, which I don’t think is theologically sound, but let’s run with it.  The point here seems to be that Vlad felt it was more pious to endure hardship while keeping his faith in God.

For example, in this scene, we see Vlad being dragged away to be raped, and he grabs the cross he wears around his neck for solace.   He doesn’t beg God for mercy or deliverance, but simply clings to his faith to see him through.   

I’m assuming the man in shadow is Sultan Murad II of the Ottoman Empire.  In 1442, Murad summoned Vlad’s father to Gallipoli, and he went there with Vlad and his brother Ruda.  The Sultane then imprisoned all three of them, and eventually released Vlad’s father, but kep the boys as hostages to ensure the fahter’s loyalty.   There was a period when Vlad’s father sided against the Ottomans, and he presumed his sons had been killed, but in fact they survived and eventually returned to Wallachia.   So maybe Kouta Hirano is taking some creative license here, and suggesting that Murad II took out his anger on Vlad in other ways. 

Eventually, Vlad became the Voivoide of Wallachia, and in this flashback we find that he considers fighting to be a form of prayer.   Not for mercy, because Vlad refuses to ask for that.   Instead, he seems to believe that if you just keep fighting hard enough, God will descend from the heavens.   None of this made sense to me the first time around, but once you start interpreting this in the context of Vlad as a religious extremist, it starts to add up.   Anderson’s fellows in the Iscariot Organization were literally blowing themselves up to help Anderson defeat Alucard, and they were happy to do it, because they saw it as a holy mission.    Anderson himself was eager to use the Nail to make himself into a monster, because he craved to be a single-minded instrument of God’s will.   A righteous bludgeon to smite the wicked.    Vlad Tepes’ “bloodlust” seems to have been inspired by a similar zealotry, at least as Hirano sees it.

But in the end, did God descend to respond to Vlad’s “prayers”?   The image of the modern Alucard is all the answer we need.    Of course that didn’t happen.  

I’m just cribbing from the Vlad the Impaler page on Wikipedia, but from what I gather about Vlad’s final years, he was fighting for the office of Voivoide of Wallachia against Basarab Laiotă , who had support from the Ottoman Empire.   Vlad fought and lost, probably dying in battle in December 1476/Janury 1477.   The story goes that his corpse was cut into pieces, and his head sent to Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II.

So Kouta Hirano depicts Vlad’s final moments with him being captured and executed.  This is certainly plausible, and it gives Vlad a chance to reflect on his failure before he meets his fate.    He fought and killed so many people, daring to resist the Ottomans even as he ruled a state that was basically controlled by the Ottomans, and I guess he must have known how impossible that would be, which is why he counted on God to deliver him, so long as he fought hard enough.

But in that final moment, just as the axe comes down on his neck, he still has his cross... but instead of taking solace in that, he reaches out instead for the puddle of blood in front of him.    The axe comes down and shatters the cross, just as Vlad Tepes forsakes his humanity.  

So maybe all of this is a way of Alucard accepting defeat.   Defeated and humbled, no longer a servant of God or a leader of men, no longer even a man, he renounced his faith and became the vampire Dracula, and eventually Alucard.    But now Anderson seems to have the upper hand, so maybe, after 523 years, Vlad Tepes is back where he started, facing an inevitable death.  

And you know, maybe Anderson’s monster form represents the divine intervention he was waiting for back in the 15th Century.   After all these centuries of battle, you might say that God finally did descend from heaven to respond to Alucard.   So maybe this is a fitting swan song for the guy.  He wanted to die at the hands of a human adversary, but maybe this works too, right?  

But then he hears someone calling out to him, and...

Hey, it’s Seras!

So yeah, we’re back to the real world, and Anderson’s well on his way to chopping Alucard in half and burning him with holy fire or something...

And Alucard’s still out of it...

And then Seras jumps in to save his ass!   Cool!

The only problem is that this was killing Alucard, and Seras is less powerful than Alucard, so she’s probably not going to be able to do a lot of good here.    For that matter, this might just get both of them killed.  

And this is why I think this moment is cool.   When Team Four Star did their Abridged parody of Hellsing, they sort of skipped this whole “Seras jumps in” part of the fight.   Instead, they did a whole thing where Alucard has a near-death experience and talks to God.   Then he rejects God’s offer of forgiveness and goes on to defeat Anderson by himself.   I don’t care much for that, because Seras is my favorite character, and I find the whole routine of “Well maybe I don’t need your forgiveness, God!” kind of stale and limp.    Can something be stale and limp at the same time?  

Like, I think I get that a lot of atheists are sore at the whole “organized religion” thing, but it seems kind of silly to write a whole bit where the premise is that God is real, but only so we can all tell him to get lost.  Like, I’m a Christian, so I can’t really relate, but if I thought God didn’t exist, I wouldn’t spend all day writing angry text messages to God to remind him of how fake he is.  

But mostly, I just really like Seras, and this is a cool Seras scene, and I think that deserves attention, so here we are.

The Alucard-Seras relationship is complex by design.    With Integra and Alucard, there’s not much to it.   She literally addresses him as “slave” at one point, and he repeatedly talks about himself like a weapon that she has to point at her target.   There’s something kind of like that with Al and Seras.   In one of their first missions together, he sends her to take out a bunch of ghouls just so he won’t be bothered, and it’s almost like he’s weilding her as a weapon.  But he also never leans on that too hard.  For one thing, there’s not a whole lot of thngs Seras can do for him that he can’t do more easily himself.   

It feels a lot more like a Master/Apprentice relationship, which may not strictly be a vampire thing, because he’s teaching her how to hunt vampires and how to be a vampire at the same time.  I think Seras has the same sort of devotion to her master as he does for Integra, but that’s mostly overshadowed by a more down-to-earth respect and admiration.   She sees him like a superior officer and a mentor, but she also knows that he has this strange charm over her that she can’t explain or resist.  

One of the things I can’t stand about he Gonzoverse Hellsing Anime is how after a while they just started having Seras say “Master...!” over and over.    I get it, there’s some power in the way she says it.   It means a lot of things to her.   I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that “Castlevania part 2″ inspired some of that, but I don’t know what chapter of the manga was published when the anime wrapped up.   But it annoyed me that they just used “Master...!” over and over again as a shorthand for Seras’s feelings.   You have to do something with it.  Demonstrate it, like we’re seeing here with Seras trying to remove a blessed bayonet from Alucard’s torso.    She has to help him, even if it means risking her own neck, because he means so much to her, and she wouldn’t be here without him.   And yeah, she’s his vampire servant, so this seems like something a loyal servant should be doing.   Stickin’ together is what good waffles do.

Let me pause here to note that this marks the destruction of whatever remained of Dandyman and Rip van Winkle, the only “name” characters featured in Alucard’s menagerie of absorbed souls.    Whatever Anderson is doing to Alucard, it’s destroying them, irrevocably.  

So it occurred to me one day, what if Seras has to save Alucard, not out of slavish devotion or plucky heroism, or even righteous loyalty?   Way back in Chapter 1, Integra explained vampires to the local authorities, and said that when you kill a vampire, you also destroy all the ghouls and servant vampires that were created by that first vampire.   In other words, if Alucard were to be destroyed, Seras ought to die with him.    So maybe her efforts here could be nothing more than self-preservation.    I’m not wild about that idea.   Maybe, after drinking Pip’s blood, Seras “graduated” from that lowly status, and she no longer depends upon Alucard in this way.  

But I think the point remains either way.   They’re in this together.   Alucard called the two of them a family, and it wasn’t just creepy vampire talk.   There’s a bond between them, and it matters to both of them.   And that’s why Seras’ intervention here is what brings Alucard back from the brink.   By rushing in to help him, Seras has placed herself in danger, and now they have to rescue each other.

I like this part where he puts his hand on hers as they pull out the bayonet together.    It’s like the moment when Seras reached out to Alucard in Cheddar and he took her hand then.   Well, that was only in the OVA, but still.  

Alucard tells Anderson that he might have welcomed a death like this, maybe back when he was about to get beheaded in 1476, but now, he refuses to be defeated.    523 years ago, he was at his lowest ebb.   He had nothing.   Today, he has Seras.  

And... yeah, he has Integra too.   I don’t want to dismiss the importance of that relationship.   But Integra could find a way to get by without him if she needed to.   He has a responsibility to Seras, though, and Seras’s loyalty trumps whatever death-fantasies he might have on his mind.

Then Al turns into this form, which I guess is the same outfit he was wearing back in 1989, when Integra found him in the basement.  Not sure if that’s supposed to mean anything, though.  

Oh, and I guess there’s still a few familiars that didn’t burn up from before?   This is the last time we see them though, so maybe this final attack finishes them off.

As Alucard strikes the final blow on Anderson, Integra flashes back to her father, who taught her about the vampires’ inner psyche.    Arthur Hellsing suggested that vampires don’t have a whole lot to show for their immortality.   They crave conflict, not for its own sake, but becuse they long for death.   Not just any ol’ death, but a kind of death that they could take some solace in.   We’ve already seen this in Alucard, as he seems to relish the idea of being killed by a human like Anderson, or van Helsing.    If all he wanted was death, he could have let that Ottoman headsman finish the job 523 years ago.   Instead, he lost everything, and he’s spent centuries with nothing to take comfort in.   And that probably explains why Alucard is so happy with his service to Integra.   At least she gives him a purpose, a duty, a cause to fight for.  

And finally, Alucard rips out Anderson’s heart, with the Holy Nail still in it. 

And he crushes it, which I guess it enough to neutralize the Nail’s effect?   Well, cool enough then.

But Al takes no pleasure in this victory.   He sees in Anderson a reflection of himself, back when he was a human.   The fanaticism, the failure, the rejection of humanity to become a monster, and then failure again.   

And then Anderson, or whats’ left of him, consoles Alucard before he dies.

[duhragonball]

Hellsing Liveblog Ch. 82-86

LIKE A BLOODY STORM

Atsuku LIKE A BLOODY STONE

So it’s come to this.   This is the “Black Onyx” arc and “Sorcerian Part 1″, where we finally get the payoff to the Major’s 55-year plot against Alucard.    Walter betrayed Integra, the Hellsing Organization, and the whole United Kingdom just so Millennium would give him a chance to beat Alucard, and he’s failing.   Alucard doesn’t see any point in dragging this out, so he’s sucking up all the fresh blood in London to power up and bring and end to this.   Also, if you’re just joining us, Alucard looks like a 14-year-old girl.    Just roll with it.

But the Major was counting on Alucard doing this, and apparently his plan to “poison the tyrant’s wine” involves his last henchman, Warrant Officer Schrodinger, cutting off his own head and adding his werewolf blood to Alucard’s meal.   Why would this matter at all?

Walter seems to understand, because he begs the Major to stop this, as if the Major could.

Desperate, he bisects Alucard with his wires, but it’s already too late for that.   Part of the secret behind Alucard’s invincibility is that he gains a 1-up for each person’s blood he consumes.   That’s what Anderson and Walter were banking on when they attacked Alucard before.   At the time, he had separated himself from the souls he had consumed, which meant that killing him once -- however tough that might be-- would finish him off.   But now it’s too late for that.  You kill him now and he’ll just come back and dare you to keep going.    And he’s taken the blood of like three million people at least.

So the Major observes that Walter’s window of opportunity has closed.   According to him, there’s only been two chances to beat Alucard in a fight since Abraham van Helsing captured him in 1898.   I assume he’s referring to Anderson and Walter’s respective efforts. 

No, Walter was never the final stroke in the Major’s plan, just part of the endgame.  All of Millennium’s resources were sacrificed to get to this moment.  Enrico Maxwell’s 9th Crusade?   The Major was counting on them getting involved, which is probably why he leaked and shared so much of his plans with the Vatican, even though his target was always London.   He wanted the Vatican to send all their best warriors to compound the horror, all so Alucard would use his full power to destroy them.

And then, once Alucard’s full power was deployed, the Major knew Anderson would step in and use everything at his disposal to kill Alucard.   This battle destroyed all of Alucard’s familiars, setting him up for Walter to take a turn.   And maybe Alucard could beat Walter without taking in more blood, but that;s never been Alucard’s style.   He sees himself as a loaded weapon at the disposal of Integra Hellsing.   He’s not going to drag things out for no reason, and Integra ordered him to destroy Walter, not humor him.

