#i mean everyone loves jan because of his foul mouth but what else can i add to that?

[duhragonball]

Hellsing Liveblog Ch. 7-10

This is the “Dead Zone” arc, featuring Luke and Jan Valentine.

This arc is set around... uh, September 3rd-ish, I think.   By now, Hellsing has had time to investigate this recent uptick in vampire incidents, and she calls a meeting of the “Convention of Twelve” to discuss her findings.   This group represents the heads of various important agencies, political leaders, and noblemen, and the manga states that they “essentially” run the British Empire.    I’m not sure how to read that, exactly.  Kouta Hirano appears to be establishing one of two things:

1) Parliament Shmarliament, everything is really controlled by this secret group of oligarchs sitting at a table.

or

2) This is a collection of all the big wheels in British society, so they might as well be calling the shots even if they aren’t a true governing body. 

I’m not terribly concerned about which one it is, since we left real-world Great Britain behind a long time ago.    The Hellsing U.K. seems to put a lot more power in the monarchy, for example.    Also there’s friggin’ draulas runnin’ around everwhere. 

Anyway, Integra reveals that the vampires they’ve been killing lately all have microchips installed in their bodies.  She says the chips “define the vampire’s status, behavior, intent, and aggression.”   I don’t know if that means outright control or a more subtle manipulation.    It might exaplain why the couple in Chapter 3 weren’t exactly being subtle.

Moreover, these vampires haven’t been following the conventional rules laid down back in Chapter 1.   Vampire bites can turn a person into another vampire, but only if the victim is a virgin.   Otherwise, they turn into ghouls.   Destroying the head vampire will destroy all the ghouls he’s created.    But that hasn’t been happening.    The couple in Chapter 3 killed a lot of children, but they all became ghouls.   And in Badrick, Anderson killed the vampire, but the ghouls remained active long enough for Alucard and Seras to fight them.  

At least, that’s what Integra is saying.   We never actually saw any ghouls in Chapter 3, and Anderson killed the vampire in Badrick off-panel, so we don’t know the exact timing.    But I’ll take Integra’s word for it.   

Something that got lost along the way was the matter of what happens to Seras if someone managed to kill Alucard.   According to Chapter 1, she’d die immediately, but we never actually see that play out, and Seras is the only vampire created by another vampire in this story.   We never see ghouls die en masse, either, because there’s never a situation where their master dies first, and the ghouls we see from here on out are these rule-breaking microchippy kind anyway.    

Never mind that shit, here comes the Seras part.   Walter has replaced her bed with a coffin.    Apparently she had a bed in this dank-ass dungeon, and then one day Integra got a wild hair and decided “Oh, yeah, she should be sleeping in a vampire bed.”     She’s been a vampire for like two months now.    I feel bad for Walter, having to lug that big-ass bed down here, only to have to take the damn thing right back out.   He must have known it was going to end this way.   You’d think he would have said something before.  

Seras hates this idea, but Walter relays a second order, one from Alucard: Seras has to sleep in the coffin.   Well, that seems kind of redundant, but I guess Seras might have tried to sleep on the floor or something instead.    The main thing I find interesting about this is that Seras is mostly irritated by Integra ordering the coffin, but she takes it much more seriously when Alucard is mentioned.  

According to Walter, since Seras hasn’t drunk any blood, her powers will weaken... unless she sleeps in a coffin lined with soil from her birthplace.   So maybe it’s an either/or deal.   Integra was fine with Seras using a big girl bed because she assumed Seras would be drinking blood.  But without it, she has to use a coffin, or she’ll be no good to the team.   And after two months, it’s become clear that Seras has no intention of drinking blood, even bags of donated blood, like the one Alucard snacked on in Badrick.

Even Seras doesn’t know exactly why she won’t do it, which Alucard finds baffling.    If this was a dealbreaker for her, she should have just died as a human in Cheddar.  

But Al isn’t entirely unsympathetic either.    His words are harsh, but they’re the truth: Seras is a vampire now, and there’s no going back.  She keeps trying to resist this, but it’s already happened.   Denial will only make this more painful for her.   I think that’s part of the reason he offered his own blood to her in Badrick.   I mean, there weren’t a lot of other options, but from an ethical standpoint, drinking Alucard’s blood seems reasonable, since it won’t kill him.    The unspoken sentiment here is: Listen, I know this is difficult for you, and I’ll try to make this as easy as possible, but you need to do this and there’s no way around it.    But even that doesn’t seem to work, and Alucard’s in no particular hurry, so he’s willing to table the matter.   Which I suppose is how the coffin thing came about in the first place.

Walter also takes this moment to give the vampires their new guns.    Alucard wanted something special for the next time he tangles with Alexander Anderson.    Recall that Al already has a special cosmogun with an infinite supply of magic bullets, and he shot Anderson in the face and it didn’t stop him.    So Walter builds him “The Jackal”, which is basically the same as his first gun, only even bigger and with a black finish.   It also says “Jesus Christ is in Heaven Now”, which drives me nuts because I don’t know if that’s like a message to Anderson, or just some random thing.    Kouta Hirano puts these nonsense religious slogans all over Hellsing, and I’m pretty sure he’s just doing it for effect, and not particularly concerned over whether there’s any religious significance to the words.   

As for Seras, she gets a giant bazooka-looking think called the Harkonnen, named after a Dune character.   One of these days I want to sit down and read Dune.   I kind of feel guilty that I haven’t already, because then I could be writing this and get all excited for this moment.   “HOLY SHIT!! IS THAT MOTHERFUCKING DUNE REFERENCE?!”  Instead I’m like, ho-hum, yes it is.

