#bullying is fine for the sake of development lol. but this ain't it

[beevean]

I offer another angle to explain why I hate the Lenector subplot: Lenore and N!Hector drag each other down.

And not in that fun "they make each other worse" way, not as people - as characters. The ways they're both badly written influence each other. And it's hard to see where the problem starts: I don't care about Lenore being a manipulative #girlboss because I don't care about N!Hector's fate in S3, and I don't care about N!Hector in S3 because he was watered down to make Lenore look good (as in, a hot #girlboss to masturbate on).

N!Hector is not a character one can root for in S3. And it's not because he's "evil": after all, fans are quick to cheer for N!Isaac when he kills innocents and defiles their corpses for petty reasons. It's because not only N!Isaac is forcibly made to be the coolest strongest most powerful character in the show, but because the dude has at least solid motivations and reacts to events around him. <- writing so peak i'm forced to appreciate the very basics of writing

N!Hector has lost all of that. In S2, there was a conflict between his morbid goal of turning humans into livestock for vampires, and his principles that made him recoil at N!Dracula's actual plan of mass slaughter. He was evil, but he was also lied to by N!Dracula through no fault of his own, and there was an unique dissonance between his terrible goals and his complete lack of malice. It at least made sense that he'd listen to Carmilla, up to a certain point. By then, I still wanted to follow his journey. I wanted to see him grow, I wanted to see him challenged, I wanted to see him learn empathy for humans. (well, I would have wanted to, if I wasn't spoiled lol. you get what I mean)

In S3? What's the point? What does he want? What does he fear? What does he feel?

Characters going through hell and coming out reshaped, for better or for worse, is the bread and butter of fiction. The CV games themselves have put some of their protagonists through the ringer: Leon lost everyone he held dear in one night in LoI, Shanoa discovered she had been groomed to resurrect Dracula in OoE, and Hector himself suffered a lifetime of abuse, watched Rosaly die in front of him, and then discovered that all of that pain was so that he could become Dracula's vessel in CoD. The thing is that, I care about these characters. They have personalities, a past, relationships, and I want them to succeed. I want them to be happy. Their suffering is a tool through which they show what they're made of.

Hell, it's not just the heroes: Isaac in CoD also has gone through hell. I don't want him to succeed because his happiness is tied to Hector's suffering, but at least I feel bad for what he had to endure, and I feel bad that he died even though it was partially due to his actions: he is both a cruel antagonist and a tragic victim whose tragedy is believable but not a full excuse. He's a compelling, fleshed out character, not to mention charismatic because he has one hell of a personality lol.

N!Hector has nothing. The story itself is just making this character suffer, in a humiliated, undignified way... but not to break him and reshape him into something different. It's just torture for the sake of torture. It's to laugh at him, because he's stupid and that's what he gets for being stupid. It's to find him pathetic when Lenore puts him on a leash: the point is not how disgusting she is, the point is that he's a cute puppy, who barely reacts to this humiliation so that you viewer are not distracted from the kink. It's to shake your head when he can barely have an edge in the interrogation with Lenore, even when he could give some more personal answers like "I followed Dracula because he accepted me and gave me a reason to live", because the point is to make him look dumb and easily malleable. It's to facepalm when Lenore tricks him into having sex so that he can be coaxed into pledging loyalty to her, because he can't even see the very blatant way she lies to him - and it's his fault for being so impossibly dumb.

What does he want? He mentions that he wants to be free, but in the same breath he says that he wouldn't be able to survive on his own, so it's not a goal he fully believes in. He still says that he wants to put humans in cages, to which Lenore says "oh it's what we want to do too", so... N!Hector's goal matches with Lenore's? Then where is the conflict? As I said in the past, Lenore didn't need to resort to rape by deception to tie him down: N!Hector already trusted Lenore and would have worked for her, at the very least, especially if she kept pretending to care about him and improving his life conditions gradually. Morally, he hasn't even begun the process of changing - and, of course, he never does. He is stagnating. He's not interesting.

(this isn't even negative character development. For N!Hector, it would have been, for example, convincing himself that everyone deserves to die, and him becoming more violent and bitter towards the people who hurt him. This could have been one of his developments in S4, even if tragic. We don't even get that. The "development" he has is that he let Lenore kill herself instead of forcing her to live like he did with his pets, which is. so fucked up i can't even put it into words.)

Hell, I even realized recently: the fucking ring would have made much more sense if N!Hector actually showed signs of rebellion, because the way she described it, the ring's only purpose is to prevent rebellion, not to force him to work! If the issue was that Striga was considering hiring mercenaries and that would have made N!Hector useless, the ring doesn't solve jackshit about it, because if he wanted to he could have starved himself to death and the ring wouldn't have hurt him! The ring only solves the issue of N!Hector potentially using his Night Creatures to harm or kill the sisters! Which it's a moot point because he has been shown to be nothing but docile after Lenore beat him into submission precisely to make him docile, and he clearly was on his way to be convinced to peacefully work for the council! If he got convinced that he would be living the best life as Styria's Forgemaster, taken care of by Lenore who at least treated him well, not lied to like Dracula did, and doing what he wanted to do which is forging and working to enslave mankind (remember, he shows no growth in this), he wouldn't have hurt anyone! Lenore saw with her eyes how pliant he is, and in S4 she even calls his ill-thought attempt to threaten her "half-hearted at best"! She got the idea to butter N!Hector up to make him trust her and work with them willingly, and not through torture, and it was going all too smoothly - and then she broke that trust by deceiving him and playing with his feelings in a much worse way than Carmilla did, and realistically, N!Hector shouldn't have wanted nothing more to do with her in S4, let alone work for her! But if he was shown having at least signs of aggression, defiancy or doubts, vulnerable to Lenore's "kind" acts but still wary enough of his situation taking too long to be convinced, then the ring would have been a good solution to "tame" him! Lenore raping N!Hector into slavery would have been more justified and not come off as a vile gratuitous OOC act if he had showed a personality!!

i'm calm.

