#castlevania emmanuel

[sepublic]

Anyhow, in lieu of a recent post, I kinda wanna apply it to another fandom and say this is the reason why I don't think Emmanuel is gonna redeem himself next season, not necessarily at least. Like yeah sure he FEELS bad but to him this is a test from God or whatever so that justifies everything.

He thinks he's someone who accounts for the long-term, unlike these revolutionaries who think only about improving their short-term mortal lives, and thus forsake their long-term afterlife in heaven in the process. Emmanuel think he's long-term and he's gonna outmaneuver Erzsebet, who will be so caught up in using his night creatures to crush the rebellion that she'll fail to account for what happens afterwards when Emmanuel can just turn on her. He thinks he's fucking Solomon with the ring that can control demons.

Emmanuel is just gonna bitch and moan and weep about all the sacrifices he's making but it's the GOOD kind of suffering, like how Christ had to suffer and make sacrifices, because it's a test from God. He compared himself to Abraham and he was even rewarded with a ram in Tera for his devotion!!! So he could absolutely interpret this as proof he's on the right path and double down.

Emmanuel is such a mediocre father. It's heartbreaking that for all of her teenage rage and rebellion, Maria still earnestly cares for him once she finds out he's her dad, she risks it all in trusting him because surely her own dad will come around for her, and she cares!!! She cares for family!!! And then Maria is burned so hard for that trust, she saw Emmanuel weep about sacrificing her and then do it anyway. Maria lost her own mother, a parent who actually cared, because she dared to assume her dad had the same basic decency as Tera did. She's gonna know better, the poor girl... But at what cost?

And Emmanuel is gonna be Oh Woe Is Me!!! when he sees what his beloved has become. But in the end his Christian savior complex matters more than anything else, even if he DOES care for other things. Because if he truly cared for Maria from the start, he'd have quit his position to focus on raising his daughter. But instead he continued to neglect her, and then endanger her with his night creatures, and then finally outright sacrifice Maria. Because being the Christian savior who saves everyone's immortal souls, at the low cost of their mortal lives, matters more. Like god he must've had a savior complex about providing Tera hospitality when they first met.

"You're not gonna spare them, are you?" Shut the fuck up Emmanuel you're gonna cry yourself to sleep over this and then the next morning decide that you've fulfilled your daily Catholic Guilt quota and can go back to being a dickhead because you feel bad so obviously that proves you're a good person right???

And from a meta standpoint, I suspect Emmanuel is the show's version of Shaft, who was a major villain who died resurrecting Dracula and successfully inflicted real damage against the Belmonts for like two hundred years. The similarities between Emmanuel and Shaft are too many and obvious, and it'd be redundant to introduce Shaft when Emmanuel is right there as the evil priest. I suspect they changed his name because Shaft has juvenile connotations in English that the Japanese creators who came up with Shaft weren't aware of, especially when pulling from the German language.

Granted, Isaac changed quite a bit from his game counterpart, as someone who DID die resurrecting Dracula in the source material; But otherwise, the creative liberties is further support for Emmanuel being Shaft in spite of the differences. I don't think Emmanuel will start worshipping Dracula as a coping method; The show kinda burned the bridge with Dracula as a villain, and there isn't really a meaningful connection nor reason for Emmanuel to latch onto that guy in particular.

More likely, he'll latch onto the demon (probably Galamoth) who gave him the forgemaster machine, and that demon will read Emmanuel like an open book -an even easier read than the instruction manual for the machine it provided- and feed into his savior complex, into his self-perception of himself as a tortured and misunderstood genius or some shit. The demon will stroke Emmanuel's ego as salve after the humiliation of S1's finale, and Emmanuel is gonna snort it like copium until he's convinced this demon is an asset sent by God to assist him; Just as Solomon's demons were. He's gonna be played like a fiddle by some higher demon AGAIN be shocked about it. Again.