Sunday, November 3, 2024

The King Of The Angels: Satan In Lords Of Shadow

It is very common for entertainment inspired by Christian philosophy, like the video games Darksiders or Agony, to egregiously distort Biblical concepts--unless they truly were intended only to be inspired very loosely by the source material.  The Lords of Shadow games in the rebooted Castlevania series feature lore very heavily borrowed from Christianity--but it is more the common cultural misrepresentations, like eternal conscious torment, that are emphasized.  Some abnormally accurate Biblical ideas or things logically consistent with the Bible, though they are not often recognized as such, still get included at times.  Some have to do with Satan.

In the first game, the presence of this cosmic demon is a revelation that comes at the end, when Lucifer shows himself to Gabriel Belmont as the schemer behind the necromancer Zobek's own manipulation and the plan to assemble the God Mask (this being something Gabriel wants to resurrect his wife Marie).  The second game very abruptly states that Satan is returning for revenge on Gabriel and Zobek for the finale of the original game.  The in-between events of Mirror of Fate do not involve the appearance or coming of Satan, instead focusing on the reign of Dracula and the attempts of his lineage to kill him.  From Satan's initial manifestation to his seemingly literal death at the end of Lords of Shadow 2, some of his moments are much closer to the real Biblical teachings than many might think.


There are at first few or no hints that Satan is behind the events of the first Lords of Shadow.  Baba Yaga of the first game vaguely calls her master the King of the Angels, and yet she does not specify who exactly this being is.  It is probable that this is an allusion to Satan, as not only is he a fallen angel, but it is also the case that some of the only other candidates for this title are God or Christ themselves, who are not exactly presented as being aligned with the witches of the Lords of Shadow franchise even though the Brotherhood of Light ironically uses magic in violation of Exodus 22:18.  Satan does eventually appear, seemingly the entity Baba Yaga hinted at, and declares himself God's equal or superior.  Asserting that he is a victim of divine injustice, he fights Gabriel.

The Belmont warrior insists that God loves even Lucifer to the point that he is willing to offer total forgiveness if Satan will go back to him.  Unsurprisingly, he refuses, but he is pummeled by Gabriel to the point of retreating away from Earth.  Later cutscenes portray the devil of the Lords of Shadow games as if he is the malevolent ruler of hell, incorporating the incredible cultural and artistic misconception (if it is meant to match the real Biblical doctrine, that is).  Satan is who hell was created to punish (Matthew 25:41).  It is not a realm where he is free to do as he wishes or eternally mistreat the resurrected human wicked sentenced to hell (an experience that ends in their annihilation according to many verses, including Matthew 10:28 and 2 Peter 2:6).  The just penalty for sin is not to do whatever you want or to be mistreated by demons!


When he finally comes back to Earth at the end of the second game, riding the Leviathan to destroy the planet and the human lives within it, Satan enters another fight with Gabriel Belmont, this time as Dracula.  The power of Dracula is what deterred Lucifer from returning sooner.  Only Alucard putting his vampiric father to sleep for centuries made it seem as if Gabriel really had died.  This confrontation does not end with Satan being sent back to hell, which is itself an unbiblical idea as it is because he is not in hell until well after the return of Christ (see Revelation 20).  It ends with the death of Satan, just not at God's hands as, if Satan is the demon in reference, Ezekiel 28:11-19 culminates with.  However, Lucifer by all appearances really is killed as is said to happen to the unsaved in hell (Ezekiel 18:4, Revelation 20:15).

Despite all of the occasional talk of eternal torment in hell in the Lords of Shadow games, the demise of Satan here is in an indirect way much closer to the actual stances of Biblical philosophy than plenty inside and outside the church imagine.  I have scheduled a separate post for this very year to address the nuance of the Biblical stance on Satan's defeat as opposed to how entertainment has presented it--this will touch on annihilationism as opposed to eternal torture and the possibility, or even the very high likelihood, of Yahweh at some point offering salvation to even the devil and simply being rejected yet again (2 Peter 3:9).  Lords of Shadow parallels or is consistent with what the Bible really says and does not say about Satan.

No comments:

Post a Comment