#also yeah lol catholic wallachia sure is a big history oof

[beevean]

You made the right choice. S3 oscillated between being tedious, infuriating and straight up nauseating, and S4 was a complete spit in the face of anyone who still thought the story had a coherent direction, let alone bothered to respect the games (oh, the poor innocent souls who believed N!Hector would "become a badass like in CoD" in the finale...). Also I'm not forgiving the accidental abuse apologism. That is vile.

Mmh. The way I took it, Hector and Isaac are, in short, master alchemists, and they were able to achieve the pinnacle of alchemy through their own diligence, the powers they were born with, and Dracula's own knowledge and magic. They are unique in their art of Forging life, but said art was built from Mathias' research as an alchemist (I like to imagine the two studied on his old books, especially the named "The Secret Arts"). The Tiramisu is the only way Hector has to decipher Sage Eneomaos' inscriptions, but I took it as the Fairy knowing an ancient language (she's called the most knowledgeable race of fairies), not that Sage Eneomaos wrote in a language only a Tiramisu would know, if that makes sense.

Dracula seems to have invented Devil Forging as we know it. Perhaps it was a refined version of the ability to create golems, seen in LoI, with the addition of his own vampire/Dark Lord power. There is definitely a connection between the two games! I definitely have a lot of fun piecing together all the scattered information, it's so cool <3

... for me the real question is not whether Hector and Isaac were the first Devil Forgemasters, but whether others after them existed or Dracula learned how to create demons on his own 😂 guess Hector's betrayal stung.

(very much love your archeology headcanon though! and yes, Hector really decided to copy a time traveller the second he set eyes on a new toy to play with. a king. bet st germain also introduced him to the concept of an electric guitar. too bad he didn't teach him how to play it so he sucks <3)

"There's a reason these two are special and it's not just that They Happened To Exist" unrelated to our point here, but now I'm thinking of how thoroughly the show cheapened Hector and Isaac's relationship. They're supposed to be foils down to the last detail! Friends turned bitter enemies! Instead N!Isaac treats N!Hector with disdain because he thinks he's "a little boy", N!Hector doesn't even remember he has a coworker half of the time, the two have parallel stories until the very end, and they are foils only in the sense that N!Isaac is the coolest dude who ever cooled and N!Hector is a kicked puppy. I'm still so salty that N!Isaac was like "uggggh i don't want to be friends with youuuuu we're gonna die anyway", what a waste :\

The show doesn't even explain why N!Lisa went to Hell, but it feels like a very Christian black-and-white view of the world. She loved a vampire, so she was tainted, right? So, the bishop who executed her was right? Combine this with God apparently giving His blessing to a zombie controlled by a necromancer colluting with a vampire who only wanted Dracula dead to enslave mankind herself, or the stupidest explanation for why vampires fear crosses I have ever heard, and I don't even know what's going on with religion in NFCV, except for the most shallow CHURCH BAD message that I could have come up with at 12. oh, but tell me more about how deep and clever the blue fangs scene is :^)

What pisses me off the most about NFCV is the way it disrespects the original medium of video gaming. The show sets up a potential action setpiece similar to a level from the game (the turning wheel, s1e3 I think) and then just *walks around it*. Everything about the way "Devil Forging" works in the show demonstrates that Ellis didn't even consult a cutscene compilation, much less the game. And sure enough, the fucker admits he never played them. Why adapt source material you've never experienced?

*Captain N* (a show I defend to the death) was better than this. It embraces the action montage, and even if things aren't 1-to-1, they do capture the appeal of the gameplay they adapt. It understands people love the original work. NFCV plows through the formalities of adapting a guy skimming the wikipedia summary of the game and then sits everyone in a basement for a full season.

The only times I felt I was watching an adaptation of Castlevania was in S1, with things like the fight against the Cyclop who petrified Sypha and Trevor falling into the deepest catacombs where Alucard hid himself, and in S4, where the last fight before the final showdown with Death happens in a clock tower, his iconic hideout.

As for the rest, I remember some snarky fans defending the show's wildly different direction with things like "what, did you expect to see Trevor jumping on platforms?" I don't know but it sure as shit would have been better than the trio wasting the entirety of S2 cooped up in a library! Yes, I would have preferred to see them travel through forests and caves and swamps, instead of wasting my time watching N!Alucard being a complete jerk to N!Trevor for no good reason! (and no, defending vampires is not a good reason)

bro. bro not even the vampire killer is treated with respect. it's replaced with the morning star which is a different weapon, and then n!trevor drops it in favor of a knife pulled out of the story's ass. the morning star pisses n!dracula off, but a fucking stick is capable of killing him. are you doing this on purpose.

And don't get me started on Devil Forging. I actually don't mind too much the idea of making it more similar to necromancy, because it would fit with the idea that it's a cursed, disgusting, blasphemous art. I also can concede that the knowledge that Dracula infused Hector and Isaac with his own power is very obscure, vaguely implied in one cutscene in CoD and one panel of PtR, and confirmed in a pre-release interview. But everything else is so less interesting. It's an art that apparently N!Hector was born with for no reason and N!Isaac could study on his own, removing the personal connection between Dracula and Forgemasters. There are other Forgemasters in the world: those two are not special (which also makes me wonder why N!Dracula bothered to hire N!Hector with a lie when he could have travelled some more: I'm sure Miranda would have helped him). N!Isaac eventually becomes so OP he can stibby stabby to create new Night Creatures without any effort. None of the interesting themes about dehumanization or forcing pure creatures to sin are hinted at*. Even N!Hector's unique cavalier relationship with death, a genuinely but interesting childish mentality of "oh no, death is sad! but I can fix it!", is never explored, because the story was too busy making him look stupid and breedable. And to top it all off, Nocturne literally introduces the concept of a Devil Forging machine which is so bad it sucks even in universe.

*the closest thing to this is in S4 with this line from N!Isaac: "You believe you are tools of destruction only because this is how your kind have always been used". Admittedly, it's a cool line I would have loved to apply to Hector and Isaac. But it doesn't quite work because by definition Night Creatures are not innocent, being demons from hell... and anyway he keeps using them to kill people in Styria because N!Isaac is a bastard and unlike Isaac he won't even admit it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ that line comes off as so self-aggrandizing and I hate how much the show shills him so I won't cut it any slack because I'm petty.

As for Captain N, I will say this: the inclusion of the Poltergeist King is, of course, totally wrong from a lore stand point, but to me it tells that the writers actually read the manual in search of information, and the American manual really was the only resource they had at their disposal at the time. Just like that, they put in more effort than Warren "somehow didn't realize on his own that Mathias Cronqvist was Dracula's human name while reading a wiki page" Ellis.