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Sep. 24th, 2022 07:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kradeelavAlucard’s stockholm syndrome / killing his own kind is up there (but also well documented in the fandom) - so I’m going to have to say the sheer amount of what Integra grew up with.
Hellsing is a deeply disturbing organization.
They are a paramilitary, hereditary institution that inherited all of the staggeringly wrong (and corrosive) parts of colonial-era based power structures and the military-industrial bits adopted from the US. They are licensed and purposely built as a weapon to genocide away all supernatural threats. (Whether they will go after benign vampires/werewolves/etc remains unclear; their own propaganda tends to lean on the side of ‘all vampires (not under our control) are malicious’, so I doubt that they’d exercise such restraint if there was resources.)
Their own board (the Knights) are of an equally patriarchal sort - decent folks like Penwood are hinted to be on the rarer side. The discord squad mentioned once that bits of it feel like a cult (perhaps not quite to the extent of Iscariot, but still-) which says plenty; they have a mission and a clear-cut enemy, (and a history) with charismatic shadowy leaders that rule with an iron fist.
- and Integra Hellsing grew up right in the heart of that.
Her father read her bedtime stories about vampires as the villains. Her father also experimented on Alucard in nights before. Her butler looks after her like she was his own blood. Her butler was also a brainwashed child-soldier that killed hundreds and would kill thousands more in her name without regret. So on.
It would be the height of naivety to say that she was not influenced by what Hellsing does, and didn’t have to slowly, painfully, crawl her way out on bloodied ideological shards of glass. There always has been and will be endless phantom bloodied hands around her throat demanding justice.
She has generations of guilt resting on her shoulders.
It is a very heavy burden for a twelve year old with good intentions to carry, and almost indeed - is too much at times.
b) a large part of me wants to see her as Yui-Ikari’ing everything important about Hellsing behind the scenes; forget Authur, he was a sadist and a womanizer and frankly didn’t even care about the important shit even in the Dawn - but Integra’s ambition had to come from somewhere and history is made by many wives who were the real power behind the throne. Would not surprise me if that ended up the case.
#plot twist: it was integra's mum that made walter #as a loyal butler to protect her offspring in the event Alucard didn't wake #and to protect her from Authur himself.
cryptidmak asked: ☕ Thoughts on Integra letting Alucard turn her? Going with the original anime vs. Ultimate if you'd like, since they have two different endings. I don't think I've seen you post any opinions on this topic, and I'm curious.
Mm - I don’t really have strong feelings either way, other than a slight leaning towards feeling it’s somewhat OOC of Integra.
(This is one of those things where I preface that a good fic writer can and has convinced me of anything, so those are exempted.)
Making Integra’s lifespan damned like Alucard’s just adds another problem to the bucket, as it were - it won’t be obvious early on, but at some point she’ll end as fucked up as he is, or they’ll be eternally hunted/captured by a different holy order (monster-hunting is as basically old as time). And I think it’s notable that we don’t see his opinions on her becoming a vampire in the manga/Ultimate - while it feels fandom-Alucard wants Integra to become a vampire, I personally think he’d be viscerally against the idea considering he, frankly, hates his own existence.
If anything, I see Integra letting him mercy-kill her at the very end with one last (painless) drink of blood. It is ... very human to want control of one’s death, and in a twisted way, it’s the most intimate gift possible to both of them.
Anonymous asked: ☕️ Hellsing+gender
By far my favorite execution of this topic was in this fic (for the relevant section to this ask: skip down to about halfway through at ‘she is sixteen-’). It’s a beautifully well done AxI series of drabbles, but there’s a particular scene where Integra’s growing into the years where she chooses to don pantsuits and gender (and the presentation) kinda becomes an inescapable thing.
It is - i cannot stress this enough - a literal minefield that she has to traipse through; not just with the restrictive, regressive, repressive (not to mention religious-) Knights who she has to cater to like any board of trustees; but trauma also has a funny way of occasionally tilting the lenses askew and shuffling priorities in an order that may seem odd to the majority of the population. Presentation is inherently lesser than survival, for some.
