Yay, time to explain Castlevania lore.
Matthias Cronqvist was a loyal and faithful knight, and best friends with fellow knight Leon Belmont. Both saw terrible things while participating in the Crusades, with Leon returning to propose to a woman named Sara Trantoul and Matthias coming home ti find his wife Elizabeth had died from the plague.
Matthias cursed God for killing his wife while he fought on God’s behalf. Being one of the most brilliant men of his time and an accomplished alchemist he was able to unlock the secrets of how souls work, and gain some measure of power previously reserved for God alone.
He first enslaved Death (as in the grim reaper), then plotted to attain physical power beyond his mortal frame.
He would absorb the soul of a Vampire, gaining its power without actually becoming a Vampire. He decided on an especially powerful one named Walter Bernhard who had a habit of kidnapping the wives of knights to lead them to their doom for fun. Walter had the power to command an unnatural night and corrupt the land, making him effectively indestructible. As a distraction Matthias baited Walter into taking Sara, and when Leon was forbidden from pursuing her by the Vatican he renounced his hard won titles and went in pursuit.
Leon beat Walter’s challenge, but when Walter returned Sara it was discovered he had begun the process of turning her inti a Vampire. Leon had discovered that no matter how powerful the Vampire is, they and everything their power flows through were weak to those who shared their blood. Sara begged Leon to kill her before she could fully transform, and a kindly alchemist placed her soul into a magic whip.
With the whip Leon was able to mortally wound Walter, only for Death to appear and steal the kill. Matthias appeared and consumed Walter’s soul then offered Leon to join him in waging war on God since both had suffered so much. Leon refused, telling Matthias the Belmonts and Sara (now the Vampire Killer whip) would pursue him and al other unholy monsters forever. Matthias fled, and Leon proved the power of the Belmonts by defeating Death with the whip.
It should be noted that Sara is still kind of a Vampire. She kills and consumes the soul of any non-Belmont who wields her, though how fast she does so differs from person to person.
We have a time skip where Matthias, now called Dracula, wandered the world consuming the souls of everything from woodland sprites to Satan, ghosts from Egypt to China to the undiscovered New World to Cthulhu, and when most of the magic on Earth and beyond was his he demanded that God face him.
But instead of war, God sent him a second chance; Elizabeth was reincarnated as a woman named Lisa. Dracula fell in love all over again, and was at peace. He adopted two boys, both driven away by the fearful treachery of witch hunters, named Isaac and Hector who had been brought to him by the fairies undef his command. Lisa gave birth to a boy named Alucard, and they were happy…until witch hunters burned her at the stake one day, and Dracula decided to switch his arch enemy from God to all humans.
Isaac and Hector were taught basic soul magic allowing them to bind/create monsters from the souls Dracula had absorbed, and aside from two armies he granted them he bound all the rest into his castle bringing it to life; the monsters in its walls a part of it, as eternal as him and a living shapeshifting creature as much as a home for the many beasts regenerating inside it.
Alucard refused to fight, so Dracula locked him away. Hector abandoned his post and Isaac went after him, leaving Trevor Belmont free to rescue Alucard and partner with the good witch Sypha and a nobleman Grant to kill Dracula.
But even though Sara’s soul can harm Dracula and anything tied to him, it cam’t kill him forever. Hell is now just the realm of Chaos, a place serving as a prison where the castle returns to until Dracula returns to the world every century if not summoned sooner. Worse yet, he was now bound to the Earth as his hatred and madness became the hatred and madness of the world, war and disease and famine spreading as his power grows.
The Belmonts continued to defeat Dracula with Alucard’s help, though they had disappeared by the time of Bram Stoker’s novel taking place. Jonathan Belmont returned when World War 1 caused Dracula’s return but failed to prevent hos power from either causing or just worsening World War 2.
In 2012 Dracula returned with a massive army and the world governments as well as a secret society attempted to defeat him. During the war Julius Belmont did what no other had done; he removed Dracula’s soul from the immense cloud of monsters the Dracula entity and castle had become.
The soul of Matthias reincarnated into a Japanese boy named Soma Cruz, and Alucard served as a mentor figure to his own reincarnated father. Elizabeth/Lisa also reincarnated as Soma’s friend/love interest Mina Hakubi.
Cultists of Dracula twice attempted to bind the malevolence of Dracula to a new being or to corrupt Soma himself, and although Soma has begun absorbing monster souls he refuses to become the monster again. Dracula still persists as a force, an amalgam of souls behaving in mindless pursuit of what Matthias once did, and the castle still returns, but Soma has twice resisted, beaten, and drained power from his old self and made both Julius and Alucard as well as his friends in the secret order proud. Also saved Mina twice.
That’s where the timeline of the Castlevania games ends because Konami refuses to make more games and the creator went “fuck it” and is making more games under the title Bloodstained starring a femald version of Soma and her supporting cast now.
In the games there’s some pretty fucking brutal monsters like Satan, Cthulhu, a giant corpse on hooks that grows demon flies, and a monster that’s basically a ball of naked holocaust victims incubating a fetus demon made of souls inside. But also somehow Dracula ends up with silly shit like aerobics skeletons, demon sexy maids with vacuums, ghost bartenders, zombie bakers, human rock stars, possessed cakes, skeleton Rambo, and so on. There’s hints the castle somewhat exists outside linear time while in Chaos which explains the anachronisms, and its possible some souls come to him willingly.
So yeah. A Belmont whipping Fluffies implies Dracula absorbed some for some reason, making them part of him and empowering them to be super dangerous to anyone but witches or a Belmont with Sara’s soul whip.
Though given he did absorb all the friendly fairies of the world, the ones who befriended Hector and Issac as abandoned children, its maybe not that far-fetched. Hector and Soma both keep fairies as close companions too. Dracula also likes souls who were wronged, even if he’s the one who wronged them like he did to Leon. He sometimes empowers the souls of butchered animals with demon magic as new monsters like pig demons, fox men, or ghosts of slaughtered cows.
Rant over.
