While I don't deny that trend exists I don't think it's exactly applicable in this setting. It's a dark fantasy story, how exactly would a "normal" person fit? Gay or otherwise?
This was my fault for not being clear, but "normal" in this context is referring to a reasonably-functional heroic character. At the very least, someone who is at least sympathetic and relatively functional. Even at the start of the show, Trevor Belmont is very obviously a
good person despite his faults: he might be a wandering drunk vagabond wallowing in self-pity and antisocial attitudes, but we see very early on that, flaws and all, Trevor is still someone who will fight to protect the innocent from the cruel and the violent.
Dark fantasy is full of various flawed characters who are still ultimately good people. Unless a work falls into being "grimdark" where basically everyone is awful and the protagonists are little better than the villains they are fighting, it's necessary to actually have sympathetic characters who the audience can invest in.
Where I take issue with depictions of certain kinds of queer characters is in shows where these characters are the villains and also happen to be the most prominent queer character on the show.
Just because it's bad to always have gay characters who are dark or edgy does not mean that every gay character who's dark or edgy is bad. What matters is whether or not they pass the smell test, and Isaac clearly does.
My issue with this is I feel like it borders on a Thermian Argument. Showrunners consciously choose how to define their characters. They
chose to depict Isaac as gay, one of the few major recurring characters on the show who is openly homosexual. They could have done basically anything they wanted with the character.
And honestly, having a queer or queer-coded character who is coded as dark/edgy isn't a bad thing. But it is something which pops up in fiction that I take issue with, especially in something like Castlevania where the character in question is
one of the only openly queer characters on the show.
Eh like I noted before there was actually a medieval catholic minority in Wallachia with a local diocese was established for them in 1381 which was headquartered in Curtea de Arges which was the capital of Wallachia, said diocese was apparently later suppressed by the Orthodox authorities in 1519 and then in 1590 the local Catholics in Wallachia came under the authority of the Diocese of Bacău in Moldavia.
So it is historally accurate to have Catholics and even a catholic bishop in Wallachia during the time depicted in the show but they were very much a religious minority not some powerful church that dominated the region.
I mean, let's be forthright: I pretty sincerely doubt that the showrunners have any significant knowledge of 15th-century Wallachian religious politics. You've probably done more research on the topic than they have.
And I can understand this omission to some extent: Castlevania does not seek nor purport to be a historically-accurate show. A show that is focused around vampires from its outset probably isn't going to spend time dealing with the conflict between Eastern and Western Christian traditions.
I just find it annoying when Orthodox Christianity is basically
omitted from history and Catholicism is basically assumed to be basically the
only form of Christianity in pre-Reformation Europe. It also conforms to a trend of Western authors having basically no knowledge of Eastern Europe and the Balkans so just kind of blindly fill in the gaps in their own knowledge by assuming that the Western European historical experience is applicable everywhere.
What gets weirder is that Castlevania is originally Japanese, but depicting Christianity as Catholic is actually
also a thing in Japan.
The Catholic Church is a powerful organization with a wide-reaching effect on the world, you don't need to be directly under its control to have good reason to dislike it.
I think the point being raised was that someone from the UK, a country where being Catholic was once fiercely persecuted, and where anti-Catholic sentiment did and still does play a role in the conflict in Northern Ireland, pushing an extremely anti-Catholic tone in their work can be kinda questionable.
Because the majority of the world's Christians are in fact, Catholics. Despite schisms and protestants disagreeing.
Yeah, but modern media is disproportionately produced in English-speaking countries which are predominantly Protestant and also influenced by the tradition of staunch anti-Catholic sentiment in English Protestantism. Most of the most populous Catholic nations such as Brasil and the Philippines are not English-speaking ones which makes their media somewhat less accessible to English-speaking audiences.
