Castlevania and Anachronism
Dec. 27th, 2018 03:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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SO I did actually consider throwing in a line about a speaker caravan having carried it back from the east and Sypha getting into it then but decided not to for two reasons. One is the handwavey something like 50% of castlevania is anachronistic, do not get me started on Trevor’s short sword it makes me want to tear my hair out, and therefore other anachronisms are more or less acceptable.
- Vlad Tepes the historical figure was born between 1428-1431 and died between 1476-1477. The action in the series kicks off with Lise’s appearance at the castle in 1455 and Dracula is explicitly stated as having been hundreds (if not thousands) of years old when he meets her, which means who knows what else they’ve messed with.
- Magic! They have magic that allows people to farsee, to teleport, and as sypha demonstrated the ability to use magic to clear land. Extrapolating from that I suspect they have lots of mundane uses for magic (building roads and house, creating timber, heating water, etc.) Because of those two factors I suspect that Castlevania’s world in 1475 was much smaller than ours was at the same time period.
- They clearly have some concept of globalism. Dracula’s generals are supposed to represent, as far as I can tell the Viking/Celts- Godbrand. India/Pakistan region- the female general in the headdress and sari? I think it’s a sari and the male general in turban. Hector is greek and Isaac is african. I personally like the idea of Moroccan!Isaac but I’m open to arguments there, and wiki tells me the disappearing female vampire’s name was Cho, which is a Korean surname. So I fall on the side of the argument that they haven extensive land networks. (And the reason that there are no New World Vampires is that they can’t cross the ocean to get there.)
So I decided that Sypha as a nomad would have encountered coffee either through her own travels or be trading with another speaker caravan. Alucard, I decided was introduced to it by his mother, who got addicted when she first starting living with Dracula and he refused to tailor his hours to a human. So Lise discovered coffee as a way to make it through all the all-nighters she had to pull- Dracula’s Magical Kitchen has Everything, and never quite kicked the habit after. (Her pregnancy incidentally was the Actual Worst because she went eight months cold turkey. Her first request after naming Adrien was for a cup.)
My headcanon for Trevor is that after the Belmont Estate went up in flames, he did the whole soldier of fortune thing and never had the money for coffee and the few times he did, he spent it on booze instead. So Sypha and Alucard are both a little addicted and expect a cup in the mornings and Trevor takes good care of his husband and wife team by providing it to them.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-28 02:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-28 05:56 pm (UTC)Heads up this is a thousand words of word vomit and if that's not your thing i put a TL:DR at the bottom. Also tagging
My theory on all that is Castlevania’s a fading world. Evidence being-
1. Lise claiming that everything she learnt is old knowledge, things they’ve forgotten. That being said literally everything in her workshop was anachronistic.Centrifuges, for example, weren’t invented until the 1860s, and while there’s a long history of medicines from mold, humans didn’t understand why it helped, as Lise clearly does, until penicillin was discovered in like, 1925.
2. Dracula’s travel mirror, and the Belmont’s distance mirror are stated as being among the last of their kind
3. The rise of the church, and it's real clear desire to suppress progress. The way the church is portrayed in Castlevania is as an organization that’s working to solidify its hold and power structure. For me, that means a group rushing to fill a power vacuum and overreaching. So what vacuum is it filling? Given the general lack of human nobility, during a time when feudalism was v real, I have to think that vampires occupied that spot in the hierarchy and then for whatever reason they didn’t.
(Sidebar: Trevor is closest thing to a human noble that we meet on screen)
So with that in mind, I think that when humans took the land bridge over to the americas (and then later sailed there), they were fleeing old school monsters. Vampires, as the lords and masters of the world were like, let them go, they’re probably all going to die anyway.
Spoiler Alert: they didn’t all die.
New World Vampires would have headed over there, via magical means (probably some sort of teleportation relay which works best with this theory), when they realized that there was a population they could exploit. They would have done so at the height of vampire society, when magic and science were at their peak. When it was easy to hop between continents by magic. Then slowly, as they lost their technologies, the lost touch with the “old world.”
So far: Vampires once had more power/resources and for whatever reason* have been slowing losing their hold on the world.
You know what people do when the world gets dangerous?
They stay home.
