#cursed meme villain ship kinda beat ok

[laboratory-for-peace]

They would've been soooo so so toxic if they'd met in their youth. It'd be horrific for everyone around them. Many dead multiple injured and she STILL plans to kill him afterwards. New war crimes were invented in the process.

[edvonstein]

Ok, time for my crackpot theories on Bloodstained Ritual of the Night given what we learned in Bloodstained Curse of the Moon 2. Before the cutoff for spoiler reasons, two notes:

Yes, there’s probably a million reddit threads about this now, reddit can burn.

Yes, I know RotN is not connected to the CotM games except having the same characters. Heck, the CotM games are barely connected. but this does deal with a surprising connection they do have.

More below the break beware lotsa spoilers for all three Bloodstained games.

I didn’t realize how much I’d ramble, there’s a tl;dr at the end.

So first of, if you came in here not knowing what’s what but don’t mind spoilers, let me talk about the RotN big twist real quick.

The shop keeper, Dominique, an exorcist from “the Church” turns out to be the true villain all along, working alongside Gremory, a moon goddess, in manipulating Gebel into summoning the hell castle that the game takes place in to lure in Miriam to use her pure crystal to summon Bael, the most powerful of the demons according to the game.

So, naturally when Dominique was revealed as a playable character the like ten seconds of speculation time we were given before the game was already released had folks wondering what in blazes could be leading her to be one of the good guys? My argument now is, what in blazes let to her becoming one of the bad guys in RotN actually.

In that game she says the calamity ten years before the game, where the Alchemy Guild massacred their shardbinder creations in a blood sacrifice to summon an army of demons to terrorize the English landscape because money, let to her realizing that God is a douche who doesn’t give a fuck and wanted to gain the power to slay God. Along the way she clearly just became straight up psychopathic because her initial goal, rooted in empathy for the people who died, has become lost, as now she doesn’t care how many people she will murder. I mean it would help put a dent in imperialism a little, but still.

That does feel quite drastic for a woman of the cloth, but I mean, it’s not impossible, it could literally just be that.

But let’s talk about something both CotM and RotN have in common besides bosses and characters. Specifically the concept of the true final boss of the “ally” route.

After beating Normal mode in CotM you unlock Nightmare mode where you play as Miriam, Alfred, and Gebel trying to free Zangetsu from the demonic powers that have taken a hold of him after saving them from some ominous sphere of darkness Gremory, the game’s final boss here, threw at them. This mode has a different final stage with a boss fight against Demon Lord Zangetsu instead of Gremory. Meanwhile, at the end of Zangetsu mode in RotN, the final bossfight is against Miriam, the big good girl of the game, who spend the entire game helping everybody, having succumbed to demonic forces herself, and Zangetsu has to stop her. The bad end of RotN does have Gremory take control of Miriam, but we don’t have a moon to slice in this battle like Gebel’s battle had. So it probably wasn’t Gremory taking control here. It could have been just the shard corruption having reached critical mass (Demons appear to be crystalline in nature and Shardbinders like Miriam and Gebel can absorb these crystals to gain powers, but are slowly turned fully crystalline themselves over time.)

So let’s shift gears real quick and talk about Dominique again... specifically her appearance in CotM2. She is met with distrust by... well, two of her partners, Zangetsu, and Robert both aren’t too fond of her. But Zangetsu quickly turns around. Robert never does learn to trust her in Episode 1. His biggest regret. ‘Cause she kinda sacrifices herself to save them from a big ball of darkness like Zangetsu did at the end of Normal mode in the first game.

Episode 2 and EX are both about saving her from that corruption. We later (in the Final episode) learn that Dominique actually *is* a schemer and she did *intend* to be corrupted by that demon, Mephisto, because her family had been trying to kill that big boy for a long while now, but a demon can only be killed if it takes physical form, so she let him posses her so that Zangetsu and his demon slayer sword could finish the job. She was ready to die to get this one demon killed. She was at her own breaking point in this battle and saw no way out and no reason to go on if she could just take this fucker with her.

...Except travelling with Zangetsu and Robert and Hachi forged bonds between them and her, and she realized she wanted to live after all. Zangetsu eventually gains the means to cut both of them down without harming Dominique, using a sword that only harms demons, the Zanmatou.

So yeah, here we have a woman who is selfless to a fault, and loves deeply (no, not talking about ships here) who... becomes an omnicidal maniac later on? Feels off. And we do see her, Miriam, and Zangetsu, all possessed at some point. So it clearly is a theme in Bloodstained.

So, let me touch on Mephisto real quick.He is the final boss of both Episode 2 and Episode EX in CotM2. And *this* is what he looks like.

Those of you who played even a brief moment of Ritual of the Night probably are doing a double take right now. Because yeah... the final boss is the RotN save room.

Mephisto, the demon Dominique’s family has sworn to slay is... always there on our adventure to slay... Dominique? Again, CotM and RotN do not share a timeline, so on one hand what happens in one doesn’t have to have happened in the other... but they still share a core universe... same characters are generally portrayed the same (for as little portraying as we get in CotM)

So here’s my theory regarding Dominique, and also Miriam and Zangetsu mode: Both were possessed by Mephisto, first Dominique while she was probably throwing herself headlong into her battle with Mephisto in her grief, defeated him, but not in a way that matters, got possessed, and her thoughts of vengeance against God which I’ve no doubt she actually harbored, were amblified a lot, and she used her natural scheming abilities to bring about this, rather than the demise of Mephisto like in CotM2. Once Miriam defeated her, Mephisto, also playing the long game, having been there, watching Miriam this whole time, possibly injectin a little of his essence each time she visited his room (the orange orbs in the save room pic enter Miriam if she saves).

Mephisto does not appear to be a well known entity in the Bloodstained universe, Zangetsu, a demonslayer by profession had to be told about him, and Miriam was probably even less likely to know... or, if she did know through the Alchemy guilt, might have just written off this statue of Mephisto appearing everywhere, even the galleon they approached the demon castle (dracula) on as just that... a statue. A curious quirk in the space time continuum that she keeps seeing here and there, no doubt brought on by the crystal in her body.

Miriam, is referred to as the blue rose and uses weapons with that name. And Mephisto appears to have a giant blue crystal rose for his chest, so Miriam may well have been marked by Mephisto as the one he wants to inhabit to reign terror upon the world.

Dominique does have dark red crystals admittedly, and she may not have been a shardbinder until after we started our adventure in RotN. So one alternative is that Dominique wasn’t possessed. Mephisto did take her into his body after all in CotM2. But she could have been mind controlled instead. Gebel spends the entire game under Gremory’s mind control and while that control wasn’t perfect, Mephisto could simply be better at it than Gremory... or Mephisto just had a hold on her so long that by now Dominique is just too far gone.

Bloodstained’s universe is... mucky, but intentionally so, it seems. There’s no telling how much the games settings *actually* share. but this seems feasible to me, considering that the series so far seems to be 11 or so different timelines smashed together. Not one ending of CotM leads up to CotM2, even though the plot premise does lead up to it. RotN is like a reboot to CotM entirely. I know IGA wanted to get away from the rigid timeline of the Castlevania series with this, so he now just does whatever he wants it seems. To quote my adaption of a Mahoutsukai Precure meme for Hugtto Precure.

It’s time travel, I ain’t gotta explain shit.

So who knows if I am right. But I like the idea.

tl;dr: I think Dominique and Miriam in RotN were controlled or possessed by Mephisto from CotM2, because that boss is literally the save room from RotN