Lenore Castlevania - Tumblr Posts
Castlevania AMV || Lenore & Hector - Howl
Lenector fans, I've made a little something for y'all! Hope you like it!
Spoiler Castlevania Hector's Arc!
I don't know why people hate Lenore so much if she has many similarities to Hector from the second season.
Literal Isaac says: "Hector only wants pets" "He only understands the pets" Hector didn't like humans but he doesn’t wish for them all humans to be exterminated as Dracula and Isaac wanted, Hector is hoping Dracula has plans to cull them and keep a controlled, caged population. Ideally, humans would be treated mercifully in their caged conditions. She is a vampire, (it seems that for her kind it is normal to see humans as cattle). Still, she is the diplomat of the 4 sisters, the one who prefers to be incredibly tactile, pragmatic and patient when negotiating with others instead of using war, the torture or violence and for that reason she is underestimated.
she seem to be oddly empathetic with the animals as stated by Carmilla, who mentions that one day, when Lenore found a crippled spider missing a leg, she felt immense pity for it and ravingly tore the castle apart hoping to find the right object to create a splinter small enough to replace it. Hector has a love for the animals that's why he revives them using his abilities, even giving them names, and his inner warmth is often shown through the way he cares for them.
Hector is not a fool as everyone thinks, is someone who is learning from his mistakes, he did "know the game"; remember the first two episodes? Hector didn't trust Lenore at all and saw right through her initial attempts to win him over; he even mocks her for using a tired old trick of faking getting angry at the guard for how Hector was being treated, even tricked her into getting close enough to attack her. After she beat him up, and told him not to underestimate her. He realized she was stronger than him.
Follow the game was what he had to do to survive. To break free. He had sex with her because he also wanted to manipulate her (if you pay attention you can see that there is a dialogue of hector that is not heard before she begged him to say he belong to hers) At that point he already knew that she was attracted to him and the way to escape is not through violence or hurting her, the way to get out of there is to gain her trust; it really doesn't seem that she raped him, when it was he who made the whole approach after she kissed him, when he was the one with the dominant position, who took off his clothes and hers, it is obvious that he was giving her what she want, but it seemed than he was pretending that he wanted it too When shouting to the 4 winds that he was hers, I'm pretty sure he thought he was gaining her trust for the type of talks they had before and Hector's expresiones, only he underestimated her AGAIN!.
he did not break in front of the sisters (in fact he has a pretty angry and determined look, and then the scene came out where the perspective of the fireplace is, maybe he will burn them), he did not break when the ring did it's magic (At this point he already knew that Lenore cheated on he didn't look worried and didn't even ask “what did you do to me?”), He was aware that she was manipulating him like he was manipulating her, the problem is that he did not know the gravity of everything until later and he broke when realized that he was no going to be able to escape.
Nobody knows what her past is or how she lived before being a vampire, so it can't be said that he suffered more than her but anyway, in the end... Yes, She cheated and manipulated Hector so that Camille could fulfill her plan just as Hector manipulated Isaac and thus be able to deceive and betray Dracula and that Camille would fulfill her plan. Yes, she turned Hector into her pet but she does stay somewhat true to her word, though, as she doesn't return Hector to his cell, but allows him to live in the castle with her and her sisters. Like Hector that he has no connection or love for humans in fact he practically wants them to be glorified pets but he dislikes seeing them suffer.
He practically became what he wanted to convert to the rest of humanity. What is happening to him is his karma. And most likely all this served as an arc for the character to develop and have an arc of redemption. Now I am not saying that she is a saint and a good person. She is not there to be a heroine, she is there to be an antagonist. She is a vampire, she has a dark and sinister side is as strong, shrewd and calculating as her sisters, I still do not know all her intentions and I feel that at some point she can betray her sisters being manipulated by hector (I say this because she spends all her time saying and repeating. "I want to do something else, but if I do it, it would be to betray my sisters and I don't want to betray them"), just like Hector betrayed Dracula.
