Table of Contents:
Personal Opinion on the overall series
I thought it was gonna be generic evil with mass slaughter immediately, but no. Dracula gave them one whole year after his wife’s brutal death at their hands. That wasn’t a genocide as his son wrongfully called it, but a declaration of war. The first episode of Season 2, Dracula even refers to it as war.
As is rightfully pointed out numerous times in Season 1, nobody spoke out against his wife being burned at the stake when it was happening and the idea of letting it go seems totally hollow. Dracula and Lisa seemed to have quite a happy life with Adrian Tepes / Alucard before the evil humans ruined it. Why shouldn’t they be punished for their horrible behavior? It isn’t even an indiscriminate slaughter. Dracula told them what would happen, he gave them a full year, and they go and celebrate the brutal murder of his wife a year after they did it insulting her memory of helping these ungrateful people with her medical skills and instigating further hatred by Dracula. Did anyone speak out against this celebration? Doesn’t seem like it. That’s after nobody spoke out against her being burned at the stake.
Now, let us get to the actual war – as it is not genocide – and what it entails. Dracula declared that humans must leave Wallachia or they’ll suffer for what they did to his wife. This is justified because the people of Wallachia were either supporting her brutal execution or being complicit in it. This is a completely reasonable response and request after what they did. They had a year to pack their bags and didn’t listen at all. The Church even got rid of their few lines of defense like the Belmont family sometime prior to these tragic events. When the actual war begins, Dracula made a big show of warning them before reigning fire on them and this was a year after giving them a warning. Ah! But what about the children? That’s obviously their parents faults. After all, Dracula made his war declaration official and everyone knew about it, therefore it is the parents of these children are primarily at fault for failing their children at being good parents.
Ah, but I hear some of you already in the comments saying something along the lines of: “Surely you’re not serious! Dracula summoned evil demons! What he’s doing is awful!” Unfortunately, following the very definitions of Just War Theory as made by Saint Augustine, which Christians for millennia have followed, shows that what Dracula is doing is entirely justified by Christian morality; that is, so long as Dracula and the demons believe that God is real and they feel what they’re doing is justified by God, then everything they do is justified. St. Augustine’s Just War Theory, still followed today in real life by even secular countries, is: “Violence and its consequences are ethically neutral — not evil” and “Christ is concerned with the political order of man” therefore anything a Christian does to another person in times of war is justified so long as they truly feel the Abrahamic God justifies it. So long as Dracula and the demons believe God exists in the Christian context, then they’re nominal Christians and therefore murdering and slaughtering innocents is ethically neutral according to Christian doctrine and not evil.
Aha! But what about Christ being concerned with the Political Order of humankind? Well, thankfully, episode 4 of Season 1 clears this up. The demons can enter the Church and the reason is that the Abrahamic God abandoned the people of Wallachia to their fate for having killed Dracula’s wife who was an innocent. Thus, the qualified authority of Jesus Christ himself and the Abrahamic God has sanctioned and justified Dracula’s revenge against the human race. Therefore, under Divine Command Theory, which is supported fastidiously by the Church and Christian theology itself, what Dracula is doing is entirely ethically justified under Christian theology because the Abrahamic God has sanctioned it as allowed.
Yet, some of you may still make angry retorts along the lines of “This is bs! God would never allow murdering innocent people!” Well, actually, the Abrahamic God is mostly concerned with 1. Spreading the faith and 2. Saving the eternal souls of humanity by sending them to heaven. Dracula is actually spreading the faith of Christianity by warring against humanity, thus causing humans to believe even more strongly in the Christian faith and thus Dracula is doing the humble job of spreading the good news of Jesus Christ far better than the Church ever could. After Dracula kills them, with their faith in Jesus Christ being the strongest its ever been when a demon horde comes to slaughter them, they’re instantly being sent to heaven instead of condemned to hell. So actually, Dracula slaughtering these people is saving their eternal souls from damnation in hellfire forever and ever because they’re placing all their faith in God at their moment of death instead of being fully condemned and abandoned by God at their moment of death. They’re dying for their faith in Jesus Christ as a test of faith given to them by Dracula.
Honestly, I think Dracula is such a wonderful and heroic person to have worked so hard for the Christian faithful to send their eternal souls to heaven. Instead of discriminating him and disparaging him with hate like they did his poor wife whom they’re entirely responsible for the death of, they should be more grateful and thank Dracula for all the wonderful activities that he’s done to send their eternal souls to heaven. They should thank him and celebrate his commitment to showing them the way to Jesus Christ. It goes to show what horrible propaganda about blood-sucking will do; after all, vampire blood-sucking and demons eating humans is not ethically different from the Christian faithful eating the literal blood and body of Jesus at any Christian Mass as per transubstantiation. The only tragedy of Castlevania is that more people aren’t appreciative of Dracula sending the Christian faithful to heaven!
Good point
One thing I would like to point out. Dracula did say that he was going to destroy Wallachia but it was clear to many, including Alucard, the two humans Dracula kept close, and Carmila that Dracula was not going to stop with just Wallachia and was gunning for the rest of humanity. He was using the war against Wallachia to delude himself into acting out his death wish he gained after the death of his wife and to act on just how fed up he was with humanity.
If you go back and re-watch scenes where Dracula is confiding in someone he considers trustworthy, the two humans he kept with him or with his son, he always uses the term human or humanity when describing who he was going to attack instead of Wallachia. He also got angry with or gave non-answers to anyone who questioned him on how he was planning to feed the vampires after the war was said and done. This was him all but saying he had no plan and that everyone, including himself, would starve. When Alucard confronted him with the idea of hunting down the people responsible for Lisa’s death Dracula made it clear that “they will all pay.”
It was stated in the anime that Dracula needed one year to summon up his army justifying him giving his one year warning to Wallachia. He did not care if they ran away, his army was going to hunt them down anyway.
Nice article though. I enjoyed it.
This is false. He makes it clear it was Wallachia and Wallachia CELEBRATES her death. Dracula’s war is a war of self-defense. Pure and simple. Of course he has to extinguish the evil of the world, which is humanity.
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