Diva

Diva (ディーヴァ, Dīva?) is the main series' antagonist and the greatest sworn enemy of the Red Shield.

The Zoo
At the Zoo in Bordeaux, France, in 1833, Joel Goldschmidt I and Amshel find a chiropteran mummy they call "Saya" and cut two cocoon-like objects from its body. The cocoons cannot be opened by force but "hatch" once they are bled upon, revealing two seemingly human infants. Intrigued, Joel and Amshel devise a social experiment: they separate the babies, Joel naming one Saya after their mummified mother and raising her as if she were a human child, while the other infant is confined to a locked room at the top of a tower.

The unnamed queen's living conditions for the first fifty years of her life are abysmal; she is locked in a cage and given mere rags to keep warm. In her role as a test subject, she is also experimented on to learn about chiropterans. Her primary caregiver is Amshel, who becomes her very first chevalier in the future.

In 1863, the unnamed queen meets Saya when the sound of her song draws Saya to the tower. Saya names her Diva for her amazing ability to sing and they become friends, with Saya secretly paying visits to Diva and talking to her in the following years.

On Joel's birthday in 1883, Diva's wish to leave the tower is finally granted when Saya finds the key to unlock it and releases her. While Saya wants Diva to sing for Joel and departs to search for a birthday gift with Hagi, Diva massacres the party-goers instead and sets fire to the Zoo. She is holding Joel's body and drinking his blood by the time Saya returns; the sight of the destruction and death Diva has caused makes Saya vow to exterminate all chiropterans, including Diva and herself.

World War I
In 1917, Diva awakens from her hibernation period, which is witnessed by Amshel and a young doctor named Solomon Goldsmith. Amshel gives her some of his blood before he stabs and kills Solomon. Afterwards, either Amshel or Diva feeds him her blood, thus transforming him into her second (known) chevalier (and, according to James, her "favorite").

Later that year, Amshel brings Karl Fei-Ong to meet Diva so that he may have a chevalier to experiment on for the Delta project and she agrees to make him into her chevalier. Against his will, Diva drinks the young man's blood and then transforms him.

Russian Revolution
In 1918, Diva assumes the identity of the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna in Russia; what happens to the real Anatasia in the process is not touched upon in the series, though she is presumably killed to accomadate Diva. At around this time, Diva creates another chevalier: Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, who disguises himself as a young girl named Sonia and attacks Saya and Hagi before s/he is killed.

World War II
In 1945, Diva resides in Berlin, Germany. She is known to have transformed Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party Chancellery and Adolf Hitler's private secretary, and James Ironside into her chevaliers during this time. Martin is later executed on Amshel's orders for unspecified reasons.

Riku's death
After meeting Riku, Saya's adopted brother, she drinks most of his blood and Saya is forced to turn him into a Chevalier to save his life. After this incident, Diva becomes increasingly interested in Riku, eventually infiltrating the Red Shield headquarters with Karl to find him. She takes off her clothes and rapes Riku, which kills him by giving him her blood which crystallizes him. A year after this attack, when the Red Shield is able to regroup, Diva has changed her physical appearance to resemble Riku and retains that appearance until her final battle with Saya. Diva becomes an opera singer in New York, sponsored by the Group. Cinq Flèches has spread the Delta 67 agent, which can turn people into chiropterans, across various populations of the world, including the United States. When heard live, Diva's voice greatly increases the effectiveness of the agent.

Pregnancy and death
As a result of her attack on Riku, Diva becomes pregnant. She does not give birth for over a year, when Amshel cuts the cocoons out of her body. At the Metropolitan Opera House, Diva is set to perform a live broadcast which would cause a large portion of the world's population to turn into chiropterans. The Red Shield and Saya are able to stop the broadcast, and the sisters have their final battle while Diva's chevalier Nathan watches nearby with the babies. The fight ends as Diva and Saya pierce one another with their swords, which each had coated with their own blood. Saya is unharmed by the attack due to Diva's blood having lost its power when she became pregnant. Diva begins to crystallize from the effects of Saya's blood. Her babies emerge from their cocoons and Diva reaches for them, imagining herself with her daughters and smiling at the vision before dying.

Appearance
Small and lithe, Diva is about 5'2" (157 cm) and 89 lbs (40.4 kg), having the appearance of a teenage girl. She looks very similar to Saya, though Diva has paler skin, long black hair, and blue eyes rather than red.

After killing Riku, Diva transforms herself to resemble him and cuts her hair short - ironically, this results in an uncanny similarity between herself and the appearance of Saya at the start of the series. Before she begins fighting Saya at the opera house, she reverts to her original appearance.