And maybe Walter was aware of all this, but he still believed he could buck the odds and kill Alucard before the Major’s winning move.  Walter’s a rook who fancied himself a king.   I guess that’s always been his problem.   This was never Walter’s story, and I guess he couldn’t handle that truth.  If he couldn’t be the hero, then he was content with being the villain, but in the end he was never more than a plot device, supporting whichever side he was on at the time.

And finally, it happens, whatever ‘it’ is.   Alucard somehow hears the Major saying that he’s lost.   Is the Major saying it?  I don’t think anyone else would be.  Whoever it is, he starts flashing back to all the other times he’s heard that.

Then he seems to realize something’s gone terribly wrong, and he pauses to notice the rising sun, which has been a common theme with all of his past defeats.   Then all these eyes appear on his body and begin winking out, one by one.  

Okay, so what the hell happened here?  Well, get comfortable, because this is going to take some time to unpack.

The key to all of this is Warrant Officer Schrodinger, a werewolf with the power to be “everywhere and nowhere”.   This sounds like he’s just a teleporter, like Nightcrawler from the X-Men, or.... Majik from the X-Men.    Well, it’s more complicated than that. 

Let me explain the “Schrödinger's cat” thought experiment, because that’s one of those things that’s widespread enough in pop culture that it’s easy to take for granted.  I think people understand it has to do with an imaginary cat being alive or dead, but that’s about all.   

The really short version of quantum mechanics is that subatomic particles don’t behave the same way as big objects like apples or planets or people.   It’s convenient to think of atoms as tiny little solar systems, with electrons orbiting the atomic nucleus.   But the reality is that electrons don’t revolve around elliptical orbits like the Earth around the Sun.   What happens instead is the electron zips around the nucleus all over the place, from all angles and directions.   What’s more, the electron can be at any particular spot at any moment.    So it’s less useful to think of an electron having an orbit around a nucleus.   What you have instead is this region where the electron is most likely to be at any particular moment.    And you can do the math and figure out what the shape of this region is.  You can’t locate the electron’s exact position at any particular moment, but you can consider the region where it’s most likely to be in an atom, which will resemble a sphere or a vaguely dumbbell kind of shape.  

This is what the Schrödinger Equation is for.   Erwin Schrödinger didn’t just talk about cats all day.   He postulated his equation in 1925 to work out the movements of electrons in atoms.   It was groundbreaking work, and he won a Nobel Prize for it in 1933, and don’t feel bad if you have trouble wrapping your head around all of this.   I’m a professional chemist and a lot of this is over my head. 

The point of the “Schrödinger's cat” concept was to help visualize how confusing quantum mechanics really is.   There are principles to subatomic particles that we know to be true, but they make no sense in our macroscale world.   For example, a particle might have a probability of being in multiple locations at a given moment.    It can only be in one place at a time, but until you actually perform the measurement to find out, it may as well be in all of those locations.    This is something called “superposition”, and I guess we could say that this idea is the basis for our wolfboy’s powers.

So Schrödinger (the scientist, not the furry) suggested a thought experiment where a macroscale event could depend upon a subatomic condition.   Like there’s some subatomic thing that could happen or not happen, and depending on the outcome, it would cause a poison to be dispensed that would kill a cat in a box.   If the particle goes one way, the cat dies, but if it goes the other way, the cat survives.    But both probabilities are equal, and supposedly both outcomes are true for the particle until you make the observation.    Therefore, you can’t know whether the cat lived or died until you open the box to look!   Indeed, according to quantum mechanics, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead until you open the box to see for yourself.  

How does that make any sense?   Well it doesn’t, and that’s the point Erwin Schrödinger was driving at.    In our large scale, things like gravity and being one place at a time are things we take for granted.  But on the quantum level, subatomic particles are governed by rules that seem completely paradoxical to us.    And yet, we’re not talking about some alternate reality here.   Those subatomic particles make up the atoms that make up us.  Cats, boxes, bottles of poison, they’re all just a huge pile of subatomic particles, each following these seemingly nonsensical rules.    They’re just organized in such a way that they give rise to bigger rules that make more sense to us.    Things like classical mechanics, chemical reactions, cats liking to be inside boxes, and so on.   As Erwin Schrödinger put it:

“It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naïvely accepting as valid a "blurred model" for representing reality. In itself, it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.”

In other words, we see the world as discrete outcomes.  We read the black letters on the page, and not the indeterminate spaces in between, or the hazy, unfinished thoughts of the writer.  That doesn’t mean the words on the page aren’t legitimate, or that the passing thoughts of the writer don’t exist.   We have to accept the seeming contradiction of it.   

So what does this have to do with Alucard?   Well, Schrödinger (the furry, not the scientist) has the ability to be like one of these subatomic particles.   Our were-boy probably can’t be literally everywhere, but he has this probability region of places where he can be, and it seems to cover at least half the world.   He’s appeared in Brazil, London, Zorin Blitz’s psychic visions, and so on.  He’s been shot twice in this story, but he just reappears like nothing happened to him at all.   It’s not like he teleported away in the nick of time, either.    We’ve seen his head burst open like a ripe melon.   Like Schrödinger’s cat in the thought experiment, he can be alive or dead at any given moment, so killing him doesn’t actually matter.  Warrant Officer Schrödinger can do all of this and he’s conscious of this ability.   So as long as he’s aware of himself, he can observe himself and direct himself to be in any location he so chooses. 

I would think getting shot in the face would interfere with this ability to control his power, but that’s probably where his werewolf nature comes in.   Like the Captain, he can grow back from a nasty headwound, so that gives him time to picture himself someplace else, and in better health.   Now that I think about it, that must have been a silver knife he used to cut his own head off.  

So when Alucard drank all that blood, he drank Schrödinger’s too, and just like when he drank Rip van Winkle’s blood and got the power to fire that magic musket, Alucard absorbed Schrödinger’s ability to be “everywhere and nowhere”.  Except that power only works when Schrödinger himself is conscious of it. And he’s not conscious of it anymore because he’s part of Alucard now.  Alucard might figure out how to control this power, but until he does, he can’t choose a location and be in that one place.   Instead, he’s “everywhere and nowhere” all the time.  So he’s experiencing all of his past moments simultaneously, with no control over his current position.  

That sounds bad, right?  Well it gets worse.   He drank all those other dead people’s blood too, so on top of his own perception, he has the perceptions of all 3 million plus of the souls he’s consumed.   So that just further complicates matters.   The bottom line is that Schrödinger’s ability is fundamentally incompatible with Alucard’s existence as a composite being made up of multiple absorbed lives. 

And since Alucard can’t just cough up Schrödinger’s blood, it’s too late now.   He’s got Schrödinger’s ability and he’s stuck with it, but he can’t control it, which means he just winks out of existence.   As the Major puts it, he’s now neither live nor dead nor undead.   He’s become like a series of imaginary numbers.  You’ll need to look that one up on your own time, folks, I spent enough time talking about quantum mechanics.

And you have to hand it to Kouta Hirano, this is a really clever way to bring down an overpowered seinen manga protagonist.  This whole time, all of these lower villains acted like they could just beat down Alucard if they applied enough brute force, but that was never going to get the job done.   For the purposes of this story, Alucard has been, almost by definition, unbeatable.   So the Major’s solution was to give him a new power, one that he would be unable to control.   It wouldn’t kill him, but killing Alucard seems like a fool’s errand anyway.  Instead, it just... makes Alucard go away, which is probably as close to destroying him as anyone could ever hope for.   He might still be alive in some semantic sense, but he can’t carry out his duties to Hellsing and the Crown, so the Major seems to have at least brought down what Alucard is expected to be. 

And there’s no way to stop it, because it’s already happened.  Integra commands him to stay, but it’s useless.  I like the way he signs off in the dub of the OVA, where he apologizes to Integra and says this is one order he cannot obey.  It’s just out of his hands.  

Then he vanishes, and all that’s left of Alucard is a bloody mark on the street, shaped like the Hellsing insignia on his gloves.   

Wait, so does this affect Seras too, since she was Alucard’s servant vampire?  Remember, way back in Chapter 1, Integra said that killing the head vampire would automatically kill any ghouls or vampires he creates.   So maybe Seras is gone too?

Hell naw.    Seras joins Integra in the Major’s command center, and she looks like she’s ready for some revenge.  Does she know what’s just happened?  I mean, she was furious at the Major to begin with, but she sensed Alucard’s return a while back when he floated up the Thames River.  Surely she sensed her own vampire dad winking out of existence.

Meanwhile, Walter had a front-row seat for Alucard’s disappearance.   At first he laughs with triumph.   I guess he must be giddy with relief, since he wanted to kill Alucard, and for a minute there it looked like Alucard had him dead to rights.   Imagine a guy’s about to murder you and then he just ceases to exist.   But it doesn’t take long for Walter to realize how hollow this all is.  He wanted to kill Alucard himself, and he bet everything just to get that one opportunity, and now he’s failed and he’ll never get another chance.   His body is giving out and he’s betrayed everyone who ever cared about him and he’s got nothing to show for it.   

Then Heinkel starts shooting at him with a sniper rifle.  Yeah, she never left the battlefield after Walter killed Yumiko.   The Captain stopped her from interfering before, but the Captain’s dead now and I guess she figures she’s got nothing to lose by trying again.   And I suppose the sniper act proves she’s learned from Yumiko’s fatal mistake.   Attacking Walter up close is dangerous.   

At first, Walter seems to invite this.   He even invites Heinkel to shoot him a few more times, as it’s a fitting punishment for a traitor.   If you’ve only seen the TFS Abridged version of Hellsing, they actually use this as Walter’s death scene, but in the original version Walter takes a few bullets and then leaves.  He says Heinkel can shoot him, but she doesn’t get to kill him.   I don’t think she even heard him say that, but whatever.

Instead, he uses his wires to board the Major’s airship one last time.

So remember how the Major was protected from Integra by a reinforced glass barrier?   Yeah, well Seras finds an 88mm cannon and shoots through it.   It also shoots through the hull of his ship and rings a large bell on the outskirts of town.   Right before she shoots, Integra orders Seras to “Search and Destroy” just like she always told Alucard.    It’s kind of sad, but Seras has automatically succeeded her master as Integra’s weapon.  I mean, it’s a triumph for Seras, but it comes at a heavy price for her.   She’s probably too enraged by what’s happened to appreciate this moment on all these other levels, but there’ll be time for that.

So there’s no way the Major could survive a cannon like that at pointblank range, right?   Wrong, the dude’s a fucking cyborg, and I guess Seras’ aim was a little off.   I suppose the downside to using big-ass guns is that you have trouble aiming at small targets.   Wait, no, what happened to all that “third eye” stuff from before?   What’s wrong with you, Victoria?  

Oh wait, she missed because she’s sad.    Aw... :`(

So we knew the Major had to be something to have survived this long without aging, but we had already learned he wasn’t a vampire.   He insists that he is still human, however, no different from a man with a pacemaker or an artificial limb.   His mind remains his own, even if it should be a brain in a life support system or backed up on a computer.   I’m not sure if either of these describes the status of the Major’s brain, but to his point, it doesn’t really matter.  He describes himself as Alucard’s polar opposite.  While Al is this beautiful monster who masquerades as a human, the Major is a human who resembles the grotesque form of a monster.   I’m not body-shaming the dude, I’m just reporting what he’s saying.  He’s taken a few fat jokes in stride, and I guess he’s got the same attitude about his cyborg body too.  He doesn’t seem to care if others find this unpleasant, because it’s better than being a vampire with a diluted self.

Arguably, this whole campaign to destroy Alucard was the Major’s effort to prove his claim on being human.   Alucard often said that only a human could defeat a monster like him, and the Major beat him, so doesn’t that prove he’s a human in the end?  

