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duhragonball · 3 years

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Hellsing Liveblog Ch. 82-86

LIKE A BLOODY STORM

Atsuku LIKE A BLOODY STONE

So it’s come to this. This is the “Black Onyx” arc and “Sorcerian Part 1″, where we finally get the payoff to the Major’s 55-year plot against Alucard. Walter betrayed Integra, the Hellsing Organization, and the whole United Kingdom just so Millennium would give him a chance to beat Alucard, and he’s failing. Alucard doesn’t see any point in dragging this out, so he’s sucking up all the fresh blood in London to power up and bring and end to this. Also, if you’re just joining us, Alucard looks like a 14-year-old girl. Just roll with it.

But the Major was counting on Alucard doing this, and apparently his plan to “poison the tyrant’s wine” involves his last henchman, Warrant Officer Schrodinger, cutting off his own head and adding his werewolf blood to Alucard’s meal. Why would this matter at all?

Walter seems to understand, because he begs the Major to stop this, as if the Major could.

Desperate, he bisects Alucard with his wires, but it’s already too late for that. Part of the secret behind Alucard’s invincibility is that he gains a 1-up for each person’s blood he consumes. That’s what Anderson and Walter were banking on when they attacked Alucard before. At the time, he had separated himself from the souls he had consumed, which meant that killing him once -- however tough that might be-- would finish him off. But now it’s too late for that. You kill him now and he’ll just come back and dare you to keep going. And he’s taken the blood of like three million people at least.

So the Major observes that Walter’s window of opportunity has closed. According to him, there’s only been two chances to beat Alucard in a fight since Abraham van Helsing captured him in 1898. I assume he’s referring to Anderson and Walter’s respective efforts.

No, Walter was never the final stroke in the Major’s plan, just part of the endgame. All of Millennium’s resources were sacrificed to get to this moment. Enrico Maxwell’s 9th Crusade? The Major was counting on them getting involved, which is probably why he leaked and shared so much of his plans with the Vatican, even though his target was always London. He wanted the Vatican to send all their best warriors to compound the horror, all so Alucard would use his full power to destroy them.

And then, once Alucard’s full power was deployed, the Major knew Anderson would step in and use everything at his disposal to kill Alucard. This battle destroyed all of Alucard’s familiars, setting him up for Walter to take a turn. And maybe Alucard could beat Walter without taking in more blood, but that;s never been Alucard’s style. He sees himself as a loaded weapon at the disposal of Integra Hellsing. He’s not going to drag things out for no reason, and Integra ordered him to destroy Walter, not humor him.

And maybe Walter was aware of all this, but he still believed he could buck the odds and kill Alucard before the Major’s winning move. Walter’s a rook who fancied himself a king. I guess that’s always been his problem. This was never Walter’s story, and I guess he couldn’t handle that truth. If he couldn’t be the hero, then he was content with being the villain, but in the end he was never more than a plot device, supporting whichever side he was on at the time.

And finally, it happens, whatever ‘it’ is. Alucard somehow hears the Major saying that he’s lost. Is the Major saying it? I don’t think anyone else would be. Whoever it is, he starts flashing back to all the other times he’s heard that.

Then he seems to realize something’s gone terribly wrong, and he pauses to notice the rising sun, which has been a common theme with all of his past defeats. Then all these eyes appear on his body and begin winking out, one by one.

Okay, so what the hell happened here? Well, get comfortable, because this is going to take some time to unpack.

The key to all of this is Warrant Officer Schrodinger, a werewolf with the power to be “everywhere and nowhere”. This sounds like he’s just a teleporter, like Nightcrawler from the X-Men, or.... Majik from the X-Men. Well, it’s more complicated than that.

Let me explain the “Schrödinger's cat” thought experiment, because that’s one of those things that’s widespread enough in pop culture that it’s easy to take for granted. I think people understand it has to do with an imaginary cat being alive or dead, but that’s about all.

The really short version of quantum mechanics is that subatomic particles don’t behave the same way as big objects like apples or planets or people. It’s convenient to think of atoms as tiny little solar systems, with electrons orbiting the atomic nucleus. But the reality is that electrons don’t revolve around elliptical orbits like the Earth around the Sun. What happens instead is the electron zips around the nucleus all over the place, from all angles and directions. What’s more, the electron can be at any particular spot at any moment. So it’s less useful to think of an electron having an orbit around a nucleus. What you have instead is this region where the electron is most likely to be at any particular moment. And you can do the math and figure out what the shape of this region is. You can’t locate the electron’s exact position at any particular moment, but you can consider the region where it’s most likely to be in an atom, which will resemble a sphere or a vaguely dumbbell kind of shape.

This is what the Schrödinger Equation is for. Erwin Schrödinger didn’t just talk about cats all day. He postulated his equation in 1925 to work out the movements of electrons in atoms. It was groundbreaking work, and he won a Nobel Prize for it in 1933, and don’t feel bad if you have trouble wrapping your head around all of this. I’m a professional chemist and a lot of this is over my head.

