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opensummer) wrote2018-12-27 03:37 pm
Castlevania and Anachronism
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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.
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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*)
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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
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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)
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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.
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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.
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