Necratoid Wrote:I can only quote Marvin the Paranoid android here... 'What a depressingly stupid machine.' ... tool that he was.As someone who had a bit of input into that fight during the writing process, I can confirm that he was suicidal during that fight. Vlad here was summoned as Saver, which is generally portrayed as a messiah archetype. Given the corruption of the Grail, it summons a Dark Messiah, Vlad II, who was willing to become any monster that was needed to drive the Turks back from his lands and people.
I'm putting it up to Grail Mud depleting his wisdom score there... or him being basically conditionally suicidal like his Hellsing counter part.
Then again I'm thinking that Medusa was thinking the same way as I am... though she really missed the opportunity by not saying 'By thinking like a man' in response to how does a monster kill a monster.
In this sequence, he sees Medusa as the same: someone who became a monster to defend the things she cared about. However, unlike Vlad, Medusa thinks of this as being an inherently terrible part of herself that she should never touch (canonically, Rider!Medusa never uses her Monstrous Strength skill because it deliberately channels the Gorgon). Hence his deliberately baiting her, over and over again, to use everything that's a part of her in the fight. He views her as someone tied down by other people's opinions on what her actions meant (and certainly, Vlad would see that as a kindred spirit, given how his legend was distorted by Stoker's Dracula), and so he's fighting not to protect the Grail, but to give Medusa the cathartic epiphany that as long as she stays true to what she wants to protect, it doesn't matter if anyone calls her a "monster".
Essentially, despite being dipped in Grail corruption and half-mad, Vlad's still living up to the function of his Class... even if it requires being devoured and destroyed by Medusa to help her get the point.
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"Oh, silver blade, forged in the depths of the beyond. Heed my summons and purge those who stand in my way. Lay
waste."