Rewatching Castlevania for kicks and this moment always hits so hard:
I still think this is one of the best frames in the entire show. Just... the skulls, the reflection... it tells you everything you need to know about Adrian. Helping a Belmont kill his own kind--but then, he’s not really a vampire, is he? And he’s not really a human, either. He’s stuck on middle ground, unaccepted by both sides and completely isolated.
This scene also makes me think of a little story from Storyteller, a nonfiction novel by the late great Kate Wilhelm about her time teaching at Clarion Writer's Workshop. Russell Bates (her student at the time, before he was working on Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek: The Animated Series) has an encounter with an awful anthropology instructor:
“The instructor came searching for [his students] one afternoon and spotted Russell Bates. "What tribe are you from?" he asked. Russell said Kiowa. The instructor grasped his chin, turned his head this way and that, and said, "You could be." He invited Russell to come see his collection of Indian skulls. With admirable restraint Russell politely declined.”
There's some juicy stuff to dig into in terms of the Belmont family's history of dehumanizing(???) supernatural beings.
