Church Bad

The following is a small compilation of my thoughts regarding the "Church Bad" cliche in media that's existed my entire life.

The Netflix-Castlevania writer did a clownishly bad job writing not just the series, but particularly his evil portrayal of the Church which has always served as a helpful organization in the series.

I believe the writer's hatred of Christians and overzealous desire to make Dracula, who is an evil "Lord of Darkness", a relatable character, is trashy writing and frankly, an overdone concept at this point. Inverting good and evil has been done for decades, it's boring.

There is no "added depth" or "complexity" here, it's simply an inversion: instead of Dracula being evil, the Church is evil. It's exactly as "black-and-white" as it's always been. So no, the writer does not get credit for "complexity".

Producer "Kevin Kolde" weakly defended the show's writing, "emphasizing a desire to explore darker themes within the fantasy genre."

What does that even mean?

What are these "Darker themes" that would be inexplorable by not portraying the Church as a cartoonishly evil organization?

He wouldn't be able to answer that question, because there are no "darker themes". So the adaptation is a simple inversion of Good and Evil for the sake of it. "Darker themes" is code for "I hate Christians."

The first thing I ever heard about Netflix-Castlevania was that the Cross scares vampires not because it's a symbol of Christ, the ultimate Good, but because "their eyes don't process right angles well". This was praised as good writing by midwits pesumably because it discards the religious reason and replaces it with, what? A fantasy-science reason. It's not *actual* science, right? Is there some IRL study that suggests vampires aren't good at seeing right-angles? I don't think there is.

What this does, beyond being a stupid attempt to deny Christ's divinity even in a work of fiction, is also water-down the identity of vampires. Evil creatures of the night? No, they're just heckin' chompy bois who just like to drink blood and aren't good at looking at right-angles. They're just like you and I. Taking away a weakness, even if you're replacing it with something else, alters the identity of the character. Changing the vampire from a creature repelled by the thought of God, to just being geometrically-challenged isn't just a single stupid and unnecessary change, it introduces a domino-effect of changes both inside the character and in his surroundings.

And it is worth stressing that the change is unnecessary. Crosses repel vampires. Why? It's a symbol of Christ, they don't like God, they fear and hate Him because they're evil creatures. There's your lore. Why change it? "I just really think it'd be cool if they hated right-angles"?

Anti-theists and anti-Christians, which the writers of Netflix-Castlevania transparently are, aren't suited for writing stories having to deal with Christianity. That's like, what, asking a Black Hebrew Israelite to write a story about how much they love Ashkenazi Jews. Doesn't work.

Throw a stone and you'll hit the "Church Bad" cliche. A complete 180 from historic and modern reality, the Church is always just up to no good in Antitheist fiction. I guess that divorce from reality is one way that it can be considered "fresh", but that's being generous since it's not the intent

Anti-Christian writers like Netflixvania's aren't just asking "What if Superman was bad?" which would already be exhausting, they actually do consider Christians bad in real life and express it in their writing.

And what does it produce? "Halp, I can't see right-angles!" Wow that's so fucking fascinating.

On the forums for the Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night game(good game), a user called purifyweirdshard listed his grievances with the show's anti-religious writing. It's much more than *I* could write about the show, since I'm never going to watch it. From what he's written, I know I made the right decision. Here's an excerpt from his post:

Treatment of religion - the sentiment may as well be that "sure God is real/out there, he just doesn't care". Everybody is in/goes to Hell, so the characters are figuring (on screen, through dialogue presented to us) that they may as well embrace sin. It's a reflection of what the writer feels about life (the most "atheist" way to write something would be that yeah sure God is real, but he has abandoned you. Eat shit). Not a whole lot to do with Castlevania's portrayal of all that, though.

Lisa *could* be in Hell simply because she didn't believe in Christ, or any/whatever other religion the show would propose as the "real" one, but I'd bet good money no religions are going to be propped up in any kind of biased way like that. She was the closest thing to a truly good and pure character we've got, and her insistence was that Dracula was more dangerous than Satan because "Dracula is real". Sypha would be next (originally a character raised by the church), and in this she's just a scholar who doesn't particularly adhere to anything but vaguely what I've described;. as said by her in conversation, some of the humans on Earth who allegedly represented God were good people i.e. Yeshua and Mohammad, but God is bad and left us.

Pretty wild how that may be the case about "no Satan", but otherwise everything is all about Hell. What we're left with is a situation where no God is real (or good, or relevant), but all Hells are. Why this is, is to most easily push a humanist view. Meaning - humans are the only source of good that can/does matter. Everything else is more a pure evil or neutral. This is fundamentally not the case in Castlevania, but the writer is again known for pushing this in his works.

Most specifically, as you may have heard, the canon background for CV3 is that the church (eastern Orthodox, as the JP manual says specifically) sent out hunters to try to take care of Dracula. Sypha was among them, as she was raised there among the monks in secret after she survived witch trials set on by Carmilla's influence (yes, Carmilla, not the church themselves) and those hunters failed. The people at that point needed to turn to a family that they were afraid of, who were socially exiled (but not explicitly "excommunicated"), so the church approaches Trevor Belmont and asks him for help. Ellis felt that magic-users working with the church didn't make sense to him, so he separated them to make the church a conglomerate villain. The implications of this change are that it doesn't extend to only Sypha, but any Belnades in the future. I guess Yoko will be a modern day gypsy person or something?

The unnecessary part to all of this is how *there are zero positive religious characters*. Religion is monolithic bad-ness with no exceptions, to a comedic degree. There isn't a character practicing the most prominent religion (the ignorant Christianity) who has shown us any amount of on-screen redeemable quality. They are all only ignorant, have died or are overtly evil - or perhaps were okay previously and convert to a different evil (the Hell monks in Lindenfeld). A case used to exist in our minds for the season 1 priest who blessed the holy water off-screen, as Trevor makes a single comment on "ha, guess that guy was really ordained" or some such. The issue with this is, in season 2, the main antagonist of the beginning of the show, the incredibly dickish bishop (the one who presides over burning Lisa), blesses an entire river as a zombie/Innocent Devil. This goes to show that the season 1 "good priest" was merely, if anything, able to do it because he knew the necessary neutral non-holy spell to do it, from being ordained - not that he was a "good believer" or something. If a zombie can do it, the method of which it is done is apparently neutral. Probably an Enochian spell, as the series hints.

Really good post. Also maybe worth noting that Satan does in fact exist in the Castlevania games if you care more about canon than the Netflixvania writers. I don't really care too much about canon in general. But the suggestion that Satan isn't real obviously is just another attempt to establish "Christianity definitely isn't the right religion" in Netflixvania.

Anyway, I've taken up enough of your precious time. I'm not impressed with "Church Bad" and neither should you be. It's not "nuanced", it's not complex, it's the same pop-culture Crucible-driven schlock that's existed before either of us were born and it's only gotten worse.

Dehumanizing Christians or attempting to vilify Christianity isn't only wrong, it makes for ugly, shitty, boring stories.