And Vampires, with sufficient food, are people. So over time as they lost power, vampires traveled less. They let their networks fray. They stop keeping/attending court and bunker down in their territories. Surely, they think, this will pass. What’s a couple hundred years to an immortal?
Nothing, until they look up and realize their favorite old route through the mountains has ten square miles of consecrated ground in the middle.
Nothing, until they look up and realize their mirror for teleportations spells have run down, and oops they no longer keep a household and have no idea where to find a mage to fix it.
Nothing, at all, until they realize in the last 500 years that they only spoken with the vampires whose territories adjoin theirs. Their networks start collapsing, and since they’ve been using a teleportation relay to travel quickly and easily, any holes in that will make it impossible to cross the distances they used to.
It’s a running joke in the series, “Villagers with pitchforks, torches. The usual.” It’s a nice bit of black humor that indicates those things are actually a problem. So they (vampires) have been on the losing side of a war thats been going on since Jesus was a thing. It’s why they’re so eager to “put the humans in their place”
(Sidebar: if Speakers are the jewish analogue in castlevania does that mean Jesus was a speaker mage?)
So Dracula took a year to gather his generals and I think he got all the ones he could reach. It’s far to take the castle to the New World and there’s too many breaks in the chain for them to attempt to come to him, so he limited himself to those he could reach.
Hector, he found on Rhodes, a greek island which means that it is possible for them to cross running water, probably by magical means.
TL:DR: Castlevania is a world in decline, they used to have a teleportation network that spanned the globe, and vampire society has been losing track of each other since Jesus was a thing.
*top three guesses:
1. Buffy type scenario where once upon a time demons ruled the earth until they were pushed out by human encroachment. Vampires are one of their remnants and used their magic/technology/skills to establish themselves as top of the food chain. However the longer the demons are gone the more useless their magic/technology/skills are.
2. They got apathetic. Living forever must be pretty goddamn boring, that combined with the understandable assumption that your dinner doesn’t fight back meant that vampires got complacent. Then you just need one relatively charismatic
speaker magepriest (*cough*jesus*cough*), in a place where the sun shines a lot, and you’ve got the structure for a revolution. Between that and the ennui they didn’t even realize they’d lost until they stop getting their annual sacrifices.3. Those pesky Christians. Kinda the opposite of 2, where they still cared but still lost. Pontius Pilate. Vampire. Longinus. Vampire. Hell is this version, Lazarus is probably a vampire that Jesus gave one last day in the sun to and then staked. The reason there were no Mediterranean Vampires among Dracula’s Generals? The all got caught in the purge that occurred with the birth of christianity. Constantine the Great’s deathbed baptism was not so much a baptism as it was the church chucking holy water in his face and then staking him.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-29 01:23 am (UTC)I do wonder when you mention the anachronisms and the idea that Castlevania is a world in decline do you mean that this is a world that is now actually in the mid 20th century but that never advanced past say, centrifuges. Or that vampires kinda took over with their own technology that then faded when they withdrew to their territories and thus don't particularly match up with the technology of the new millennium?
(I'm sorry if I'm wording any of this horribly, I am not all that skilled (at all) about writing about history and time periods and I have not actually watched all of Castlevania. I am that asshole who gets into a fandom because of meta, and then am too lazy to actually watch the content so I'm probably 100% off from what you might be saying about this haha. *sweats*)
no subject
Date: 2018-12-29 02:33 am (UTC)So I think I get what you’re asking but if I’m totally off let me know ok?
So the way I imagine this is that Vampire society has their industrial revolution around the time humans started forging bronze. After all with people staying in one place all the time they didn’t have to scrounge for food and hell some of the smarter ones probably offered protection in exchange for the occasional meal. Which is y’know the basis feudalism
But since they’re no longer spending all their time hunting they suddenly have free time and then they got bored. Which starts at lets find a better way to make pots, and ends at lets tie a key to a kite and find out what happens. For SCIENCE!
Which means that they get running water, gaslights, and penicillin something like (lets say) 600 years* ahead of schedule. And then they probably didn’t advance much beyond that because they would have started running into what my friends called the demon carriage problem.
(And by that timeline it’s when the church got into crusading. Which I suspect the vampires were Not Amused about.)
