OBJECTIVELY THE BEST CHARACTER IN CASTLEVANIA 

As hes just eating punches to his face

A lesser show will make a bathos joke "Did you expect a coompir? OF COURSE I'M THE BELMONT"

I like how he says that as if he was expecting that there might be more than one.

Not gonna lie, the Castlevania anime Dracula is way better than, and also kind of nothing like, the old timey religious moral essentialist version you described. The whole point of him is that he isn't inherently evil because he's a vampire. He's explicitly driven to villainy by the ignorance and religious superstition of the people around him, which leads the fearmongering priests to take away that which he loves the most in the world. He *isn't* an abomination cursed by God or some embodiment of natural evil. At the start of the anime, he's just a man, immortal and supremely powerful, but still basically just a man - and not only that, a learned man of science and reason who values knowledge. He falls in love with Lisa because, unlike most of her kind, she's the first human he's ever met who was as passionate about learning as he was. He basically goes mad and unleashes literal hell on the world because losing that has convinced him that the problem is an essential failing of humanity as a whole, that their tendency to fear and hate those who are different is an intrinsic flaw. Alucard is a whole extra can of worms on top of that and goes even harder on the same morally ambiguous themes. As the first season is very blatantly an adaptation of Symphony of the Night, a huge part of his motivation, if I remember correctly, relates to his mother's last request to not blame humans for their own ignorance - the mistake Dracula makes and later begs forgiveness for in death. So the whole point of Castlevania is that it's a rejection of moral naturalism and a deconstruction of medieval superstition. The point is that they aren't "amoral monsters" at all, but rather are what they are as a result of the cruelty of society's biases.

1

Our boy

I gotta hand it to Graham McTavish, he really sold the character. This is one of the few animes where I can confidently say that the English dub is as good as, if not better than the Japanese (I think they came out simultaneously in this case).

@@BlackEpyon that’s because the show isn’t an anime. It was made by a western studio. It takes a lot of stylistic inspiration from anime but it’s like Avatar the Last air bender. Inspired by anime but not one

@@jackmclaughlan8299 written by americans animated by non americans. I wouldnt wanna assume japanese studios because i dont know

eh, carmilla was the ambitious one. the sisters even say so outright, they were all content within the walls they had built, and each had a role. but carmilla always wanted more; "all of their stuff" and so on. which is why, in the end, she was the one who was actively fated to die. the lovers bailed when they realized styria had fallen, and lenore did herself in out of pride. carmilla was the only one isaac killed because, as he said "you're not going to stop, and eventually you'll be a problem for me."

That’s wayyy too perfect, someone’s gotta write it

That‘s Blade 3‘s blood bank scene. =D

phh he has yet to even reach angelous from buffy level let alone that

How naive, Spike from Buffy the vampire slayer is obviously the best example of what you are talking about.

Another reason why bloodlines 2 will be shit, it's ind envelopment hell and in no way will the writing convey the themes as well as the first

@@wile123456 you should write them and explain what vtm is *really* all about

@@amoral_minority I'm not saying I can do it better. Just that 6byears of development hell, different dev studios, firing the original elad writer and producer and more, is very unlikely to end in huge success

@@wile123456 I trust the writers of the vtm tho. LA by night was a masterpiece, just as much as the bloodlines series. That likely has to do with jason carl being a masterclass on being a story teller but still

All he did was describe johnny depp in the movie Dark water lol

@@erica.7231 Hey, a win is a win, even if it's minor

People called you gay in high school too?

Hilarious thing is I intended it to be framed and experienced as a PSA, and oh how it gloriously backfired.

Role playing as a vampire at highschool drama debate tournaments is a solid way to score, from my highschool experience, just saying. . .

@@Chazreal I'm sure you did an ok enough job but I think kids in high are often too stupid to understand stuff like that, I should correct this to the people that go though high school. Seriously though why are they so god damn stupid and in such a unqie way, it really is impressive.

Seriously, my eyes when my Senior English Teacher gave the class a final report over *Anything!*

I wonder who's going to be the main villain in the sequel series? Hopefully it's not Dracula, because I love his character arc in Castlevania.

