as much as i love the idea of fan kids in media with immortals in it[and i do find peoples fankid ocs generally fun], i don't think Integra would do that even adopted even whatever, at least not intentionally.
I gotta be real, I don't think she'd want to do that to Alucard unless there Really isn't another choice. One would assume he is bound to the bloodline/inheritance line and another heir is kind of just... extending the capacity of this to hurt him for at least another generation.
Unless the powers that be threaten to do something bigger than him otherwise, Integra, who seems to have intentionally picked the under-equipped for the position and non-related Penwood jr to get the organization after her death, her plan here is pretty clear. She wouldn't have a 'real' heir if she can help it because she wants Alucard free of the bond after her, she wants to be the last person with the capacity to take away his autonomy like that.
none of the characters in this show are good people exactly, but I do think she feels a kind of remorse for both her family's past likely uncountable abuse towards him, and personally for perhaps overstepping a boundary or two. because that just Will Happen if you have that kind of 100% control over someone.
Legit, that's why you rarely hear her specify something as an 'order' even when he obviously acts out, only in real key moments/after their back and forth they do for that. I genuinely do not think she likes to use the full extent of the power she has over him, just more so fill that role in his life so he feels... comfortable for a lack of a better word? There is fun powerful and there is 'this is something my father would do to you' and i reckon hard orders are a lot more of the latter
i don't think she'd trust an heir or a potential heir's heir to tell the difference.
partially because i don't know how much she trusts herself to.
Alucard characterization headcanons and Why exactly making Seras a vampire was something he felt the need to do. And why she felt the need to resist it so much.
So, here's the big one that p much drives my personal characterization of him
He's not some sort of just-because devil figure that 'corrupts people for the fun of it i guess.' No, his reasons for doing what he does are deeply painfully personal and informed shamelessly by his own trauma and things He wanted back before he lacked power.
Oh and wanting to justify himself and that pesky thing called being afraid to be alone.
"I wish everyone that's hurt me ever died a painful gory death" is something a lot of people feel, but he makes the assumption that it's something people also want to Act on. He did.
How Exactly he became Dracula is not known, but it is strongly implied something happened and he Gave Himself that kind of power through the rage he felt.
And then the dynamic flipped. He became a powerful feared warlord, he was in a position where, if he so wished anyone that as much as looked at him wrong could be easily be rid of forever in a matter of minutes or seconds.
He also got to know all too well when he was defeated just exactly how painful it was to be powerless again, though not entirely this time, by comparison it must've Felt exactly like coming back to being a scared kid.
Especially having been betrayed further, and, as far as he knew, being tossed to that basement to the end of time, unable to even move, until Integra found him.
And in his mind, not only did she Save him, she saved him By Giving Him Power again.
And he wants to replicate that feeling, that exhilaration of being granted power to... honestly just reach the absolute safety of being the scariest thing around really.
He saw Seras and realized, maybe, just maybe thats someone thats kind of like him, maybe that's someone that Could Be Like him, maybe if he gives her what he previously mustered for himself, and what Integra gave him
finally, finally somebody will understand him. Finally he can justify who he is by saying 'look! here's someone, here's someone who thought the same!' that he's not a monster, or at least not that much of a monster, or at least that being a monster is a normal, reasonable thing to be.
Trouble is, Seras, no doubt growing up with no real support as an extremely traumatized, and, honestly, likely autistic child knows something about the human world he might've forgotten about.
And that something is, that outliers are not Welcome in the world, that the world is Always bigger, that being visibly hurt is Dangerous and that lashing out will get you in deep shit and it's best to not give anyone reasons to notice.
She's not just a bubbly girl simply to be cute I guess, the girl is masking.
Oh but she no longer lives in the human world. And to him it's weakness, to him it's bullshit. To him it's Seras digging her own grave.
He doesn't quite get at first that she doesn't just cling to humanity because change is scary, but because her humanity has been The One Thing she's had to protect herself with. And Acting Like A Normal Human was her one defense against being neglected and othered more than she already was.
It did literally take the human world visibly crumbling around her for Seras to realize, wait, that's not, that's not as real or as powerful a structure as she thought and it wont even apply to her anymore once its back.
And likely shocked as he was, that Seras turned out a very different kind of monster from him, Alucard, nonetheless, got something much better than he bargained for. Not a copy or a follower. An equal.
There is a very simple reason for the antagonistic dynamic at play between Alucard and the dragon
Their apathy annoys and... unsettles him.
It's not that they've merely given up, he would've been able to work with that, hell, he would've been able to work with bitter nihilism too, but it wasn't either of these.
This was a piece of roadkill that fully expected to get mangled further and did not care.
He's never seen such total dissociation from one's identity, pain, or any feelings at all, never,
aside from himself.
He's never fallen that deep but something deeply familiar rang to him when in that upsettingly even voice they said that it's 'it's just a body' and that they 'don't see how it mattered'
A husk.
Something he's had every chance to become himself.
