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#its the tragedy that freaks me out like something about suicide haunts me so much and i grieve so hard for those that decide they dont want
adoranymph · 4 years
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I’m not a fan of horror.
I’ve acquired a taste for things that contain horror elements, like Stranger Things, which contains moments of comedic heart and compelling character drama in addition to the horror, more so than say something with similarly disturbing horror moments like Alien or Aliens, and Shawn of the Dead, which is a romantic comedy spin on the traditional zombie apocalypse movie. And I’m more than certainly looking forward to checking out Lovecraft Country when it comes out. I’ve even gotten over my squeamishness concerning the face-melting in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the villain aging rapidly and ghoulishly into dust and then exploding in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. 
Actually, one of my favorite movies to watch with my father was the original Predator, probably because it was as much a movie about an alien trophy hunter hunting humans for sport as it was a macho action movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. And unlike Alien and Aliens, didn’t involve that oh-so-disturbing means of procreation we all have come to know and love about xenomorphs. Which means that no, much as I’m chill with the Predator, I still have little desire to watch its crossover with the xenomorph menace, Alien vs. Predator, all the way through. Admittedly, I have, in the past, watched clipped reviews of the Alien movies, including AVP and even AVP Requiem, which I think if I had watched in full would have made me sick. Because my curiosity just gets the better of me from time-to-time, and I know that about myself only too well.
And as much I love Michael Biehn in a James Cameron movie, and was touched by the concept of the found-family storyline in Aliens, I just don’t think I can stomach those chestbursters (ha ha).
I can’t even watch John Hurt reprise his role as “Kane” in a parody of his iconic horror scene in Spaceballs, and, like Shaun of the Dead, that’s a comedy! Even more so than Shaun of the Dead! Well, I do watch the part after when the CB sings, “Hello My Baby,” but by that point the parody of the worst part of that scene is over and done with, and there’s nothing but the joy of a dancing baby alien with Michigan J. Frog’s singing voice coming out of it while John Hurt “Kane” laments, “Oh no! Not again!”
And however compelling The Exorcist is in terms of character…yeah no, not touching that.
It is weird though given how far I’ve come in tolerating horror gore, but that’s just not a line I’m willing to cross yet as of writing this.
But back on track.
Sprinkling this in to counter-balance the PTSD I get from the mere thought of xenomorphs.
A few weeks ago, I got a taste for a different kind of horror, and honestly the kind I’ll take over gore in a heartbeat, even if both equally can get stuck in my head to an ugly degree. And that was rewatching M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense. Probably because I got it in my head to watch Ari Aster’s Midsommar, and I still needed something else to fill out my creep-factor quota. I thought about backpedaling and watching his film before that, Hereditary, but I already know that that one ends far more bleakly (compared to Midsommar, depending on how you look at it, mind), and I needed something that was creepy and tragic, but had an ending that positively affirmed itself.
Then I remembered that The Sixth Sense sort of did that, and it had been a while since I had seen it, but I remembered it from as far back as childhood, me with my parents, adamantly not understanding how they could be fans of things like Alien and Aliens. More than that, I remember actually being able to enjoy Sixth Sense somewhat, even then. Appreciate it for its horror elements and moments of tragedy, rather than shrink away from it.
So I that’s what I did. And for all that Shyamalan has done (botching the first attempt at a live-action adaptation of Avatar: the Last Airbender chief among them), this one still gets me in the feels. Helps, I suppose, that I faced certain deaths and griefs at a far tenderer age than I was “meant to”, but even so, what Shyamalan does best, he does best here. And probably in Unbreakable and even Split too, but I haven’t seen those, and apparently after all that, Glass got panned so…yeah.
Still, if nothing else, it was fun to remember that Toni Collette was in this, and now that I’ve grown and seen her in things like Little Miss Sunshine, and clips of–that’s right, Hereditary–not be surprised, but no less pleased for her performance. Not only is she in a Shyamalan film that works its earmarks to its advantage, but she sells her character as a single mom at the end of her rope, with both a son, Cole, going through a difficult time that they can’t talk about, considering the kid knows what she’d think if he told her he sees dead people, and haunted by the death of her mother with whom she clearly had a difficult relationship. Not saying that this still couldn’t have worked, but given what The Happening did to Mark Wahlberg, color me double-rainbow impressed.
