This comes from a place of Drac being my fave character, lol. The fun thing is the player is not supposed to agree with Mathias, it's framed as he being selfish and frankly, full of shit. Leon calls him on his bluff. He's not convincing anyone and Mathias is transparently aware of it, the voice acting does a good job of communicating it. Leon is obviously portrayed to be on the right. It's not ambiguous at all.

Mathias is only convincing if you're Ellis and write edgy atheist reddit ass shit, I guess.

NFCV wants to be deep and nuanced and morally grey, but in reality it's only cynical and mean and accidentally justifies heinous crimes by ironically flattening cruel villains into sad 🥺 beans.

I resent how the show is praised for "turning Dracula into a tridimensional antagonist". My dude and my pal, Dracula waging war on mankind out of deep-seated grief for Lisa was not something Adi Shankar came up with: it was taken from SoTN, in 1997. It ain't new. What the show did was giving more moments of vulnerability with Dracula - which again, on paper, it's awesome! But it went too far in the opposite direction. Dracula in S2 is a broken man unworthy of respect, who lets Carmilla walk over him, who is all :( that Hector won't be friends with him, who only wants to kill himself awww don't you feel bad for him already.

NFCV has this very funny trick. For example, it's very noticeable that Lenore stops showing sexual attraction to Hector in S4, because she's meant to be cute and sympathetic and good deep down, and having her hitting on the guy who is constrained by the cursed ring she put on him would make her look bad (and incidentally, now she looks like she only has sexual interest in people who are 100% weak, vulnerable and depending on her. mhh 🤔). Isaac talks a lot, and I mean a lot, in S4 about himself and his growth and his agency and how huge his meat is, but he never mentions his unjustified killing spree done because he was on a power trip, because that would make his lack of remorse look bad. And in a similar vein, S2 doesn't show one single time the results of Hector and Isaac sending Night Creatures on towns like S1 did. Because that would make Dracula look bad :) that would remind us that he's killing innocents :) that the issue is not just that his plan will eventually lead to the starvation of vampires and an empty world: he is, right now, decimating people who do not deserve his wrath.

Because then we would be less sad when he cries that he's killing his boy, you know?

And, of course, we're still debating whether Lisa knew what her hubby was up to during her death. He sure doesn't mention it :) because their reunion would be less cute if we remembered that my man went against her wishes and nearly killed their son :) convenient :)

The games are not cowards. They give you villains with sympathetic motives and go "cool motive, still murder". I feel bad for Dracula who has to live centuries with the grief of losing his beloved ones, but he's still a dangerous monster to be stopped. I feel bad for Isaac who lost everything he held dear and got his brain scrambled by the Curse of his own master (and I honestly love how PtR frames Hector as Isaac's villain), but he's still a bastard who killed an innocent woman out of petty revenge and delighted in Hector's pain and humiliation. I feel bad for Brauner who lost his mind because he lost his daughters in the world, but that didn't give him the right to steal two other girls and vampirize them to play pretend.

You are allowed to recognize their understandable motives without the narrative going all "aren't they so traaaaaaagic 🥺🥺🥺 ignore their war crimes pls 🥺"