“The tide of history flows towards me.  If I delay, Fortuna will find another man to kiss.” - Cesare Borgia

“I could not stop thinking about you.  What you have done for me.  Who you are to me.” - Lucrezia Borgia

Carnival of Souls (1962) dir. Herk Harvey

Why’d you spill yer beans?

Maria Renard by Ayami Kojima for Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (the Dracula X ~Nocturne in the Moonlight~ Art Works included artbook)

Maria Renard By Mindy Lee

Subscribers on Twitter asked me to draw a young Tera with baby Maria. I really liked the idea 🥰

thinking about...them

Okay, Now I Can Talk About Annette's Vodou

Sike! I have to detour through Maria's summoning first. Spoilers for Nocturne will be said here so please stop reading from here if you haven't finished the show.

I know I watched the trailers and saw her summoning birds and thought it was cool but it still took me aback to see it in the show. And I think it's because, for one, knowing that her mother was a speaker made me question why she didn't know speaker magic and, for two, it was the first set of magic that needed a not-plot-relevant explanation for how it works. In the first show, the only times we got explanations for the magic was when something big was happening and the explanations served as part of the setup such as Doctor Saint Germain in the Multiverse of Madness and The Parent Trap: Alucard's Nightmare Editon. For Maria, there wasn't a plot reason for her powers being explained, it just seemed like the show had to provide one because the question was gonna be asked as we were watching. After all, she was summoning animals from somewhere and no other character we have seen had powers to teleport beings from one place to another so casually. Okay, so we have a daughter of a speaker magician who doesn't use speaker magic and we know that her daddy is definitely not capable of teaching it to her so what gives, right? Thus the show (read writers) felt compelled to break a convention from the first show and give us an explanation so that we could understand Maria's abilities and introduce the existence of other realms- something that was introduced in the first Castlevania via Saint Germain: Into The Germainer-verse. And that's fine, nothing too complicated, her relationship with the animals she summons seems to be something both originating from her magic and also from her using them in every day life. Cool! The alternate realm even has a name: the Other World. Alrighty, so I'm certain that it's that simple and we won't need anything else to be explained.

Except there is... turns out that the Otherworld is part of Celtic/Gaelic/Britonic myth which would explain why Maria's powers are different than her mother's as they most likely stem from her father's side of the family. An odd thing to leave out, no? I almost thought it was like Forgemastery where it was a Castlevania original form of magic. A small dive into the native roots of her magic could have added a bit more to her character and have the double effect of prepping us up mentally for Annette's Vodou especially since the two were directly compared but also to help showcase just how different Vodou is from people's traditional views on faith and magic.

Now I should say that my understanding of Vodou is coming from being an outsider to the faith but still connected to it culturally due to my ancestry, upbringing, hearing stories, etc., and then having to fill in the blanks with some research. This isn't gonna be accurate Vodou info because we're talking about a faith with three major variants that all have been pretty secretive for most of their existence due to religious oppression, demonization, and centuries-long attempts at exploiting and capitalizing on their "exoticness". So with all that said, take what I say with a good amount of salt.

Edouard says that Maria's Otherworld sounds like Annette's ancestral plain which is right in the sense that there is AN ancestral plain similar to the Otherworld. AN as in one because, in Vodou, there's multiple "nations" or families of spirits, with each spirit behaving and acting differently in some accordance to the nation they're in. The first red flage here is that the ancestral plain we see is pretty ambiguous and is just a gaggle of spirits in some ethereal place and the spirits themselves are mostly just diversely colored shadows save for Annette's mambo (teacher), Cecille. The next red flag is that Annette's magic is her own. In Vodou, powers are given by the spirits themselves, there's no level of spiritual genetics that can just imbue you with magical ability. Why? Because a major lesson in Vodou is that our strength comes from those who came before us and we can use them to support us as long as we reach out to them. Removing that aspect of Vodou from the equation just turns Annette's magic in regualr magic but with some Haitian flavor on it. And all of this is made most apparent than the biggest red flag...

THEY BROKE PAPA LEGBA'S NECK!?

So, Papa Legba is one of the most beloved of Lwa. First of all, you can't do much without him being involved as you have to talk to him first. Have you ever lived in a neighborhood and there's this gentle old man always sitting at his porch whose basically everybody's grampa? That's Papa Legba and his "house" is the entirety of the lwa nations (although he's considered to be from the Rada nation, one of the major nations I mentioned earlier). But he ain't no slouch and to cross him is to play one of the biggest FAFO games in your life. He's the head guard of all crossroads, doorways, etc., so him being summoned to deal with a portal to Hell and Forgemastery machine sounds appropriate but who thought it was a good idea to have him die? Is he dead? Just... why? How? Can spirits just die now? Ugh... on top of that, they could have just had him possess her. Usually, when Vodou practitioners want something from a lwa, the lwa can only interact physically through a human body so a rite is performed for the lwa to "dance in the head" of a trained practitioner who personally works with them. I can understand cutting corners in the show so that all Annette has to do is focus and call the name of a lwa but this would have been cool to see, allows greater focus on Annette, and allows you to have Papa Legba there without doing him dirtier than what American Horror Story did to him by having him just stand around until his neck gets turned intoa tetris piece.

You can see why I had to take this long to get to my main point, right? The first Castlevania used the straightforwardness of their magic to great effect but Nocturne introduced two new forms of magic with rocky starts because they don't match the formula established by the first set of magic. I hope that we get to see better representation of both.

The summoner

warmup

Queen Helaena Targaryen and Dreamfyre

Queen Helaena “The Sweet” Targaryen

By: yanjinsq

"Jaehaera & Aegon III grown up modern AU"

High school girl & College boy Relationship

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fc : Kiki hertz & Hugh Laughton-scott

Credits: @_noxirae (Twitter)

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