Bruce Willis too. Plus he had the advantage of working with Shyamalan on Unbreakable. So he probably knew how to play things in either situation. That and it’s honestly not a badly written character, all things considered, any more than Toni Collette’s character was. Or, even if it was, again, he sold it with his performance. He has a handle on subtle gravitas as much as he does going toe-to-toe with Alan Rickman (rest in peace) playing a terrorist.
Picked this one for the nostalgic fondness of, “Rent it on video. DVD’s also an option!”
Then you have Haley Joel Osment as Cole. And again, given he’s supposed to be this awkward kid with the added burden that he can see ghosts when no one else can and they scare him and even if he tells someone no one will believe him, any stiffness that comes with the Shyamalan style makes sense here. Death makes everything…stiff. Moreover, he sells it too. I get a lump in my throat just thinking of that moment when, after he’s at least told Bruce Willis’s character, as his therapist, about his secret, he tearfully demands, “How can you help me if you don’t believe me?”
Then there’s the revelation itself of the probably reason the ghosts come to him in the first place. Even if they’re not appearing to him with any conscious desire, some subconsciousness of their incorporeality compels them.
They need help.
In death, they’re lost, but maybe, as Cole’s still alive, there are loose ends he can tie off that they can’t. Not that he should, or even can–like I’m not sure what good he can do for that deceased housewife who clearly committed suicide to escape her abusive husband–but when he’s visited by the girl who’s mother poisoned her to death in a little fit of Munchausen-By-Proxy Syndrome, and he goes to her wake, finds the tapes that prove her mother’s guilt, gives them to her father, and the father confronts the mother about it, that got me more even than it did when I was younger and still trying to wrap my head around the concept of mothers poisoning their daughters.
That’s when things start to turn around for Cole. It’s still scary, but he takes that leap of faith, if you will, and one of the last times you see him with a dead person he’s conversing with them rather normally. Going over lines with them where he gets to play Arthur in a reenactment of the legend of the sword being pulling from the stone. You don’t even realize they’re another ghost until his teacher asks him who he was talking to and the ghost turns her head and you see the burn on the other side that obviously came from the fire that killed her. There’s just something so pure and honest in that, the idea of not only facing your fears, but doing so for the sake of lost souls who otherwise have no other hope because they’re dead.
After that is the one-two punch feels conclusion.
One being Cole not only confessing to his mother at last that he sees dead people, and her clearly starting to freak out about it, until he tells her that, “Grandma says, ‘hi’.” And communicates to her something that her mother never got to tell her herself. Of course, after thoughts of, “Oh dear lord, my son is insane,”, when the proof that Cole has indeed been talking to her mother’s spirit, that goes out the window in favor of,
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“Do I make her proud?”
and she just cries and she and her son hug it out. And again, Toni Collette sells it.
Then you have the revelation of Bruce Willis’s character: he was dead the whole time! His wife wasn’t just distancing herself from him and then maybe cheating on him, he was dead and she was a widow who was simply trying to find love again. A moment of horror, and then tragedy, and then bittersweet letting-go all in the last few frames of the film. There’s the two in the one-two punch.
Not to mention my first experience of a “Shyamalan twist”. One that was set up well. Scenes constructed to lead you into thinking that of course he’s alive, details you glaze over, and then you realize, “Oh sh**.”
Which was probably part of the problem with some of his later works, where the twist became synonymous with his style, so sometimes it felt like they were put in there in future movies of his without any real rhyme or reason other than that the public were expecting them and thus somehow obligatory to the script.
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Just as I haven’t seen Unbreakable, or Split, and certainly not Glass, I haven’t seen The Visit, either, though from what I understand, it almost sounds like Shyamalan went back to the same headspace he had here in The Sixth Sense, using the awkwardness that seems to come out in his work to an advantage in the found footage format. And the twist was apparently actually hilarious. Which is nice. Good for him.
Not everything someone makes is going to be a hit, even if they’re getting paid for it. But when things are a hit, sometimes, they hit so well that it can make up for all the misses. Or almost make up for them.
Honestly, Sixth Sense is, ultimately, the only Shyamalan film I’ve seen in full. But I enjoyed it no less this time, in fact, enjoyed it more now that I have a better understanding of death and grief and loss.
Guess that’s kind of a weird thing to say, but it’s that same kind of “enjoy” that comes from feeling like someone understands something about something you understand, and maybe even feel a little bit less alone for it. Not only did I experience a lot of grief as a preteen, but before that, I was the weird one that most everyone else at school generally avoided if not viciously teased, with the exception of a few fair-weather friends. All these elements and story beats used to creepy effect in Sixth Sense, along with that sense that some horror doesn’t so much horrify me as actually make my own life seem brighter rather than darker, made for a viewing experience that I place value in as I write this. (Especially given right now we are all apparently living a Stephen King novel right now.)