So when they started retreating into their lands, they took the technology they had and hoarded it. Like goddamn dragons. Between them and the church by the time 1455 rolls around and Lise barrels into castle most of it has been forgotten or purposely erased. So vampire have had their rise and decline and are looking to rise again and humanity is on track with their development in actual history. Does that make sense?
Meta is actually the best part of fandom and I’ve got the same problem with finishing stuff. So I know that feel
no subject
Date: 2018-12-30 11:52 pm (UTC)Ohhh and I am so interested in the 'demon carriage problem' now. Would you be willing to expand on that a little or is it a specific inside joke?
Sorry it took me so long to respond to this, I was writing an essay that I was excited about when I read your response and I didn't want to kick myself too far out of that headspace while I was going. (Not that there's much quality/quantity in this response anyway, but oh well.)
EDIT: And yes, your response totally makes sense and I totally agree that meta is the best part of fandom (Bar fanfiction which seems to mostly really be meta in action/practice)
no subject
Date: 2018-12-31 04:20 am (UTC)It's kinda both. In college I was part of a continuum campaign, (Continuum is a time travel tabletop rpg) and one of my group was roleplaying a knight from the norman conquest. But our clubhouse was in modern times so everytime we encountered modern technology he had to make a saving role on whether he could comprehend it or not. Two or three sessions in we call a taxi to take us somewhere rather than time traveling there. And he rolls a nat 1. So played 100% seriously he grabs one of the foam swords (we were weird kids and lowkey drunk) we've got lying around and starts waving it around shouting DEMON CARRIAGE and pretending to attack a car. After that the joke was, roll for demon carriage.
Eventually it became our shorthand for medeival minds encountering technology beyond their imagination. So vampires can imagine centrifuges for instance, but they can't imagine lets say a car.
No worries! Nothing worse than getting knocked out of your headspace when you're in a groove
Sweet, i thought i was reading that right but i wasn't sure. Yeah meta is just the academic side of fanfic; fanfic is the literature side of meta.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-01 10:06 am (UTC)I'm more of a worldbuilder meta writer. I really like digging into a flawed canon and figuring out ways to fix it, or to expand upon ideas I think the author might have benefited from exploring more thoroughly (or at all *coughs*). The most obvious examples of these kinds of canon are: the naruto canon, the bayverse transformers movies *makes gagging noises*, and the avengers movies.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-01 06:57 pm (UTC)So I'm loving everyone in this bar right now
Date: 2018-12-29 08:27 am (UTC)A world in decline!! Hotdang that is a good take. It makes sense, it makes Lisa's quest not the persistent hope of a desperate idealist, but one founded on research and a consuming knowledge to know the truth. I love every single detail about technology that you all have going on, but what's the role of magic in this?
Is Jesus someone who gave humans the tools necessary to fight back? And though killed fairly early, his followers began the overthrow of their apathetic vampire overlords.
The speakers often struck me as more of a Romani analogue.
Re: So I'm loving everyone in this bar right now
Date: 2018-12-29 10:33 pm (UTC)So I think Lise was upper middle class
prior to running away to bang Draculaand likely educated enough to find all sorts of references to when humanity knew more.So magic in Castlevania is mostly elemental and offensive, and it belongs to the educated class. A mage can cause earthquakes, create rain, snap their fingers for fire, and force choke someone but that’s the large part of their powers. A creative person could absolutely come up with some mundane utilities (irrigation, leveling land, fires without fuel in winter, etc.) but then it would be more of a life hack then it is transformative to the culture. Especially since mages seem to be in short supply and the church is down with burning witches.
(I’m cheating a bit by having wards be a thing, but order of ecclesia had glyphs, and portrait of ruin had magical painting so clearly we don’t know the full scope of magic)
So I think Jesus was the first crusade against the vampires that succeeded at least partially which is how the church got to be such a thing. Once you prove a thing can be done, more people will do it. And of course people succeeded in the past but I think that the vamps were pretty on it with a cull immediately afterward so those stories never got out. But the whole Jesus thing was too public and they were too apathetic to get on it.