What I love about nonhumans that get to choose what their designated human interaction form looks like, or get to choose their physical form, is that certain appearance choices inadvertently imply they're a little bit of a freak
Like, we all love Alucard's multiple lanky weirdo forms of course, especially how it compares to what we know he looked like as a human man. Like him smoothing right over a bunch of the stuff that made him look specific in life in his is default form, whatever he was doing in rio compared to that. We love whatever the fuck the thought process is behind girlycard because none of these are normal decisions. A person Normal about his body or appearance doesn't do that.
I absolutely adore Seras's emo little situation too it's fun. Let's go whole fucked up arm wing thing love it for her. I feel like there was a missed opportunity to give her a fun appearance post-timeskip but at the same time, the decision to not change anything in 30 years is also Deranged.
Yet when a character looks Normal and you distinctly know they Don't Have To that's like, that is undisputably freak behavior.
Like, looking at my funny dragon OC too. Those are weirdly specific choices to make. They weren't ever really human they didn't have a baseline appearance to fall back on at all and needed to make one.
So the fact that they Actively Chose to be a pointedly normal human height and Manually Put Wrinkles On Their Face, and then still went with visibly nonhuman eyes says a lot about them as a character I think. Mostly that they're a fucking weirdo. Why are they 5'5 like willingly.
Like sure, Alucard is freakishly tall but like, wanting to be the tallest person in the room is easy to understand. But 5'5? It's such a weird spot since it's shorter than 'exactly average' but taller than 'look at me I'm short because I want to be cute or something' why did you do that you weird magic snake.
Especially since with how they work any appearance change is gradual and therefore needs notable commitment to the idea. They really said and went yeah I want to look older.
I don't know I just like how the way a character presents their appearance Already implies a long series of little decisions, and with being able to change more major elements it can let you read a character for Filth from even just inferring things from character design and story context it's great
Like, obviously realistically some design decisions in real life were down to 'eh the artist felt like it' but it's great for transformative media purposes
is the oc insert because i am obsessed in putting the dragon in situations? perhaps, but frankly
it's mostly about putting the trio in situations because the canon doesnt quite have anyone who'd provide the exact flavor of sheer identity crisis
[whoops this thing is way too long]
someone that is revealed to, before all of this, to have for a very long time simply kept on living in the human world anyway despite their inhumanity is arguably a description that doesn't... add up cleanly ideologically with how Hellsing operates, does it?
Though, funnily enough, 'ordinary human' doesn't apply cleanly to even any of the actual literal human major characters of the story except for maybe the wild geese.
There is a reason Pip has to give the speech about grieving the burning city and Sir Penwood had to make his strategically important sacrifice. The Iscariots dont read like normal people enough for something like this. Integra may be a sort of messy symbol for humanity narratively but the way the actual story treats her?
She's as much an outsider to humanity as the monsters are.
Been that way since that fateful day since she was 12, depending on how you imagine she was raised, maybe has always been to a degree.
Highly doubt Integra had much of a taste of normal human society. She's clearly not even remotely friendly with the other knights. Sure, she found Penwood amusing but i highly doubt they were in any capacity close. It doesn't appear the woman even Really leaves the manor outside of her job. We see her in civilian attire Once for fucks sake and it felt very 'what are normal people clothes again' to me personally. Walter and the vampires are realistically the only real close relationships she really ever had.
Seras too, has lived through something incredibly traumatic as a child and has been given no community or support, seen as at most a nuisanse. We do not get any mention of an adoptive family or other previous life to come back too, and its a context where in real life omission alone would be very telling.
Through that she has arguably too been robbed of being 'allowed' to be truly human long before she became a vampire. She was around people, sure, public school, foster care, what have you, but I somehow doubt a girl with severe ptsd would be understood much considering the time Hellsing is set in. If you're unwell as a kid you quickly learn just how conditional the care of strangers can be. Even if on paper they're meant to take care of you. She's kept up a mask of humanity with varying success but likely had known very little warmth a human life supposedly entails.
Alucard is strongly implied to believe that his humanity was torn away from him. He openly mourns it, but feels like he's been all but thrown into the grave of undeath by being forced to protect himself, and he's since only dug it so, so much deeper that he can scarcely see the sun anymore.
The very idea of being anything besides monstrous is very ludicrous to him, and he's so very jealous, of anyone who seems to have had even the slightest bit of a choice.
He was impatient and annoyed with how long it took Seras to accept her new nature because to him. It confused him to no end why Integra would never just make it official and admit her humanity was too incomplete to keep.
monsters are one way, humans are the other.
Humans have friends and family. They have homes to come back to, take care of each other, like many other animals they play and express individuality. They love, and love in uncomplicated, unconditional ways.
Monsters are inevitably alone. There isnt really a place for them to belong, they're solitary and must learn to enjoy it. Violence is, if not enjoyable, grimly necessary to a monster. A monster's attachment to others is a laborious, painful thing.
There is a clear line. You can't be both, you can't be one but keep some traits of the other.
But that's just one way of thinking, is it?
The dragon certainly starts out fitting so very neatly into the monster box. Glassy eyes, little priorities, truly alien relationship to the self. Their illness makes them appear like something that Should be dead. The way they seem to rationalize their situation comes off arguably even less human than even Alucard does.