  So even if I still can’t handle body horror to the degree of stuff like Alien or Aliens, or David Cronenberg’s The Fly (much as I would love to see Jeff Goldblum in all his 80s hair awkward nerd glory as he romances Geena Davis), there is some horror I can handle. And figuring out why is yet one more thing that I place value in.
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Sixth Sense Post I'm not a fan of horror. I've acquired a taste for things that contain horror elements…
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cinemamablog · 4 years
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Lana Del Rey Goes to the Movies
I use roughly 1/16th of my iPhone’s storage space to hold my collection of Lana Del Rey’s music, including her (misspelled) self-titled album Lana Del Ray AKA Lizzy Grant and over a hundred of her leaked, unreleased tracks. (If you have an MP3 of “Yosemite” or “Life is Beautiful”... Hit me up, please.) My husband teases me because I have a LanaBoards account so I can read - and occasionally participate in - the pre-release gossip months, sometimes years, before the next Lana album drops.
Just like I make no secret of my Lana Del Rey obsession, Ms. Lizzy Grant pulls no punches when it comes to her idolatry of the silver screen and Hollywood lore. With songs aptly titled “Hollywood,” “Hollywood’s Dead,” and “Super Movie,” she wears her movie loving heart on her sleeve. Lana makes references to movies, iconic (usually dead) actors, and David Lynch throughout her discography. She has also contributed to countless recent movies, providing sultry vocals while matching the vibe of the films, like on the soundtracks for The Great Gatsby, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and Big Eyes. In fact, Mary Ramos, Quentin Tarantino’s music supervisor, revealed last summer that Lana submitted music for Tarantino’s latest film, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. She also reportedly recorded a song for the James Bond franchise at one point. A casual fan of motion pictures, Lana is not. To which I say: girl, same.
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Lana frequently references to Marilyn Monroe in her music, always in a very blatant (some might say distasteful) manner. “If I call you on the telephone, I might overdose, ‘cause I’m strong but I’m lonely, like Marilyn Monroe,” she mews in an otherwise sweet love song named after the actress. She also references suicide and Monroe in her single “Body Electric”: “Elvis is my daddy, Marilyn’s my mother,” she sings in the first verse. By the second verse, she sings “Diamonds are my bestest friend [Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, anyone?]. Heaven is my baby, suicide’s her father, opulence is the end.” On a less morbid note, she also pays homage to Monroe in the intro of her National Anthem music video. In the black and white clip, Lana sings “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” a la Marilyn Monroe, except instead of JFK on the receiving end, she serenades rapper A$AP Rocky. 
The reason for Lana’s attraction to Marilyn’s mythos seems obvious to me. They both created their persona by studying the stars that came before them: Marilyn by emulating Jean Harlow, Lana by paying her respects to Marilyn, Sharon Tate, and other young movie stars known for the tragedies that marked their lives. The cycle continues into the 21st century.
Lana has a few other movies and film people that reappear throughout her song catalogue: David Lynch, Scarface, and Easy Rider. I find this appropriate, as all three present the viewer with stylized visions of how the American Dream can go wrong. Lynch explores the nightmarish underbelly of the suburban lifestyle, Scarface follows Al Pacino’s immigrant character up a violent ladder of success, and Easy Rider glorifies living on one’s own terms, a freedom for which the main characters pay dearly.
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Lana covered the titular song of David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet on her first studio EP, Paradise. At first, I thought that maybe she just likes the song, but then, on her second studio album, Ultraviolence, she gave an undeniable nod to Lynch that marked her for a fan. In the song “Sad Girl,” she sings: “He’s got the fire and he walks with it,” a blatant reference to the phrase “fire walk with me” from Lynch’s project Twin Peaks. Both Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks focus on the sexual, drug-fueled violence lurking just under the surface of an otherwise idyllic community, much like Lana’s storytelling through song.
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“Scarface, sacrifice, sold my soul to make it nice. It was worth it, paid the price, life is death when blow is life,” Lana sings on an unreleased track called, you guessed it, “Scarface.” The lyrics of the song follow the same themes as the movie, describing a life characterized by mob violence and stoned patriotism. Lana also references the De Palma remake in another unreleased song, “Never Let Me Go”: “Like they say in Scarface, kid, you can push your drugs and I can make it big.” I’m pretty sure they don’t say that in Scarface, but still, the sentiment remains the same: the road to the American Dream (and doom) can be paved with drugs, money, and luck.
