Why a Dark Lord previous to Dracula is needed:In Castlevania III, Dracula is said to have made a pact with an "Evil/False God" to obtain his power (the precise term used in the manual for this entity is "ankoku jashin" or "False/heretic god of darkness"). I considered this idea to have been scrapped until I discovered that IGA actually reinforced it in the Curse of Darkness manga endossed by him:
This page reads:
In the beautiful landscape of southern Romania,
since a few months ago, a horrible curse has been treatening the people
The undeniable darkness at night...
Demons who were just believed to appear just in legends
suddenly started to reveal themselves to humans
The leader of the grotesque creatures was a black clothed count known as Dracula...
Borrowing the power of the false god, he summoned monsters one after another
The entire land of Wallachia was changed with darkness and slaughter.On this manga, it is explicitly mentioned that Dracula is "borrowing" the power of a "False God" to obtain his demonic troops. If Dracula was already the Dark Lord - the demon atop the food chain - why would he need to make a pact with another, lower being to obtain demonic troops, if the Dark Lord alone has the power to do it through the Dominance? Furthermore, why would the harbinger of mankind's destruction live among humans, even fathering a child with a human woman, if his entire purpose is to destroy mankind?
These things seem awfully out of place for someone who is the Dark Lord. The only answer is that he was not the Dark Lord before Lisa's death - and this is confirmed by the story contained in
Castlevania Adventure's japanese manual. Dracula was "transformed" into the Demon King. And by Christopher Belmont's time, he's already the Demon King.
Credit for the CVIII translation goes to Nagumo.
Credit for the page translation goes to Shiroi Koumori.
The choice for Amatsu-Mikaboshi to be this previous Dark Lord:Amatsu-Mikaboshi (AKA Amano Kagaseo) is a Shinto deity related to the primordial chaos and the stars. He's a "star god" (deities meant to be defeated due to their rebellious nature -
heretic gods ) and having existed before gods like Amaterasu or Susanoo as a primordial entity, he's referred to as the August Star of Heaven/Brilliant Male. The star associated with him is either the North Star, or Venus (which is not a star, but is symbolically recognized as one due to its shine). Different from what Wikipedia will have you believe, though, Mikaboshi is not inherently evil, but he does stir/feed from emotions of destructive nature inside humans. As the lore goes, he's the "lack of good", therefore being a sort of an "unintentional evil" that spreads/grows with each evil deed perpetrated by human hearts. However, in some stories concerning the battles between the gods, he is indeed referred to as an "evil kami" that must be banished.
Through this part of the plot, I considered many entites to be the previous Dark Lord to Dracula. The top ones were Satan, Pazuzu, Ahriman, Azatoth, and Susanoo, but they were discarded in favor of Amatsu-Mikaboshi for two reasons:
1. In 1999, a Shinto ritual was needed to banish the castle from this plane. Althought the eclipse itself could be a reason for requiring Shinto knowledge to banish the castle, there is something else: Exorcizing/cleansing rituals tend to have an intimate relationship with what they are exorcizing and the lore this entity is associated with, and eclipses are not specific
enough to require a Shinto ritual, since they are symbols of darkness in many different cultures. Mina Hakuba's mention about the Tensho Daijin (Amaterasu and Susanoo's story) being required for the banishment is incredibly specific.
Therefore I choose Mikaboshi to be the entity that would become Chaos, the force feeding the castle from the chaos in human's hearts. The Hakuba ritual was the only able to banish the castle because
the castle was possessed by a Shinto entity all along. Thus the need for a very specific ritual to banish a very specific entity.
2. In Aria of Sorrow, the Chaotic Realm displays some very interesting imagery beyond the obvious chaos. I'm specifically talking about the stars.
Right at the entrance of the Chaotic Realm we see a motif of stars and the moon:
Even though this could be interpreted as a reference to Tsukuyomi-no-Mikoto, Shinto deity of the moon, or simply as meaningless decor, I have more evidence showing otherwise.
Then, throughout the entire Chaotic Realm, we see that there are patterns of a starry sky/space as the background for decaying rooms, suggesting that this is an alternate reality composed of whatever chaos represents:
In the room containing the portal to Chaos, there is a single light in the middle of the darkness that could be easily interpreted as a single, brilliant star's light (the August Star of Heaven, one of Mikaboshi's names, sometimes depicted as a very bright star through the Pole Star or Venus):
Finally, Chaos' true/last form is that of a black sun in the middle of a heavily distorted, Giger-esque background representing its chaotic nature:
But when Chaos is defeated, the black sun breaks
like a mirror. In japanese mythology there is a black, round mirror that once was used to lure Amaterasu out of her hiding - The
Yata no Kagami. Mina Hakuba mentions this specific story's lore (the Tensho Daijin) to have been used as a base for the castle's banishment ritual:
Notice the sun motif in the middle of the mirror.
In the end, the connections are too many to overlook, and Mikaboshi fit all the requirements to be the deity chosen to be the dark entity with which Dracula sealed his pact for power, and eventually topped. He fits both the need for a Shinto banishing-ritual and fits the symbolism of the chaotic realm through his association with the stars and the chaos much better than any other entity could, in my perspective, and in retrospect.
The Dominance grants the position of Dark Lord and Dracula becomes its eternal owner:First, the Dominance granting its owner the throne of Dark Lord is explained in Aria and Dawn of Sorrow. Dmitrii explicitly mentions that the Dark Lord's power is needed (the Dominance) but Dracula's soul is not, and therefore if he can obtain the Dominance, he can become the Dark Lord. Obviously we saw how that turned out, as Dmitrii was not able to have the true Dominance by his side on top of his soul not being able to contain it.
Secondly, Dracula has already been defeated numerous times, and even reincarnated, and the Dominance is STILL strapped to him. Why would that be, if not for the fact that, possibly, Dracula CAN'T be separated from this power anymore?
So I provided this answer too, and it is due to the pact's power. Until the pact is rendered void, Dracula cannot be separated from the Dominance. And with Dracula's strategy, he ensured that this is never going to happen.
How will this factor on Umbra at all:The story for Umbra will introduce the Hakubas, and how they were summoned by and experienced Charlotte to banish the castle. Originally, Charlotte will be the one to discover about Mikaboshi's existence, so she'll employ the separation of Dracula from his power, and the Hakubas will employ the sealing of the castle inside the eclipse.