So Integra whips out her other gun, the one she didn’t use to shoot at the Major’s glass case, and they start shooting each other at pointblank range.   The Major’s a terrible shot, though, and yet somehow he manages to take out one of Integra’s eyes before she puts a bullet in his forehead.   I still don’t understand how you can shoot someone in the eye and not kill them.   Did the bullet just angle away from her brain or is the Major’s gun just really weak on stopping power?  

Anyway, Integra’s shot kills the Major, but not right away, so I guess it’s not just his original brain in there.   He’s just thrilled to have finally hit something after a lifetime of terrible marksmanship.    It’s a fitting reflection of his win over Alucard, because he and the rest of Millennium were warriors who had never won a war before.   In the end, I’m not sure the Major would have been disappointed if his plan had failed.   He’d never won before, so I don’t think another defeat would have bothered him much.    As it is, he dies contentedly, satisfied with his “good war”.   What a shithead.

So yeah, we’ve got three more chapters to go and then we’re done.   See you next time.

[duhragonball]

Hellsing Liveblog Afterward

So, this is just a place for me to toss in some other Hellsing stuff I wanted to talk about outside the reading of Hellsing itself.

Okay so first off, I wanted to document this cool trivia I noticed about Rip van Winkle, the werewolf(?) with the musket that fires magic bullets.   Her weapon is based on the 19th Century German opera Der Freischütz. The opera is based on a  story published by Johann August Apel in 1811, and this writing was based on German folklore.    The legend involves a marksman who makes a contract with the devil and receives seven magic bullets.   Six will hit whatever the marksman wants, but the seventh is at the sole discretion of the devil himself.   In Hellsing, the Major speaks to Rip about her own musket and reminds her that the opera ends with Zamiel, the devil, coming to claim his due.  This is intended to foreshadow Alucard counterattack on the H.M.S. Eagle, where he plows through Rip’s defenses and kills her in gruesome fashion.

So I went back and counted all the times Rip van Winkle shoots her musket, just to see if there was any special significant to it.    The first was when the old Nazi officers complain to the Major, and Rip shoots the Colonel’s cane before he can strike the Major with it.     At least, I’m pretty sure that was the idea here.  The cane breaks and everyone looks around and Zorin points to the lady with the gun to indicate who just did that.   So that’s one bullet.

After assuming control of the H.M.S. Eagle, Rip van Winkle meets with the Eagle’s first officer, who betrayed the crew to Millennium in exchange for vampire powers.    She then betrays him and his fellow traitors, killing them all with a single shot from her musket.    This is where we first find out what her ability is.   So that’s two.

The British Navy tries to take back the ship by sending a helicopter full of SEALs, but Rip destroys the entire team with another shot from her musket.   So that’s three shots fired.

While Hellsing prepares their own response, the Navy tries again, this time sending a fighter plane to sink the Eagle with missiles, but Rip shoots down the missiles and the plane with one bullet.   Four.

This is where I started to wonder if there was a particular pattern to Rip’s use of the musket.  I’m pretty sure she just uses one bullet and can fire it as many times as she pleases, but she was literally singing songs from the opera and it seemed kind of superfluous to have her foil two separate attack by the Navy.  The first one showed us that conventional forces wouldn’t get the job done, so the second one only makes sense if Kouta Hirano was just trying to add to the count.

Then Alucard arrives aboard a modified SR-71 Blackbird.   At 85,000 ft in the air, he’s out of range, but then he nosedives onto the deck of the ship.    Rip fires again to destroy the Blackbird before it crashes into them.    Five.

Alucard survives the crash and wipes out all of Rip’s soldiers while she has a panic attack.   Cornered, she finally gathers her wits and attacks Alucard.  Her bullet hurts him, but he eventually catches it in his teeth, neutralizing her weapon and leaving her at his mercy.  That’s shot number six.

I was hoping this shot would be the seventh, since the seventh bullet in Der Freischütz belongs to the devil, and Alucard caught this one in his teeth, but no.   Then I remembered that the musket gets fired one last time...

... in London, when Alucard releases the familiars of all the victims he’s consumed over the centuries, including Rip Van Winkle.  She fires the musket once more, but this time it’s Alucard directing the shot into the helicopters of the Ninth Crusade.   Shot number seven is at the discretion of the devil himself, and “Dracula” is a diminutive of “Dracul”, a Romanian word for “devil”.   Neat stuff.

Okay, so now let’s talk about Seras, because that’s kind of my jam.   What’s the deal with this line?  “Her existence is somewhat of a marvel.  You could say it’s somewhat of a joke.  Perhaps she herself has not even noticed yet!!”

That’s the Major discussing Sir Integra and Seras in Volume 5.   He stresses that neither is to be underestimates, and I think he makes a good case for Integra, but with Seras he never actually comes to the point.   So what’s up with that? 

Of course, there’s the truth we saw in the final battle.  Once she finally drank blood of her own volition, Seras became a full-on vampire and one of the most powerful warriors on the field.   She destroyed the Captain quite handily, and he was the strongest guy Millennium had.   But this seems a tad obvious?   Why not just spell it out for Zorin.  “Hey, our intel says she’s weaker than expected because she won’t drink blood, but that could change at a moment’s notice, and she’s still strong enough to take down a lot of our soldiers, so proceed with caution.” 

I’m not saying the Major is wrong.   He told Zorin not to engage, and he made the right call.    I’m just wondering what the “joke” is exactly.  

I think it might be one of two things.   By the end of Hellsing, Seras demonstrates a similar level of ability to Alucard.  Sunlight appears to have no effect on her, she can summon familiars like Alucard, and regenerate her wounds with great alacrity.   I’m pretty sure she’d be about as hard to kill as Alucard himself, which Integra said was a product of Hellsing “enhancements”, rather than natural vampire power.   Except Seras was never “enhanced”, she seems to have just inherited these “super-vampire” powers from Alucard when he turned her.   The Major and Doctor may have anticipated this, and the “joke” was that Seras could completely upset the balance of their plans, except she’s too squeamish to drink the blood that would make this possible.  

Or, the joke might be that Alucard turned Seras at all.   He just sort of did this out of nowhere, and I’m pretty sure no one saw that coming.   Millennium and Walter had been keeping tabs on Hellsing for decades, and not much changed until Alucard decided to add Seras to the group.   The vampires in Millennium’s Last Battalion were all produced through the Doctor’s artificial vampire research, which was based upon intense study of Mina Harker, the last person Alucard turned into a vampire before he met Seras.   

So from that standpoint, Seras represents a superior version of Mina, who represents the ideal that the Doctor was trying to achieve.  At best, his finest artificial vampires could only be as strong as Mina Harker, and Seras got that way in one night by a twist of fate.  

I guess there’s no way to be sure what the Major meant.  I checked the OVA subs and dubs and they basically repeat the same line, so there’s nothing for me to triangulate there.  And maybe it only refers to Seras being a joke in the sense that she was mostly comic relief up to that point.   Even that badass moment she had against Jan Valentine’s ghouls probably didn’t impress anyone at the Millennium office.   

Finally, I checked out Hellsing: The Dawn, and it really wasn’t worth the trouble.   I couldn’t find any official English release, so I sort of gave up on it, but I finally ran across it last week and decided to check it out.   

Basically, it’s only six chapters, and very little actually gets done in those six chapters.   I’m not sure if Kouta Hirano is just running super late on the thing, of if he abandoned it completely, but my guess is he got this far in and decided there really wasn’t any point in continuing.   

Let me break it down for you.

Chapter 1: Walter is sent to the Major’s facility in Warsaw, to destroy the vampire research.   He jumps out of a plane with Alucard’s coffin.

Chapter 2: The Doctor reports on his progress to the Major, and they briefly discuss “She” aka Mina Harker.  From what I gather, Mina is still alive/undead in 1944.   Then Walter crashes into their facility and declares his intentions to kill them all.

Chapter 3: The Major is impressed with Walter’s power and offers him a place in his command.  Walter refuses and the Major leaves him to die at the hands of the Captain.

Chapter 4: Walter fights the Captain, and Alucard finally emerges from his coffin in Girlycard form.

Chapter 5: Walter and Alucard fight the Captain, who now stands revealed as a werewolf.   The Major somehow recognizes Alucard on sight and takes an interest in observing the battle.

Chapter 6: Alucard leaves to go hunt down the Captain’s superiors, leaving Walter to fight alone.  Alucard then encounters Rip van Winkle and defeats her with ease.    He seems like he’s about to kill her when some menacing figures approach from the shadows...

In other words, not a whole lot actually happens that we couldn’t have guessed from the original Hellsing manga.    At the rate he was going, it would have taken Hirano maybe 30 or 40 chapters to actually get to anything truly juicy, and I’m not sure the audience would have wanted to wait around for that.    The main problem is that we already know how this ends.   None of the good guys or bad guys die, because they all show up in Hellsing 55 years later.  The Major will lose badly enough that he has to evacuate the whole operation to Brazil, and that interests me because somehow he has to lose this battle, but not so badly that he can’t escape.  

What disappoints me is that there’s really only three things of interest about this part of the Hellsing mythos: Walter’s decision to betray England, Alucard’s relationship with Walter, and the Major’s relocation from Euope to South America.    The Dawn appears to gloss over all of these.   The Major asks Walter to switch sides in their very first encounter.   Walter refuses, but we know he’ll say yes later, so there doesn’t feel like there’s any conflict to this.  So far, Walter comes off like a little shithead, so if he changes his mind at the end of this story it’ll seem completely capricious.   I’d like to think the Major could say something persuasive to convince him, or Alucard could piss Walter off enough to push him into the Major’s arms, but none of that seems to be happening.  

The Girlycard form is taken completely for granted.   Al shows up and Walter immediately takes offense.  He knows Alucard doesn’t normally look like this and he sees no reason for this new look.   Al just says the same thing he says about it in 1999, that form and appearance mean nothing to him.   Well if it doesn’t mean anything to Alucard or Walter, what’s the point?

The way I always imagined it, the Girlycard form had a lot of emotional baggage for Walter.   I figured he met Alucard in this form, and they spent some time together hunting down the Major.    Walter fell in love with Girlycard, even though he should have known better, and when Alucard finally abandoned the form, he knew that there was no way his feelings would ever be returned.   And this would build resentment within Walter, making him more interested in joining the Major.  

Instead, none of that seems to be happening.    This is just one big long fight in one building.   Hirano already threw his biggest gun at Walter, so there’s no buildup to the Captain.   Alucard won’t fight the Captain, but it’s unclear what else he’s supposed to do instead.  There might be a good story in all of this, but these first six chapters don’t encourage me.    Also, they keep jumping over to check in on Arthur Hellsing in London.   I don’t think this guy is Integra’s father, but maybe her grandfather had the same first name?    He looks cool, but he has nothing to do.   He’s like thousands of miles removed from the action, so anything he says or does just comes back to him talking about how tough and cool Walter is.   So yeah, I think The Dawn is a huge waste of time, and maybe Kouta Hirano reached the same conclusion.  

And... yeah, that’s all I’ve got.   In May, I’ll be liveblogging another comic.   Will it be as successful?   Only time will tell...

[duhragonball]

Hellsing Liveblog Ch. 51-56

This is the “Seras Coming of Age” part of Hellsing, but the chapters are all one-off titles: “Last Mission”, “Get Away”, “Yaksa”, “The Man I Love”, “Ogre Battle”, and “Angelous,”

Last time, Zorin Blitz’s company invaded the Hellsing HQ, and Seras managed to kill them all except for Zorin herself, and then she used her psychic whammy, forcing Seras to relive some traumatic moment.   We saw one of the Wild Geese get this same treatment, and he briefly saw his dead daughter before Zorin killed him.  As for Seras, she relives the deaths of her parents.   Years ago, two guys barged into their home and shot them.   The circumstances aren’t entirely clear, but they must have had some forewarning, since Seras’ mom hid her in a closet and told her not to come out no matter what.   But when she saw what they did to them, Seras became so enraged that she attackedthe men and stabbed one in the eye with a fork.  

The other guy shot Seras, and while she must have survived, she remembers laying on the floor as the guy she stabbed decides to rape her mother.   I’m not even sure “rape” is the right word, since she was already dead, but the guy doesn’t care because the body is “still warm.”   You’d think he’d be too upset about losing an eye, but maybe he’s high on cocaine or something.

