Counting Down the 20 Coolest Characters in Anime - #8 Seras Victoria, Hellsing

"I did what you told me...In return you're going to help me...send these Nazis to hell!!"

How interesting it is that another Hellsing vampire finds it's way onto this list. After all, Alucard has already clocked in on this list and theres no other vampire in the series that should be able to top his level of awesomeness? That's where popular perception is wrong because Seras Victoria is without a doubt Hellsing's best character. While appearing adorable and innocent on the surface, deep down we know that Seras is capable of producing moments of epic badassery and she is an interesting outlier when it comes to discussing the series' main themes.

Glowing red eyes of doom? Check

It sounds like the beginning of a comic book superhero's story. Seras Victoria was just an average police girl who worked in a small town in England. Then one day a vampire rampaged the entire town turning everyone into ghouls, including her partners. Trapped against the vampire, Alucard came to Seras' aid. Unfortunately, such aid required shooting her through the chest in order to kill the vampire. Before Seras 'dies', Alucard drinks her blood, turning her into a vampire. From then on, Seras becomes Alucard's "vampire apprentice" if you will. However, it takes Seras a very long time to adjust to becoming a vampire as she's not really comfortable with many of the things that it entails (drinking blood, sleeping in a coffin, etc.). Watching her grow as a vampire apprentice though is either chilling or utterly badass as we see this sweet and innocent girl turn into a wild, sadistic killing machine. It's debatable how much she really controls this either. Seras really becomes a great character when she finally accepts her life as a vampire and drinks blood for the first time, turning her into a true vampire. From then on in the series Seras becomes easily the coolest and best developed character around. Like Alucard, she's able to wield guns with firing power beyond what any human could possibly control. This leads to her essentially wielding two tank cannons as if they were rifles and shooting down an airship with them. Seras has all of what makes Alucard a badass but is nowhere near as creepy or scary as he is, probably because she used to be a human before the series' events. It's even shown that she possesses even more power than Alucard does, a scary proposition for anyone who opposes the Hellsing Organization.

Before becoming a badass, Seras comes to terms with what she is

Seras is an interesting character when it comes to discussing some of the themes that the series brings up. For one, Alucard talks down to those that he consider too weak to cope with their humanity and turn themselves into monsters like vampires. However, he is the one that made Seras a vampire. Perhaps, Seras' wish to become a vampire was different in the respect that it was her only way of staying alive. It wasn't that she was afraid of her humanity, she was simply afraid that her time on Earth was going to be cut short and becoming a vampire would enable her to stay alive. During her time as a vampire, Seras is hesitant to drink blood because she's afraid that becoming a true vampire would cause her to lose what made her human in the first place. This is what I think Alucard saw in Seras, someone who could become a vampire but recognize the gift that they were given. Someone who still respects their humanity and wishes to preserve it, something that Alucard had probably forgotten long ago. When Seras does become a true vampire it appears that her humanity is lost but after she's done fighting she turns around to her fellow soldiers and gives them a smile. Seras is still in there and she hasn't lost what made her Seras in the first place. Being a vampire does not have to define what Seras is and the conceptions that people have of monsters maybe isn't always the correct one.

I always found Seras' to be Hellsing's most interesting character. There is no shortage of interesting character in the anime/manga but none of them struck me in the way that Seras does. In a show where the characters philosophize about the importance of one's humanity, Seras is the character that represents such a debate. Watching her transform from a scared girl to a powerful vampire is the show's most compelling character development and the fact that she retains her bubbly personality afterwards is an added bonus.