So I kinda found them to be a mix of both, the caravans, historic persecution, and pograms were features of both Jewish people and Romani. I mostly lean Jewish because I like the idea of Sypha speaking ladino as her first language, hence the Spanish accent
And I'm feeling thankful in this chillies tonight
Date: 2019-01-01 07:43 am (UTC)Part of me thinks, that the Church burning witches has a lot to do with power too. Saints and witches are both women doing magic, one is just propping up the Church and the other isn't. With that kind of pressure on the average lay magician, they're probably honing it for defense or offense-as-best-defense. I do think, that since Castlevania is also primarily a really short action show, we're missing out on whether people use magic in other ways too. Amongst other things.
Women doing things, and doing them better than men, has always been a problem with the ruling institution of the day. I remember seeing witchy posts on how to use herbs and stuff on Tumblr and thinking that this was basic shit even my dad knows. But it was women herbalists who were being burned as witches, weren't they? That was a culture shock I had to quickly get over.
Both, both is good. The Speakers are a traveling people who have their own religion, that's enough grounds for persecution in those times. I'm not sure if I'm that comfortable with attributing a real world aspect of a marginalized group to a fictional group though.
Also, Happy New Year!
Re: And I'm feeling thankful in this chillies tonight
Date: 2019-01-01 07:09 pm (UTC)Yeah we can't even begin to estimate the knowledge we (western european culture) lost through the suppression of female herbalists/doctors/witches. Especially since most of those women only treated women.
you're right and you should say so. it gets cringey v quickly and i'm trying to avoid that.
Happy New Year!
Re: And I'm feeling thankful in this chillies tonight
Date: 2019-01-02 10:41 am (UTC)- Priests blessing holy water
- Devil's Forgemasters
- Sypha
There's also magitech like distance mirrors and the castle, I guess.So Sypha and her battle magic (ice elevator being the exception) are the most we've seen of magic in their world. Which means there's plenty of room to play around with it!
Go be OP! Go be mundane! There's 2 kinds of peopleThankfully people are gaining that knowledge back! Not as useful as modern medicine, but it's always nice to know.
Re: And I'm feeling thankful in this chillies tonight
Date: 2019-01-03 06:42 pm (UTC)Since you said that I’m going to have Sypha burn mana on the most mundane nonsense and then have her turn around and cast meteor when she curb stomps Carmilla
Re: And I'm feeling thankful in this chillies tonight
Date: 2019-01-04 05:38 am (UTC)that isn't trying to limit the playerwould depend a lot on how she's proportioning her mana and also...exercise I guess? How often she uses her magic and stuff, like training muscles.Sypha is the epitome of "get you a woman who can do both" meme.
Re: And I'm feeling thankful in this chillies tonight
Date: 2019-01-04 05:55 pm (UTC)Sypha, smol bean who is soft and clever, but also Sypha, Magical Goddess
Re: And I'm feeling thankful in this chillies tonight
Date: 2019-01-04 06:26 pm (UTC)Righteous, strong, and brave, and totally willing to f*** shit up. No wonder those boys are smitten.
Re: And I'm feeling thankful in this chillies tonight
Date: 2019-01-04 06:53 pm (UTC)Re: So I'm loving everyone in this bar right now
Date: 2019-01-01 10:19 am (UTC)I'd have to watch the show to really dig into the specifics of magic and how it might have manifested in the world and how that might affect the timeline alongside the effects of vampires and super advanced (though hoarded) technology that most of the humans in the world might call magic anyway. Haha, so, as I am clearly out of my depth in this case, I'm going to bow out haha.
I'm really glad you enjoyed our gleeful discussion of meta, and thanks for the subscription too!~
Re: So I'm loving everyone in this bar right now
Date: 2019-01-01 11:09 am (UTC)Happy New Year and thanks for the subscription too!
Who did you think was gonna die?
Re: So I'm loving everyone in this bar right now
Date: 2019-01-01 11:14 am (UTC)Re: So I'm loving everyone in this bar right now
Date: 2019-01-01 01:13 pm (UTC)Re: So I'm loving everyone in this bar right now
Date: 2019-01-01 06:59 pm (UTC)Thankfully only two named characters die in the second season and both are antagonists
Re: So I'm loving everyone in this bar right now
Date: 2019-01-01 07:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-28 05:04 am (UTC)I can't believe you gave more thought to the Anachronism Stew that is Castlevania than the show's writers but I'm enjoying every minute of it. 10/10 would read more.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-28 07:44 am (UTC)I have a theory for that too! Just need to get it typed and oraganized.