The point of the “Schrödinger's cat” concept was to help visualize how confusing quantum mechanics really is. There are principles to subatomic particles that we know to be true, but they make no sense in our macroscale world. For example, a particle might have a probability of being in multiple locations at a given moment. It can only be in one place at a time, but until you actually perform the measurement to find out, it may as well be in all of those locations. This is something called “superposition”, and I guess we could say that this idea is the basis for our wolfboy’s powers.

So Schrödinger (the scientist, not the furry) suggested a thought experiment where a macroscale event could depend upon a subatomic condition. Like there’s some subatomic thing that could happen or not happen, and depending on the outcome, it would cause a poison to be dispensed that would kill a cat in a box. If the particle goes one way, the cat dies, but if it goes the other way, the cat survives. But both probabilities are equal, and supposedly both outcomes are true for the particle until you make the observation. Therefore, you can’t know whether the cat lived or died until you open the box to look! Indeed, according to quantum mechanics, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead until you open the box to see for yourself.

How does that make any sense? Well it doesn’t, and that’s the point Erwin Schrödinger was driving at. In our large scale, things like gravity and being one place at a time are things we take for granted. But on the quantum level, subatomic particles are governed by rules that seem completely paradoxical to us. And yet, we’re not talking about some alternate reality here. Those subatomic particles make up the atoms that make up us. Cats, boxes, bottles of poison, they’re all just a huge pile of subatomic particles, each following these seemingly nonsensical rules. They’re just organized in such a way that they give rise to bigger rules that make more sense to us. Things like classical mechanics, chemical reactions, cats liking to be inside boxes, and so on. As Erwin Schrödinger put it:

“It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naïvely accepting as valid a "blurred model" for representing reality. In itself, it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.”

In other words, we see the world as discrete outcomes. We read the black letters on the page, and not the indeterminate spaces in between, or the hazy, unfinished thoughts of the writer. That doesn’t mean the words on the page aren’t legitimate, or that the passing thoughts of the writer don’t exist. We have to accept the seeming contradiction of it.

So what does this have to do with Alucard? Well, Schrödinger (the furry, not the scientist) has the ability to be like one of these subatomic particles. Our were-boy probably can’t be literally everywhere, but he has this probability region of places where he can be, and it seems to cover at least half the world. He’s appeared in Brazil, London, Zorin Blitz’s psychic visions, and so on. He’s been shot twice in this story, but he just reappears like nothing happened to him at all. It’s not like he teleported away in the nick of time, either. We’ve seen his head burst open like a ripe melon. Like Schrödinger’s cat in the thought experiment, he can be alive or dead at any given moment, so killing him doesn’t actually matter. Warrant Officer Schrödinger can do all of this and he’s conscious of this ability. So as long as he’s aware of himself, he can observe himself and direct himself to be in any location he so chooses.

I would think getting shot in the face would interfere with this ability to control his power, but that’s probably where his werewolf nature comes in. Like the Captain, he can grow back from a nasty headwound, so that gives him time to picture himself someplace else, and in better health. Now that I think about it, that must have been a silver knife he used to cut his own head off.

So when Alucard drank all that blood, he drank Schrödinger’s too, and just like when he drank Rip van Winkle’s blood and got the power to fire that magic musket, Alucard absorbed Schrödinger’s ability to be “everywhere and nowhere”. Except that power only works when Schrödinger himself is conscious of it. And he’s not conscious of it anymore because he’s part of Alucard now. Alucard might figure out how to control this power, but until he does, he can’t choose a location and be in that one place. Instead, he’s “everywhere and nowhere” all the time. So he’s experiencing all of his past moments simultaneously, with no control over his current position.

That sounds bad, right? Well it gets worse. He drank all those other dead people’s blood too, so on top of his own perception, he has the perceptions of all 3 million plus of the souls he’s consumed. So that just further complicates matters. The bottom line is that Schrödinger’s ability is fundamentally incompatible with Alucard’s existence as a composite being made up of multiple absorbed lives.

And since Alucard can’t just cough up Schrödinger’s blood, it’s too late now. He’s got Schrödinger’s ability and he’s stuck with it, but he can’t control it, which means he just winks out of existence. As the Major puts it, he’s now neither live nor dead nor undead. He’s become like a series of imaginary numbers. You’ll need to look that one up on your own time, folks, I spent enough time talking about quantum mechanics.

And you have to hand it to Kouta Hirano, this is a really clever way to bring down an overpowered seinen manga protagonist. This whole time, all of these lower villains acted like they could just beat down Alucard if they applied enough brute force, but that was never going to get the job done. For the purposes of this story, Alucard has been, almost by definition, unbeatable. So the Major’s solution was to give him a new power, one that he would be unable to control. It wouldn’t kill him, but killing Alucard seems like a fool’s errand anyway. Instead, it just... makes Alucard go away, which is probably as close to destroying him as anyone could ever hope for. He might still be alive in some semantic sense, but he can’t carry out his duties to Hellsing and the Crown, so the Major seems to have at least brought down what Alucard is expected to be.

And there’s no way to stop it, because it’s already happened. Integra commands him to stay, but it’s useless. I like the way he signs off in the dub of the OVA, where he apologizes to Integra and says this is one order he cannot obey. It’s just out of his hands.

