Topic: Vampire Hunter D's influence on the series

[XombieMike]

Great thread. I'm a huge fan of both D and CV. I love that Yoshitaka Amano is doing poster art for Bloodstained. To me it's a special tie between Castlevania's legacy and VHD.

That Amon Saga was worth a look. Thanks for the recommendation.

[gallandryal]

D's storyline and background is exactly the same of Alucard's.

[Guy Belmont]

Also Doris Lang shares her last name with Curtis Lang, who also carry's a whip with him.

 And IGA is Wrong, as Toshiki Yamamura  came out and said  that he was pretty influenced by Hideyuki Kikuchi, soooo yeah
there's some more D in there.

[theplottwist]

And IGA is Wrong, as Toshiki Yamamura  came out and said  that he was pretty influenced by Hideyuki Kikuchi, soooo yeah
there's some more D in there.

IGA never said there wasn't anymore influence. He said the original series (by which I, personally, understand that as meaning "the three first main games") were not inspired by D, but as products came out, some inspiration was had. He revealed Alucard, but it's pretty obvious there's more, such as the one you just mentioned in Bloodlines. It's possible that Sonia was inspired on Doris Lang too, for instance.

[Guy Belmont]

IGA never said there wasn't anymore influence. He said the original series (by which I, personally, understand that as meaning "the three first main games") were not inspired by D, but as products came out, some inspiration was had. He revealed Alucard, but it's pretty obvious there's more, such as the one you just mentioned in Bloodlines. It's possible that Sonia was inspired on Doris Lang too, for instance.

Ahh  I took the Original series too mean everything that used the old gameplay before SoTn. As  that was really the rebirth or new series of gameplay. But TBH its ones thing that we'll all never know.

and yeah sonia good one.
 

[Dracula9]

D's storyline and background is exactly the same of Alucard's.

i am super late on this but this might be the single most incorrect statement i've seen on the boards in a long time

[X]

D's storyline and background is exactly the same of Alucard's.

That is a bit of a stretch. They are not exactly the same. Sure, both are Dhampyrs. Both had Dracula as their father and a human woman as their mother. And both feel strongly against the evil they partially represent. But that's.. kinda where the similarities end. I could be missing some other details since they escape me at the moment. And alucard's name -for obvious reasons- came from the movie 'Son of Dracula'.

[Dracula9]

That is a bit of a stretch. They are not exactly the same. Sure, both are Dhampyrs. Both had Dracula as their father and a human woman as their mother. And both feel strongly against the evil they partially represent. But that's.. kinda where the similarities end.

there's a reason i didn't say any more than i did--we'd be here all day if you were to actually list the differences, but for clarity's sake here're a few

-dracula in vhd is a literal diety to the point of being a cosmic force of nature
-d's conception was not "dracula loved a human woman" but vhd's dracula wanting to ascend his species so he knocked up countless human women and killed the offspring over and over until they evolved into a being with practically none of the crippling vampiric weaknesses--that being was d
-d fights all vampires rather than simply having a feud with daddy and sleeping when daddy's on vacation like alucard
-d doesn't necessarily like going full vampire but unlike alucard he doesn't really have a problem letting it out when he needs to
-alucard's around 600 or so, d's over 10,000

so already, completely different origins and character motivations

now for abilities
-d is almost cosmic-god levels of OP like his father late in the novels, to the point of resisting being erased from reality via manipulation of akashic records and other reality-warping forces

...^this is all i need to bring up, really 

[X]

D9: Ouch! That's a whole lotta info I didn't know. I only ever saw both animated movies so I'm guessing all that info came from the books.

[Aiddon]

There's a decent argument to be made that if D was never written Castlevania (and a lot of vampire fiction in general) would never exist. The thing is, I literally can't find an earlier work of vampire fiction in Japanese media (heck, horror fiction in general wasn't very popular in 1980s Japan). The first novel was released in 1983 with the OVA in 1985. Castlevania released 1986. Furthermore, it's not just the character of D himself as even the early games took influence from the overall Gothic Horror genre Kikuchi wrote into the series. And that's before getting into the wackier, genre-mixing bits of science fiction and fantasy.

[theplottwist]

There's a decent argument to be made that if D was never written Castlevania (and a lot of vampire fiction in general) would never exist. The thing is, I literally can't find an earlier work of vampire fiction in Japanese media (heck, horror fiction in general wasn't very popular in 1980s Japan). The first novel was released in 1983 with the OVA in 1985. Castlevania released 1986. Furthermore, it's not just the character of D himself as even the early games took influence from the overall Gothic Horror genre Kikuchi wrote into the series. And that's before getting into the wackier, genre-mixing bits of science fiction and fantasy.

IGA clarified that "the original series never took inspiration on D" (by that I'm assuming the three first main games). Although, of course, he was not part of the team that created Castlevania, I'm pretty sure he knows the development history behind it as a (former) Konami employee in charge of the franchise. He knows even who de facto created the series, but couldn't reveal this. He went on to say that later games did take inspiration on D, however.

That said, there's quite a bit of vampire media predating D in Japan. Here is the supposedly first Japanese vampire movie. Here's one later example of vampire media predating D. Dracula's name was already a thing, and this comical cartoon was quite a hit too. Not to mention actual vampire myths in Japan that are ancient.

There are Dracula novel translations into Japanese as far back as 1963, but the 1958 movie played in Japanese theaters before that.

[Dracula9]

>hammer dracula

kikuchi himself cites this and particularly lee's dracula as a major inspiration source for writing VHD, just so it's out there

[Aiddon]

kikuchi himself cites this and particularly lee's dracula as a major inspiration source for writing VHD, just so it's out there

That just comes with the territory. Hell, the most recent Blu-ray remaster of the original 1958 Hammer film used footage from a Japanese print to restore Dracula's death scene. But again, Dracula and the horror genre (as said by Kikuchi himself) was very niche in Japan in the eighties. It's why most Japanese horror media you find prior is a bunch of B-film junk. It's also why Kikuchi threw in a bunch of sci-fi, fantasy, and spaghetti western elements into the VHD series so it could sell. Kinda weird considering how lauded a lot of Japanese horror films are nowadays.

And anyway, the circumstances are just too coincidental. VHD was first written in 1983, the OVA came out in '85, then the first Castlevania was out in '86. Heck, CV even has the standard hodgepodge elements what with constant anachronisms regarding sci-fi and mythological elements. All they really was switch it to a medieval setting, strip out the Western parts, and make the protagonist a gender-swapped Doris Lang. At the very least VHD showed there was a rising interest in the kind of vampire ficition that had previously been extremely niche.

[Dracula9]

yeah, kikuchi i think really contributed to that -- i wouldn't say he opened the door, but he definitely widened how far it was open