I don’t think you need me to tell you this, gentle reader, but hol-ee shit this dark.   We knew Seras’ parents died when she was young, and it wouldn’t be hard to speculate that they died in some violent crime, but Seras watched it happen, and she stabbed a dude in the face, only to get shot herself, and she watched her mother’s body getting molested before she passed out.  

And this gives us some insight into what Alucard saw in her that night in Cheddar.  There, Seras was surrounded by ghouls, many of them her comrades in the police department, and a vampire who promised to rape her before drinking her blood.   Alucard found it remarkable how she persevered in this horror, but now we see that may not even be the worst thing that ever happened to her.  It’s not even the first time she got shot!  

And from the earlier flashback we saw, Seras was hellbound to become a police officer like her father.  After a trauma like this, it’s amazing that she’d want anything to do with the police, since those men killed her father for digging “too deep” into whatever they were involved in.  But Seras quietly, defiantly chose to follow in her father’s footsteps, only to suffer a similar fate. 

Because, let’s not forget, Seras is dead.   She died in Cheddar, because Alucard had to shoot through her to kill the vampire who had taken her hostage.   Then she agreed to become a vampire like him, and join the Hellsing Organization.   Once more, she has quietly, defiantly, chosen to carry on in this life of public service.  

But none of that matters to Zorin Blitz.   She just wanted to dredge up all this trauma to keep Seras preoccupied long enough for Zorin to do this...

Oh, also she lopped off Seras’ left arm, but I liked this impalement panel better. 

On top of that, Zorin slashes Seras’ eyes, which was pretty gruesome and shocking.   When I started watching the Hellsing Ultimate OVA, I couldn’t wait to see what happened next, so I trawled YouTube for clips of Seras, so I had a pretty good idea where the character was headed, and noticed that late-story Seras was missing a left arm.   So Zorin cutting it off didn’t surprise me much, but everything else she did to her was a surprise.

Then, just as Zorin seems to be ready to finish Seras off, Pip Bernadotte gets the drop on her and whacks her with the butt of his rifle.    Machine gun?   Semiautomatic?   I don’t know from guns.    He hits her with it, is my point.   Then he shoots her with a different gun to put the exclamation point on it.

There’s two other guys left in the Wild Geese, and they toss smoke grenades to cover Pip as he tries to carry Seras to safety, but he’s wounded, and then a Millennium soldier wakes up and shoots him in the thighs.   Was that guy playing possum?  The Geese take him out, and Pip even makes it back to them, but I’m not sure what good that does anybody.   Then Zorin gets back up and cuts him down with her scythe.    I don’t think she chops him in half or anything, but he’s not getting back up again, that’s for sure. 

Seras calls out to him, and he steals another kiss.   I guess he forgot about the last time, because he acts like he “finally” managed to do this.   Then he asks Seras to drink his blood, which will allow her to win.   I guess someone must have explained enough vampire lore to Pip for him to have figured this out.    Maybe Seras herself told him how it worked, which makes it doubly-meaningful for him to say this to her now.  

And Seras starts wailing with grief, before Zorin finally mocks her for it, calling Pip an insect.   I’ve seen a few people poke fun at this scene, because it’s kind of weird for Zorin to just stand by while Pip and Seras have this final moment together, but Zorin’s a sadist.   Much of what she’s done in these past several chapters has been about reveling in her enemies’ suffering.    She took her sweet time with Seras earlier, which was the only reason Pip managed to help her, and now she’s taking her sweet time again, like she’s enjoying this drama. 

So Zorin uses her psychic whammy again, but this time it doesn’t work on Seras.   Maybe because Seras is already in the middle of a terrible trauma in the here and now.   She couldn’t do anything to avenge her parents back then, and she was powerless against the Cheddar Priest, but this time?   This time she knows exactly what to do.

VENIT AEVUS ILLE, O MESSIAH, O MESSIAH

YUDULIYA-VELE YUDULIYA-VELE

EN ESE MOMENTO ZORIN BLITZ SINTIO EL VERDADERO TERROR.

So yeah, this rocks.    The anime version does this cool thing where all the blood soaks up into her clothes and stains them red.   Maybe the manga was going for the same thing, but it’s harder to tell in black and white.   I find it kind of strange how Seras’ eyes grow back, but her left arm does not.    I’m pretty sure she could reform her arm, but chooses not to.   Instead, she’s got this black ectoplasm-y thing, like the same black stuff that Alucard uses when he’s not holding back as much.

Then Seras starts slaughtering Zorin’s men.   Didn’t she already kill them all?  Yeah, but there’s more.   The anime tries to cover for this by having Zorin explain that some “late arrivals” showed up.  Well, they did have to enter the building single file to get past the mines, so it makes sense that Zorin would keep some in reserve in case there were more traps inside. 

Seras is my favorite character in this whole thing, and since these pages of her kickin’ ass speak for themselves, I guess I’ll talk about why I like her so much.    I’m pretty sure I saw a cosplay photo of her on tumblr, and I found the design intriguing.   She’s a vampire, but dressed in something like a military uniform, kind of like the “Bridge Bunnies” in Macross. I looked up Seras to find out what she was from, and I was like “Oh, Hellsing was the show Team Four Star has been abridging, I guess I need to watch that anyway so I can watch the Abridged version and get the jokes.”

Mostly, I just like the idea of a vampire with a very professional mentality, as opposed to the whole Lost Boys/What We Do in the Shadows/Buffy kind of aesthetic.    Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but we see that sort of thing all the time.   I’ve also seen a lot of “reluctant” vampires in my time.    Vampires who try to avoid doing any vampire stuff, or going about their business like the vampirism is just this inconvenient obstacle.   Hellsing presents this other option, where vampires like Alucard are used for the purpose of anti-vampire countermeasures.   He’s been turned into a weapon, but he’s basically just Dracula with a fresh coat of paint.   Seras is more firmly rooted in the concept.  Alucard was a vampire who became a sort of cop, and Seras is a cop who became a vampire. 

And while I liked the idea of Seras being like “Oh, well I didn’t want to be a vampire but I’ll try to make the best of it”, I quickly found out that she wasn’t just a cop with pointy teeth.   There’s moments where she can be scary and creepy too.   “Sir, yes sir, my Master.”  It sums her up very neatly.   This is a vampire who can be polite and respectful and professional, but she can also get very deep into the more horrific aspects of this thing.   She’s got layers.  Zorin Blitz tried to peel them back, and look how that’s working out for her.

Once the rank and file goons are dealt with, Seras goes after Blitz, and just wrecks her shit.   Blitz tries to punch Seras in the face and it does nothing.   Seras just bites all her fingers off and spits ‘em out.   Then she announces that she refuses to drink Zorin’s blood, not a single drop. This is important, because Seras was always reluctant to drink blood.  She said she feared that drinking blood would mean the end of something inside of her, but now she’s crossed that Rubicon.   One might suspect that she’d suddenly want to drink more blood, but no.  She drank Pip’s as a means to an end.   Zorin’s blood would serve no higher purpose, and I think there’s an implication that she doesn’t want to dishonor Pip’s sacrifice.  Desperate, Zorin tries to use her power on Seras a third time, and then this happens:

  Okay, so at first Zorin sees Seras’ memories, like before, but now there’s all this stuff from Pip’s memories, and then Warrant Officer Shrodinger, of all people, shows up.   Zorin is confused by this, but he explains that he’s “everywhere and nowhere,” which means he can appear in this psychic vision just as easily as he can teleport between Brazil and England.

Schrodinger is here to pass along a message from the Major.  See, Zorin disobeyed his orders, and he would normally punish her for this, but he and the Doctor are busy with a “most interesting toy”, so they’ll just leave it to Seras to take care of punishing Zorin.  

Yesterday, I think I figured out what Zorin’s disobedience was.    Before I was confused because she didn’t start attacking until Seras opened fire on her blimp, and that only happened because Seras was shooting at the rockets fired by the Major.   Everything that Zorin did afterwards could be considered a matter of self-defense, but therein lies the problem.    Namely, what was Zorin’s blimp doing in the line of fire to begin with?  

Because once Seras shot her down, everything Zorin did next was sort of her only option.   She pretty much had to attack the mansion, and brave its defenses, whatever those happened to be.   And the Major knew that this was a big unknown.   He warned Zorin about Seras Victoria and while he didn’t seem to know exactly what her abilities were, he regarded her as an “arch-enemy” on the same level as Alucard.  That’s why he wanted Zorin to hold off and wait for the rocket attack.   It was intended to probe the mansion’s defenses, and once it became clear that they had anti-aircraft guns, and that Seras was eagle-eyed enough to shoot down their rockets, then the Major could have ordered Zorin to find a different way.   

But instead she was too close and gave Seras a target, which precipitated everything else, up to and including this:

Yeah, Seras just drags Zorin across the walls until her whole head smears apart.   Cool!

With Zorin dead, Seras delcares her intention to take the fight to the enemy, and the last three Wild Geese salute her before she leaves.   One way or another, they realize that Pip has become a part of Seras now, and they pay their last respects to him through her. 

Then Seras flies toward London, using her left arm-thing to make cool bat wings.    And this is a good illustration of what Seras is all about.  Once, she might have been horrified at the thought of doing something like this, but now she sees it as a way to carry on with her duty.    This was what Alucard had been trying to get her to understand, but sometimes you just have to work these things out in your own way.   Seras is about utility, and now that she has a use for these vampiric powers, she’s finally prepared to embrace them as her own.

In London, Schrodinger reports back to the Major and informs him of Zorin Blitz’s death.  He’s not surprised, and even declares “our ruin has begun”.   Schrodinger points out that he’s leading everyone, friend and foe alike, into destruction, and the Major simply observes that this is war.   Millennium didn’t come to London to win, they came to London to fight.

Then the Ninth Crusade shows up.  Recall that, earlier, Enrico Maxwell organized a military response to deal with the Millennium invasion of London, but he hasn’t come here to save the civilian population.   Instead, he’s treating them as enemies, just like the Nazi vampires.    Somehow, there’s still living people in the city, and as dawn approaches, they see Maxwell’s helicopters putting off some sort of light show.  I don’t know what you call this, but the people on the ground think it’s angels, and then Maxwell orders his men to open fire.

I want to point out that the newly promoted Archbishop Maxwell is riding into this battle in a special truck with a glass box for him to sit in.   He’s surrounded by microphones so he can address his troops and the people below.   Also the truck is hanging from a helicopter.   It’s stupid and pointless and over-the-top, so naturally the Major is highly impressed with Maxwell’s style. 

[duhragonball]

Hellsing Liveblog Ch. 62-67

I guess this image sets the stage pretty well.   This is the first part of the climactic Alucard vs. Anderson battle, featured in the story arcs “Hundred Swords”, “Might and Magic”, and “Psyoblade”.

So yeah, most of this is just action shots of Alucard and Anderson fighting.  The main story beats here are the different forms they take on through the course of the battle.   Alucard starts out in this Dracula form, which I assume is meant to depict how he used to look 500 years ago.  He’s got armor and big sword and a mustache.  

Anderson’s big idea here is that Alucard is vulnerable in this form, because he unleashed his horde of familiars to destroy the 9th Crusaders and Millennium troops.   Now that he’s temporarily separated from those creatures, Anderson thinks he can finally kill him once and for all.  

And it seems like Alucard isn’t opposed to the idea.   He calls Anderson his “beloved rival”, and seems to enjoy the prospect of meeting his end at the hands of a worthy human adversary.   But he’s also under orders from Sir Integra to destroy all of the invaders, and I’m pretty sure that includes Anderson.   Soon enough, Alucard reverts to his default appearance, trading in his sword for his handguns. 

This only makes sense, because way back at the start of this story, Alucard asked Walter to build him the Jackal, an even bigger, more powerful version of his original handgun, the Casul.   I mean, why wouldn’t he try it out?  Its bullets shatter Anderson’s bayonets with ease.  

And Alucard still has his horde of familiars, the absorbed souls of all of his victims.  There’s Ottoman soldiers, Wallachians, even those Brazillian cops that tried to kill him in his hotel room that one time.  

