The Alucard Spear is meant to be used alongside the Vampire Killer, right? So why does Wind give it to Jonathan to use, thus forcing him to settle for one or the other? Sure, there's the obvious answer: the Lecardes are unavailable. But you'd think he'd suggest passing it on to one of them after Charlotte saves them.
And on that note, since he has no problem wielding it and it isn't going to kill him over time, why not put away the whip, use that spear, and save himself some trouble later? (In canon, not gameplay.)
He's already been using the Vampire Killer for a while. It's probably too late for switching weapons to save him.
Doesn't the Vampire Killer need to be activated in order for life to be drained?
By the time Jonathan can even acquire the Alucard Spear, the possibility that he might have already proven himself to the Whip's Memory, and thus unlocking the Vampire Killer's true power, exists. Yes, gameplay-wise, the Whip's Memory is an Optional Boss , but it is this troper's belief, lore-wise, that Jonathan proved himself to the whip at some point during the clearing of the game's second half of portraits.
I've been playing some Portrait of Ruin lately and was playing through the boss rush with Richter and Maria, and does it strike anyone else as profoundly messed up that they sent a 12 year old girl armed only with birds and cats to fight against the forces of Dracula (which includes Werewolves, Frankensteins monsters, dragons, giants, undead dinosaurs, and a giant balls of human corpses). Am I the only one who imagines Maria may have needed some therapy after all that crap (or even a stay at an asylum, if I may be so bold).
Well, I'm not sure if PoR's Boss Rush has any sort of storyline to legitimize her being there, but in Rondo of Blood/Dracula X Chronicles, she wasn't sent; when you rescue her as Richter, she basically tells you "I'm going to help you save Annette, and if you disagree, expect a seiryu up your ass! :D". So when it comes down to it, any therapy she ends up needing is kind of her fault in the first place.
Exactly where did the whole "the Vampire Killer will suck my life away" thing in Portrait of Ruin come from? I guess that I could see that maybe nobody who wasn't as superhuman as a Belmont could do well with its unlocked powers, but it still seems like little more than a bit of pointless angst for Jonathan (not that he wasn't already pretty good at that already). Why is such a holy weapon so dangerous?
Good Is Not Nice and/or Light Is Not Good. Might also have to do with the soul powering Vampire Killer not being able to connect as well with people who aren't direct descendants or something.
Maybe Miss Trantoul gets a bit upset when the in-laws start telling her what to do?
Hmm, a WMG just came to mind thinking about this. Namely that over the years, the whip was warded and upgraded from "hurting evil" to causing injuries or not working in the hands of any non-Belmont. At the time, they weren't expecting a Belmont to become corrupted, and thought that it was a safe bet.
Another WMG idea could be that Shaft somehow cursed the whip while controlling Richter in Symphony of the Night. After all, with the whip so close, why not add curses for future generations to succumb to? And the whole "not until 1999" was waiting for the curse to wear off, but it didn't quite dispel when Julius used it, causing his memory loss.
Assuming a "pure" Belmont can handle the whip without concern, it might simply be because the 'impure' branch families don't have the same supposed power of the Belmonts, and so the power of the Vampire Killer has a kind of degenerative effect on the life force of those with "insufficient power" to handle it. It would also serve to explain why a second family (the Lecardes) are needed to help unlock the full potential for a non-Belmont, who otherwise wouldn't have the spiritual power to handle the weapon.
As a potential reason why Vampire Killer sucks the life out of non-Belmonts, there's the fact that it was created by an ancient blood pact that Rinaldo oversees. He specifically mentions that "[Leon's] blood will accepts your hatred for the power to slay your kind!". Given that he says Leon's blood accepts the power, this means any Belmont can wield the whip. Those more tangentially related, perhaps only needing to lack the Belmont surname and a direct relation to them, aren't included into the pact. Their blood hasn't accepted Sarah's hatred, and thus the cost of it is exacted from their lives instead.
About Whip's Memory from Portrait of Ruin, why did it still have Richter as it's recognized owner? Shouldn't that be John Morris instead? He harnessed the power of the Vampire Killer before so Lecarde and Morris must have done the same ritual years ago to unlock the whip's true power. They wasted so much great small scene and plot. Imagine Jonathan's father testing him if he's really up to the job and responsibility of wielding the whip.
The Vampire Killer allowed itself to be used by John Morris but it was slowly killing him the entire time as it didn't actually accept him as an owner. John didn't teach Jonathan how to unlock the whip's full power to protect him from the same fate; Jonathan doesn't know this at first and resents his father until Eric Lecarde reveals the truth.
This is probably a minor importance question in comparison to the above, but it bears warranting nonetheless: in the bad ending, Brauner shows up just in time to stop Jonathan from landing the killing blow on Stella and Loretta. This implies that somehow, he has a way of keeping an eye on the two of them while he's working on his plan to punish humanity. This makes some sense: he's cursed the Lecarde sisters into believing that they are his daughters. What better way to keep them on that line of thinking than to make sure there's nobody who's about to do something completely and horrifically drastic to them, right? So... what's stopping him from intervening right then and there if the fight ends as it properly should, with Charlotte casting Sanctuary and curing Stella and Loretta?
Presumably, Brauner can sense how injured Stella and Loretta are. So when you're beating them up for the bad ending, he jumps in to stop you before you can finish them off. However, casting Sanctuary ends up scrambling this sense. Either it doesn't differentiate between uninjured vampire and uninjured human (So Brauner doesn't know they've been purified) or it only registers injury. (So Brauner only senses when and how they're injured, and being purified is the same as not being attacked at all.) As for Stella's first fight, I assume Brauner sent Loretta to rescue Stella.
