Some Perspective on Rip van Winkle
This journal entry about Livejournal roleplaying does actually have a real life point to it. The brief backstory is that I'm a second-semester college senior in English Lit, and about to graduate in less than three months. For whatever reason, my major at this school doesn't require me to do a final wrap-up project, and I wanted something incredible to demonstrate the passage of four years' worth of academic study and research.
I immediately latched on a final paper for my Graphic Narrative class, in which we get to choose our paper topic, just so long as it has to do with the graphic novel or comic book. And what I hope will eventually grow into a full-blown report of epic proportions is to discuss how the world, sixty, sixty-five years later, views one of the most mind-blowing, terrible groups of people this side of the 20th century; the Nazis. And I'm going to eventually talk about Maus and Hellboy and Captain America and a few other comics where fictional Nazis crop up, but the work I was chiefly interested in talking about was the manga, Hellsing.
Hellsing is by no means a perfect comic. It's gruesome and hard to read at times, the story structure reads somewhat like a video game action sequence, the translations can be off at places, and there's a whole truckload of fetish fuel, practically reeking of exploitation.
That will probably all find its way into my final draft of that paper. What I'm actually writing about here is the stuff that most likely won't make it into the paper; my interpretation of one of Hellsing's small-bit villains, Rip van Winkle, who is arguably my main character over at thewake_rp. Fitting that I should talk about what initially drew me to her as a character and why I've continued to play her so long, because tonight is the eve of her one-year anniversary over at that comm.
Rip's part in the manga and the OVA is tiny. Her screen appearance clocks in at maybe seventeen minutes total of a 45 minute episode, and one of currently seven equally long episodes. About as much as Hannibal Lector got in Silence of the Lambs. Her part in the manga is about as long in comparison; her appearance spans about six chapters of a 90-chapter canon; not even a full volume. Yet for the brief amount of time she's the focus of the story, she captures viewer attention in very unusual ways.
The story of the Hellsing manga takes place in 1999, when descendent of Bram Stoker's Abraham Hellsing is a young woman called Integra Hellsing, who controls the most powerful vampire in existence: Dracula, or Alucard as he's mainly called. The two of them, along with newly created vampire Seras Victoria and long-time butler and Angel of Death Walter, protect Great Britain and outlying territories from the threat of the supernatural, battling rogue vampires and the like.
Hellsing's chief antagonist (bypassing the inclusion of Iscariot for the moment) is an organization called Millennium; a group created in the earlier days of World War II by Hitler in order to find ways to manipulate the supernatural to the advantage of the Third Reich. After the end of the war and the defeat of Nazi Germany, the group relocated to Brazil and continued to make breakthroughs in supernatural warfare, until its unveiling in 1999 when it begins to send out its troops to do battle with Hellsing and bring England to its knees via the use of artificially created vampires.
There are six named, core members and officers of Millennium: the Major (the head of the operation); the Doktor (the man chiefly responsible for the creation of the vampires); the Captain (a mute werewolf, and arguably the most capable fighter); Zorin Blitz (a 'witch' with incredible powers of hypnosis and the ability to cause authentic hallucinations); Schrodinger (a 'catboy' who serves primarily as a messenger throughout the length of the story); and Rip van Winkle. I am excluding mention of the Valentine Brothers and the Dandy Man because they are not German, do not appear to be Nazis, and are indirectly assumed to not have been with the organization as early as 1944.
Several important, unusual things differentiate Rip from the rest of this group. One is that she is one of two women in a battalion of 1,000 men, and is decidedly much more feminine than the rather heavyset bodybuilder-like appearance of Zorin Blitz. Next is that she is the highest-ranking and only named officer of the artificially created vampires; none of the other five core members of Millennium are bloodsuckers. Last, and most interesting to me is that in a time period widely known for its discouraging of the past and its push towards future and modernity, Rip is increasingly the representative of "old" Germany, rather than the new Nazi mentality she is supposedly a part of. Hopefully I'll get a chance to talk about all of these and why they should be considered significant to her character.
Plot-wise, Rip is incredibly important. A long-running joke of mine is that her entire canon history is showing up on a ship, singing, and dying; very operatic in its simplicity. Looking at the canon as a whole, however, indicates that her existence has a more subtle significance. Prior to her appearance, Hellsing dealt briefly with the Iscariot, rogue vampires, the Valentine brothers, and the Dandy Man; none of them have any (apparently) connection to Germany or to Nazis, and no confirmation of Millennium is ever given.