No need to worry this sort of meta is my jam. there will undoubtedly be more as I figure out this world
Disclaimer: I am not Japanese, just a Chinese person who can discern a lot of shit from kanji.
Date: 2018-12-28 08:12 am (UTC)So when I was a kid, I used to headcanon that Cho Chang was half Japanese because it made no sense otherwise. The Chinese translation has her name as Zhang Qiu (meaning Autumn btw), because people with better grasps on the language than me couldn't make it work. And Cho Chang sounds too much like Mandarin for "melancholy" which would be unacceptable in a Chinese family where names and the possible meaning of homonyms means A LOT. A mixed family though, might be more willing to let things slide.
It's quite fun to look at how the original culture translates a character supposedly from that culture but written by foreigners. The Hong Kong dub for Cardcaptor Sakura has like a hilariously long bit of word vomit explaining Syaoran on his first appearance.
Disclaimer: *is white* what i know about naming conventions comes from my v salty korean friend
Date: 2018-12-28 06:06 pm (UTC)oh that makes sense! I prefer half!japanese cho to the alternatives, at least. And it's good to know that other translations changed her name into something more in line with the culture.
I'll have to run that down, it sounds V Relevant to my interests
Re: Disclaimer: *is white* what i know about naming conventions comes from my v salty korean friend
Date: 2018-12-29 08:02 am (UTC)I love hearing translation choices. It's always fascinating and provides such a different insight into something. I practically devoured the article where Emily Wilson explained her translation choices for The Odyssey.
Also Cho Chang deserved better!The short version is they insist his family is from Mainland China and moved to Hong Kong because no one would dress that weird. *Cue the frame already moving on*
Justice for Cho Chang 2k18
Date: 2018-12-29 09:34 pm (UTC)Yeah it’s some really cool reading about translation choices. When I was like 15 I read an article about how they chose to translate studio ghibli movies to English and since then I’ve been hooked.
That’s fantastic and I love it.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-28 06:17 pm (UTC)TL:DR: Castlevania is a world in decline, they used to have a teleportation network that spanned the globe, and vampire society has been losing track of each other since Jesus was a thing.
As that pertains to Cho. I imagine that vampires in Korea, Japan, and China did a better job keeping tracking of each other than the rest of the world was doing. Partially because of the cultural exchanges between those countries, which were many, and partially because of buddhism coming from India, which claims a place for everything that exists.
So when Dracula sent out the call, the vampires in those countries hopped in their teleporation mirrors and met up and decided to send Cho over to Romania, thus bypassing the problem of getting her to the mainland
no subject
Date: 2019-01-05 05:47 pm (UTC)But about point 1, in game canon Vlad Tepes wasn't always Vlad Tepes. At the time of Castlevania 3: Dracula's Curse (the game Netflix adapted), he's indeed around 400 years old. The thing about the mirrors in the Belmont Hold and the Castle, plus the leon Belmont portrait is more significant than you think!
For 2, magic is strongly implied in the games to come from blood and is very female-biased. Magic, not alchemy, which's more gender neutral. Magicians are also rare because of the witch trials. It's also implied to advance with time the way science does - a 18th century Belnades descendant has much more uses for magic than Sypha, and a 20th century descendant has even more uses for magic than the 18th century witch (and magic users are called witches in game lore, even if they act more like sorcerers or wizards).
As for 3, nothing to add - that's strictly Netflixvania territory, the game setting only starts getting global on the later installments of the chronology - starting from Bloodlines (1917) to Dawn of Sorrow (2036), and only for Europe, USA and Japan. Point for Netflix to make the cast more diverse.
For anachronisms in general - CV is actually a very campy franchise who does not take things very seriously, despite the gritty series. The fandom is all over the french fries and canned tomato soup in Curse of Darkness, for example. SKELETONS IN MOTORCYCLES IN THE 19TH CENTURY is sorta a fandom meme for a reason!
tl;dr PLEASE JOIN THE GAME LORE SIDE, IT'S FUN ;_;