By this point Hector has already suffered a lot, they have also cheated, hurt and manipulating him and it would be justified if he wants revenge but I think if they both had met long before Dracula and Carmilla they could have had a more symbiotic relationship. Because Lenore has the same goals as Hector, so she wouldn't have had to lie to him like Dracula, so there would have been no need to manipulate him anymore and she is not violent for fun like Carmilla, (Lenore beat him up because he attacked her first and it was a way of punishing him for underestimating, but if he hadn't attacked her, she wouldn't have beat him up because she doesn't look happy and satisfied when she hits him as Carmilla did, Lenore looks angry and tired, as if she was detested of being seen as weak because of her personality) and he would have received the kind of rewards he was looking to get from Dracula what it was to be safe and live well.
The Lenore discourse
Really. I love my Castlevania. I love my Castlevania fandom. But gosh dolly, I hate the entire Lenore discourse.
On the one side we have people who claim that Lenore is a sweet little innocent angel who did nothing wrong and if she did she did not know better and everyone who says otherwise hates women or something.
On the other side we have people ready to forgive Dracula and the forgemasters for freaking genocide, but Lenore is evil and irredeemable and everybody who likes her is evil.
Meanwhile I am sitting here: "You are both wrong?"
Like, she abuses Hector. There is just no way around it. She abuses him. Not only physically, but also through gaslighting and powerplay. The sex scene? Yeah, that's assault. It is assault on multiple levels. For once because he is in no situation to give consent, but also because he most certain had not consented to be enslaved through sex.
But... Like, she is not more evil than most of the other characters?
The Castlevania series has a lot of fucked up characters, who are not exactly good people. People, who are traumatized by stuff that happened to them and who act out of trauma. And while Lenore (and Carmilla for that matter) are two characters whose trauma gets not explored. We could have long discussions on the why and how, but the basic thing is a fact: They are two traumatized characters whose decisions are informed by their trauma, while this trauma barely gets explored in the text.
What she does to Hector is bad. And there simply is no excusing it. No, the fact that season 4 just handwaves both this and the trauma Alucard has after the freaking rape does not make this more excusable.
But... Acting as if she is worse than Dracula, Isaac or Hector for the matter, is silly as well.
She is a grey character. Like almost all characters within this series (with the exception of Lisa and maybe Sypha - and to me Sypha still reads very blue-orange) are grey characters.
Hating on her like some do is just... silly, really. But idealizing her is the same.
She is complicated. Everyone in this series is complicated. Which I like.
But also... Wishing for a happy end for her and Hector after she freakingly assaulted him is just a slap in the fact of every RL assault victim. I am sorry. Wishing that she lived in the end? Sure. But not with freaking Hector, man. The guy deserves some time for himself.
season 3, episode 6 - the good dream
"can I see you tomorrow night?"
a sketch of Lenore
about lenore from castlevania
tw : rape, abuse, toxic relationships, suicide
don’t get me wrong. lenore is a great character. i almost wrote was, but in the end, yes, she still is.
but the way her relationship with hector evolved in season four is truly so f*cking messy. and this is, imo, the biggest problem with lenore.
i loved that she was this cute, seemingly soft vampire (even though it was too good to be true, yeah, i’m looking at you hector) but well, she is a vampire, part of an evil sisterhood with a super-evil vampire as its head. she had a mission, she did it in the most cruel way, that’s true, but she succeeded. i personnally despised people who use their power as she did with hector, who was abused, denied food and clothes, tortured (probably) and literally treated like a dog. it might be ~ sexy ~ in some situations (the bdsm vibes, not the abuse ofc) , it’s not supposed to be when you’re a prisoner.
that’s the key word here : hector was a prisoner. and lenore was his torturer. let’s not forget about this. PLEASE, LET’S NOT FORGET ABOUT THIS.
what happened at the end of season three is definitely super upsetting. it’s obviously very morally wrong as lenore tricked him, forced him to have s*x with her. yes, she forced him. i won’t listen any justification of what she did. it was morally SUPER wrong. it was r*pe. i only see two options here, from hector’s perspective : one) he wanted her because he developed feelings/some sort of comfort for/from lenore, or two) he didn’t and thought that having s*x with her would probably help him with his situation.
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