Personality
Diva is essentially a child, with a psychopathic streak of selfishness. Although she and Saya are twins, Diva is often referred as the younger sister due to her immature nature. Unlike Saya, Diva is sadistic, killing for pleasure rather than duty. By 2005, when Blood+ begins, Diva has five living chevaliers, who head up the Cinq Flèches Group. She giggles after killing people, shows little reaction to the death of her own chevaliers, and tends to destroy things when bored. Diva seems to enjoy tormenting Saya and frequently says she wants to kill her.

Her personality is the combined result of neglect and being raised by Amshel. Prior to being released from the tower she inhabited for 50 years Diva could not speak, instead communicating telepathically with her sister. Just before Saya opens the door Diva mentions that she is scared, despite being asked to be let outside. This is the only sign of fear she ever mentions throughout the series. Despite this she remains expressionless - showing no surprise when Saya opens the door and no joy when killing the people at the Zoo.

As for all of her powers and abilities, Diva was shown to be incredibly fearless, even at the thought of Saya killing her, she never showed any cowardice (The only sign of her being afraid during the series was about going outside). Diva was shown to actually engage in playful threats on her enemies as in saying she could eat David alive, or in Kai's case extend an offer of becoming a Chevalier so he could be with Saya.

Like Saya, Diva's personality changed once she learned to love someone.

Powers and abilities
As a chiropteran, Diva naturally has enhanced strength, speed, agility, and heightened senses. In fact, she may well be the most physically powerful character in Blood+ as the only chiropteran queen who feeds freely on blood: at one point she throws Saya through the wall of the Zoo tower while holding Riku, with enough brute strength that the impact upon Saya's subsequent landing causes the ground to cave in beneath her. Diva is also very fast, to the point that it is nearly instantaneous and her movements (when perceived) are depicted as a blur: after knocking Saya through the wall of the tower, she appears seemingly out of nowhere next to Lewis. She is also able to evade Hagi's attack when he throws his cello case at her as she prepares to kill Saya, and reappears moments later next to Solomon.

Any injuries Diva sustains heal almost instantly. She is also long-lived (and possibly immortal), being almost 200 years old yet maintaining the appearance of a teenage girl; however, after she turns Amshel into her first chevalier, she spends only a few years awake from periodically entering a 30-year hibernation cycle, before which she experiences a slow in her regenerative abilities and bouts of fainting spells.

As a queen, Diva's blood is capable of crystallizing and killing any chiropteran of Saya's bloodline, including Saya herself, when it enters their bloodstream. When it enters the bloodstream of a human who has lost most of their blood, however, it has the effect of turning them into Diva's chevalier, as demonstrated with Solomon and Karl.

Diva's impersonation of Riku in the latter half of the series demonstrates that she can alter her physical features, though this ability seems limited in comparison to other chiropterans' transformative abilities. She then resumes her default appearance before her duel with Saya at the Metropolitan Opera House, even regaining her long hair. Most likely, Diva also used this power to impersonate the Grand Duchess Anastasia in 1918.

Diva possibly possesses a telepathic connection to Saya and vice-versa as she is shown capable of verbally communicating with Saya without knowing how to speak, and could have utilized this to match Saya in swordplay at the opera house, as she did not appear to have much experience beforehand. Diva is implied to be telekinetic; she once shatters a window with no apparent movement other than smiling.

Diva has a severe psychological effect on her enemies: Hagi's chiropteran hand begins shaking at one point when he senses her presence, during the first half of the series Saya freezes up when she hears Diva's song, Riku is paralyzed with fear when she corners him on the Red Shield HQ (though the explanation in the light novels is that his own chiropteran biology rendered him immobile and unable to resist her), and she intimidates Lewis badly enough during a brief encounter that he sweats and falls down when she steps close to him.

During her childhood at the Zoo, Diva learned to sing. In fact, Saya found and named her precisely for her beautiful singing voice. In Diva's first concert, many claim her to be "the Diva of the century". When heard live, her song is able to increase the chance of humans turning into chiropterans who had ingested Cinq Flèches products infected with the Delta-67 agent from 3% to 100% likelihood.

Family

 * Unnamed mother (deceased)
 * Saya (twin sister)
 * Kanade and Hibiki (daughters)

Chevaliers

 * Amshel (deceased)
 * Solomon Goldsmith (defected, deceased)
 * Karl Fei-Ong (deceased)
 * Grigori Rasputin (deceased)
 * Martin Bormann (deceased)
 * Nathan Mahler
 * James Ironside (deceased)

Chevaliers who appear only in supplemental materials

 * Appearing only in the manga continuity as Karl's counterpart: Charles (deceased)
 * Appearing only in Blood: Adagio as Grigori's replacement: Alexei Nikolaevich (deceased)

Blood+ manga
Diva's personality is quite similar to her anime counterpart's, though the manga version of Diva appears to be more genuinely immature and childish. Although both versions of Diva want to have a family, how they try to attain said family differs greatly between the mediums; here, her love for Saya is greater than her desire to kill her and she genuinely cared for Amshel and Charles (in the anime, she did not show any real affection for any of her chevaliers). Also, Diva herself is able to induce Saya's "berserk mode" by singing while it is triggered through alternate means in the anime (such as feeding from Hagi).