Rip appears on a British battle cruiser, murders the crew and paints a bloody swastika on the deck of the ship to taunt and invite; she symbolically become the herald of destruction and future terrible things to come. Her appearance signifies that Millennium still exists and is a very real threat. She successfully lures Alucard onto the ship, where he kills her squad and then murders her in turn.
But unlike when we've seen Alucard kill before, Rip's death is the one point where we begin to actually feel sympathy for his victim. Rip, while somewhat tall herself, is a head shorter and much thinner in compared to the broad-shouldered Alucard, who physically towers over her and extensively uses his hands to grip and restrain the much weaker vampire. She is the only female personally killed by Alucard, in either manga or OVA. Her death is slow and drawn out, and practically drenched in rape symbolism. More than that, her death becomes a turning point in the series; after she dies, Hellsing battles exclusively in reaction to Millennium and the war over Great Britain begins.
All of these are just little points that the audience may or may not be aware of as they continue to watch or read Hellsing: however, most people I've talked to who've seen the series mention Rip's death as the point in the canon where they grew actually uncomfortable, for some or all of the reasons listed above.
So we've established that plot-wise, Rip is unique to Hellsing canon. That alone causes her to be a character of interest, but it's also extremely interesting to look at how she compares to her theoretic mirror image, Seras Victoria. The two of them are the only named female vampires in the whole series; Seras representing the "good" vampire and Rip of course being the bad sort. For their size, they both wield impressively huge artillery, and both possess extraordinarily good sniping skills. They are also both intimately connected with the series' secondary protagonist Alucard; Seras is Alucard's fledgling and protege, whereas Rip sees Alucard as her mortal enemy and eventual doom. Considering that Seras is Hellsing's protagonist, it's left to wonder what that makes her image and story double, Rip van Winkle.
Very little canonically is known about Rip's background, which is a shame, given the longevity of her life and the period in which she lived. She was old enough and remarkable enough to be a woman soldier in 1944 in Nazi-occupied Poland and likely faced one or more engagements with the Russians on the Eastern front. When the base was invaded, she was moved by the Catholic church, likely stationed and hidden in the Vatican until such time when she could flee to Brazil and live there for over fifty years. Barely any of this is alluded to in Hellsing canon, and then only as a general Millennium catch-all, rather than specifics.
The name itself hints at something important that I've tried to bring out in the way I play her. The story of the original Rip van Winkle is about a man who falls asleep for twenty years, only to reawaken in a world that's significantly differed from what he'd known. All of his friends are old or dead, his family has grown up and the world has changed without him. He is a stranger in his own country; and the legend of Rip van WInkle is very much how Millennium must have reacted to the new world they reemerged in.
For spending fifty-five years in Brazil - longer, doubtless, than they had even spent in Germany - Millennium is almost fundamentally unchanged in its structure and beliefs, leading to the assumption that the group must have been deep in seclusion for an extremely long time. And yet when they come into the world again, it is to a Germany that has undergone deNazification decades ago, and is now part of the Western world of capitalism and democracy, more in common with France and England, its mortal enemies in World War II. It is a terrifying, uprooting experience of almost incomparable proportion; the thousand-strong group of men are from a different time and place altogether, and this alienation is represented in the supernatural, or the distinction of different species. The vampire.
But what is so special about vampires? Why is Rip's vampirism so important within the inclusion of werewolves and witches and half-human cyborgs and the like?
Basically, the vampire is the 'blank slate' of the monster world. First of all, the vampire tends to appear most frequently in the fiction of whatever nation is growing in power; in the 19th century when Great Britain was in its Victorian era, there was Bram Stoker's Dracula. In post-World War II the United States had the Anne Rice books, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and yes, Twilight gets a mention too. And now Hellsing is the product of the Japanese, a nation that gained a significant amount of world power in the last sixty years or so.
So the vampire becomes a reflection of a country's inner doubts and turmoil. They look and act human, but they're parasites, giant mosquitos with vertebrae. They're the doppelgangers, more monster than person, and represent a mirror image of everything we consider to be a threat; disease, AIDS and homosexuality, death, and in this case, Nazis. Turning the Nazis - one of the most demonic group of sadistic people in human history - into vampires distances them; makes them alien, not of our species, something supernatural that we can say we don't even share a gene pool with. By literally demonizing the Nazis, we're chasing them away and banishing them from the human race.
There was more to this, which I'll eventually talk about when I have more time, but it's a good start to my explanation of how I characterize someone with very little canon history, one year after I first apped her at the Wake. There's a lot more to Hellsing than just the given surface, and its underlying history and folklore is and will continue to be a point of extreme interest.