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“Is the sun in your eyes, easy rider?” Lana asks in the unreleased “Angels Forever, Forever Angels.” She sings in the bridge, “Paradise is a hell-colored flame sky. Is it nice to feel free and wild?” throwing out a subtle, decades-old reference to the theme song of Dennis Hopper’s 1969 counterculture hit Easy Rider, “Born to be Wild.” On her third studio album, Honeymoon, Lana recycles the reference on the track “Freak”: “Sun reflecting in your eyes, like an easy rider.” Like Blue Velvet and Scarface, Easy Rider shows the American Dream onscreen as a drug-induced fantasy that can’t end well, but the ride is worth it.
Occasionally, Lana sings about the real dark side of Hollywood, where the bad decisions and late nights aren’t a fun game or even a choice anymore, but rather the price of artistic success, demanded of her by men with sinister intentions. In Lana Del Ray AKA Lizzy Grant’s “Put Me in a Movie,” Lana teases a powerful man in the movie industry: “Come on, I know you like little girls... Put me in a movie.” Some of Lana’s other lyrics came under fire in the media shortly after the accusations against Harvey Weinstein publicly surfaced. Lana sings the lyrics in question during the bridge for the already-controversial song “Cola”: “Harvey’s in the sky with diamonds and he’s making me crazy.” She’s since claimed in interviews that she won’t sing “Cola” anymore due to the backlash, but I think the song has made its point: Lana’s always known that men like Harvey have the money and power (“diamonds”) to drive desperate people crazy.
In her penultimate album, Lust for Life, Lana doesn’t let up on the Hollywood imagery. In the album’s teaser trailer, Lana lives inside of the Hollywood sign, stirring a witchy potion and pondering the fate of the world from above the LA lights. She climbs that same Hollywood sign with the Weeknd in the music video for the titular song, “Lust for Life.” While the album begins on this upbeat note, by the third song, “13 Beaches,” we return to a familiar sense of isolation and sadness. An audio clip from the cult classic movie Carnival of Souls plays over string instrumentation: “I don’t belong in the world. That’s what it is. Something separates me from other people. Everywhere I turn, there’s something blocking my escape.” (This monologue is only available in the deleted scenes of the recent Criterion Blu-ray release and in unrestored YouTube videos. Lana knows her independent horror movies.) This cinematic depression haunts the rest of the album, with lyrics like “Cherry”’s “My celluloid scenes are torn at the seams, and I fall to pieces” and the disturbing Charles Manson references in my all-time favorite LDR song, “Heroin”: “Manson’s in the air and all my friends have come ‘cause they still feel him here… Something ‘bout the sun has made these kids get scary. Oh, writing in blood on the walls and shit…” Even when Lana tries to shift her audience’s focus to her lust for life, she can’t help but revert to her old melancholic ways. But as she sings in the final bridge of “Heroin”: “I hope that I come back one day to tell you that I really changed.”
“You move to California, but it’s just a state of mind,” Lana sings on her latest album, Norman Fucking Rockwell, and the rest of the album echoes that sentiment. Her disenchantment with the City of Angels has been a running thread through her discography and yet she returns to it over and over, in songs like “Bartender” and “California.” On Honeymoon, she sang “I will never sing again. With just one wave, it goes away.” On Lust for Life, she sang “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t sick of it.” Now on NFR, she sings “I guess that I’m burnt out after all.” But after three albums of threatening to leave it all behind, I don’t think Lana Del Rey will ever really be done with Hollywood. In the words of the last song on NFR: Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like Lana to have… but she has it. 
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dahliadreamcraft · 5 years
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Lament of Innocence AU
So I’m working on a fanfic of Castlevania that is basically “Frankenstein is the villain instead of Dracula”. However this au is in turn based in an au of Lament of Innocence instead of canon Lament of Innocence.
This post was originally going to be a bunch of random facts about the Lament of Innocence AU, mostly focused on giving Sara more character and her own backstory, and rewriting things so that they make more sense with the cartoon.
It ended up turning into a plot outline of the prequel to Requiem of Resurrection ( the name of the actual Franken Leon fanfic when I get around to actually writing it).
