short version:
"your differing opinion is stupid"
good talk
long version:
This concept has not been touched on in the show before this. There were no rules set up for it.
-whip kills night creatures, explicitly stated to be denizens of hell which in this universe is an actual place, because it's consecrated and not because it has a soul tainted with vampirism willingly giving it the power to harm demonic entities like it is in the games
-holy water also harms night creatures for the same premise of reason
using the collaborative information of the above, it can be very reasonably inferred with considerable confidence that items or substances consecrated or blessed by some source of faith in a holy and divine manner, in the case of the show this applies to at LEAST christianity
as the show never outright confirms or denies the existence of the abrahamic god or the christian satan (or any deity really), but does confirm the existence of hell (which could very well simply be an underworld of the demonic races, but given its strong similarities to dante's hell in S3 i'm on the fence on this one), it can also be reasonably assumed that clearly some form of "divine" power does exist but may simply be powered by faith or belief and this is what does the job
so we have multiple cases of items outright confirmed to be blessed in some fashion with some form of holy power which harms and repels anything unholy or demonic, this is what i'll call Point 1
now fast forward to the S1 bishop
we see him tell bluefangs that demons cannot enter a house of god
now, obviously the bishop was an evil bastard who cannot be trusted to be a man of true belief and he shouldn't entirely take him at his word, but the immediacy with which he refers to this suggests that the very idea of unholy creatures entering a church is something unheard-of -- presumably because, like the above instances, a church is consecrated ground and would kill demons just as well as a blessed whip
bluefangs also seems to confirm this premise by responding that said church is "an empty box"
now obviously he could just as easily be mocking the bishop and i think largely this is what he's doing, but with all the above information i also choose to believe there's a small ring of truth to the statement, in that yes, in a non-horrifyingly-corrupt setting a demon entering a "true" church's grounds would be cause for pain and/or death but the absence of any god in that particular church (due to the actions of the bishop "making [god] puke" causing any former holiness of the site to dry up like a well in the desert) eliminates this risk
the above is very much a bit of a stretch and i'm relying on it because it just happens to enforce my interpretation, but i also do willingly concede it's just as likely to be true that bluefangs was simply mocking the bishop's empty words
the above about the "no demons in church" clause of reality is Point 2
under the previous inferences and assumptions (which i'd like to reiterate aren't entirely unreasonable or ill-founded, but i'm also not claiming them as the sole interpretation either), we have established "world rules" for the following, with varying degrees of how "set" they are within the world:
-objects can be blessed/consecrated with holy power which can cause significant harm to any force of dark or demonic alignment
-some form of underworld exists as a literal plane of reality, regardless of whether or not it's literally the christian hell or is simply called that
-all night creatures are, in essence, demonic creatures/souls that come from that underworld
-there exists some form of opposing force of divine or holy power, regardless of whether or not it's literally the abrahamic god or is simply called that
-demonic entities cannot be in the direct presence of any object or place which has such consecration or blessing without risking harm to themselves
-the lack of any concrete confirmation or denial of the existences of any god or satan figures suggests these forces may simply be freefloating and the act of genuine belief in blessing is what gives things their power, but once they're imbued with it they may not necessarily be bound to being USED solely by those of belief (as trevor's not exactly a godly man, but can still use the whips just fine), unless something occurs which robs them of that power (see: bluefangs in church)
now, onto the bishop zombie blessing the river
let's look at the bishop
prior to death and reanimation:-false prophet, cares only about furthering his own power and ambitions
-doesn't give two shits about anyone but himself and will step on anyone he feels necessary to achieve the above
-cannot be considered a "true" man of faith as his motivations are selfish and his priestly exterior just a facade
-"believes" certain things of his faith system, but only insofar as to whether they directly benefit him (see examples below)
+++++doesn't "believe" demons can enter a church until he himself is hiding in one alone, fuck everyone else outside
+++++puts on airs of being a genuine man of the cloth, until he's alone and needs to monologue or until someone (trevor) calls him out on his bullshit
+++++had an innocent executed because she threatened his position, but only justified it as "god's will, she's a witch" when in the presence of others
-every word that quotes, refers to, or deals with any aspect of his faith, the god he claims, or scripture is entirely lip service and empty words which lack any of the belief necessary to actually have any power (unrelated reference, gabula out-praying the paladin in lords of shit 2's epic rap battle is actually a good example of this principle, if anyone needs a reference of what i mean illustrated more easily than my wordiness probably is)
