History WesternAnimation / Castlevania2017

* CorruptChurch:
** Writer Warren Ellis is an atheist and ''not'' a fan of religion, and it shows. Despite Romania historically and currently being Eastern Orthodox, the religious authorities in the show are clearly the Catholic Church. They function as a secondary antagonist in the first two seasons, and are the reason Dracula launches his war in the first place. Even Dracula gets redeeming qualities, while the evil vampires can at least be interesting characters. Meanwhile not a single member of the Church ever displays ''any'' redeeming or even interesting qualities. They are invariably cowardly, stupid, ignorant, hateful, and cruel.
*** The one minor exception is a priest Trevor recruits to help create holy water to repel the Night Creatures towards the end of Season 1. Said priest has no lines, and his total screen time is four seconds.

[[caption-width-right:300:[[{{Tagline}} In darkness, a hero returns.]] [[note]] (Clockwise from top right) [[KnightInSourArmor Trevor Belmont]], [[LadyOfBlackMagic Sypha Belnades]], [[TokenEnemyNonhuman Alucard]], [[BoisterousBruiser Godbrand]], [[FemmeFatale Carmilla]], [[TragicVillain Hector]], [[MyMasterRightOrWrong Issac]], [[BigBad Dracula]], [[/note]]]]

* WhipItGood: The signature Belmont whip can be seen as Trevor's weapon of choice, though it has yet to be called "Vampire Killer" as in the games. The wounds it inflicts demonstrate how effective a whip is in a Belmont's hands, as he can use it to remove limbs and eyes, or alter the course of the whip mid-throw by using his hand. It is also consecrated so that it can be an effective weapon against the demons and vampires that the Belmont family constantly faces. The Morning Star whip (treated as separate from the leather whip [[EarlyInstallmentWeirdness as in the earliest games]], most explicitly ''Simon's Quest'') is even better, with the ability to make evil creatures ''explode'' when it hits. In Season 3, Trevor can [[DualWielding use both whips at once]].

[[caption-width-right:300:[[{{Tagline}} In darkness, a hero returns.]] [[note]] (Clockwise from top right) [[KnightInSourArmor Trevor Belmont]], [[LadyOfBlackMagic Sypha Belnades]], [[TokenEnemyNonhuman Alucard]], [[BoisterousBruiser Godbrand]], [[FemmeFatale Carmilla]],[[TragicVillain Hector]], [[MyMasterRightOrWrong Issac]], [[BigBad Dracula]], [[/note]]]]

[[caption-width-right:300:[[{{Tagline}} In darkness, a hero returns.]] [[note]] (Clockwise from top right) [[KnightInSourArmor Trevor Belmont]], [[LadyOfBlackMagic Sypha Belnades]], [[TokenEnemyNonhuman Alucard]], [[BoisterousBruiser Godbrand]]. [[TragicVillain Hector]], [[MyMasterRightOrWrong Issac]], [[BigBad Dracula]], [[/note]]]]

[[caption-width-right:300:[[{{Tagline}} In darkness, a hero returns.]]]]

* BadassBaritone:
** Dracula naturally, courtesy of Creator/GrahamMcTavish. He even goes deeper in tone when going for pure menace.
** Also Trevor, courtesy of Creator/RichardArmitage. Especially noticeable on the rare occasions that Trevor decides to be serious about a subject.

[[/folder]]

** Of all the Night Creatures to attack, it's a bit fortuitous that the one who kills [[spoiler:the Bishop of Gresit]] is Blue Fangs, who can very clearly articulate a pointed TheReasonYouSuckSpeech, and state what God thinks of certain actions. Even more, Blue Fangs left enough of the body intact that [[it could make it back to Carmilla and Hector to be useful in their plan.]]

** [[PlayingWithATrope Played with]] alongside DragonInChief. Season 4 has Varney and Ratko. Varney, seems to be driving part of the plot forward, contacting others, trying to assemble people to bring back lord Dracula, because [[ICouldaBeenAContender He Coulda Been A Contender]], but then Ratko gives him a TheReasonYouSuckSpeech and proceeds to take over control of the situation in Tragovista, and assaults Trevor and Sypha [[spoiler: he dies after a tough battle, and Varney not only is shown to have been working with St. Germaine, but the angel of ''DEATH'' and the season's BigBad.]]