Which I’m putting under a read more so that it doesn’t end up turning into a ridiculously long post on people’s dashboards.
Also @darkartist98 for the freaking AMAZING fanart you did of Franken Leon. That inspired me to start posting content again and actually start working on the AU like I was supposed to. This doesn’t feature Franken Leon quite yet, this is all backstory but I thought you might like to know it.
*TRIGGER WARNING: One of the characters commits suicide. While I am going to do my best to treat the subject with all the gravity and respect it deserves, this is still a sensitive subject matter that I feel should be warned for.
Lament of Innocence is a tragedy. This doesn’t have a good end.
*Mathias was a vampire for at least two thousand years before Lament of Innocence happened
*Mathias is the “king of the vampires” by virtue of being the oldest. Bernhard is the second oldest. A vampire by the name of Oriana (inspired by the Witcher series) was the third eldest.
*Leon was eighteen when he first became a knight and actually earned his baron title by defeating a basilisk.
*The town the basilisk was menacing was where he met Sara and her father Rinaldo (I combined Sara and Rinaldo’s backstories)
*Sara gives him the first prototype vampire killer which she made.
*Sara eventually also makes the real Vampire Killer along with its upgrade Morningstar.
*Sara and Rinaldo are originally from Italy but came to France following Bernhard.
*Sara is a polyglot, which is a fancy term for she learns languages uncannily quick. She was damn near fluent in French and barely had an accent when she meets Leon for the first time and she’d only been in France for a year. The accent completely disappears a few months later.
*Sara was a young girl when Bernhard kidnapped her sister Gabriella, starved her to the point of madness, and let her loose outside of Sara’s home. Sara’s brother managed to throw her inside their father’s workshop to protect her just before Gabriella killed him.
*Her brother’s screams still haunt Sara’s nightmares.
*Rinaldo made it back in time to kill Gabriella before she could force her way into the workshop to kill Sara.
*He still has nightmares about that night.
*It was not love at first sight for Leon and Sara. Despite Sara giving him the whip, neither of them thought they were going to see the other again after that day.
*After Leon (with Trefor’s help) killed the Basilisk thanks to the whip Sara gave him (because his sword broke during the fight) Leon is so high off of the win and the fact they didn’t die that he finds Sara again to thank her and in his excitement kisses her.
*He comes back down to earth and starts to apologize but Sara waves him off saying ‘there are far worse things than being kissed by a cute knight’.
*Despite this they still didn’t think much of it when he left to go report to his captain about the basilisk being dead.
*On his way back from the basilisk fight he comes across an exceptionally tall vampire about to rip some poor bastard’s throat out.
*He attacks Mathias with his new whip, which causes him to drop the man out of shock because the whip actually hurt him. Not much, but the fact it did anything at all was amazing.
*Mathias at first thinks Leon is just some upstart vampire hunter, and accuses him of believing in superstitions because of the cross he is wearing at the time.
*Leon’s response becomes ingrained in Mathias’s memory.
*Said response was ‘I wear a cross because I’m Catholic. You prick.”
*Leon keeps refusing to be impressed by any of Mathias’s grandeur showboating and that leads to a fight.
*Leon gets his ass kicked and the whip gets torn up.
*Mathias decides to let Leon live however, instead stealing the cross necklace he was wearing at the time.
*Leon ends up having to go back to Sara and Rinaldo to get another whip.
*And that is how Leon ended up becoming a vampire hunter.
*Over the next three years Mathias keeps coming back to pick fights with Leon, each time Sara’s whips getting better and better but still not quite good enough.
*Leon and Sara also end up getting closer and closer until Leon proposes to her.
*Mathias crashes their wedding to pick another fight with Leon.
*Sara gets her revenge for this about a month later when he appears in their kitchen and she hits him in the face with a frying pan.
*Leon is where the Belmont impulse to fight the supernatural “because it’s the right thing to do” comes from. Sara is where the Belmont impulse to fight the supernatural “BECAUSE FUCK YOU” comes from.
*Mathias never quite lives the frying pan down.
*Meanwhile Sara’s best friend Elizabetha meets a tall handsome stranger one night. This tall handsome stranger is totally unrelated (no it isn’t it’s Mathias).
*The event that finally leads Leon and Mathias to becoming friends is right after Sara creates the true Vampire Killer using a blood ritual that creates a bond between Leon and the whip.
*Leon and Mathias get into another fight, but this time Leon says something that strikes a chord with Mathias.