after death and reanimation:-bishop is now an unholy night creature in being resurrected as a zombie
-as a night creature, he is now subject to all of the world rules i've explained and they actually get this mostly right as the blessed river also burns him
now this is where the fucking problem isyou have, first and FOREmost, a zombie saying a prayer of consecration and blessing an entire river into a metric fuckload of monster-b-gone juice
beyond that, you have the bigger issue: a zombie made from a man who was a false prophet in every sense of the word, had no true belief or faith in any god but his own avarice, regularly spread falsehoods and lies and plenty of empty words citing scripture and god and holiness he never meant to further his own political position and power over the peasant class...and this is the zombie that is
successfully consecrating holy waterthis, to me, is a massive issue because it's more or less saying one of two thing:
-either the bishop actually did in the deepest cockles of his black little heart believe in god and somehow had enough embers of real faith to make the shit happen
-faith doesn't actually fucking matter and anyone who knows the right words and can say them in the right order can perform what wouldn't be unfair to call miracles
and neither one of these makes any goddamn sense considering all the other instances of this subject matter in the show that contradict both outcomes
if knowing the words is all that matters, then why the fuck aren't the heroes just learning and consecrating literally everything down to a shitload of pebbles that you can just toss at a demon and instantly kill it? i'm sure if it were that easy they'd have found something about it in the belmont library and the importance of the whips being consecrated wouldn't matter as much
if the bishop DOES still somehow have enough real faith left in his now-demonic shambling corpse to pull off a literal miracle, then what was the purpose of going WELL above and beyond to pound "the church is bad, and this guy is just everything bad about it (barring the pedo shit, we had to wait another two seasons for that, ugh) wrapped up in one package LOOK GUYS HE'S A PRIEST AND HE'S FUCKING
EVIL AS SHIT" into our heads the entire first season
so since neither "explanation" makes any sense lined up against other instances of same/similar material extrapolated in the show, the idea of a zombie of a bishop who was about the most faithless son of a bitch you could hope to meet successfully managing to turn an ENTIRE RIVER into holy water on demand really strikes me as a noticeable moment of "hold up a second" in the series amidst the MANY others
(personally i think they just really wanted to upsell that "yeah, carmilla can do THINGS and she's MILDLY competent and formulates BRILLIANT plans using logic a grade-schooler could come up with" aspect and didn't put much thought into how they did it and thought the bishop being zombified would be a cool gatcha moment, but that's just me)
so yeah, taking all the above into consideration, which i think even if you don't agree with whether or not my points really count as "rules" for the world there's enough there to at least be cause for further discussion, and considering all of the above explicitly uses material from the show to draw connections and contradictions from,
you can hopefully see why "well the games did it that way" didn't exactly strike me as much more than a handwave that contributed practically nothing and addressed no elements of what i was talking aboutUntil we saw a demon monster using holy magic, people say that makes no sense, we say that's right out of the games... Acting like this has no bearing because the show is different is just... Stupid. That's like saying "how come he's using a whip?". And lambasting when someone says it's because they did in the games.
so as you'll now clearly be able to tell, i actually have fucking reasons and entire breakdowns that form the bases for opinions i have, and i'm not just making shit up on the fly or not having any kind of rationale for what i think
i might have been able to explain all this thought process much sooner if i hadn't immediately had my shit jumped, but i'll just assume you've read all that business and know at least up until now why i'd not been making lengthy breakdown posts like this for things
is a lot of my speculation probably reading too far into a script that only barely approaches such levels of depth at its best? most likely, but as cronq put it very well just a few posts ago -- i find it fun, and it's kind of the point of threads and discussions like this
hell, i don't even care whether or not anyone even AGREES with this whole big thought process, that's y'all's right to decide yourselves, but to fucking sit there and call something i've said stupid on the faulty-at-best assumption that i'm just being contrarian for the sake of it or whatever you thought?
that, to me, seems a
hell of a lot more stupid, right up there with the idea that if something isn't plainly and directly stated verbatim then it obviously cannot exist or have
potential narrative elements suggesting the larger premise without needing to hand it to audiences on a plate (not that i'm saying warren is necessarily doing this with CV, mind you, but you jumped pretty fucking immediately to putting words in my mouth (eRmAhGeRd WhY bELmOnt UsE wHiP) under this very premise)
now on a significantly more pleasant note:
MariaXStriga&Morana
yes
MariaXLenore
a shitload more yes