Okay, so we know what the Catholics are doing while this is going on, because Anderson told them to retreat while he faced Alucard alone.  But what is Millennium doing during all of this?    Not much, actually.   The Major just lost his entire invasion force down there, but he’s chilling out in his airship, enjoying the duel between Alucard and Anderson.  He orders Walter to make him some hot chocolate.   He seems pretty pleased with all of this...

And here’s a cool shot of Seras Victoria watching the fight.  

So now Anderson has to fight his way through Alucard’s familiars to get at the monster himself.  The odds are steep, but he’ll do it anyway, which pleases Alucard to no end.   He’s thrilled to see another human daring to challenge him this way, just like Abraham van Helsing a century ago.   Well, he doesn’t name names, but come on, we already saw him revealed as Dracula, so there’s no point dancing around this anymore.

Anderson’s arm gets badly injured, to the point where he has to carry it in his mouth as he fights on, but then his Iscariot colleagues show up to help.   Anderson is pissed because he told them to clear out for their own safety, but Heinkel and Yumiko are just as fanatical as he is, and just as eager to die for what they see as a righteous cause.    Anderson can’t talk them out of it, so he accepts their help.  

This guy kind of looks like Anderson with black hair, but he’s not.   He’s just some rando Iscariot dude.   As they get overpowered by Alucard’s minions, or fatally wounded, they set off explosives to take out as many enemies as they can.   So I guess they were just... carrying this stuff on them the whole time?  I think I see now why they lost so many of their guys defending Integra from the Millennium soldiers.  

At last, Anderson clears a path to Alucard, and he finally whips out his secret weapon, procured by Vatican Section III, the Matthew Organization.    In the Hellsing-verse, the Catholic Church seems to have 12 sections that handle their business, each named after the twelve apostles, with Iscariot as the secret 13th section that does all the black ops murder-y stuff.   Fun fact: After Judas Iscariot’s death and Christ’s ascension into heaven, the 11 apostles had a meeting and picked a new member, Mattias to round out their group.   So I assume Section XII is the Mattias Organization, and they handle... I don’t know, maybe making those little communion wafers.    But Section III handles ancient relics, like the one Anderson is holding in his hand.  

Alucard recognizes this at once as the “Nail of Helena”, one of the nails used to crucify Jesus.   I’ve heard of the others that Alucard mentions, but not this one.   The Holy Shroud was the burial cloth used to put Jesus in the tomb, and widely believed to be the Shroud of Turin, although this is disputed.   The Holy Grail, or “Holy Chalice” is supposed to be the cup Jesus used at the Last Supper, and was the subject of “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.”   The Lance of Longinus, also known as the “Spear of Destiny” was the spear that the Roman soldier used to pierce Jesus’ side when he died.    This got a lot of play in DC Comics, which used the Spear as a plot device to explain why the Spectre couldn’t intervene in World War II. 

The “Nails of Helena” refer to Helena, the mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine, who converted the Roman Empire to Christianity.   Helena went on a quest to find the cross used to crucify Jesus, and she supposedly succeeded.   And now Alexander Anderson is holding one in his hand like Wolverine.  

And this development takes all the wind out of Alucard’s sails.   Not because he’s worried about losing, but because he wants to fight Anderson as a man.   He knows that if Anderson uses the nail on himself, he’ll become some sort of miraculous creature, but give up his humanity in the process.    In other words, he’ll just be another monster like Alucard. 

But Anderson doesn’t care, because he’s not interested in such details.    Alucard wants to die to a human adversary, but Anderson just wants to destroy Alucard, period.   If the nail can make that happen, he’ll gladly use it.

And he does, and this leads to Anderson regenerating his damaged body parts with some sort of thorny tendrils.   One of the Iscariots, probably Heinkel, likens this to the crown of thorns placed on Jesus’ head at the crucifixion.    Alucard shoots Anderson in the face, but he just grows thorns in place of the wound.    Anderson cuts off Alucard’s head, but we already know that won’t stop him.   

Meanwhile, the crew of the Major’s airship are freaking out, because the ground forces have all been destroyed.    The captain asks the Major for orders, and he tells him to arm the crew and give hand grenades to anyone who can’t walk.   If they run out of weapons, then they can use steel pipes or whatever’s handy.   The captain objects, arguing that the battle has been lost and there’s no longer any point in fighting, but the Major scolds him for missing the whole point of this.  

This doesn’t really get explained in full until the end of the story, but I think it was already made clear that the Major’s sole purpose was war for the sake of war.    Now that the battle is turning against him, it seems like a lot of his own goons don’t understand how far he was willing to take this.   

One thing that confuses me is that the airship is apparently staffed by German naval officers.  Presumably these guys were Nazis turned into vampires too, but the captain seems to have different sensibilities than the SS guys that died on the ground.    It’s weird, because they’ve all been planning this invasion for the last 55 years, and so many of them still don’t understand the Major’s plan.   Maybe he just never saw fit to share it with them, or he’s been intentionally deceiving them so they’d cooperate.  

Anyway, the Major summons a pistol from his chair, and there’s this whole sequence where a mechanical arm hands it to him, but when he shoots the guy for insubordination, he misses.   Then he orders his loyal men to do the shooting for him.   Wait, so does Millennium have anti-vampire weapons too?  I mean, we’ve already established that ordinary bullets don’t work on vampires, so why was the Major trying to shoot this dude in the first place?  

Back to the fight, this is what Anderson looks like now, and he’s becoming less human as these thorn tendrils grow over his wounds.  

And he finally gets the drop on Alucard, running him through the neck with one of his bayonets, and getting all that thorny stuff into the wound, which seems to do a real number on Al.  One way or another, his army of familiars starts to burst into flames, so he’s in deep trouble.  

[duhragonball]

Hellsing Liveblog Ch. 57-61

This is the “Wizardry” arc. 

I don’t know why it just now occurred to me, but there’s more than a hint of the Joker in the Major’s character.   He’s always grinning, and now we have him dancing on a blimp while enemy helicopters are firing on him.

The Doctor shits a brick over this, because the arrival of the Vatican’s 9th Crusade force is the first serious resistance that Millennium has encountered since they invaded London.   He begs the Major to come back inside and move their airship to safety, but the Major is too preoccupied with dancing like a goofball.   Up to this point, the audience must have been eager to see someone take a poke at the Major.  I know I was, if only to see what sort of powers he had.   I mean, he hasn’t aged a day, but he doesn’t seem to be a vampire, so what’s his deal?

But before we can find out, the helicopter that was about to shoot him gets torn apart by magic wires.   Wait... that sounds like...

DUN DUN DUUUUUNNNNNNN! 

Yeah, Walter’s switched sides.   He’s also younger-looking too, so this must be what Schrodinger was talking about when he told Zorin that the Major and Doctor had a new “toy”.   They were too busy turning him into a vampire to bother punishing Zorin for disobeying orders.   In the previous chapter, the Major asked about using Walter (without mentioning him by name), and the Doc said something about the rushed nature of the job.    Presumably, the Doctor was doing the artificial vampire treatment on Walter all through the night, while Seras and the Wild Geese were defending the mansion. 

What I’ve never been sure of is whether this was a spur-of-the-moment decision, or if Millennium approached Walter a long time ago, and Walter’s been their mole in Hellsing throughout this entire story.   The Major’s line here seems to suggest this was a long-term plan.    “I had already decided half a century ago.   The Death’s Head [the Nazi SS skull insignia] is a fitting match for the Angel of Death [Walter’s old Hellsing codename].”

But that could just mean the Major thought of the idea way back then.   He saw Walter and Alucard wrecking all his stuff in World War II and thought “This kid would be a good recruit someday!” But when did he make the pitch?   Was it last night?    Before the Valentines’ attack?   Before Arthur Hellsing’s death?   Before the end of the war?

I think it’s reasonable to assume that Walter was on board at least before he parted ways with Integra back in Chapter 39.  The Captain suddenly showed up, and he told Integra to take the car and flee, because he wasn’t sure he could defeat the Captain and he didn’t want her around in case he failed.   But it’s much more likely that he only said this to keep her from finding out that he had a rendezvous with the Major, who arrived soon after.   

Now that I think about it, this may be the only reason the Major sent his troops to capture Integra.   He wasn’t particularly concerned about her, but he knew Walter would be with her, and he wanted to get him to the Doctor as quickly as possible.   This may also be why he ordered Zorin Blitz to hold off on attacking the Hellsing mansion.  If Walter had been inside, Zorin wouldn’t have known about his allegiance, and it’s very likely that one might have killed the other.  

Actually, yeah, this is why the Major fired those rockets on the Hellsing mansion in the first place.   If Walter was there, he would know the attack was coming, and use the attack to cover his departure. Then Zorin probably would have been ordered to give him a lift back to the Doctor.  But Walter wasn’t home, and Zorin didn’t wait for orders, and Seras turned out to be much too powerful for her.  

Wow, this is like peeling an onion.  That must be what the Major meant when he chided Zorin for costing him “precious soldiers.”    Her reckless tactics got her and her company killed, but she might have also wrecked his plans to extract Walter, and it’s only a matter of luck that he happened to be at the naval base instead of the mansion. And we know that Zorin knew nothing about Walter, because Schrodinger only hinted about him without mentioning his name.   If Zorin had known, he would have just said “Yeah, we’re turning Walter into a vampire right now, no thanks to you.”

Anyway, Walter’s betrayal fascinates me, but also fuck you, Walter, you traitorous piece of shit.

Speaking of treachery, the 9th Crusaders are busy shooting the shit out of London, killing anything that survived the previous night.    Millennium is a threat, sure, but Maxwell sees this as an opportunity to conquer England for the Catholic church.    I’m not really sure “conquer” is meant literally.   I think it’s more like, Hellsing and the Iscariot Organization have some treaty, and I think that treaty applies to their respective governments as well, but the civilian governments might know nothing about it.    Maybe?  

What I’m saying is that I think this 9th Crusade is supposed to end with the overthrow of the Anglican Church in the United Kingdom, with a new Catholic-leaning regime in its place, so that the Pope would have the same influence over the U.K. that he apparently has over continental Europe.   

In that sense, I’m pretty sure Hellsing’s version of John Paul II didn’t order Maxwell to gun down civilians and shout “Die did die die!” over a loudspeaker.   He may not have been terribly worried about Protestant casualties, but there’s plenty of Catholics living in London, after all.    Maxwell doesn’t seem to care, and I think it’s clear that he’s exceeding his mandate.   

And Alexander Anderson knows it.   I think the whole Catholic contingent in this story knows that Maxwell’s gone too far, but Anderson’s the only one honest enough to say it out loud.    Anderson’s group is still escorting Integra home when the 9th Crusade attacks, and Integra accuses Maxwell of betraying her, but Anderson remarks that such backstabbing is typical in war.    So it’s not Maxwell’s duplicity that offends him, it’s the way he’s going about it.   When Anderson kills people, he’s doing it to serve God, and God alone.   Maxwell’s not serving God at all.

“All you’re serving is his power!!” Anderson says.    By “his” does Anderson mean Satan?  Millennium?  Mars, the god of war?   Maybe all three, or maybe it doesn’t matter.   I always thought Maxwell was serving his own power, but the point is that he’s not doing God’s will by any stretch of the imagination.

But the others still respect the chain of command.  Archbishop Maxwell is in charge of the 9th Crusade and the Iscariot Organization, and Heinkel reminds Anderson that they were ordered to capture Sir Integra, not escort her home.    So they all draw their guns on Integra, resulting in the most Integra panel ever.

Then Seras shows up and beats all their asses.   Yeaaaaahhhhh!   Seras, you’re doing amazing, sweetie!

Everyone’s like “Oh shit, it’s Seras Victoria!” like they’re gonna try to fight her, but Anderson can tell that Seras is now way out of their league.   Remember, this group of Iscariots fought some Millennium troops and half of them were killed.   Seras tore through about as many Milennium troops without much hassle at all, and that was before she drank Pip’s blood.

