"Trinity Blood": Vamping Vampires

[wayshway]

There's no use complaining that vampires today aren't what they used to be. The days when they were just rat-faced reprobrates or metaphors for the degenerate central European aristocracy are long gone. Nowadays, pretty much any character type can be a vampire. Even Marge Simpson has sported fangs.

You'd think this would be a good thing, since it means vampires can now get a little character exploration; and if that's your thing, there are plenty of places you can certainly find it. Too often, though, it seems like vampirism just becomes a crutch, an excuse to goose the action in a story. But boring and irritating people do not automatically become more fun to hang out with just because they've picked up a blood lust and the power to jump really, really high. I hope any real-life Draculas looking to widen their social circle by increasing their cohort class keep that in mind.

Gonzo's Trinity Blood in some ways and respects tries to take vampires seriously. It is set in a post-apocalyptic world where vampires have re-emerged and established an empire in eastern Europe, from which they face off in a Cold War against a Vatican-led assemblage of human states in the west. Plot-wise, episodes are tenuously linked by political intrigue as the vampire and human states grope toward a state of détente while terrorists try to manipulate them into fighting a war. Story-wise, it plays out with human and vampire characters getting to know and respect each other. In practice, though, it mostly emerges as 24 episodes of eye-rollingly lame emo dramatics punctuated by a few half-glitzy fights.

The main character in Trinity Blood is Father Abel Nightroad, a member of a special Vatican order with a loosely defined porfolio of police, espionage, and diplomatic powers. Father Abel affects the mien of a meek, cheerful, and rather clumsy priest; in fact, he is a Crusnik, a kind of super-vampire that feeds on the blood of vampires themselves, and with other members of the AX he investigates and fights terrorists and infiltrators, many of whom either are vampires or are armed with the now vaguely occult technology of the pre-apocalyptic world. His job sometimes brings him into conflict and sometimes into cooperation with officials from the empire of the Methuselah (as the vampires prefer to be called); in the last half of the series he acts as a special diplomatic courier on a mission to normalize relations with the empire. His closest aide and confidante becomes Sister Esther Blanchett, a nun he meets early on and goes to great lengths to save from embroiling herself in a potentially ruinous anti-vampire vendetta. That's because, for all his power to maim and terrify, Father Abel is laboring under some immense personal guilt that he is trying to expiate by protecting innocents without surrendering himself to mindless vengeance and destruction—and it's a standard he would like to see others embrace.

In concept, Father Abel is an intersection of several intriguing if not especially novel conceits: the monster chained by conscience; the warrior sworn to pacific ideals; the criminal reformed and turned against his erstwhile comrades. Unfortunately, by and large he only remains a set of conceits instead of becoming the complex character one might hope for. Largely that's because the makers of Trinity Blood have chosen to explain him instead of letting him develop in action: too often they shove him into a sticky situation where he has to tell someone why he is acting or not acting in a certain way. Typically, this takes the form of wordy after-action reports where he gets moody and irritable with guilt as one wide-eyed female naïf or another listens and gasps and coos sympathetically. It doesn't help that his human and Crusnik halves are kept almost as firmly segregated as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; it's hard to be a "complex" character when the aspects most in tension have barely a nodding acquaintance with each other.

Father Abel still remains an attractive character; this is more than can be said for most of the supporting cast. His t