Arcueid Brunestud
Arcueid Brunestud is a female anime and manga character who features in Tsukihime.
Contents |
Biography
Arcueid Brunestud (Japanese: アルクェイド・ブリュンスタッド, Hepburn: Arukweido Buryunsutaddo) was a female vampire born of the race of the shinso True Ancestors where she was the daughter of Crimson Moon and came to have a sister named Altrouge Brunestud. As the White Princess of the Shinso, she gained the title of Brunestud on account of being capable of manifesting the Millennium Castle Brunestud thus making her akin to vampire royalty. Long ago the planet had no defense mechanism against humanity, nothing to keep them in check. Thus the Crimson Moon came down and offered to help the planet make a race of ultimate beings to rule over humanity. However the race was fundamentally flawed, they had a desire to drink blood that the original, the Crimson Moon had. The True Ancestors needed to use a large portion of their power to suppress this impulse, but as there was no cure, and with passage of time the impulse grew, more and more True Ancestors fell and began drinking blood indiscriminately, while others most likely went into eternal sleep. Thus the True Ancestors created Arcueid as a weapon, the executioner of the fallen True Ancestors and Dead Apostles, the most powerful of them all. She was able to perform this duty splendidly, but she was nothing more than a tool. She knew nothing except whatever details were necessary to go after her target, and went to sleep after every kill, with her accumulated memories erased.
As the executioner, she did not have any vampiric impulses, and the rest of the True Ancestors also believed she had none. A priest from the church seeking perfect immortality, Michael Roa Valdamjong, needed to become a Dead Apostle to continue his research as he had already reached the potential of his human body. He hid blood in a rose and offered it to Arcueid, who not knowing she was not supposed to drink blood, drank it and in the process fell, becoming berserk and wiping out most of the True Ancestors and turning Roa into one of the strongest Dead Apostles before she managed to regain her sanity long enough to chain herself to the throne and go to sleep. From then on she had to suppress her urge to drink blood like any other True Ancestors. The rest of the True Ancestors were wiped out either by Roa or the rest of the Dead Apostles who made a game of trying to assassinate their creators.
Arcueid finally managed to destroy Roa's original body, although it took an alliance with the Burial Agency to do it. Roa was not killed however, as he had managed to master re-incarnation, and constantly re-incarnated into host bodies he chose before his deaths. These host bodies were chosen for a mix of social standing (rich families with influence) and the physical/magical potential of the body. After destroying Roa's original body, Arcueid went to sleep and awoke only to kill Roa's re-incarnations constantly, but was never able to destroy him and get her power back as he would simply re-incarnate each time. At the time of Tsukihime, Roa had re-incarnated 17 times, with his last re-incarnation being SHIKI.
After leaving school early because of an anemia attack, Shiki Tohno spots Arcueid on the street and is consumed by an irresistible urge to kill her because of his Nanaya blood. The Nanaya were a family of killers that specialized in hunting down non-humans, and Arcueid as a vampire awoke his Nanaya blood. Skillfully trailing Arcueid back to her apartment, he rings the doorbell and in the instant the door opens, sneaks through the crack and slices her into 17 pieces in an instantaneous single strike with his knife and his Mystic Eyes Of Death Perception. The next day when heading to school, Shiki finds Arcueid waiting on a guard rail outside his school. Panicking, he runs, only to be chased into a dead alley and confronted by Arcueid. Their conversation is interrupted by one of Nrvnqsr's beasts, and Arcueid "convinces" Shiki to help her deal with the vampire in the town as she used up most of her power to re-form her body after Shiki killed her and will need time to regain the power she had lost. The two of them are partners against Nrvnqsr Chaos, with Shiki killing Nrvnqsr by striking his 'death point'. The next night, Arcueid sends Len to Shiki's room to give him a dream of a sexual encounter. The next day, they decide to again be partners to take out Roa who Arcueid has been targeting. Over the course of her route she and Shiki begin to understand one another. Shiki shows Arcueid the various things she's unaware of, such as movies, which are things Arcueid can't comprehend as important. At several points she attempts to bite Shiki, though she manages to hold herself back in time, though usually she runs until her impulses have stopped. Eventually she and Shiki have fallen in love with one another, despite her slightly unstable nature and vampire lineage. However, she attempts to take out Roa by herself and is apparently killed in the process. Enraged and in grief, Shiki proceeds to destroy the walkway he and Roa are on as a distraction and utterly destroys Roa's point, thus nullifying his very existence and preventing him from ever reincarnating.