And Anderson spares some words of praise for his foe.   I guess this is like the owner of a Ford truck exchanging compliments with the owner of a Chevy truck.    “You’re a rat bastard, Chevy man,” he says, “but those are some fine Truck Nutz” you have dangling from your tow hitch.”  They’re never gonna be pals, but real recognizes real.

Also, I just think Seras looks super extra-cool in this moment.  Anderson kind of treated her like a joke before, but now he sees her as a peer.   She looks so dark and haunted now, and at the same time she’s more comfortable and sure of herself than we’ve ever seen her.    Seras never set out to become a vampire, but she’s still found herself on this path.  It’s scary and beautiful at the same time.

But never MIND that SHIT, here comes...

No, not Maxwell, Alucard is returning!  I just used this page because Maxwell’s reaction to the news is more interesting than gloomy images of a ruined carrier drifting up the Thames river.   

There’s a moment in the Hellsing Ultimate anime, right after Seras and Anderson turn to look, where she’s got this big grin on her face, and she goes “I can feel it.   He’s returning.”  It’s not in the manga, maybe because it’s not that important, but I’m a sucker for any Seras content, and I love that moment because she can sense Alucard at a distance now, and it’s a very pleasant experience.   For Seras, I mean.  I suspect it’s actually a very bonechilling, bloodcurdling sensation, but Seras has gone Full Goth, so she digs that sort of thing now.  

I don’t know how the hell Anderson can sense Alucard, though.   Maybe being a Regenerator gave him super smelling powers, like Wolverine.  

And even the Major is pleased, because now we finally have all the major players in the same city.   Not sure why the Captain rates an appearance here, when he never says a word, but we’ll run with it. 

So, up to now, we’ve had these 9th Crusaders lined up against Millennium soldiers, each cosplaying as troops from old wars.  I guess Millennium’s SS uniforms have hint of legitimacy to them, as these guys really were part of the SS back in World War II, before they became vampires.  But the point stands, they’re walking anachronisms and they know it.  

But then Alucard jumps in between them, practically giddy for a chance to participate in this war.   Not to be outdone, Anderson and the Captain perform similar Iron Man landings on the same street.   When I watched the OVA, this was about the point I started to wonder if I had missed something about the Captain, because this story has been hinting that he’s like Millennium’s strongest guy, and somehow on par with Anderson and Alucard, even though he hasn’t said anything or done anything this entire time.   This would be like if Superman and Goku squared off in the middle of London, and then some rando OC from DeviantArt walked up to join them.   Like, we know Al and we know Andy, but who the hell is this dude?   I don’t care if he can hang with these two, they should have established that earlier.

Al asks for orders, and Integra makes this big production out of “Kill everybody with a racist uniform and a funny accent.”   Okay, fine, but this is a lot of bad guys.   How is even Alucard supposed to take them all down?  And this leads us to Control Art Restriction Level Zero.

I’m just gonna cut to the chase, because this post is running long enough already.  Al used “Level 1″ to make short work of Luke Valentine and Rip van Winkle, and maybe Dandyman as well, I’m not sure.   Recall that nothing could stop Alucard on the H.M.S. Eagle.   The Blackbird crash, the Millennium soldiers, Rip’s magic bullets, none of it.   So he activates “Level 0″, which ought to be even more gonzo overpowered, and starts reciting this alchemical poem which I really out to cover in some other post, and all the bad guys panic and start attacking him. 

To all the smartasses who say “Well why don’t the bad guys attack them during the transformation?” there you go.   AGAIN.   This sort of thing happens a lot more than you’d think, and it never works, because anime/manga creators are more self-aware than you’d think.   It never works, because if it did, then it wouldn’t be “attacking a character in mid-transformation”.  It would just be “killing a guy before he could do his big move.”  So when a character does a big climactic thing like this, there’s really only two options.   1) Have the other characters stand back and watch, or 2) have them TRY to stop it, only to fail, because it’s too late for that.

Anyway, I’m skipping all of that and just showing the end result of Alucard’s power-up.   The bad guys tear his body apart, but it doesnt’ matter because that never worked on him before, and then all these undead men crawl out of the black ether that seems to make up Al’s body.   Just a veritable flood of humans, all washing out of him like a tide of death.  

Anderson starts to figure it out when he recognizes some of the uniforms on these creatures.   And if that’s not enough, Integra explains it for Seras.   When vampires drink blood, they absorb the very essence of the living being who contained it.    “To suck blood is to make the whole existence of a life one’s own.” That’s why Zorin saw Pip’s memories when she tried to read Seras’ mind.   By drinking Pip’s blood, Seras has taken on Pip’s soul as well.   But that’s just one guy.   Alucard’s been drinking blood for over 500 years.   And each one he consumes becomes another soul in his personal army.   

I’m going to guess that Alucard didn’t always have the ability to manifest all of his victims as familiars like this.   Otherwise, how in the hell was Abraham van Helsing able to subdue him a century earlier?   The Hellsing family did stuff to enhance and improve Alucard’s powers, so maybe this was one of them.  They gave him the means to weaponize all of his victims’ souls, for use in large scale battles like this one. 

And I think this might be why Seras is trembling in this scene, because she knows that this ability was passed down to her when Alucard turned her into a vampire.   Or maybe, she’s realizing that she’s got something in common with all of those dead people in Al’s army.   Alucard made her a vampire, sure, but he still drank her blood, so doesn’t that mean there’s a Seras Victoria creature down there, standing alongside all the Janissaries, Wallachians, and everyone else Alucard has consumed?

Something I picked up on was that this is what all of those eyes in Alucard’s design are supposed to represent.   When he used Level 1 you’d see all these eyes staring out from the shadows, and now Level 0 has brought out all these dead people, like they’re the ones the eyes belong to.  Although, most of them don’t actually have eyes, just smoke trailing from their eye sockets.   So maybe that’s symbolic as well.  

There’s also horses in this mess, and that makes me wonder if Alucard drank the horses’ blood along with the riders. Anyway, Archbishop Maxwell observes all of this from his Popemobile and finally confronts the elephant in the room: Alucard is Dracula, like the Dracula.  I don’t think it was ever meant to be a secret, but Kouta Hirano’s been dancing around it this whole time, without ever spelling it out, and now he’s finally spelling it out.  

I think the only one who might not know is Seras?   Someone might have filled her in off-panel, or maybe she figured it out, since it’s not exactly hard, but I don’t know.

So yeah, somewhere in this arc, they do a headcount of all three sides of this thing.  Millennium has “572″ soldiers left, and the 9th Crusade has “2875″, while Hellsing, of course, is down to just 3.  But Alucard has more than evened the playing field, since he can do this trick and spawn an invincible army.   I’m more confused how Millennium lost 428 guys in one night.   Seras killed a lot of them, but not that many. Sir Penwood got some and Anderson killed a bunch of them, but not hundreds of them.  The Crusaders could have taken out that many, but they haven’t been here very long.  

But yeah, they try to form a Phalanx to hold off Alucard’s forces, and it does not work at all.    You can’t kill these things because they’re already dead. right?  I mean, maybe the Crusaders have holy weapons that can destroy these things, but there’s just too many of them.    And the Millennium troops don’t even have holy weapons, so they’re completely fucked.

But what about the helicopters?  Well, Alucard drank the blood of Dandyman and Rip Van Winkle too, and their powers are now a part of him, which makes quick work of nearby aircraft.    I like how these two look the same as before, but they never say a word.   I think they’re the only ones with normal eyes, although Alucard’s shadow tentrils are still fused with their bodies.  

The Crusaders’ battle lines are broken, and they beg for Maxwell to order a retreat before they’re all slaughtered.   But Maxwell refuses to give up.  He’s drunk on his new power, and so he can’t accept that he’s been one-upped so easily.   Then the helicopter carrying his Popetruck gets destroyed, and he somehow crashes without getting hurt.

And now he’s got a front-row seat to the same hell his troops are experiencing, but he still gloats, because somehow Alucard’s soldiers can’t get through the glass.    He refers to “tektite” reinforcement, and that’s dumb because Tektites are just an enemy in the Legend of Zelda.   I’m onto your ass, Hirano. 

But then Anderson throws a knife at the glass, and that breaks it, so maybe it was magic glass that only a blessed weapon could pierce?    All that really matters is that Anderson has finally turned on Maxwell, and Maxwell is doomed.

Alucard’s dead warriors hoist him up on pikes, fitting for Vlad the Impaler, and Maxwell realizes that he’s going to die alone in a foreign land.   The moral is: Don’t start none, won’t be none.

Then this happens, and I’m pretty sure Dark Horse Comics goofed when they scanned this manga for the digital edition.  I’d contact them to complain, but they don’t even sell Hellsing anymore because they lost the license years ago.   I don’t think a lot of stuff happened on Pages 62-63 of Volume 8 of the Hellsing manga, but I can’t tell.  I’m guessing just Maxwell finally succumbing to his injuries while Anderson pontificates about why he had to do it to him.   And really, Anderson hardly needs to explain his actions in this case.   Maxwell sucked.

Moving on, Anderson contacts all Vatican forces and tells them to withdraw.   They can’t beat Alucard, Maxwell is dead, and there’s nothing more they can do here.  However, Anderson chooses to stay behind and take on Alucard.  

This is Anderson’s reasoning: By releasing all of Alucard’s stolen lives to fight as his army, Alucard has left his person vulnerable to attack.  So Andy thinks that if he gets close enough to Alucard, he can finally have a chance to defeat him.   If he’s right, this might be his only chance to try.   

Anderson further speculates that this may have been the Major’s plan from the beginning.   Invade London, force Alucard to use this Level 0 ability, all to leave Alucard vulnerable to assassination.   Perhaps the Major was even counting on Anderson to see this opening and take it.  

More to the point, I think Anderson kind of has to fight Alucard because it’s the only way his people can escape London.  Integra’s orders were clear: None of these invaders leaves the island alive.    Alucard would continue hunting down the Crusaders whether they retreat or fight back, so some force has to stay and keep them occupied to save the rest.  

Anyway, now we get to the actual part with this scene, where Alucard kneels before his master and she welcomes him back.   It’s pretty satisfying to see all these butthole soldiers finally get what’s coming to them.   

I’m just gonna put up the entire reunion moment because it’s so sweet.   Interesting how Seras sort of reverts to her old self when Alucard returns.    For all that badass power she gained from drinking Pip, she’s still uneasy around Alucard.   But he missed her and I think that look on his face tells the whole story.    He of all people can tell that Seras has finally taken the fateful step to becoming a “true vampire”. 

I do think it’s kind of interesting how Seras continues to address Alucard as “Master”.   He promised her way back in Volume 1 that she’d no longer be a servant if she drank blood of her own free will, but maybe it’s more complicated than that.    Or, perhaps she still calls him “Master” out of respect, rather than any sort of blood bond or whatever you want to call it.   It’s like how Anakin continued to call Obi-Wan “Master” in “Revenge of the Sith”, even though he had been promoted to Jedi Knight.   The relationship is still there, even if it’s no longer official.  

I’m a big, dumb Seras fanboy, so you’d better believe I think about this sort of thing a lot.   I’m not real crazy about Alucard/Seras shipping, although I do sort of get it.   I’m really not interested in Seras in some freaky-deaky sex kind of way.    Take the D/s stuff to the Alucard/Integra room where it belongs.   No, there’s something very wholesome between Alucard and Seras, and I could talk about it all damn day.    And why not?  It’s my blog, and I’ve got the time.    So let’s start with--

Um, excuse you?!  

Okay, so Anderson isn’t waiting around to take on Alucard, so I guess we’re doing this now.

And whether or not the Major planned for this to happen, he certainly approves...

[duhragonball]

Hellsing Ch. 70-76

I guess anything I say here is a spoiler, so yeah, this is “Heart of Dreams”, “Relics”, “Heart of Iron”, and the arc “Finest Hour”.  Oh, and “Lunatic Dawn”.   Gotta lotta ground to cover.    Treacherous ground.

Not a whole lot to say about Anderson’s death.  He tried to become a monster using one of the Holy Nails from the True Cross, and then Alucard defeated him anyway, once Seras gave him a little help and a reason to go on living.   Alucard was pretty upset about Anderson’s demise, but Anderson says a few soothing words, and reminds him that Al only became a vampire because he couldn’t stand being a human, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense for him to cry now.  

