Topic: Inside the Armor

[darkwzrd4]

I don't know if this was already discussed and I apologize if it already was, but I've been wondering something for a few years now.  Now then, as we all know, there are a lot of knight enemies in this series, but we never see what's inside of the armor.  So, what's inside?  Is it a skeleton? A zombie? Some sort of demon? Or, is the suit of armor simply possessed and is empty inside?

[crisis]

As with most enemy descriptions, they are ancient armor "animated to life by the castle's magic." I don't believe there's any corpse inside (there's no blood or guts when you kill them, they just fall apart)

[Flame]

They are empty, probably filled with some sort of ghostlike/energy entity.

LoS portrayed that pretty well I think. I liked the touch of being able to rip the entities out of the armor to kill them.

[Gunlord]

Isn't there a piece of Portrait of Ruin art where there's a cute girl inside the axe armor?

[Flame]

Not just art, it's a playable character. Called "Axe Armor"/"Old Axe Armor" or something.

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

An Axe Armor (and basically every 'armor' enemy) is just a puppet.  A suit animated by an unseen force.
When vanquished, the force that is driving them to move is destroyed, and they just fall apart.

[Super Waffle]

Axe Armors are obviously unknown enemies until I write a fanfic that explains their corruption-based origin.

[X]

Axe Armors are just as everyone above mentioned. They are nothing more then animate suits of steel via Dracula's magic. As for the 'Old Axe Armor' from PoR, there is a story behind that particular playable character.

From the Castlevania Wiki:

There is considerable amount of debate and confusion over the Old Axe Armor's gender and identity. The character appears to have a male voice (Jonathan's), however, the game treats the character as if they were female (Zacchino presents the armor with a rose instead of a sword and Astarte's charm attack has no effect). Artwork, which may be official or simply fan service, found on the official Konami web page depicts an unknown female warrior wearing the armor.

The description of the enemy indicates that it is a "veteran zombie" which is wearing the suit of armor. This suggests that the playable character may be a zombie, but it could be someone else wearing the armor in the playable mode. When the Axe Armor gets on the high score board of Boss Rush Mode, two portraits are listed, one showing the Axe Armor with its helmet down, and an image of Maria Renard is shown as its partner. Also, the portrait shown in the end credits is Maria's. This suggests that Maria is the one who is wearing the armor. The artwork found on Konami's web site does not resemble Maria, however.

One possible explanation for this is that like all other modes in the game, this mode can be considered a two-character mode. One character is the armor itself and accounts for the male voice in the game. The other character is the one wearing the armor, who is female and accounts for enemies' behavior towards her. This may have been the intention for this character, but they did not want to spend any additional time on this bonus mode than they had to, so they took a shortcut and used Jonathan's voice for the male sounding armor and Maria's portrait to represent the female wearing the armor. Then after the game was created, they put up artwork of what the character is supposed to look like on their web site.

The true nature of the Axe Armor may never be known for certain without an official statement and may not be important, as the mode is non-canon to the series and has no storyline.

http://images.wikia.com/castlevania/images/b/b3/Por_pic_41.jpg

[Reinhart77]

Portrait of Ruin (and Harmony of Despair, which copied PoR's descriptions) calls them Zombies.  I hope that's just a terrible localization for that particular game, as empty armor is simply much cooler and matches the death depictions better.  Or maybe they're just zombies in that game.

[JooohnShaft]

In LOI the armours seem to shrink and form into electricity when they fall hmm...

[Mooning Freddy]

Armors are obviously possessed by the ghost of Michael Jackson.

[BoxHusky]

Hey this is just a question that passed my mind, why arn't the armors that are destroyed drop their armor peices?

[Lumi Kløvstad]

Well, if I had to make an in-universe guess... it would be that whatever power animates the armors also keeps the armor from rusting or disintegrating, and so when that power is undone, the rust/disintegration process is sped up to supernatural extremes as time "catches up" with the materials, evaporating the armor within moments.

But, that's just a guess.

Interesting question though.