@@kittykittybangbang9367 Well, it could be another mini boss villains considering they made Carmilla and Death much more threatening than their video game counterparts. I'm so excited for it thooooohgh!!! Castlevania is one of my favorite series of all time 🙌

That's why Wind waker Ganon is the only god incarnation of the character outside of the growing up gerudo fancomic

On god I'd have hit that priest with the 100 hit combo.

I think it would make sense to tie that in to the bloodsucking somehow. Like they need workers in their factories to prey on, and/or the labour makes the blood better for them or something.

That's also not a type of creature we would identify with vampires in horror fiction, though. Vampires in these days were more...zombies. Or a sort of curse. They weren't Dracula-type vampires.

@@Tacklepig Actually, they were. Dracula, as portrayed in the novel, was pretty traditional. Like many vampires in Slavic/Balkan folklore, Bram Stoker's count could walk in sunlight without harm. Van Helsing also speculates in one chapter that the process of dying and then reanimating as a vampire caused short term trauma to the brain and mind of the victim, so that like zombies, they would be less intelligent for some time after transforming.

@@Tacklepig I think that might be true. Strictly in terms of history, the question then becomes what the earliest authors of vampire fiction had in mind when they conceived of the aristocratic vampire archetype. 'The Vampyre', 'Varney The Vampire', 'Carmilla', and 'Dracula' all featured aristocratic vampires, but it's not really clear that any of them did it because they saw aristocrats as particularly monstrous. The vampire in 'The Vampyre' was inspired by Lord Byron, who was a friend of the author; Varney is shown as resenting his own condition and struggling against it; Carmilla is frequently interpreted as representing a similar struggle against Victorian gender norms; and Stoker was a monarchist, so probably not particularly anti-aristocratic.

What about Alucard?

That's a lot of text to say "I'm a furry".

Vampires doing their grocery shopping as they avoid the 79 different counters they have because god fucking hates them apparently

This is why being a dhampir (half human half vampire) is better, you have all the strengths of a vampire without any of the weaknesses.

I remember reading in Translyvanian folktales just how ridiculously easy it was to become a werewolf. Eat meat that was killed by a wolf? You're now a werewolf. Born with a weird birthmark? You're a werewolf. Born out of wedlock? Werewolf. And probably some others I've forgotten.

vampires are usually portrayed as more powerful.

have one, looks dumb would recommend

Not that I don't do that already

I once did it with makeup, I did it specifically to look like an evil vamp man, and it worked

Great show, some of the action scenes blew me away

If you want the snorting to be a part of what makes them dangerous, have them snort the soul straight out of your body. If you want it to be a weakness rather than a combat ability, they could snort people's ashes instead.

Dracula was starving himself and wasn't at his strongest yet was still powerful and dangerous enough that none of his War Council vampires tried to challenge him directly (and even the indirect challenges via manipulation Luke with Carmilla didn't really matter because Dracula saw through them and just didn't care enough to stop them really). And he was still able to basically wipe the floor against Alucard, Trevor Belmont, and Sypha while holding back, only really basically allowing them to kill him out of guilt for nearly killing his and Lisa's son Alucard. Without that last minute suicidal heel face turn, Dracula would've most probably killed the Trio. Dracula is still considered arguably the strongest person in the world that even his resurrection is a major plot point that drives the conflict for Season 3 and 4. One can only imagine what a fully powered and serious Dracula could do, especially with his centuries of practice and experience under his belt.

Okay but hear me out Confederate vampires in modern times who own private for profit prisons, and they feed on their inmates who can't do anything about it cause they're inmates and don't have anyone to tell about it.

Was it good?

@@asherroodcreel640 it’s been a bit since I’ve watched it, and he’s not a vampire (although he is undead) but he has very similar themes regarding the whole “old wealth clinging to the power they once held” I definitely recommend watching it, the whole first season is on RU-vid

@@khicks8799 true, also all his minions where stock broker vampires

The shopping mall thread reminds me of Contrapoint's Opulence.

Agreed, for me it's pretty close between Isaac and Zuko, at least in terms of animated media

THE PAIN OF BEING DEAD!

GODBRAND

BOATS

He does like a good boat

After all, he is a fucking Viking~!

