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#also yes the human rant applies to the likes of eggman too
beevean · 19 days
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I'm so happy that I get the chance to rant again, because the subreddit just gives me so much inspiration <3
I don't really care about Carmilla. She was, at the end of the day, a villain from a kid's cartoon, who wanted to conquer the world because she was just so eeeevil, with only the barest of backstories to pretend she had good motivations. In fact, it's hilarious to me that when you think about it, the N!Isaac vs. Carmilla epic fight, one of the climaxes of this show that has touted itself on being so deep and nuanced, has all the emotional depth of an average Sonic vs. Eggman boss battle: the impossibly cool superhero wants to stop the nefarious supervillain and her world domination plans.
(no shade to Sonic and Eggman, who are far better written than those two assholes could ever hope to be. you know what I mean)
yeah yeah she became what she depised, after a whole season of sitting on her feminist ass lol and then randomly going insane at the last minute. peak writing, as per usual.
No, it's as usual Lenore who has my attention.
She's the most human of the sisters, they say. And they're right. She is a terrifyingly realistic depiction of an abuser.
She's not a cackling madwoman who only serves as a caricature, and she doesn't exist only for shallow representation like Striga and Morana who have no objectives or personalities outside of each other. Lenore may not want world domination like Carmilla, but she absolutely longs for power over other people. I went about it here, how once you read between the lines, Lenore only wants to feel powerful and important, and she's willing to steep as low as she can to get her way because she folds like a coward the moment she doesn't have the upper hand. While Carmilla would just beat people for shit and giggles because look at how Evil (but in a Cool way) she is, Lenore is genuinely convinced that everything she did, all of her physical, mental, emotional and sexual abuse, it was all for a good cause, and she did nothing wrong, and anyway you were enjoying it too so what's the issue?
So yes, in this, she's human. She's a cruel, cunning, vile human like many women in the world who know that they can use their charm and take advantage of emotionally starved men to feel powerful, all while still painting themselves as cute and lovable. Her vampiric nature doesn't come into play until the very end, where she realizes (in theory) that she's nothing but a disgusting evil creature and she's doomed to always be so; but until then, you could write her as a human and little would change in her personality and the way she played with N!Hector.
And that's what makes her scary to me. Yes, Dracula and Carmilla are more dangerous on a wider scale, but we are much, much more likely to fall into the trap of one of the many Lenores around the world.
(I usually don't like making it all about gender, but Lenore's abuse of N!Hector is absolutely gendered. Her entire character revolves around what I can only call toxic femininity.)
And that's why the takes I see about her deadass trigger me, because what the fuck do you mean, she's the less cruel of the bunch????
I don't give a shit about the Lesbians, but at least they realized that what they were doing was wrong! Sure, their motivations were mainly self-centered because they didn't want to waste their existence fighting, but they also took pity on the humans they were meant to kill!
I just fought fucking farmers. Saw the fear in their eyes. Not fear of dying. Fear of not having fought. Fear of not saving their people.
It's more empathy than Lenore ever showed for N!Hector, with her filthy "you were having fun"!
"Found her strengths" yeah, instead of physically torturing N!Hector, she used manipulation, abuse, coercion, gaslighting and rape by deception to "solve his problem". Wow, such strengths, many power. And then the second things got worse for her she immediately decided to peace out of life rather than wait a few decades until N!Isaac died, sorry N!Hector if you grew to care about me but my own bratty feelings are more important. I'm sorry, I know it's in bad taste to paint suicide as the cowardly way, but it's what the story did!
The Lenore apologism creeps me out more than anything else. I can stand the Carmilla stans who think she's so cool and badass and #grrlpower. I'm annoyed but resigned to the N!Isaac stans who believe he's the most complex character of all time and forgot about all the petty murders he commited. I'm baffled by the N!Dracula stans who genuinely believe he had the right to start a mass slaughter because some peasants didn't take him seriously enough. But this rhetoric that Lenore is the least evil of the sisters, that she was ultimately a poor broken woman who only did what she thought was the right thing, terrifies me. She's a realistic, human female abuser... and just like many female abusers, her crimes get brushed off because she's cute, because she looked sad enough, because women who sexually dominate men are inherently hot. And I know that fiction is not reality and you can enjoy villains without being a bad person, but the arguments the stans use, not to paint Lenore as cool like Carmilla but to actually downplay her very realistic crimes, just hit too close to home for me.
I just wish that "human" didn't become shorthand for "good deep down", because it's not true. Sometimes a "human" villain is far more evil than a villain so shallow they don't quite feel real.
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