** Writer Warren Ellis is an atheist and ''not'' a fan of religion, and it shows. Despite Romania historically and currently being Eastern Orthodox, the religious authorities in the show are clearly the Catholic Church. They function as a secondary antagonist in the first two seasons, and are the reason Dracula launches his war in the first place. Even Dracula gets redeeming qualities, while the evil vampires can at least be interesting characters. Meanwhile only a single member of the Church ever displays ''any'' redeeming or even interesting qualities. They are almost invariably cowardly, stupid, ignorant, hateful, and cruel. The one minor exception is a priest Trevor recruits to help create holy water to repel the Night Creatures towards the end of Season 1. Said priest has no lines, and his total screen time is four seconds.
** However, this treatment does not extend to other religions or to God, who is shown to be very real but mostly hands-of in approach. Additionally, Isaac is a Sufi Muslim, whose faith is shown to be a source of clarity of mind and thought for him, and gives him the belief that God will eventually free sinners from Hell. Eventually Isaac resolves to [[spoiler:use his powers to give condemned sinners a chance to earn repentence.]]

* AndThenWhat: A running theme of the show is this question and certain character's answers or lack thereof.

** While Carmilla is the planner of the Styrian Council, Lenore, Striga, and Morgana have to eventually question the plans to catch up to the realization of the possible outcomes.

** Dealing with grief. The characters that the show focuses on all deal with pain, grief, trauma, and oppressive sadness throughout the series. The heroes are shown to deal with their pain and move past it, or at least believe that their trauma doesn't give them the right to hurt people. The villains are all steeped in their pain, lashing out at the world that they believe has wronged them, even willing to tear it all down and kill them if it means getting the vengeance that they feel they deserve.

* AlwaysChaoticEvil: Vampires, night creatures, and other assorted demons and monsters are almost always extremely sinister and dangerous. Alucard is thus far the ''only'' known supernatural being who is benevolent towards humans.

* BadassBaritone: Dracula naturally, courtesy of Creator/GrahamMcTavish. He even goes deeper in tone when going for pure menace.

* ChristianityIsCatholic: A rather egregious instance, considering that the majority of real life Romanian citizenry is Eastern Orthodox. Although it's stated that the region's clergy has become corrupt and self-righteous, so maybe they decided to make a change in decorations, too. The Bishop's smug InfoDump as Trevor leaves the Church reveals that he's planning on using Dracula's invasion to rebuild the clergy into his own vision of how the Church was supposed to be. Hell, the only reason he was sent to Gresit in the first place was a "difference in clerical discipline" between him and the Archbishop.

* CorruptChurch: Writer Warren Ellis is an atheist and ''not'' a fan of religion, and it shows. Despite Romania historically and currently being Eastern Orthodox, the religious authorities in the show are clearly the Catholic Church. They function as a secondary antagonist in the first two seasons, and are the reason Dracula launches his war in the first place. Even Dracula gets redeeming qualities, while the evil vampires can at least be interesting characters. Meanwhile only a single member of the Church ever displays ''any'' redeeming or even interesting qualities. They are almost invariably cowardly, stupid, ignorant, hateful, and cruel. The one minor exception is a priest Trevor recruits to help create holy water to repel the Night Creatures towards the end of Season 1. Said priest has no lines, and his total screen time is four seconds.

** The dealer of antiques that Isaac visits in Season 3 is polishing [[Franchise/JoJosBizarreAdventure the stone mask]]. Viewers can identify it by the forehead curl and vertical forehead ridge. (Strangely, it lacks the fangs that appear in JJBA.) As with the Star-Spawn of Cthulhu, the games have included this artifact several times already, and the show is merely continuing the tradition.
*** Also from Jojo, during the final battle against [[spoiler:Death]] in season 4, the slightly askew frame and Trevor's pose makes it look like the famous "You're approaching me?" panel from ''Stardust Crusaders''.

f* HealItWithFire: When Sypha gets slashed in the right arm during the final battle, she uses a low-intensity fire spell to cauterize the wounds.

* HealItWithFire: When Sypha gets slashed in the right arm during the final battle, she uses a low-intensity fire spell to cauterize the wounds.
* HeelRealization: [[spoiler:Dracula has a huge one when he comes to his senses after his fight with Alucard brings them to the latter's bedroom, making him realize that what started as an attempt to avenge Lisa's death has led him to try to kill the beloved son he raised alongside Lisa]].

** However, this treatment does not extend to other religions or to God, who is shown to be very real but mostly hands-of in approach. Additionally, Isaac is a Sufi Muslim, whose faith is shown to be a source of clarity of mind and thought for him. Eventually Isaac resolves to [[spoiler:use his powers to give condemned sinners a chance to earn repentence.]]

* AndThenWhat: The Captain asks this of Isaac with regards to the OmnicidalManiac plan of wiping out humanity. As the Captain notes, killing everyone would end human cruelty, but it would also end all human kindness, too. Besides, if Isaac does kill every human being, what then? This makes Isaac question his motives, with Isaac and the Captain parting on amicable terms.

** While God [[spoiler:has no love for the bishop or his corrupt cronies]], it seems fortuitous that the one man who could save the people of Gresit arrives, and in just under a day, [[spoiler:not only exposes the Bishop's evil, but helps remove the corrupt priests (namely by killing them in self-defense), saves the life of a heroic girl, trains the townsfolk to fight demons, stops the hordes of demons from taking any more lives that night, and finds Alucard]], gaining two allies to help save the people of this country.

