How and Why
I Trashed the Original Castlevania Timeline

To set the tone for this page, let me state for the third time (apologies to those who read it the first two times and don't care to again) that it was only some time after I became Obsessed with Castlevania and began writing fan-fiction about it that I found the original canonical Castlevania timeline. And when I did, I found that I had already pretty much trashed it. However, by that time, I really didn't care too terribly much about this fact, and just kept on with what I was doing.

And this page is devoted, not to the results, but to my ramblings about just how and why it happened, and the nature of the relationship of fanfiction to its source material in general. In the writing of it, I also meandered into the story of my fanfiction writing career through the years. I hope it's at least an entertaining read, but if you prefer, you can skip straight to the Castlevania part.

To begin with, let me back up a little---okay, a lot---to my very first fanfic-writing video game obsession. It was Metroid. I was... probably no more than eight. You are not going to see any of that fanfic on this site because, looking back on it from the lofty vantage point of nearly 22, it was really dumb stuff. Pretty good for a little kid, tho. Anyway, what I'm getting to for the sake of my point is that I was well into the story when my brother solved Metroid, thus dropping the bomb on me that Samus Aran was in fact a woman. These days, I think that fact is really cool, but then, it caused me no end of stress. If Samus was a woman, they should have let me know from the start, gosh darnit! And now, all of a sudden, my stories were all wrong!

It caused me no end of stress because the game was canonical to me. If I was writing about Metroid, then anything Metroid said had to be true in my story-world.

What I didn't realize at the time was, it didn't have to be. It was not until the last few years that I realized that.

During my early-to-mid teens I took a long hiatus from fanfic-writing, the result of my abuse at the hands of a couple of really horrible English classes. It was Final Fantasy 3 that at last lured me out of my dark hole of despair and back into the light of active fan-fiction authorship. And once again, I was impatient and started writing about FF3 long before I finished it. Well, actually the sad fact is that I never did finish FF3 (I blame the Sketch glitch! And the fact that the World of Ruin didn't have nearly as many cool story scenes...). However, this was a problem, because I still considered the game canonical. At last, I decided the spoilers were worth it and asked some friends who had solved the game enough questions about the later bits and the ending to avoid trouble. ("So, did the world go back to how it was, or stay in the World of Ruin configuration, or what?" "Um... they didn't say.")

After that, however, things started to get really weird. I transitioned from FF3 into Battle Arena Toshinden, and the great thing about writing about fighting games is that they don't have much in the way of story on their own, so you can pretty much do whatever you want. And oh, boy, did I. I was also into Highlander at the time, and immediately mashed the two together. Then I met my best-friend-to-be, Kati, who had some Marvel superhero fanfiction going. So we mashed my mashed-together fanfic universe together with hers and came up with the Externalverse. Looking back on the stories now, I am forced to wonder "What was this all about??", but it was a ton of fun to write them.

Another noteworthy thing about the Externalverse with regards to the subject at hand is that it contained a few divergent timelines. In a few places, the story could go one of two ways, and we wrote them both, saying that each solution had its own Alternate Universe in which it had occurred. This turned out to be a very useful concept in our next phase, Fushigi Yuugi. If you know anything about our Fushigi Yuugi fanfiction, you know that the original-as-canonical concept was out the window. In fact, it was a self-conscious alt-verse rewrite.

Perhaps after swinging wide in both directions, I was able to finally land at a happy medium in the middle. When Kati and I went our separate authorial ways and I wrote my Rurouni Kenshin fanfiction, I decided to treat the original as generally canonical, because unlike Battle Arena Toshinden, it was a very tightly constructed story, and unlike Fushigi Yuugi, I was actually satisfied with the original and had no reason to write counter to it. However, not quite all the details fell into place. For example, there's a final story arc that is generally accepted as canon but never made it into the Rurouni Kenshin TV episodes. I just couldn't get it to see if my story fit with it. And there were details that were important to my story that may not have been entirely accurate. However, I suppose the freewheeling style of the previous obsessions had given me the freedom I needed to simply not worry about it.

(Note, BTW that although I mention them in past tense, I still am writing the Fushigi Yuugi and Rurouni Kenshin fic. But I mention them in this order because the level of "canon" consideration was decided in the conception phase, which was pretty much done before I moved on to the next obsession.)

And now, to finally come to the Castlevania part!

That was pretty much what happened with Castlevania, too. I didn't set out with the intention of making something different from the original Castlevania story, it just turned out that way, and I just didn't worry about it. At this point, Alternate Universes are still a useful concept because they're always an easy way to explain things. But I generally don't think of my stories as an alternate universe. They're just different. I just "agree to disagree" with the original timeline.

And there is nothing wrong with this. I'm much more into writing fan-fiction than reading it, but in my opinion, that is a fan-author's perogative. Recently, the online comics magazine Sequential Tart published an excellent article that dealt with fan-fiction and fan-art, and spoke of its relation to folklore. No single person or corporate entity wrote Beowulf as we read it now. People told it over and over with their own takes on it, and---we can hope---history remembered the one everyone liked the best. We should all respect the original creators of our favorite stories, but maybe the story itself deserves for us to tell it in whatever way feels right to us, so it will have that much more material to draw on as it finds its way into the future.

However, the effects of this in my Castlevania stories are, while not so extreme that Castlevania fans reading my work would go "What the hell!?", more pronounced that the liberties I took with Rurouni Kenshin.