LITTLE GODBRAND

Interesting! Right off the bat, I'm picturing a vampire Elon Musk offering to build people houses on Mars in exchange for X pints of blood over Y number of years. One thing that occurs to me is that Libertarian and Ancap types, even the socially conservative ones, tend to think that their systems would actually be optimal in terms of social and technological progress. They think progressive politics actually slows things down, and that the "degeneration" they despise about the present is actually a kind of stagnation. They long for the past in part because they think we got *more* done back then. Ever notice how many far right types envision their future utopias as interplanetary federations? Given that many actual right-wingers claim an ideological link to the Liberal and Progressive achievements of the past, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the vampires claimed to have literally been there themselves. Then there are the arguments about how Capitalism has lifted so and so many millions of people out of poverty, generated so much wealth, lead to so many medical and scientific breakthroughs, etc. Imagine making those arguments as a vampire who's been around for centuries and has a plausible claim to have personally been involved in making some of those things happen. "I brought us to the New World, I brought us to the Moon, and now I'm going take us to the stars." Finally, I was reminded of that Chomsky remark about how some of the most high-ranking commissars in the USSR went on to become some of the most successful Capitalists after the fall of the Soviet Union. No matter the paradigm, some people are going to try to find a way to put themselves on top of it. You start off ingratiating yourself with the tsar because that's where the power is, then switch to the new leadership after the revolution, and then switch again after the Union collapses. My question would be whether or not vampires would necessarily want to restore Feudalism, or if it'd be a matter of finding ways of accruing power and wealth regardless of what the system happens to be? In other words, is it about wanting to play Feudalism again, or is it about winning whatever game the world happens to be playing?

Same

@@kittykittybangbang9367 idk maybe ppl just saw castlevania and wanted non stop action. Seems like that would have been an L manuever to me compared to what we got

Out of curiosity why do you hate the show?

@@SunburnCity Just all around bad writing, disguising rampant cursing/sex scenes as "adult themes", writer squabbles with the fandom, this writer - besides being a creep - displaying open contempt at the source material he was supposed to adapt to the point of writing stuff in reverse of the original meaning, etc. I'm surprised that Vaush likes this because it's really very subpar writing with stuff not making sense and contradicting itself at every 5 minutes. And a lot of misplaced edgy nonsense for no reason, too (an example off the top of my head is Lisa going "Dracula is worse than Satan because he actually exists"

They can also be a fear of the mob, like a sundown town for everyone, horde of snarling maniacs who hate the living

Can't wait for the sequel series

He is also gæ

Not quite that simple. There have been many very different variations of vampires from different traditions and cultures, varying wildly, with the one common factor being that they drank blood. There are also many possible origins, many of which overlapped. One big possible factor was diseases, particularly diseases like tuberculosis and pneumonic plague. People would get horribly sick, start coughing up blood, turn deathly pale, become confined to a bed, start turning down normal meals, and, ultimately, they'd just waste away, like they were being drained or consumed (tuberculosis even used to be called 'consumption'). Then, the person would die, and those around them would start experiencing similar symptoms. These diseases killed whole communities like this, with no explanation as to why and how (well, none that was available at the time). And the second, often overlapping, potential cause was a lack of knowledge of human decomposition. People, often in desperation, would dig up bodies, and find them looking well-fed (likely bloated with gases), pale, with apparently longer nails and teeth (due to the skin around the nails, and the gums around the teeth, receding), and full of 'blood' (especially in the heart. Also, I may be entirely wrong as I can't quite remember, but the 'blood' might not've even been blood). These all combined in some areas to give people the understandable belief that people were turning into vampires, consuming and 'turning' those around them, and they needed to be stopped. They would then often drive a stake through the heart because that was often believed to be where the 'soul' was, destroy that, and you destroy the person, or former person. Also, they're from eastern Europe because that's where many of the myths originated

Yeah, I had a feeling the vampire lore (as most monster lore is) was rooted in phobias at the time, promiscuity, the draining of life by force, a creature that feeds on you unrempentantly, against God, against nature, all rooted in phobias and other superstitions at the time that develop into the cultural phenomenon that is the vampire. Vlad the Impaler didn't do anyone any favors either, then Bram Stoker came along and cemented it.

My understanding is that there was a string of supposed vampire attacks in Eastern Europe in the 1700's that received a lot of attention in the rest of Europe, and that this is why a lot of early modern vampire fiction had that Eastern European connection. Until fiction established the trope of vampires being aristocrats, I think most alleged vampires tended to be rural commoners.