* “You’re old enough to have seen all of these great things, old enough to have witnessed history itself, but never did any actual witnessing? You’re bragging about all the things you missed. That’s nothing to be proud of, all it means is that you’ve spent the past however many thousand years just...existing! That’s not respectable, that’s just pathetic.”
*Mathias leaves in a huff but while he does Bernhard comes in and attacks Leon (who is exhausted from his fight with Mathias.)
*I won’t get too graphic here in the interest of avoiding triggering anyone but let me put it this way. Bernhard is the vampire equivalent of a serial killer torturing small animals before eventually moving on to people (other vampires). Leon is the small animal.
*Mathias comes back and after seeing Leon in horrible shape (he’s barely alive at this point) realizes he actually cares about Leon quite a bit and doesn’t want to see him dead.
*Mathias then proceeds to fight Bernhard and saves Leon’s life.
*And that is how they end up becoming friends.
*Over the next ten years a lot happens.
*Leon and Sara have two children. The eldest Sonia and the youngest Gabriel.
*Mathias and Trefor are named the godfathers.
*Mathias gives Leon and Sara a mirror that allows them to communicate and even venture through to the mirror on Castlevania’s end.
*Elizabetha and Mathias get closer as well, Elizabetha in fact is the reason Mathias learns so much about the medical field and the human body. She wanted real methods to actually treat people inside of “throwing tea leaves at the problem and hope it works.”
*Sara still makes whips and other alchemical weapons in hopes of defeating Bernhard one day, which leads to the creation of the Morningstar upgrade.
*However one day Elizabetha dies unexpectedly. It’s the first major bereavement Mathias has ever hand in over two thousand years. 
*It is then that it hits Mathias just how little time he has left with Leon and Sara.
*He wants them to become vampires themselves.
*They both refuse.
*Mathias, knowing that they would hate him if he forced them to become vampires, instead tries to manipulate the matter in his favor.
*He pretends to have gotten bored of Leon and Sara, and suggests to Bernhard that a good way to get Leon to come to him would be to take and turn Sara.
*This goes horrifically wrong.
*Bernhard does to Sara what he did to her sister, starving her and once she went mad with bloodlust, he lets her lose inside her and Leon’s village.
*She massacres the entire village of people she personally knew for the better part of a decade. Sonia and Gabriel barely make it in time to hide from her inside the basement with Trefor.
*When she comes back to her senses she’s drenched in the blood of all the people she knew from their village.
*Sara, unable to cope with the overwhelming guilt of having massacred her own village or the prospect of living with that knowledge for thousands of years, kills herself.
*Leon comes back just in time to see the results of what Sara had done and what she did to herself.
*Bereft and angry, Leon takes the Morningstar whip and hunts down Bernhard, and finally is the one to put an end to the vampire.
*Just before he disappears into dust however, he reveals the true mastermind behind Sara’s turning.
*Leon is completely crushed by the revelation.
*Mathias meanwhile is just discovering how horrifically wrong his plan went and goes to Bernhard’s castle with the intent of killing him in the slowest most painful way he could manage.
*Instead he finds Leon just outside the ruins of Bernhard’s castle, tears running down his face and hatred in his eyes.
*Leon attacks Mathias, beside himself with rage and grief and betrayal.
*This time Leon wins.
*But he ends up sparing Mathias. Not because of their friendship, but because it’s the cruelest thing he can think of doing to Mathias, forcing him to live with the consequences of his actions.
*He swears that the Belmont line will haunt Dracula’s every step from now on, that they will kill every vampire who dares try to harm humanity and never again will they put their trust in a vampire. 
*Mathias moves to Wallachia and Leon takes Sonia and Gabriel and goes there too. Trefor follows knowing that Leon needed a friend to help raise Sonia and Gabriel.
*Five years later however, Leon dies of a similar illness to Elizabetha.
*Sonia contacts Mathias via the mirror to inform him of Leon’s passing. She angrily declares however that she will continue what he started, and that she won’t let any other vampire hurt people the way Mathias had hurt her parents, had hurt her and her brother
*She then through tears informs him that this was goodbye. That if they ever met again, she would fight to kill him, or die trying.
*Sonia then uses the morning star whip to destroy the mirror.
*The pain and loss of losing all three of the people he had come to love and care for, the fact his godchildren now hate him and he now has to fight Leon’s family for the forseeable future, ends up physically aging Mathias in a way time hadn’t.
And this is how Lament of Innocence happens.
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