So yeah, as determined as Anderson was to kill Alucard, he’s a pretty good sport about losing this fight, and he seems to genuinely pity the man.   He wonders how long Alucard will go on living with his regrets, and Al replies “Until my expansive future shatters my expansive past.”  So, if we want to take that literally, I guess he’s trying to find redemption by being a good guy to make up for his years as a bad guy.   Well, he’s been a vampire for 523 years, and a servant of Hellsing for 101 of those years, so I guess maybe he figures if he trucks along for another 321 years that’d balance the scales?  

And maybe I’m finally starting to appreciate some of the complexities of Alucard’s character.   The Team Four Star Abridged series spent some time on his desire for redemption, but I couldn’t tell if it was based on the original material or something they came up with for their own version.   For instance, the Abridged!Alucard rejected the forgiveness offered by God himself, but later Anderson spoke of his desire for redemption and Alucard didn’t dispute that.    It seemed contradictory to me at the time, but the manga does seem to support that.    As Vlad Tepes, he refused to ask God for anything, preferring instead to fight and drive himself and his followers to the limits of endurance and decency as proof of their faith.   

I find that idea heretical, because it suggests that a person can “earn” God’s favor, or God’s forgiveness, or a place in heaven.    Arguably, Anderson tried to do the same thing, but I think he was coming more from a place of doing zealous deeds out of gratitude for the Lord’s grace, rather than trying to earn anything he didn’t already have.  

The difference with Alucard is that he seemed to be really wrongheaded about his faith, trying to use violence to become a good person.   Then it didn’t work, and he became a vampire, devoted entirely to his own selfish desires, and I guess he’s spent the 20th Century realizing that he’s back where he started, trying to fight his way to redemption, only now he has centuries of red in his ledger instead of mere decades.   

Oh, anyway, while this is going on, Integra takes a sword and stands it upright so it looks like a cross to mark Anderson’s death.   It’s like this quiet sign of respect.   I’m not sure whose sword that is, but it looks like the one Alucard was using in his Dracula persona.   

Anyway, fuck all that, because Walter finally shows up and stomps the ashes of Anderson just as everyone was having their final farewell with the guy.  Rude.

Young Walter just looks kind of stupid to me.  Why is he still wearing the monocle?  He’s trying to be 14 and 69 at the same time and failing at both.

Seras asks what Millennium did to him, but Walter makes it clear that this isn’t some brainwashing trope.   He’s doing this of his own free will.

He also doesn’t consider himself loyal to Millennium.    They turned him into a vampire, but he’s doing this for himself, and he’s only cooperating with them because their goals are in alignment.  

Yumiko Takagi tries to kill Walter for... Was she mad at him for stomping on Anderson’s remains?    I mean, Alucard’s the one who actually killed Anderson, so shouldn’t she be mad at that guy? 

It doesn’t matter, because Walt just slices her into pieces with his magic filaments.    Now Heinkel Wolfe wants revenge, because she was her long-time partner in assassin stuff.   The TFS Abridged series implied that they were lovers, too, which seemed authentic at the time, but I’m not sure there’s any confirmation to be found in the manga itself. 

But before she can take the shot, the Captain shows up and shoots Heinkel in the face.    Like, through one cheek  and out the other, and the only thing saving her from serious injury was that she happened to have her mouth open at the time.  

Side note: I caught myself referring to Heinkel as “him”, which frustrates me because I’ve known she was a woman for like five years now.    When I first watched the OVA, I was confused, becuase I could tell it was a female voice actor, but maybe that just meant he was really young, like with Schrodinger.   But the Hellsing Wiki set me straight, or so I thought.    I didn’t think I’d still be making this mistake. 

On the other hand, Yumiko sometimes looks a lot like Goemon from Lupin III, so her wearing a nun’s habit isn’t as heteronormative as it might seem.  I’m getting off-track.

You’d think this would be leading up to some big double-team on the Hellsing group, now that the Iscariots are out of the picture, but the Captain’s only stopping Heinkel so Walter can have a clear shot at Alucard.    That’s the sole reason Walter turned traitor, you see.   He wants to fight Alucard and win, and for the last 55 years they’ve been on the same side.  

But is that all it is?   I never got to read or watch “Hellsing: The Dawn”, the prequel manga Kouta Hirano created after Hellsing.  I’ve heard that it never got finished, but also an anime adaptation was released with the home video release of Hellsing Ultimate Episode VIII.  All I really know about it was that there was this time where Alucard and Walter were fighting the Nazis, and the Captain showed up, and Alucard ran away because he didn’t think he could beat that dude. Presumably, he left Walter to fend for himself?   But all three of them survived until 1999, so I’m not sure what the outcome of that was.   I always wondered if Walter held a grudge over that.   But maybe I’m reaching. 

There’s also a suggestion of professional jealousy.  Walter was a rockstar vampire hunter in his youth, but he’s been overshadowed by Alucard, who is--let’s face it-- a living legend.  This would be doubly true in the 90′s, when Integra reawakened Alucard, and Walter having to step back even further from the spotlight.  The only way for him to reclaim his former glory would be to challenge the greatest of all vampires and win.    He’d go down in history as a traitor, but at least he’d be cemented as the absolute best.  

Or... or, you can go with the TFS version, where Walter hints at his motives, only for Alucard to take the wind out of his sails and announce “because you wanna fuck me!”   And I love that theory more than any other explanation, because it just brings everything together a lot more neatly.   I guess you don’t need Walter to have had a crush on Alucard for 55 years, but it’s a lot more compelling than revenge or professional jealousy.    Those things have weight, sure, but they work better as distractions, the things Walter might admit to because they hide the deeper reason that he can’t bring himself to say out loud.   

And it’s not entirely rejected by the manga.  Alucard remarks on how much more beautiful Walter looked in his old age, compared to this treasonous knockoff vampire look he’s sporting now.   The last time he spoke this way, it was when he flirted with Queen Elizabeth II.   The next time he does it, it’ll be with Sir Integra when she’s in her early 50′s.

Speaking of QE2, she’s safe and sound, because the Secret Service evacuated her to a fortified location in Dover before Millennium attacked.   If things get really hairy, they’re prepared to send her to Canada, and if London can’t be secured, they’ll nuke the whole city, though the Queen is certain that Integra and Alucard will win the day.  The vampires acting as Millennium agents outside of London are being contained and destroyed, so things seem to be getting under some semblance of control.  

However, the Royal Order of Protestant Knights, also known as the “Round Table” is down to just three surviving members.   Integra’s in London, but here we have Rob Walsh and Hugh Irons, reflecting on the death of their fellow Round Tabler, Penwood.  

This whole scene struck me as a complete non sequitur when I first saw it in the anime.  Walter’s betrayal seemed to sudden and poorly explained that it felt like the author was just winging it by this point, and now we have these two dudes struggling to provide some justification for the twist.    But reading this manga in 2021, I find that it makes a lot more sense.    We’ve already seen tons of Britons in rather lofty positions, all willing to sell out their principles for a chance to become a vampire.   Walter is no different from any of them.   It’s just more personal when he does it because we actually know the guy.  

But as Walsh discusses the utter debacle of this Millennium invasion, he deduces what we’ve just learned back in London.   There must have been a traitor in their ranks, because that’s the only way Millennium could have made it this far.   I mean, they just flew a bunch of giant blimps full of rockets right into British airspace.   That only worked because they had traitors sabotaging the U.K.’s defenses and communications, and Hellsing was especially vulnerable at the same time.  

The only thing Walsh can’t figure out is who the traitor was, since it had to be someone at the Round Table, but they’re all dead now, except for Integra, Irons, and himself. 

But Irons fills in the missing pieces.   It doesn’t have to have been one of the Round Table’s members, but someone close to one of the members.   Years ago, Irons warned Walter about Richard Hellsing.   Irons knew that when Arthur died, Richard would try to make a play for the Hellsing estate.   But when Irons’ fears came to pass, Walter wasn’t there.   It’s like he wanted things to play out the way they did.  

But why would Walter want events to play out that way?   On her own, Integra had no choice but to unseal Alucard to defend herself, and she’s kept Alucard active ever since.   And now, lo and behold, Walter reveals that he turned traitor just so he could take on Alucard.   It’s like he arranged for all of this to happen years in advance.   But how many years?    Fifty-five, Irons wonders.   

It’s never explicitly confirmed, but Irons’ reasoning makes too much sense to ignore.    Earlier, the Major said that he decided back in ‘44 that Walter “Angel of Death” Dornez would have been a good “get” for his side.    Now, Irons is suggesting that Walter might have agreed in the same year.   So maybe Walter and the Major made a secret agreement even then.   It’s possible that they might have done it later, but why not in 1944?

I mean, the whole backstory here is that Millennium is a continuation of a secret Nazi Vampire project that Walter and Alucard destroyed in 1944.   Except they didn’t destroy it at all, which sure makes Walter and Al seem very bad at their jobs, unless Walter let them escape and covered it up.

Meanwhile, the Captain tosses a first aid kit to Heinkel, kind of like he’s saying that he doesn’t want to kill Heinkel, but he can’t let her interfere either.   We’ll talk about the Captain later.

As for Alucard vs. Walter, Al wants to check with Integra before he goes through with it.   He asks for orders, repeating his big speech from when he killed all those cops in Brazil.    Yeah, Walter’s a traitor, but he’s been a close mentor and advisor to Integra for all these years.   Does she really want Alucard to killerize his ass?

Yes, she does.   If Walter stands against them, then he’s the enemy, and Integra has already ordered Alucard to destroy the enemy, no matter who (snif!) they may be.  Integra doesn’t relish this command, but she refuses to compromise over sentimental feelings.

Man, fuck you, Walter.  

Then the Major lands his airship near the battlefield and invites Integra to come aboard and fight all of his remaining guys.    Alucard orders Seras to join her while he deals with Walter.   I can appreciate Seras’ concern here, because the last time she watched Alucard fight alone, he took a flaming bayonet to the face.   She probably doesn’t care for Integra and Alucard splitting up like this.

Before she goes, she thanks Walter for all of his support, which disarms Walter for just a moment.   Man, fuck you, Walter.   Seras is so nice and grateful and polite and cool and you just go right ahead with your 55-years-in-the-making Nazi Vampire Jilted Lover scheme.  Fuck you, Walter.   You don’t deserve to be in Seras’ life.

So the gals go on board the airship and Schrodinger’s there and Integra just shoots him right between the eyes without bothering to slow down.    This is maybe my favorite Integra moment in this thing.    I sort of wish Kouta Hirano had done a spin-off of Integra and Seras doing cool shit like this for 30 years.

Alucard taunts Walter with the fact that he no longer gets to be a part of Inegra or Seras’ lives anymore.   It sounds kind of petty, but when you think about it, it’s a pretty sick burn.    Walter may have been planning this for 55 years, but he still had to live that double life, and it’s not like he can just say he was faking it the entire time.  

So they fight.   Walter’s magic wire powers seem to be amplified, either because of his restored youth or maybe the boost offered by vampire powers, or maybe he’s always been this strong but now he no longer needs to hold back anymore.  For instance, he can make mesh screens with his wires to deflect Alucard’s bullets.   And when Alucard summons that dog creature he used to dispatch Luke Valentine....

... Walter just bisects it with a flick of the wrist.   You really begin to see why he was “The Angel of Death” back in his heyday.  

I never understood what this dog familiar was supposed to be.   Walter refers to the Hound of the Baskervilles, but as far as I know that’s just a legend confined to the Sherlock Holmes novel of the same name.   But apparently that concept was based upon “black dog” folklore of the same region.  There’s a whole laundry list of “black dog” apparitions in Britain alone.   Black Shuck, Padfoot, Hairy Jack, Bizarro Snoopy, and so on.   So I’m not sure if Hirano is saying that Alucard was the source of these legends, or if they were all based on a single creature which Alucard eventually defeated and absorbed into himself.   

