The issue there is when a journalist was asked why they endlessly cover the same tired stories of Royals that may not have actually happened was that everytime there is even the slightest royal connection sales doubled. People want this this shit basically and will read or watch it.
So that's why the glut is there, we can all want to see more working class heroes and there is a rich history of such but when all is said and done the Tudor Abbey Halls of the world will just always make back the investment so will be the mainstay of period pieces. People don't give a crap about merchants they just want to see sexier versions of premodern royalty.
Admittedly, I tend to go by the old advertising maxim that people don't always know what they want until they get it. We don't
know that a show about say, a traveling merchant in Ancient Rome would not be interesting or financially successful.
The challenge, of course, lies in persuading some big-money producer or studio to fund such a project. I don't really work in such media, so I couldn't really say as to whether the opportunity is there or not.
I'm guilty of this too in that the even the classes of 'ordinary' people in history I want to see are probably the top 5% of the population given just how bloody poor and tied to a limited plot of land most people were?
This does actually touch on the very practical issue that shows about historical nobility and royalty just have a lot more things going on. There's a lot of possibility for all kinds of important plot developments and events: major battles, civil wars, noble intrigues, etc. Which you just wouldn't get if you told a story about say, a cobbler in 13th-century Canterbury.
It would have to be something with a gimmick or detailing people in a time or place where their status and situation is fairly fluid. A traveling merchant whose job requires frequent travel, a mediaeval pilgrim visiting different churches, etc.
Like there are ways to do it, historical societies were very interconnected and those interconnections relied upon a vast number of people to maintain them. There's stories to be told here.
One thing I really dislike is the Catholic Church being the evil ignorant bad guys.
Like in Castlevenia during the rough time period of the series Catholics far from being in a postion to damn the entire world were a persecuted minority. I get people forget orthodox exist but like in proto Romania you were either pagan, orthodox or Muslim in later years with actual laws against being catholic yet somehow yet again we are the ones burning intellectual women (despite the Church holding the view that it was those accusing people of witchcraft who were the heretics because magic doesn't exist) it would be fine if literally any other strand of Christianity got hit by this but they never do.
I'm not sure I've ever seen any kind of mediaeval or Renaissance-era fiction that
acknowledges the existence of Orthodox Christianity, let alone correctly depicts a country which would have been firmly Orthodox by this point in history (15th-century IIRC). Not to mention that a vampire lord waging a genocidal war in Wallachia would
almost certainly have drawn the interest if not the outright intervention of the Ottoman Empire.
It's kind of boring and two-dimensional tbh. I wish we could see a series that presented the actually sincerely intellectual side of the Catholic Church (because the insane witch-burning, science-hating church depicted in Castlevania probably wouldn't have liked the Jesuits either). There's a scene where some goon from the Church looks at a centrifuge and is shocked to the point of terror by the fact that it can spin. Like it seems to treat people in a very weird and infantile sort of way: in the same way that covering your face in front of a baby will make it think you've disappeared. People in 15th-century Wallachia were not complete ignoramuses, they understood such shocking newfound scientific concepts such as motion and rotation.
My feeling about this sort of thing is there should be a show which presents both sides: depicting both the more fanatical and repressive elements of the Church while also depicting the very real scholarship and learning that it actively promoted. At which point you leave it to the viewer to decide how to assess both the good and the bad elements.
One thing I will say in Castlevania's defense: the actions of the Church are never, ever shown as actually being a justification for Dracula's genocidal reprisals against all of humanity, the majority of whom had nothing to do with his wife's death. The show repeatedly points this out and and
even the other vampires on his war council are happy to call Dracula out on his disproportionate retribution. Even if their interest in humanity is fundamentally a purely selfish one (i.e. if someone kills all the humans, who will we feed on?) the fact remains that very nearly everyone of sound mind recognises that Dracula is horribly wrong and not in his right mind.
Edit: One other thing about the Church in Castlevania is it's not made entirely clear that the Church is... entirely what it claims to be. The Bishop's various goon squads are occasionally spoken of as former criminals and murderers. One of the monks at a local priory in Season 3 is explicitly described as being a former assassin. The show repeatedly drops hints that the Church actively invested criminals to serve as an effective secret police, which strikes me as being basically some local church official using it to his own corrupt ends.
Then again, at the same time as I say this, I also feel the need to point out that Castlevania seems to have, at times, a borderline-misanthropic view of humanity. And while many characters who espouse this view, such as Isaac, are depicted as clearly flawed and disturbed individuals, at the same time, the show doesn't really do a lot to explicitly call them out on how wrong they are. And if anything goes out of its way at times to have such characters come across extremely horrible and unsympathetic individuals who seem to exist to basically validate all of their worst feelings about humanity and reinforce their belief in the justification of exterminating humanity.
And it seems to clash weirdly with the show's theme of local heroism: the idea that all you need to make the world a better place is a few good people who go around righting wrongs and defending the innocent.