Then he vanishes, and all that’s left of Alucard is a bloody mark on the street, shaped like the Hellsing insignia on his gloves.

Wait, so does this affect Seras too, since she was Alucard’s servant vampire? Remember, way back in Chapter 1, Integra said that killing the head vampire would automatically kill any ghouls or vampires he creates. So maybe Seras is gone too?

Hell naw. Seras joins Integra in the Major’s command center, and she looks like she’s ready for some revenge. Does she know what’s just happened? I mean, she was furious at the Major to begin with, but she sensed Alucard’s return a while back when he floated up the Thames River. Surely she sensed her own vampire dad winking out of existence.

Meanwhile, Walter had a front-row seat for Alucard’s disappearance. At first he laughs with triumph. I guess he must be giddy with relief, since he wanted to kill Alucard, and for a minute there it looked like Alucard had him dead to rights. Imagine a guy’s about to murder you and then he just ceases to exist. But it doesn’t take long for Walter to realize how hollow this all is. He wanted to kill Alucard himself, and he bet everything just to get that one opportunity, and now he’s failed and he’ll never get another chance. His body is giving out and he’s betrayed everyone who ever cared about him and he’s got nothing to show for it.

Then Heinkel starts shooting at him with a sniper rifle. Yeah, she never left the battlefield after Walter killed Yumiko. The Captain stopped her from interfering before, but the Captain’s dead now and I guess she figures she’s got nothing to lose by trying again. And I suppose the sniper act proves she’s learned from Yumiko’s fatal mistake. Attacking Walter up close is dangerous.

At first, Walter seems to invite this. He even invites Heinkel to shoot him a few more times, as it’s a fitting punishment for a traitor. If you’ve only seen the TFS Abridged version of Hellsing, they actually use this as Walter’s death scene, but in the original version Walter takes a few bullets and then leaves. He says Heinkel can shoot him, but she doesn’t get to kill him. I don’t think she even heard him say that, but whatever.

Instead, he uses his wires to board the Major’s airship one last time.

So remember how the Major was protected from Integra by a reinforced glass barrier? Yeah, well Seras finds an 88mm cannon and shoots through it. It also shoots through the hull of his ship and rings a large bell on the outskirts of town. Right before she shoots, Integra orders Seras to “Search and Destroy” just like she always told Alucard. It’s kind of sad, but Seras has automatically succeeded her master as Integra’s weapon. I mean, it’s a triumph for Seras, but it comes at a heavy price for her. She’s probably too enraged by what’s happened to appreciate this moment on all these other levels, but there’ll be time for that.

So there’s no way the Major could survive a cannon like that at pointblank range, right? Wrong, the dude’s a fucking cyborg, and I guess Seras’ aim was a little off. I suppose the downside to using big-ass guns is that you have trouble aiming at small targets. Wait, no, what happened to all that “third eye” stuff from before? What’s wrong with you, Victoria?

Oh wait, she missed because she’s sad. Aw... :`(

So we knew the Major had to be something to have survived this long without aging, but we had already learned he wasn’t a vampire. He insists that he is still human, however, no different from a man with a pacemaker or an artificial limb. His mind remains his own, even if it should be a brain in a life support system or backed up on a computer. I’m not sure if either of these describes the status of the Major’s brain, but to his point, it doesn’t really matter. He describes himself as Alucard’s polar opposite. While Al is this beautiful monster who masquerades as a human, the Major is a human who resembles the grotesque form of a monster. I’m not body-shaming the dude, I’m just reporting what he’s saying. He’s taken a few fat jokes in stride, and I guess he’s got the same attitude about his cyborg body too. He doesn’t seem to care if others find this unpleasant, because it’s better than being a vampire with a diluted self.

Arguably, this whole campaign to destroy Alucard was the Major’s effort to prove his claim on being human. Alucard often said that only a human could defeat a monster like him, and the Major beat him, so doesn’t that prove he’s a human in the end?

So Integra whips out her other gun, the one she didn’t use to shoot at the Major’s glass case, and they start shooting each other at pointblank range. The Major’s a terrible shot, though, and yet somehow he manages to take out one of Integra’s eyes before she puts a bullet in his forehead. I still don’t understand how you can shoot someone in the eye and not kill them. Did the bullet just angle away from her brain or is the Major’s gun just really weak on stopping power?

Anyway, Integra’s shot kills the Major, but not right away, so I guess it’s not just his original brain in there. He’s just thrilled to have finally hit something after a lifetime of terrible marksmanship. It’s a fitting reflection of his win over Alucard, because he and the rest of Millennium were warriors who had never won a war before. In the end, I’m not sure the Major would have been disappointed if his plan had failed. He’d never won before, so I don’t think another defeat would have bothered him much. As it is, he dies contentedly, satisfied with his “good war”. What a shithead.

So yeah, we’ve got three more chapters to go and then we’re done. See you next time.

#2021hellsingliveblog #hellsing #alucard #seras victoria #sir integra hellsing #walter c dornez #the major #heinkel wolfe #warrant officer schrodinger #erwin schrödinger #uh... yeah #that's everybody #starting to run a little low on characters now

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