And what I love about the fic is it straightforwardly acknowledges this, and her very real need for absolute authority as a tool to best shoulder the burden that is the Hellsing legacy. And - and - the validation and actual understanding that Alucard gives in turn; he’s a lewd ass, but he reads between the lines and points out the safe path through the minefield in that matter (and many others, I reckon).
It’s a perfect example of the kind of closeness that they would have; odd and deeply transgressive (I mean, Girlycard. That’s a mind-bender no matter how you put it) - but both of them having to face those very raw and very vulnerable questions in terms of survival and how to use them as tools first (and when they’re free not to) - creates an unshakeable bond there.
(Nah, you’re cool!
Being bluntly honest here - it’s a gorgeously done confrontation, but it doesn’t rank anywhere near the top of my favorites so I truly don’t remember much about it?
Young Walter is a character that my brain for some reason does a U-turn at, (now old!Walter, I have an aircraft carrier of feels for) and Girlycard - while I find fascinating - is ... very hard to grasp on a characterization standpoint. Alien in a lot of ways. Which unhepfully doesn’t answer your question, lmao, but the short story is that I just see it as two dudes and jilted lovers with a cruise-liner’s worth of baggage and a sucky situation where they can’t just sit down to talk or fuck it (and their brains) out.
re: Old!Walter’s specific motivations - already covered that in this post here.
I wanna see more Seras-as-a-cop mentality - fics, art, general meta, whatever.
She’s awesome, cheerful kickass cutie that gets a pretty rad ending with Pip, great beatdown action scenes, astonishingly well handled lady protag with A+ sexual tension with tegs, and has a cool dynamic with literally every main character; she’s got a lot going for her in terms of things you could talk about.
But the one thing i never see even remotely handled (much less realistically) is the whole ... cop ... bit.
Which would influence her mentality a shit ton! I disagree with the canon here in that she’s gotta be a little older - maybe late-twenties; still young on the force but has enough years that she’s seen some dark shit on the street that’s jaded her just a touch and that’s changed her to the point she’s not a green-ass rookie. That there’s a lil’ more authority there than we see in the canon.
(There’s a side of me that wants to headcanon that some of Pip’s men survived, and that one of the things she’s pleasantly surprised about in her vampiric years is bonding and shit-talking with them on that level. It eases her loneliness about not being able to go back and visit her police buds, in some ways.)
I honest to goodness think that the kindest ending for him is allowing him to die, at some point within Integra’s lifespan.
The man has lived a long. ass. extremely. unpleasant life that is an exponentially longer lifespan than anyone else technically alive or undead - he’s tired. bone-fucking-dead weary. he’s seen precious few good things actually happen - mentoring seras, getting to know integra and actually seeing the better side of humanity there - but the human mind was simply not built for multiple lifespans let alone all the incredibly traumatic shit thrown at him.
his greatest wish - upon coming back to integra - is sweet blessed peace of being under her hand in a relatively quiet span of years where they fool around and see to cleaning up the major’s mess and whatever pops up in that power vacuum, and then:
dying.
( and so in my vague ‘best ending’ of hellsing, between those years and when she dies, they figure out a loophole to fucking up schrodinger’s whole … thing … and set plans in motion for the organization to be led by seras instead of Hellsinger blood proper. in a weird way, it’s the last best fuck you they could give to the major and to integra’s ancestors. )
(I’m not at all interested in the worldbuilding needed to set that up, but it’s the characterization I tend to lean towards.)
goblins-riddles-or-frocks asked: ☕️ integra
I have a lot of words in me about how alienated she feels from most humans, and the resentment and contempt that comes with that.
Hellsing dabbles quite a bit in monster theory and how it relates to the ~Other~ and i don’t think for one second it’s a coincidence that Integra is set up as the stark opposite of the other (very patriarchal) Knights in the table in terms of her identities. Nor a coincidence that she states repeatedly that she sees herself and her men as monsters hunting other monsters - she will protect the weak, yes -
- but she sees far more of herself reflected in Alucard’s eyes than Penwoods.
(It’s also one reason why she gets along with Alucard (and Walter to an extent) more than anyone else; they all don’t even pretend they’re normal, and there’s a brutally refreshing honesty in that you don’t fucking care about humanity some days.)