When I started the Castlevania fanfiction, all I had to work with was Symphony of the Night, still the crux-point of my Obsession, and a basic working knowledge of the earlier games left over from my childhood. (I actually had a Castlevania fling as a child, but of course, it was far more brainless than my current work, due to my tender age at the time.) I knew that Alucard had fought alongside Trevor long ago, and that Simon came later. Using the dates and ages provided in the Symphony of the Night manual, and inventing a certain amount on my own, I pieced together my own chain of events.

That was then. Now I own every Castlevania game ever released for the gaming systems that I own (NES, SNES, and PSX, or, game-wise, Castlevania 1-4, Dracula X, and Symphony), and am desirous of a Gameboy Advance so that I can buy even more of them. None of them contain much to contradict my timeline or my story (unfortunately I'm just not a skilled enough player to get to Alucard in CV3, so I haven't checked what that did for me). In fact, some of them contain information that is demonstrably false. Dracula X purports to take place in Medieval times. All other sources indicate that it happens circa 1790. That is NOT Medieval times. Since the games themselves are so equivocal, my information about the timeline mostly comes from The Castlevania Dungeon, and in places even they admit that it's a mess.

One reason I don't feel bad about disregarding the original timeline is simply that it is so muddy to start with. At one point it was asserted that Trevor Belmont was Simon Belmont's grandfather. Then it turned out he was 100 years before Simon. Guess those Belmonts had kids really late in life. And I don't know if anyone is sure whether Christopher Belmont, hero of the first two Castlevania titles for Gameboy, came before or after Simon.

More detailed information is available about the later (both chronologically and in terms of release date) Castlevania games, which I suppose makes sense since historical records for long ago are more sketchy. They even tend to say what year they occur in, and some of them take advantage of wonderful period flavor. Most of it even works. The only one that doesn't entirely hold water is Castlevania: Bloodlines, which tries to make its dates mesh with Bram Stoker's Dracula (the novel, not the movie, thank heaven) without success, especially since most people, including CV: Bloodlines, seem to assert that the story took place in its publication year of 1897, ignoring the fact that the book contains an afterword supposedly penned 7 years after the events.

The idea of Dracula showing up once per century, first stated in Castlevania 4, is apparently out the window as well. Simon alone seems to have fought him at least three times. In the roughly one hundred years that passed between Dracula X and the novel Dracula, the big guy showed up not once, not twice, but four times (Symphony of the Night, 10 years prior to Circle of the Moon, Circle of the Moon, and Castlevania 64, if I'm not mistaken). Of course I can understand this. They have to fit more games into the timeline somewhere, and I'm for pretty much anything that keeps Castlevania games being made.

But all that is just rambling, really. Practically all the other Castlevania games can fit in with my timeline, either because I don't contradict them, or because no one really know when and how they happened anyway.

All except one. Castlevania Legends.

Legends is chronologically the first Castlevania game, starring Sonia Belmont, who supposedly founded the Belmont clan of Vampire Hunters. However, the game supposedly takes place pretty shortly before Castlevania 3. To cap it all off, Alucard crops up in it, he and Sonia seem to have a thing, and this leads to rumors that Trevor Belmont is in fact Alucard's child.

I'll say it right now. Castlevania Legends is not canonical to my fanfiction. I love the fact that the original Belmont was a woman, but for me, the rest just fails to wash on multiple levels. Firstly, it violates the hundred-year rule. And with Simon supposedly being 100 years after Trevor, and the hundred-year rule being in place in lore and legend by that time, having put Drac down for a century one time so far just doesn't cut it. Plus, if you compare this with the age given for Dracula in Symphony of the Night, it turns out he was around for about four hundred years before there were any Belmonts to smack him down. I suppose there's no reason why that couldn't be so, but I just don't quite buy it. And frankly, the idea of Alucard being Trevor Belmont's father really hurts my head. I guess it could happen, since dhampir like Alucard have special vampire-killing abilities that can be passed along to their descendants, but again, I just don't buy that as an explanation of the Belmonts' abilities. (Not to mention how much the idea hurts Alucard-in-my-head's head.)

Since Alucard is my soulbond, I suppose it makes sense that most of my changes have to do with him. It's a Soulbonder thing; he tells me his story, and I believe him before I believe the video games. He claims that he and Trevor Belmont were pretty close the same age; in fact, Trevor may have been slightly older. Sonia was the first Belmont Vampire Hunter, but she was like, hundreds of years before that. It's also widely accepted that before helping Trevor, Alucard did put in a stint of evil-doing with his Dad, but Alucard-in-my-head swears it's not true, and it isn't just that he won't admit it.

Anyway, what it all boils down to is that I'm happy with my fan-fiction as it is, "inaccuracies" and all. I only dearly hope that by following my own heart, I don't lose my readers. Writing for a target audience is a very important skill. However, when I'm really honest with myself, I'm not being paid for writing my fan-fiction. I don't even really know if anyone will read it (especially when Alucard gives me a story sixty pages long). So, the honest truth is that I'm not really writing it for all those people who may or may not read it, I write it to satisfy myself. And even in areas other than fanfiction, I believe that if an author sacrifices satisfying him/herself for the sake of the percieved desires of the audience, nothing good can come of it.

The moral of the story is to keep your mind open when reading my Castlevania fanfiction. It may contradict some of the games; I probably know about it and have just accepted it as it is. If you want to e-mail me and complain, that's fair, but I will not be making any "corrections."

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