Interesting characters, unusual treatment of a classic figure

Hello there, and whale-come ^^

I made this topic so that we may share about characters that we have read about, saw in a movie, TV show, video game or such. Characters that struck us as unique, or simply having a particularity that made them stuck in your mind. But, as the title specificates, I also want us to talk about classic characters, such as mythical figures, classical characters such as Dom Juan or Don Quixote, that are treated in a way one could consider unusual from their roots.

With that being said, I'll begin ^^ (Warning though, this may be a tad spoilery, although I mostly refer to the content of the first few episodes)

So, I've recently been through a large amount of the Castlevania anime serie that Netflix made, and sommfink that struck me was how they treated Dracula in it. To those who do not know the Castlevania franchise, Dracula is mostly portrayed as an incarnation of evil, so powerful that Death itself is a mere pawn of his.

However, in this serie, Dracula is portrayed as seemingly evil, yet it definitively seemd like he essentially minds his own business, away from humanity which he seems to despise. But he still let a woman willing to bring good to her own kind in, and to teach her. Furthermore, he is described as a man of science, sommfink that plays a good part in the plot by the way.

Why? Well, because this woman he taught, she ended up falling in love with him and so did he. Then, she went back to the human civilization as a doctor, but, unsurprisingly, the Church was not happy that someone would deal with science, which they considered a great insult towards God.

And so they burned her. And so, they triggered Dracula's wrath upon mankind.

My point here is that in this serie, Dracula is presented at the beginning in a more neutral way, and it is emphasized upon that, should he die, an enormous amount of knowledge will be lost. Out of the fact that it is nice to see a character presented as an antagonist doing sommfink else than plottin and plotting, it reinforced, in my opinion, his neutrality.

Not only that, but even though he wages war upon mankind, he is not some kind of roaring, slaughtering maniac. No, in fact, he is presented as tired of all that, and, even though he doesn't clearly state it out, one can feel that he wishes he never had to do that in the first place. Yet, the war has come too far.

And, as Alucard, his son, phrases it, this war is "History's longest suicide letter". Subconsciously, he seemingly hope for someone to kill him and stop this.

Long story short, what I enjoy in this depiction of Dracula is his greyness, so to say, as well as the emphasis there is on the fact that he is a scholar, as well as a scientist, a precursor.

And I do not think I have seen such a depiction before, which is why I wanted to talk about it ^^

That brings up a good point about characters being multi-dimensional. It also brings to light the idea of evil being made rather than born. No character should be evil for the sake of being evil. It's the stuff of children's tales and has no place in serious fiction.

As an example, one of the antagonists in my major project is "evil" insomuch as he ruthlessly pursues his goal. However, his goal isn't evil but rather to see the running of the kingdom handled better when it comes to emergencies. His mother dies in a plague and he blames the king because not enough was done to stop the spread of the disease. So he vows (at a young age) to change the kingdom. So rather than being born a bad guy he is made into one through circumstance. Which seems to be what happened to Dracula here. Just as the good guys should have a purpose, so should the bad guys.