In the chapter centered on the characters' past at the Zoo, Diva is shown to have already developed her current-day personality through her friendship with Saya. Even in the tower she may be better "fed" than Saya, as she is shown feeding from actual corpses whereas Saya drinks blood from a chalice. She does not resent her life as a mere test subject; in fact, she later wistfully states that she would have actually preferred to remain in the tower because Saya and Amshel always came to visit her. When Saya and Hagi start getting closer, however, Diva is jealous and orders Saya to drive him off so that he won't come between them. When that fails, she and Amshel conspire to trick Saya into freeing her for the sole purpose of killing Hagi; Diva's first action after leaving the tower is to fatally wound him for being a "nuisance" after he mistakes her for Saya, which results in Saya turning him into her chevalier.

When Diva and her chevaliers attack the Red Shield HQ to acquire Riku as Diva's "bridegroom", she sings to bring out Saya's "berserk mode" to punish her for killing Charles (Diva's favorite chevalier) by forcing her to slaughter her friends and allies at the Red Shield. Although Amshel has commanded that she not go reunite with Saya until they have suceeded into turning all humans into chiropterans, Diva bemoans that he never spends time with her anymore and decides to disobey him and seek Saya out. This leads to a fight between sisters while Diva playfully teases and compliments Saya. She believes that they are simply playing a game and is deeply shocked when Saya announces her intent to kill Diva then herself. In a fit of rage, she grieveously injures and nearly kills Nathan; this, coupled with her indifference over James' death and her telling him that Amshel and Charles were the only chevaliers she had actually wanted, causes Nathan to develop a deep-seated hatred of Diva.

Solomon persuades Diva to mate with Riku, whom they had successfully captured, despite her new marked lack of interest in him or reproducing. When Riku mistakes her for Saya, however, Diva stops and they talk instead. She convinces him that he is now a chevalier by wounding him and letting him see how rapidly he heals. When she mentions that Saya killed Charles, Riku (having previously befriended him) refuses to believe it and they argue childishly. Insisting that Charles is dead and that Amshel is not a liar, Diva strangles Riku in a fit of rage. He is saved in a timely intervention by Solomon who had been monitoring the situation with Amshel via a hidden camera. During a temper tantrum, she refuses to try mating with Riku again and claws Solomon's face. This prompts his declaration that he'd had enough of her and Amshel; expressing his disgust at them both, he leaves with Riku in tow, which greatly upsets Diva.

Three months later, Diva, Amshel, and Nathan prepare to put their plans into action. She declares that she now wants to kill Saya rather than live with her (which pleases Amshel) and even transforms a number of humans into chiropterans in front of Saya to hurt her. When she fights Saya, however, Diva cannot bring herself to actually kill Saya even when she had the opportunity to do so and breaks down into tears. Just as Saya begins to comfort her and it appears that the sisters may reconcile, Nathan snaps due to a comment Hagi made and stabs through Saya and into Diva. As Diva crystallizes, she stops Saya from trying to commit suicide, smiling and telling her to live before she crumbles into pieces. In vengeance for Diva's death, a grieving Saya brutally slaughters Nathan, continuing to attack his body even after he is dead.

Blood+: Adagio
In Adagio, Diva's impersonation of the Grand Duchess Anastasia is expanded on. She begins to bond with the sickly Prince Alexei and decides after "breaking" him to make him her new chevalier to replace Grigori. She empathizes with Alexei (both having been "bound" at one point, Diva to the tower and Alexei by his illness) when she sees him happy and healthy after his transformation. Despite her pleas, Alexei confronts Saya to protect Diva while she and Amshel flee. She is depressed when she realizes that Saya most likely killed Alexei.

Reception
Opinion regarding Diva changed dramatically throughout the series. At first she was seen as an interesting and sympathetic villain, having been locked away for years while Saya was allowed to be free and raised in luxury. Following her cold-blooded rape and murder of Riku, fans were shocked and many believed her actions were unforgivable.

However, Diva's treatment of her unborn children gained back some pity for the character when she showed a motherly and loving attitude towards them she had not show to anyone else, including her own chevaliers.