Overview
Personality and attributes
In appearance, Aruceid Brunestud was a beautiful woman with short blonde hair down to her neck and bright red eyes. Typically, she was shown to wear a long sleeve white shirt, long purple skirt, and black boots. She was known by a number of titles that included the White Princess of the True Ancestors, Golden Princess and the Moon Princess. Her last name Brunestud (ブリュンスタッド?) was actually a title bestowed upon all True Ancestors who come close in power to Brunestud of the Crimson Moon. When overcome by her Vampiric Impulses, she came to be called Red Arcueid.
Arcueid is shown to be a whimsical individual who, although knowing the basics of the modern era, does not seem to know about social norms. Once, she shows up at Shiki's school and waves to him from the school rear courtyard, luckily for Shiki only Ciel spots her. Even more luckily, she doesn't do what she planned, which was jump up to his window and knock. Her behaviour is almost child-like, due to the lonely nature of her up bringing, although she is over 800 years old, she spent most of it asleep and knows nearly nothing about the world or how to interact with others. As she works together with Shiki to stop Roa, she gradually begins to enjoy life and starts to like Shiki as more than just a friend.
Similar to all vampires, she came to suffer from Vampiric Impulses (吸血衝動, Kyūketsu Shōdō?) that caused her to seek out to drink the blood of a human. She was said to be the only True Ancestor that could resist this urge as she did not want to become a monster that fed on humans in order to survive. Arcueid did everything in her power to resist drinking blood though it was said that after doing it to Roa that she would ultimately lose this struggle. Upon meeting Shiki, she came to use her will to try to not to drink Shiki's blood as he practically became the only human at night with her. Her problems controlling her vampiric impulses after being drastically weakened by Shiki's attack.
Arcueid seems to thoroughly enjoy when Shiki cooks breakfast for her. In Melty Blood, Shiki threatens to stop doing this for her if she doesn't meet him in the park that night. When Sion questions whether such a threat would ever have any sort of effect on a True Ancestor, Shiki recounts to her a time that he managed to get Arcueid to immediately apologize to Akiha when she and her were arguing by making the same threat. Later that night, Arcueid does, in fact, meet Shiki and Sion in the park. She apparently cannot stand garlic. In a scene in Kagetsu Tohya, Arcueid eats instant noodles cooked by Shiki that had garlic in them, and becomes sick.
Powers and abilities
As a True Ancestor, Aruceid came to possess a number of superhuman abilities far in excess to mortals. However, even among her own kind, she was noted as being the most powerful of their number as she had been created to hunt down the fallen True Ancestors. It was said that her abilities were akin to the First True Ancestor namely Crimson Moon making her far beyond the other True Ancestors. As a result, few could match the sheer strength, speed and endurance of Aruceid Brunestud.
Before Shiki killed her, she was using 70% of her power to suppress her vampiric impulses, but even then she was more than strong enough to destroy almost any Dead Apostle that got in her way; especially with her Marble Phantasm, which can literally change reality to create any naturally occurring effect and summon the Millennium Castle Brunestud, the ancestral home of the True Ancestors. The power of Marble Phantasm is such that even in her extreme weakened state, she was able to reduce Roa's latest host body to just the ankles.
She also has the normal vampire claws, and as a True Ancestor very few conceptual weapons can harm her. All vampires can ignore damage from most sources as their body will revert to the pre-damaged state rapidly, a conceptual weapon such as the Black Keys used by members of the Church nullifies this ability. At night she is almost invulnerable, and her power is at its peak during the full moon. During the night, all of her lines and points of death disappear, rendering her indestructible; however, they show up again when Shiki "kills" the very nature from which she draws her strength in one of the endings. She can not only regenerate most wounds rapidly, but even re-form her body completely after having her 'lines' cut by Shiki, even though it took the majority of her power to do so.
She was shown to possess Mystic Eyes that enabled limited control over others such as the ability to plant suggestions. The color of her eyes changes to gold when they were active thus revealing them to be Mystic Eyes of Enchantment.
Notes
- Aruceid Brunestud was created by TYPE-MOON / TSUKIHIME PROJECT where she featured in the Nasu universe.
- On IGN, A. E. Sparrow wrote in a review that Aruceid, "should be on anyone's top ten list of manga heroines, but there's not a stitch of fan service to be found on her…she dresses head to toe in every panel except for a pinup at the beginning of this third volume. Yet I guarantee you'll be captivated by her."
In other media
Television
Appearances
- Tsukihime:
External Link
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