Also wrong.
His power revived, not his consciousness.
But see above. I'm incredibly lazy and cannot be arsed to hand over MLA citations for information I already know to be correct regardless of whether such a citation exists.
MLA is horrible and I'd never ask you to do that to yourself, though still not as bad as APA.
But Aria of Sorrow is one of the most divisive games in the whole franchise for exactly these reasons: it needlessly fucked up what was essentially up until then a given quantity, and left us with something that's poorly explained, endlessly reinterpretable, and further attempts to clarify things just wound up attempting to dig Castlevania out of that hole with a bigger shovel.
Here's my personal read on Soma, damning canon to it's convoluted and unpredictably self-contradictory self which I do not trust for many reasons (particularly since due to translation errors there are essentially two separate canons depending on which side of the Pacific you're on). I have read the canon a number of times and there is no end to the list of things that do not make a lick of real sense when held up to scrutiny (which was a HUGE flaw of the Iga era -- trying to make a unified timeline at all was a huge mistake).
Soma's power of dominance is one expression among many possible ones of Dracula's power. It is an expression that is unique to him. Graham is the first alternate "Dracula candidate" (Dracula isn't a Sith Lord after all) that we meet, and from what we understand of him, his "facet" of Dracula was his charisma and ability to sway people to do what he wants. Dmitrii essentially embodies Dracula's adaptability by being able to duplicate the powers of those around him, and Dario simply embodies the sheer raw power of Dracula as well as his rage at God. These are all relatively unimportant points of data. Maybe they help fill out a canon, but they lend zero sense of narrative, which as a writer I will stress is the ENTIRE POINT OF STORYTELLING. So. Moving on.
But let's address that narrative, because it really is great, but only if you disregard a strict interpretation of canon based on Word of Creator and instead firmly invoke Death of the Author.
Soma's physical appearance shares a LOT in common with Mathias. They dress very similarly (simply accounting for changes in fashion across a millennium). Their faces share a LOT of their basic skeletal structure: enough so that I don't think this is just Ayami Kojima is only good at drawing one type of face (that is also true though). I mean this in the sense of "change the hairstyle and color and they look like the exact same guy", which I am CERTAIN is intentional. We don't know much about Mathias, but we know a lot about Soma. And what we know about Mathias jibes with what we know of Soma --Mina is his Elisabetha and both Sorrow games go to almost PAINFUL levels of detail to communicate this (as in if they hammered that nail any harder it would have split the castle). Ergo, I'm gonna tell canon flat out that it's wrong here. Soma isn't some guy who inherited Dracula's power. Soma isn't even
Dracula's reincarnation. He's
Mathias'. 1999's result served to remove Dracula from Mathias' human equation, and Mathias is being given essentially a second chance. This is at once a very Eastern spiritualist viewpoint and one perfectly in line with the Christian New Testament; the greatest sinner has been given his greatest shot at redemption. This is also perfectly in line with Iga's preferred kind of story; those games of his which we typically regard as his best all share a theme of humanising Dracula and lending context to his actions that we can understand and empathise with. In that sense, Soma represents the ultimate culmination of what Symphony of the Night and Lament had set up: Mathias given a chance to cast aside Dracula and engage in the highest form of humanisation: becoming human again. One can easily infer that Soma's idealism and good nature represent what Mathias used to be (at least if we go by how Leon described him, which admittedly wasn't much).
The STORY BEING TOLD pretty much adds up to Mathias being reincarnated, Hindu style, for one last shot at spiritual redemption, rather than a "resume from checkpoint" which had been typical of Dracula's prior resurrections. The story's authors clearly were not aware that's what they were saying, at least what they were saying to me. Whether God is behind it or not is a matter for other debates.
Canon is GREAT. It helps explain a lot. But it's also tricky. You cannot read it like a textbook because it deprives necessary context and interpretation, especially when writing teams frequently change and have their own ideas (which was incidentally the thing Iga had been trying to clear up by enforcing a canon to begin with). The best way to understand a story is to read it, read what the author has to say and consider it, and form your own interpretations from what you've gathered. I am NOT a guy who feels that "canon" is a concept that deserves absolute loyalty, especially when I find something that makes more sense. Canon is not the be-all-end-all, not the Alpha and Omega. It's maybe an Alpha at best, but you, me, Waffle, Jorge, and everyone else who has taken the Castlevania journey represent the ACTUAL omega. What I have just spent a page writing is the result of my runthrough of this process, having played the games, read the notes, read Iga's interviews, and decided on as the interpretation that makes the most sense.
This isn't math. It doesn't all add up neatly and cleanly. It doesn't spreadsheet well (thank the gods). This is art (suck it Jack Thompson!). And art, at its core, is subjective and meant to be interpreted by its
beholder, not its author.
I respect your views, and I have also given mine. I do not believe that our views are entirely incompatible, but I also believe that to argue that further is pointless as we can never truly see eye to eye.
As a peace offering, have a dove.