Let’s move on.    This arc is about the Valentine Brothers, two vampires who take the fight to Hellsing instead.   They have a small army of ghouls, and their plan is to just drive up in a tour bus and storm the gate.   Ghouls are mindless, zombie-like monsters, but apparently they can work a gun well enough, and Hellsing never imagined an enemy would try such a thing.

As soon as Integra finds out about this, she tries to evacuate the Twelve, but their helicopter gets destroyed, cutting off any chance of escape.   Then Jan (pronounced “Yon” by the way), calls her on the comm system and threatens to kill them all.  

So Integra calls Walter, who already knows what’s happening.   Um, how?   I feel like the anime explained this better.   Maybe Jan’s profanity-laden threats were on a public-address system instead of just for the conference room.   But it sure looks like Walter’s just chilling out in a windowless, underground room.   But he already knows there’s no hope of reinforcements arriving to save them.   He proposes himself and Seras using the ventilation shafts to get to the coference room, where they can defend the twelve, while Alucard can go on the offensive.

Alucard is amused to hear that Walter is going back into action, and calls him “Angel of Death”.    We’ll come back to that.

So Walter’s pretty much on top of things here.    No one ever considered anything like this happening before.    Hellsing is supposed to be a secret organization, so a vampire shouldn’t know to come here in the first place.    Moreover, no one dreamed that a vampire would plan it out so well, using ghouls in a military fashion.     But he’s optimistic about their chances for survival, because...

Walter has super powers.    Specifically, he has these magic wires he can use to bind and slice up his enemies, and this makes short work of the Valentines’ ghouls.   He then repeats Jan’s taunts back at him.   Okay, so I guess Walter did hear Jan’s message from earlier. 

The problem I always had with this development was that it seemed awfully convenient for Walter to have super powers.    But then, it took me a while to catch on to Anderson having super powers, and he took a bullet to the face.    I think the conceit of the Hellsing world is that these “anti-freak” organizations have to have super-powered operatives, so they use secret techniques and alchemy or whatever to empower men like Walter and Anderson.   It’s really not that hard to swallow.

Except that the first vampire-hunter we meet in Hellsing is Alucard, who is himself a vampire. So it seemed like the whole point was that he was the best suited for the job because he had the raw power to do it.   Integra doesn’t seem to have any powers, and neither do any of the rank-and-file Hellsing operatives who get mowed down by the Valentines’ ghouls.   So it always confused me for Walter to just go “Wassup, I have powers too.”   But it only makes sense for Hellsing to have more than one card to play.    Clearly, Walter used to hunt vampires on  the regular before he retired to become a butler.

Between Walter’s wires and Seras’ giant gun, they manage to subdue Jan easily enough, but he reveals he has a partner, Luke, whose job is to tackle the second half of their mission: to destroy Alucard.   Let’s check in on him...

Yeah.    I was thinking about doing a blow-by-blow of this fight, but it’s kind of pointless.    Luke talks a big game, and seems confident that he’s on a higher level than the vampires Alucard has been fighting recently, and for a hot minute, even Alucard believes that he might be a worthy adversary, “above even a ‘Category A’ vampire,” so he releases his “control art restriction,” to “Level 1″.  

I guess I should back up and explain this.    Alucard, like all overpowered anime characters, can hold back his full power and reveal it in stages.   For some reason he has to announce that he’s doing this, like Windows 10 describing it’s own updating.   Presumably, there’s a Level 4 where he usually operates, and that was enough for him to fight Luke evenly.    But here, we see him jump all the way to Level 1, which allows him to turn into some shadowy form with lots of eyes and two dog heads.  

Also, centipedes.  The point is, this is all stuff Luke can’t do.   He’s more of a “super speed gun-shooting” kind of vampire, so he’s immediately outclassed.    Alucard’s dog form eats Luke and that’s the end of him.... OR IS IT? 

Meanwhile, Jan’s ghoul army is beaten, but he still has reinforcements in the form of all the Hellsing soldiers they killed earlier.   These men rise up as new ghouls and chase down Seras while Jan makes a break for the conference room where the Twelve are holed up.    Walter tries to catch Jan, but only manages to rip off one of his arms.   He makes it to the door, only to find...

Integra and the others all have guns, and they shoot him down.  

All Jan has left now is his second wave of ghouls, except Seras manages to overwhelm them.   At first, she was panicking, but then she freaks out and goes feral on them, to the point where Integra has to jump in and order her to stop.   When she does, she seems to have no idea what just happened.    This is mostly overshadowed by the sheer horror of Hellsing’s soldiers being reduced to the undead.  

All that’s left is Jan, who refuses to talk.    He has the same microchip implants as the previous vampires, and the people who sent him are monitoring him in real-time, which means they know he failed, and they can make him self-destruct before he can tell Hellsing anything.  As he dies, Jan flips them all off and gives them one word of information: “Millennium.”

After that, Integra tasks Walter with destroying the remaining Hellsing ghouls, until Sir Irons, one of the Twelve reminds Integra that this is the duty of a commander.   As Hellsing’s C.O., it’s her responsibility, so she agrees and starts shooting the ghouls in the head.   

Meanwhile, Jan’s mysterious overseers talk amongst themselves, and their leader calls for them to resume their “research”.   As devastating as this attack on Hellsing was, for Millennium, this was merely a test.   

#2021hellsingliveblog #hellsing #alucard #seras victoria #walter c dornez #sir integra hellsing #luke valentine #jan valentine #i guess i should have said more about the valentine brothers as characters #they're all right but they don't stick around long enough to make much of an impression #i mean everyone loves jan because of his foul mouth but what else can i add to that?