Anyway. My point is, there is no conflict between these two characters, even though Lenore is clearly the real antagonist. The conflict of Styria's story in S3 is watching this snake deliberately play with N!Hector's feelings for no reason other than sadism and a power trip. And the conclusion we're meant to reach is "wow he sure is a dumbass, he deserved to be enslaved".

Unlike in CoD, N!Hector's life is so miserable, and his conditions so suffocating, that I wouldn't have felt anything if N!Isaac actually killed him. Who cares? No one cares about this character. Least of all the writer. I don't care if he succeeds or not, because he has nothing to succeed in; and I don't care if he suffers, because he doesn't even care, and has nothing to live for. It's literary bullying.

So this brings me to Lenore. If Lenore's whole thing in S3 is that she's such an amazing manipulative bitch who gets her way through deceit and subtle abuse, but she's effectively deceiving a bag of meat... I'm not impressed.

Oh, I hate her, because her actions are disgusting and poorly match what she's supposed to be, which is the selfishly kind diplomat who finds power in taking care of lesser creatures. She doesn't come off as her own archetype, because she is too smug, too happy to force herself on N!Hector in a sexual way (the collar, the ring), and her first scene shows she's just like Carmilla in that she easily resorts to excessive violence to prove she's not weak. So, while this is yet another instance of bad writing, in-universe she also comes off a a raging hypocrite (further proved in S4 where the writing and voice acting imply that Lenore sunned herself because she didn't like the idea of being in the same gilded cage she had put N!Hector in, which makes her look cowardly and pathetic). But she's not fun to hate in the same way Isaac is when he forces Hector to watch Rosaly's execution in PtR. She's bullying a shell of a person. She is weaving uncomfortable lies to a manchild who is not even trying to put up a mental protest to her manipulations. Why should I care? She is getting her way so easily, not because she's that good (she's really no better than Carmilla, who in-universe failed) but because N!Hector doesn't have enough personality to challenge her; and if she succeeds, N!Hector would either be okay with it, or if he's not... well, he'd deserve it for being stupid, according to the show's logic.

Lenore in S3 exists solely to further prove the general message of that season: trust is for fools, and fools deserve to be punished. She is a plot device moved around like a puppet to serve that general message, and on top of that her creepy actions are painted as titillating... well, as long as you either want to be dominated by a pretty woman (which explains the great amount of male fans simping for her) or you want to dominate a pretty failure of a man. Which I don't. Because I have no reason to care about N!Hector, let alone find his sexual humiliation hot.

Do you see the problem here? Lenore cannot shine of her own because N!Hector is not written well; but since she only exists to bully him, she doesn't come off well either, despite her concept being brilliant and actually interesting and deserving of being fleshed out more organically without turning her into four characters clumsily stitched together.

And of course, as you have noticed, I have only talked about S3 so far. What's the point of even talking about S4? It completely destroyed everything S3 set up. Lenore has lost everything that made her allegedly cool in that season, being reduced to a whiny brat who feels so alone and unwanted and cries about it to the man she raped by deception. N!Hector mildly sasses her back and listens to her woes, but doesn't seem to care at all about what Lenore did to him, both positive (being put in a giant gilded cage where he can't be killed and being given some sort of authority) and negative (the mocking, deception and rape). They have chemistry now, a positive chemistry made of mutual respect, but it comes out of nowhere and it clashes with their past.

I don't care that now Lenore feels sorry about her life, because she crossed the moral event horizon and now she doesn't get to regress into being a poor little girl who only wanted to do diplomacy 🥺. I don't care that N!Hector freed himself and tricked everyone in the castle, because his "badass" actions were all for the purpose of bringing Dracula back, which is proof that all the suffering he went through was for nothing - he didn't learn that putting humans in a cage was bad, and now he seems to want back the madman who planned to kill everyone out of personal atonement (plus, he only freed himself from working for Carmilla, Striga and Morana: he still chooses to live with Lenore, so effectively still tying himself to the woman who forcibly tied him to her). He's even worse now, he has regressed for no sensible reason: I still don't want him to succeed. And I don't care that N!Hector has found the strength to let Lenore go, a contrast with how he used to resurrect animals to have loyal companions, because I don't even know why he'd grow to love her. The story wants me to believe his love for Lenore is pure and organic, and not the result of breaking from horrible abuse and accepting the scraps of something barely resembling kindness. As if S3 never happened.

And if S3 never happened... why should I care about these characters and that story?

(funnily enough, I could make a similar post about N!Alucard in S3 and S4. I also don't care about his grief, because he was a cunt to N!Trevor and his own similar trauma. I don't care about the Japanese not-twins raping him, because it's so out of nowhere that it only feels like gratuituous shock factor. I don't care about N!Alucard apparently falling down the same path as Dracula, because he gets better after one episode. His story in S3 - well, what little can be considered a story - is also "trust is for fools, and fools gets punished", although at least N!Alucard isn't painted as a dumbass for trusting these two plot devices, and at least he kills them before he can forgive them. but basically my point is that this writing is bad.)