Fridge / Castlevania: Curse of Darkness

Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

Fridge Brilliance

• Julia, who is Isaac's sister, is a witch who escaped the witch hunts and inexplicably looks identical to Hector's wife Rosaly, who was killed in said witch hunts thanks to Isaac. Could it be that Isaac framed Rosaly both to piss off Hector and to protect his sister...?
• As mentioned on the YMMV page, the "only a Devil Forgemaster can be used to resurrect Dracula" thing sounds like a complete Ass Pull used to facilitate a plot where Death strings the Devil Forgemasters along and allows Dracula to snatch up the Big Bad position at the absolute last second. But think about it. Canonically, the events of Castlevania Legends never happened, so chronologically, Dracula's first death was in Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse. Which means that chronologically, the events of this game are the first time Dracula has been resurrected. Either Death thought that reviving Dracula requires a lot more effort, energy, and pompous arcane ceremony than it actually does, because he was doing it for the very first time, and he had yet to realize how many metaphorical middlemen he could afford to cut out; or, Death really did need to go to a lot of trouble to resurrect Dracula because, due to the fact that he was doing it for the very first time, the process was clunky, unrefined, and inefficient, and Death had yet to fine-tune the process to be more reliable. TL;DR: A Devil Forgemaster specifically was only necessary for reviving Dracula this time because Death was reviving Dracula for the very first time and didn't quite know what he was doing yet. Later Dracula resurrections have still required a Human Sacrifice, yes, but it doesn't have to be an especially strong human — all sorts of conduits have been used, ranging from a lunatic Dracula-worshipping sect leader to a wannabe Dracula replacement to an elderly vampire hunter to some random unfortunate lady who got nabbed by cultists. So, clearly, after the events of this game, Death must have set out to find a way to make resurrecting Dracula easier. After all, he was fresh out of Devil Forgemasters to do it with.
• In every Castlevania game, Dracula's Castle is always filled with numerous monsters for you to fight. This game seems to justify this by introducing the Devil Forgemasters — people who are allied with Dracula, possessing the ability to summon monsters. Among the various Innocent Devil evolutions that Hector can choose, there exists Gargoyles and Golems, which are some of the most common mooks throughout the franchise.
• The Skull Bomb that the Proboscis Fairy uses isn't a very useful weapon as it does minimal damage to enemies and can even damage Hector. But against a certain penultimate boss it takes out a whopping 25% of his HP. Why is this? Perhaps the skull on the bomb, which is commonly associated with Death, might have something to do with it.
• There is actually some Fridge Brilliance when one considers a subtle piece of foreshadowing of Zead really being Death. Aside from obvious points like him summoning the scythe blade from his sleeve and antagonizing Saint Germain and mentioning "nobody escapes from me", consider where Germain later gets trapped at thanks to Zead: the Clock Tower. The place where in more of the modern Castlevania titles of the time Curse of Darkness was released, Death was commonly fought at or guarded due to how close it was to Dracula's quarters!
• The concept of Devil Forgemasters only exists in this game, but doesn't exist in other Castlevania titles. Why do we not see them? Well, there's a couple of reasons why.
  • The first is that while they can bolster Dracula's forces, the Innocent Devils they summon and create are ultimately loyal to their creator, as Dracula gets a first hand demonstration of against Hector. If they cannot be loyal to him, then he has no need of them.
  • The second is that given Hector's prowess in battle against Dracula and his betrayal beforehand, Devil Forgemasters can ultimately turn out to be more of a danger to work with than to kill.
  • As said above, Death originally thought that only a Devil Forgemaster would do to resurrect Dracula. However, when he later found that summoning Dracula simply needs blood sacrifice of pretty much anyone, there's no more need to even keep a Forgemaster present, much less work with one.
  • Finally, Dracula's Curse, which plagued Europe and spurred humanity into self-destructive actions through anger and hatred, was cast aside by Hector who gloated about it to his face before he died. Dracula would naturally be salty about that and as a result, his thoughts on working with devil forgemasters would be sealed to "never hire".

Fridge Horror

• Legion, who's met in the depths of a Church. Yes, that probably means that someone willingly worshipped an Eldritch Abomination whose sanctum is made of human corpses and which eventually hatches an evil monster of pure light. Think about it for a second.
• Julia mentions that she was previously persecuted in "the western lands" for being a witch, prompting her to escape to Wallachia as her kind was "hunted like vermin." The chilling implication of her words is that Dracula's curse, said to bring disease, violence, and chaos in its wake, reached as far as Spain and the rest of Western Europe in only two years' time and caused The Spanish Inquisition.