I actually had the exact same spiral when I was watching the show and godbrands like, I feel like I would know it would kill me, and everybody else is like, sit down godbrand you’re an idiot.
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 bluewinged_songbird and hoping they get a mention.
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 mage priest (*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
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.