And that would make sense! They weren't human for hundreds upon hundreds of years, in fact they were never human at all. There are some universal human experiences like how most acessible in modernity human food tastes or childhood they are fundamentally external to.
But as time goes on, as they realize that for the first time in the last few years, they're fine to stop running on empty and rest? As they find it safe enough to speak earnestly? The line gets increasingly blurry.
They start to talk of first sensible subjects like music and prose and history, but increasingly you'd find they're not simply 'making polite civilized conversation,' no. They've known some of the histories they speak of first hand, were friends with some of the writers mentioned even. They're intimately familiar with Making music, what goes into a play, and know a surprising amount about notably dated by now music production hardware and software. There's silly stories they have on hand to share.
Community to the degree Integra likely hadn't really ever known.
They've accepted certain few as siblings, they even apparently know how to take care of a child. They are currently the primary caretaker of their mysterious """benefactor's""" child because 'the woman might've wanted the kid but doesn't much care for raising one.' They genuinely care for the kid, and not Just because its someone else hurt by the same person. They seem to have Opinions on what's good for a child that seem to come from experience. It's not their first time around.
The culture to whom the human that caused them to exist belonged to? They still identify with it. Kept track of the family even, for actual hundreds of years they've been the distant relative that visits sometimes.
They seem to earnestly love the people they speak of and miss those no longer alive or who've they been unable to reach for the past nine years, which is most of them.
Family in a way Seras struggles to even imagine having.
Their illness, though something specific to nonhumans, is suddenly rather easy to recontextualize as a collection of individual rather human symptoms. Integra even has similar complaints about her joints. Their sometimes stilted speech isn't hard to accept as a mixture of something like neurodivergence and having modern english be about 5th language they learned. Humans do plenty of these same things with gender and sexuality too, thats nothing too special.
Even their suffering under the control of the woman in red, if you pay closer attention... starts looking a good bit more like plain old domestic abuse.
Yet they're very obviously Not a human, they say as much too.
The way they grieve is from a different angle, from one colored by hundreds of years of losing people, unable to forget even one. The way they love is similar, encasing every moment in amber of their eerily clear memory. They know too much historical context for every aspect of society to take much seriously, looking right for the outsiders of it for something truly interesting.
For fuck's sake, it's barely even blood what courses through their veins, even their internal anatomy is a touch off.
Somehow though, they lack Alucard's characteristic violent self hatred about it. Even in their current situation, having the very 'justification' for their abuse be that they're not human, they are very firm in the fact that being a dragon IS a cornerstone of their identity, that its not something that can be removed or altered, they wouldn't particularly want to be a human, and they're not worse off for it, they just Are who they are.
At peace with their belonging outside of humanity. Something Alucard swore to never be as much as complacent with.
They dont come in trying to challenge anything particularly, they just happen to be the kind of person the trio's worldview hadn't truly been tested against.
If any luck, maybe it'd get them to give some much needed attention to their own traits that have never quite fit the ideology either.
You know.
The real reason Integra had long known she wants Hellsing to cease to exist, at least in the way it does now.
Besides, it's kind of pointless rummaging through the shadows searching for boogeymen when monstrous humans are just as real.
"the woman in red" as the dragon calls her, may just be one.
me: hm canon doesnt show her having much in the way of hobbies and interests, potentially implying she didnt much have a lot to get attached to in the world or due to simple pacing reasons
me: surely though post timeskip she'd develop an interest in Something she has a space she's reasonably comfortable in and at least some downtime right
me: the year post timeskip is 2030 or something right? she has a vast array of things available to her
me: she also strikes me as the type to attempt to hold onto modernity for didnt really get a childhood reasons
a fucked up thing about traumatizing characters that aren't young and/or long lived beings of some sort
there's room. there's room in their lifespan to go through the full cycle of trauma-denial-anger-healing should they be so well adjusted or at least some of the way through it
and then it can just happen to them again
took decades to relearn to enjoy existing? took a lot of effort? Too Fucking Bad!
and they now know the signs, they know just How Bad the situation is without the dubious mercy of obliviousness or being "used to it" from growing up in the environment or from gradually getting used to it.
They know what's being done to them now and if they're for whatever reason unable to leave or stop it, they'll be aware of the slow decay of their psyche against the things they thought can't hurt them anymore.
Because in a world where people barely acknowledge someone can even live after surviving incredible violence, they sure as fucking hell don't tell you it can happen twice
The thing about the dragon saying that they 'do not care' about what happens to them is that it's neither a show of strength nor an attempt at running from their feelings
It's a very pragmatic decision
So long as they serve who they serve it is simply not safe to care. So they don't. The woman in red can only hurt them so much if they remove that from the equation. It's hauntingly simple as that really.
Arguably the most destructive thing one can do for themselves as far as living on past the violence is concerned, but, as far as they're convinced, there won't be a 'living on' so might as well be efficient.
There are still people to take care of in that cursed house, if they want to be able to protect them properly options that call for rest are off the table regardless.
