| “ | I'LL MAKE YOU MY MASTERPIECE! | „ |
| ~ Brauner (taking his art a little bit too seriously). |
Brauner is the secondary antagonist of the 2006 platform video game Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. He is a former artist who became a vampire following World War I and attempts to resurrect the Castlevania to take it over. He resembles Olrox, who in turn is based on Count Orlok, but both Vampire Lords have little in common.
He is based off of Victor Brauner, a real-life surrealist painter who thought himself a seer. A different character of the same name appears in the reboot Lords of Shadow.
He was voiced by Hisao Egawa in Japanese and Jamieson Price in English.
Personality[]
Brauner is calm, collected, refined, and polite, albeit aloof, uncaring and scornful. But to his core, he is very cruel, hateful, misanthropic and power-hungry, filled with seething, barely contained anger. He explodes in rage when denied and stubbornly clings to his vision even as it crumbles around him. Also, he appears excitable and quite disturbed, considering his frantic yells when fighting.
Brauner staunchly hates humanity, regarding them as hateful, violent and self-destructive. He regards World War I as the proof that humans are unfit to live and deserve eradication. (Little did he know that World War I was the doing of Elizabeth Bartley, though she indeed has nothing to do with the political powder keg that led up to it).
He is exceedingly arrogant, disdaining the heroes whom he regards as beneath him, and Count Dracula himself, whom he regards as a loser. He considers Dracula as having lost his right to be the King of the Night, due to his repeated defeats at the hands of the Belmont Clan,
However, he is genuinely fond of (what he thinks are) his daughters, being fully willing to stop his plans if it means keeping them safe. All in all, he is a broken man deeply traumatized by the horrors of World War I and the loss of his beloved family. His desire to exterminate humanity is a highly unhealthy way of lashing out in grief, and his deluded obsession with taking the Lecarde sisters as his own is an even less healthy way to cope with his loss. Being a vampire severely corrupted his pain and turned it into malevolence, blind hatred and ambition.
This makes him at the same time one of the most disturbing, but also the most pitiable villain of the series. He is one of the scarce vampires who retain a somewhat human heart, albeit horribly warped by his new, evil nature.
Powers and Abilities[]
Brauner is an immensely powerful Vampire Lord, who manifests his enormous dark powers through his art, which he calls the "Blood Art Technique". Not only can he enter portraits at will, and then travel through them, but he can go from painting to painting. He can also use his paintings to influence the real world, like he did when he took control of the Castlevania. He gains power from his portraits. The more he makes, and the more they influence a defined place, the mightier he becomes.
He relies primarily on them in battle, as he can make what he paints real and cause his painting to affect the real world. He mostly uses them to bring enormous monsters to existence. His paintings can be entered, casting the visitor into a vast world looking exactly like what they represent, full of details and traps likely of his design.
History[]
Background[]
Brauner used to be a painter, until World War I laid waste all over Europe, claiming the lives of his beloved twin daughters. Enraged, he relinquished his humanity and became a vampire, to wage his own war on humanity. In 1942, he used the souls of the victims of World War II to resurrect the Castlevania, then used his bewitched paintings to take control of it, preventing Dracula's return. He later ambushed and murdered Eric Lecarde, one of the heroes of Castlevania Bloodlines, who defeated Dracula alongside his friend John Morris in 1917.
Noticing the striking likeness between Eric's daughters Stella and Loretta and his own, he persuaded himself that they were his daughters reincarnated. As such, he turned both into vampires and brainwashed them to believe that he was their father.
Role in the Game[]
Stella and Loretta.
In 1944, Brauner not only confronts John Morris' son Jonathan and his friend and partner Charlotte Aulin, but Dracula's right-hand man Death, who is outraged that he would dare claim ownership of the Castlevania and determined to put an end to his "reign".
Exploring the Castlevania, Jonathan and Charlotte enter the Vampire Lord's paintings to destroy the evil ruling the world within and weaken his grasp over the Castle. They learn the truth about Stella and Loretta and, upon defeating them, restore them to their human selves with the Sanctuary spell. With their help, they reach and defeat Brauner himself, who is finished off by Death to lift his seal and enable Dracula's return.
Bad Ending[]
If Stella and Loretta are beaten without being cured of their vampirism, Brauner barges in in a flying portrait to shield them, begging for their (un)lives on his knees. He swears to abandon his plan in exchange for letting them all go, and departs with them as the Castlevania crumbles. This leaves the heroes frustrated that the Vampire Lord is still around with his two brainwashed victims, but relieved that without the Castlevania, his threat is minimal and that most importantly Dracula will not return.
Boss Battle[]
Brauner is a very powerful foe who can prove really challenging. He attacks by painting two blood-red lines on his portraits that appear for real and cross the entire screen in various patterns, in order to hurt the heroes and trap them into a corner. The heroes can destroy the lines before they reach them. He is not always easy to reach, so it is best to attack with spells from a distance, and strike between his attacks.
Brauner can enter his painting to make it fly and spin to dive at the heroes, but remains vulnerable, and draw monsters coming to existence: Blue paintings spawning a swarm of flying cyclops-heads petrifying at contact, grey paintings spawning gigantic spectres with many hands cursing at contact, and green paintings spawning tentacled monstrosities spinning and poisoning at contact.
Brauner is fought again in the exact same fashion in the crossover game Harmony of Despair.
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow[]
Lieutenant Brauner.
Another powerful vampire named Brauner appears in Lords of Shadow. In this game, Lieutenant Brauner is a demonic vampire spawned directly from Hell, who was never human. He and his mightier older brother Commander Olrox, serve as the main henchman of the Queen of Vampires Carmilla.
Carmilla sends Brauner to lead her subjects raid the nearby Wygol Village on a regular basis. The hero Gabriel Belmont confront the vampires in the village, with the intent of cleansing the land of their blight.
Brauner is a violent foe who attacks relentlessly with his claws and sabre, but his attacks are easily telegraphed and he is highly vulnerable to Holy Water. He can throw his sabre at and turns into a swarm of bats to attack, but he poses little threat and Gabriel cuts his arm to finish him off with his own blade.
External links[]
- Brauner on the Castlevania Wiki