* CorruptChurch: Writer Warren Ellis is an atheist and ''not'' a fan of religion, and it shows. Despite Romania historically and currently being Eastern Orthodox, the religious authorities in the show are clearly the Catholic Church. They function as a secondary antagonist in the first two seasons, and are the reason Dracula launches his war in the first place. Even Dracula gets redeeming qualities, while the evil vampires can at least be interesting characters. Meanwhile not a single member of the Church ever displays ''any'' redeeming or even interesting qualities. They are invariably cowardly, stupid, ignorant, hateful, and cruel.
** The one minor exception is a priest Trevor recruits to help create holy water to repel the Night Creatures towards the end of Season 1. Said priest has no lines, and his total screen time is four seconds.

** Early in Season 4, Trevor and Sypha come across a cult that apparently worships the physical incarnation of Death itself. Trevor explains that the entity they deify isn't actually any such thing (the concept of death doesn't have an avatar), but merely a primeval monster that feeds off of the energy released when living beings are snuffed out. Much later in the season, in an entirely unrelated conversation between contextually disconnected characters, Varney casually tells Ratko that the reason he keeps the Russian vampire around is because he's so good at killing, [[spoiler:and "it nourishes me." Take a wild guess who [[TheGrimReaper Varney turns out to be.]]]]

* GoryDiscretionShot: [[spoiler:When Blue Fangs "kisses" the Bishop (i.e. bites his face clean off), the scene cuts to the church's stained glass windows depicting [[RuleOfSymbolism indifferent-looking saints]].]]

* TheHeroDoesntKillTheVillainess: [[spoiler:All of the male villains in the series are killed by the heroes or other villains. This is not the case for the Council of Sisters; Lenore commits suicide via sunlight, Striga and Morana opt out of the conflict with the humans after realizing how futile it is, and Carmilla chooses to kill herself, going out on her own terms rather than dying by [[HeelFaceTurn Isaac's]] hand.]]

* ImpaledWithExtremePrejudice: Dracula has a field of skeletons on stakes in front of his castle.
** [[spoiler: Alucard does this with the corpses of Sumi and Taka, invoking his father]].

* TheFundamentalist: The bishop [[spoiler:has Lisa executed because she was using medicine instead of prayer to heal people]], and outright says that the archbishop "would prefer that life in Wallachia be kept ''simple''" (i.e. an uneducated, easily-manipulated populace). He's also utterly convinced that anyone not directly in service to the church, like the Belmonts or the Speakers, is an evil heretic that must be destroyed, and sees himself as the ultimate religious authority in Wallachia due to all the other major cities (and by extension, every priest who was his equal or superior in them) being destroyed by Dracula's forces.

* AdaptationalDiversity: Isaac and Hector go from pale (likely white) characters in the games to black and AmbiguouslyBrown in the show; Alucard also goes from [[AdaptationalSexuality being ship-teased with women in the games to bisexual in the show]]. There are also quite a few CanonForeigner minor characters of color, such as the Japanese Sumi and Taka and the black Captain in season 3, and new characters who are LGBT, like Carmilla's vampire generals Morana and Striga, who are in a relationship.

** When Isaac reveals that a raiding party's death was likely caused by Alucard. ''And that there was a Belmont with him''. Godbrand doesn't get why that's an issue, but ''Carmilla'' buries him in expletives [[HorrifyingTheHorror why this is indeed, a bad thing]].

** When Isaac reveals that a raiding party's death was likely caused by Alucard. ''And that there was a Belmont with him''. Godbrand doesn't get why that's an issue, but ''Carmilla'' buries him in expletives why this is indeed, a bad thing.

* OneSteveLimit: Presumably to avoid confusion with BigBad Vlad Dracula Tepes, the ruler of Wallachia (UsefulNotes/VladTheImpaler, the [[CelebrityParadox namesake for the literary Dracula]]) is never named.

** Dealing with grief. The characters that the show focuses on all deal with pain, grief, trauma, and oppressive sadness throughout the series. The heroes are shown to deal with their pain and move past it, or at least believe that their trauma doesn't give them the right to hurt people. The villains are all steeped in their pain, lashing out at the world that they believe has wronged them, even willing to tear it all down and KillEmAll if it means getting the vengeance that they feel they deserve.

* ActionBomb: Any unholy being or beast struck with the spiked tip of the [[IconicItem Belmont]] [[ChainPain Morningstar]] gets involuntarily turned into this, even Dracula himself (though he is a singular case of being able to ''survive'' such a strike). Trevor tactically uses this to light off vampires or hell-beasts amongst a formation of them to cause SplashDamage.