Al tries to use the Jackal to kill Walter, but that’s kind of stupid, since Walter designed the gun in the first place.   In the anime, I thought Walter somehow triggered a bomb he had planted inside it, but maybe he used his wires to make this happen.   It doesn’t really matter, because we already saw that the Casull was useless against Walter’s defenses, and not because it had smaller ammunition.  

Then Luke Valentine emerges from the black dog’s body.   This part never made any sense to me, but I loved how the Major recognized him, but barely.  “Oh yeah, it’s that guy from Volume 2!    The guy with the brother.”

The doctor suggests that when the dog was killed, this allowed Luke to reassert himself from inside the dog.   Something about a “control ratio”, whatever that is.  Like, he was absorbed into the dog’s mass, but now that the dog is no longer conscious, he can think for himself again.    Notably, only half of Luke actually makes it out .   It’s like he’s half-Luke, half dead dog monster. 

But before he can do anything else, Walter puts his wires into Luke and starts controlling him like a puppet, mostly so he can use the dog half to attack Alucard.

Alucard seems more impressed than threatened.   Keep in mind, Walter was doing pretty damn well against him early on.   You’ll notice Alucard’s missing his right arm along with one of his guns.   This is better than Anderson managed to do.   So why does Walter even need this Luke-dog puppet thing in the first place?

Well, it’s because Walter’s body is giving out on him.   Earlier, when the Doctor was performing the procedure to turn Walter into a vampire, he spoke about how rushed the operation was.  I mean, he had to finish the whole thing in one night, after all.   And Walter’s a lot more powerful than Dandyman, whom the Doctor considered his finest artificial vampire work.    So maybe Walter’s just too powerful for this, and he can’t sustain this form.   The Luke-dog-thing is just to keep Alucard busy while he coughs up blood.

The Major sees this development, and likens Walter to a high stakes gambler who’s mortgaged everything for a single hand at a high stakes table.   Walter’s risked everything just to tangle with Alucard, and it still isn’t enough.

Alucard does manage to finish off the dog-Luke thing, and this sets him up for Walter’s next attack, and then he goes to finish him off, so things seem to be going Walter’s way...

But Alucard used a decoy, disguising Luke’s severed torso as his own, all so he could sucker-punch Walter in the face.   As it turns out, Walter’s physical breakdown is making him younger, which amuses Al to no end.

So Alucard follow suits and assumes the form he once used when they fought the Nazis in 1944.   Yeah, say hello to “Girlycard”.   I’m not sure why Alucard looked like a 14-year-old girl during World War II.   I’ve heard this form described as a Japanese 14-year-old girl, and I can’t dispute it, but it also makes Girlycard seem even more random somehow.   

I mean, I guess the idea here was for Walter and Alucard to be able to move inconspicuously through enemy territory.  No one would suspect a couple of kids until it was too late.   I’m imagining a similar scenario to the ones presented in “Cross Fire”.   Heinkel and Yumi would play innocent bystanders, then whip out their guns and swords and go ham on the bad guys.    Knowing Hirano’s style, maybe Girlycard and Young Walter operated the same way.  

And this further supports the Walter-had-an-unrequited-crush-on-Alucard theory.   He might have understood that Girlycard was a disguise.  On an intellectual level he might have known, but maybe he still carried a torch, and told himself that there was some way that they could be together.   Was he just in love with this disguise, or does he love the real thing?  Alucard says that he told Walter the truth decades ago, and claims that this is the reason Walter turned traitor, so yeah, it sure feels like Walter couldn’t handle Alucard’s true nature, one way or another.   

I mean, let’s assume that this isn’t just about Alucard not being a cute girl.  Maybe Walter fell in love with Alucard in all his forms, whatever that means for his sexuality.    The bigger issue is that Alucard’s a vampire, and he’s just fundamentally different from Walter, and maybe that was the problem all along.   It’s interesting to think about, but the point here would be that there was some kind of problem, and Walter couldn’t let it go.

Meanwhile, Seras and Integra are busy looking like total BMFs.   Just HBIC’s.   What’s better than this?   Two gals bein’ pals.   

Hell yeah!

Bad ass!

The vampires on board this airship are happy to meet their doom, and Integra recalls what her father once told her about how vampires want to die on their own terms.   Seras doesn’t get it, because if they want to die so badly, they could have just died in the war they were already in fifty-odd years ago.  

So the Major gets on the PA system and explains to her that they want more than just a glorious death.   They want bigger, better, more perfect battlefield, so as to make their deaths as meaningful as possible.  That’s why I don’t understand that airship captain from a while back.   Everyone else in Millennium seemed to understand that they weren’t necessarily fighting to win.   Britain is prepared to nuke London if they have to, so it’s hard to imagine anyone in Millennium surviving past today, even if they won.  

Anyway, as the Major explains all of this, the Captain appears before the gals.  It looks like he’s here to stop them, or is he?

[duhragonball]

Hellsing Liveblog Ch 28-34

“Alucard, you’re the laziest vampire on Mars.”

So, I’ll be wrapping up the “D” arc in this post.   Previously, we saw a squad of Millennium goons commandeer a British carrier.  Their leader, Lt. Rip Van Winkle, has a musket that shoots magic bullets that can change direction in mid-air.    Also, Integra cut her own finger and made Seras lick the blood off.    As for Alucard, he’s been binging medical blood and taking a nap.

This is all to set up a one-off gag where Alucard has a dream similar to the one Seras had back in Brazil, where she was visited by the spirit of her cannon, which looked a lot like the guy who played Lord Harkonnen in the Dune movie.   Not the new one, the one with Sting in it.    Not the wrestler Sting, the musician.  

I don’t know why, but the spirit of Al’s gun, the Jackal, is Bruce Willis, but then Bruce gets killed by another guy who looks like Muldoon from Jurassic Park?  Maybe?   I just googled Muldoon and he doesn’t quite look like I remembered, but there’s no point to any of this, so let’s just move on.  

Aboard the H.M.S. Eagle, now renamed the Alder by Milennium, Lt. Winkle has painted a swastika on the deck and she’s taking a nap in the middle of it.  Her team is all holed up inside, and they talk about how they’ll never be able to venture out in the sun again.   This seemed like a continuity gaffe to me, but then this one dude points out that unlike them, Winkle is a werewolf.   So that’s why she can go out in the sun and they can’t.  

Maybe the Hellsing Ultimate anime covered this, and I just missed it, but when I watched that series in 2016, I found it strange how there only seemed to be two werewolves in Millennium: The Captain, and Warrant Officer Schrodinger.   And yet, Schrodinger speaks of his fellow werewolves with some pride, as if there were more than just two of them, and it turns out that this was what he meant.    Rip Van Winkle’s a werewolf, and I’m starting to think Zorin Blitz must be a werewolf too.   

And that explains a few things, because the real inner circle of Millennium is those four characters, the Doctor, and the Major.   Their 1,000 soldiers are vampires, but their leaders are not.   Like the guy in this scene observes, Millennium’s vampire corps are “mere rookies” compared to the werewolves, and that’s why they’re the ones the Major put in charge.   

This also puts the Dandyman in context.   The Doctor seemed to have high hopes for the Dandyman, but he failed to put a dent in Alucard.   I never understood his confidence, seeing as Winkle and Blitz were stronger, but now it makes sense.   The Doctor’s been trying to perfect artificial vampirism for the last fifty-odd years.   Dandyman represented the most powerful vampire he could produce, and he paled in comparison to the real thing.    Millennium’s werewolves are far more capable, but I don’t know if the Doctor had anything to do with them.    Even if he did, his success with them is unrelated to his vampire research.   

Also, Rip just looks... different somehow.   Maybe I’m grasping at straws, but her design might be intended to evoke wolf-like features, as opposed to vampiric features.   Well, I’ll worry about that later.

In England, Sir Integra barges in on the British Navy HQ and all the officers there take offense. They seem to find the idea of vampires ludicrous, even though Hellsing is an official government agency and has been for over 100 years.   Their commander, Vice-Admiral Shelby Penwood, asks her to stay, but it’s like his subordinates don’t even notice this.   He’s a pretty weak leader, is my point.

The Navy insists on handling the Eagle crisis without Integra, so she lights up a cigar and observes them in action.   They send some helicopters to check out the carrier, but Winkle shoots them down with her magic bullet.   It quickly becomes apparent that nothing can get close enough to the Eagle without getting destroyed, and since the Navy won’t listen to Integra, she withdraws to her own HQ to consider a proper strategy.   

The fundamental problem for Hellsing is that they need to get Alucard or Seras aboard the Eagle in order to neutralize the threat, but vampires can’t cross running water.   A boat is out of the question because it’s too slow, and an aircraft would be shot down by the magic bullet.    But there is one aircraft that can get the job done...

So Integra arranges to launch a modified SR-71 Blackbird.     Comics fans will recognize this as the plan the X-Men used in the comics.   I don’t know if they still use it.    At some point it probably stopped being cool, but in 1999 it was cool enough for Hellsing.   Strictly speaking, the Blackbird in this comic was heavily modified by the RAF’s research and development teams, so it’s practically a whole other aircraft.   The main point, though, is that it’s a reconnaissance plane, capable of flying at speeds of Mach 3 and at altitudes of 16 miles.  Unlike Sir Penwood’s aircraft, this one can approach the Eagle high enough in the air to avoid enemy fire.

Below, Rip Van Winkle appears to sense Alucard’s approach and seems to have a panic attack over it.   Me, I’m just wondering why Hellsing wasted precious time having their cutesy logo painted on the tailfin of this plane.  

So how the hell does Alucard plan to get the plane down without getting shot at?   SImple, he doesn’t.    He just nosedives straight down onto the carrier, and what does he care if the plane gets shot to hell on the way down?   

A lot of this arc is just badass shots of this crash landing, and the ensuing carnage.   I’m skipping a lot of beautiful artwork, but there’s really nothing going on beyond “Alucard crashes his plane onto an aircraft carrier.”

Once he hits the ground, Al releases his restraints to Level 1, the same level he used against Luke Valentine, and he goes to town on Milennium’s soldiers.    Rip Van Winkle keeps whimpering about Zamiel, which is a reference to Der Freischütz , a German opera about a huntsman with a musket that fires seven magic bullets.   The first six will hit whatever the huntsman aims for, but the seventh belongs to the Evil One, Zamiel, who can guide it wherever he pleases.   

Winkle flashes back to a coversation she had years ago with the Major, who recognizes her musket as a reference to Der Freischütz, and he warned her to remember how the opera ends: With Zamiel coming to claim the soul of Kaspar.   Rip is terrified because it doesn’t take a genius to see how Alucard’s attack might resemble this moment.   

After her men are all destroyed, Rip gathers enough composure to put up a fight, but her magic bullet can only hit Alucard, not kill him.   Eventually, he just catches the thing in his mouth, neutralizing her power entirely.   

Then we proceed with what I consider the most gruesome scene in the whole story.   Alucard starts by impaling Rip through the heart with the barrel of her own musket.

Then he sprouts all these extra hands and grabs hold of her like some horrible nightmare-spider or something.   

Then he starts licking up the blood from her wound, really taking his time with it.    He’s stuck on this boat, after all, and there’s no one else alive to distract him.   

And finally he goes for the jugular, as it were.   

Aboard his zeppelin, the Major is watching all of this.   I guess Schrodinger’s power to be anywhere makes it possible for them to keep tabs on what’s happening.   All he has to do is bring a video camera along.   The Doctor prepares to activate Winkle’s self-destruct chip, but the Major forbids this.   They used this device on Jan Valentine and the Dandyman, but only because they failed in their missions.   As for Rip Van Winkle, the Major declares her mission a complete success.    He orders his men to salute as they watch her die slowly at the hands of Alucard.    A twisted honor, to be sure.

And with Winkle finally dead, Alucard just laughs up a storm.  

Here’s the problem, he’s stuck on that boat now.  And Hellsing knew it would go like this when they sent him, but they didn’t have a choice.   Early into the crisis, Integra and Walter recognized the Eagle as a mere decoy, one that would distract them from the real threat, but they couldn’t ignore it, and now Alucard’s on the Eagle while Millennium’s true forces are heading for Great Britain.

So yeah, take a good look at Alucard, because we won’t be seeing him again for a while...