Netflix Castlevania Season 3 *SPOILER Discussions*

I'm struggling to decide if the writer is keeping within the spirit of Castlevania. It's normal for TV adaptations to change the original backstories, but you'd at least be able to feel whether it's something that would have likely happened if there were alternative pathways. I'm still a bit mixed about how weak they portray Hector. He's at the same level as Issac in regards to power, but nowhere near the same drive or ambition as him.

Music could have been better. It would have been nice to get some nostalgia from using in game music at some point, just like they did with Season 2 and Bloody Tears.

All right. Time to air all this out. lol

Everybody's airing their thoughts, support and grievances about the show now, so here's my huge ass novel about it. In season 1, I loved the art and was still excited and hopeful, though it looked to be taking a turn I didn't like. Season 2 kept going down that road, but was still enjoyable and kept loosely to a story I could recognize. Season 3 has moved the show from its safe "finally a faithful adaptation" status, to something really pretty that I just can't get behind. Like Lenore herself, right? lol. It's really pretty weird the shift I have seen from "finally, a show that does the series justice" to "why does it matter if the show does the series justice? It can be its own thing". I think that both of these are fine, but the prevailing stance of the time has drifted significantly. The only problem with it being its own thing is, it will be "the" thing that Castlevania is now. That doesn't feel great to me.

My issue isn't with Alucard/his sexuality. If anything, my problem there may be with the shield it creates against criticism. The base assumption of a supporter is that the person who has a problem with the writing of the show or the show in general is a bigot (or racist, or sexist). A rejection of what the show presents is a rejection of progress or positive social ideas, etc, as it were. That's pretty brilliant as a built-in defense - but I think most people who have a reasonable issue with the show aren't just in conservative idiot camps, and I actually think those characters are good things, at least in Isaac and Carmilla's cases. Those two hadn't had much of a chance to shine as characters in the actual game series.

No, my issue is with the foundational/fundamental changes to the world and background of everything, and the gratuitous insertion of things for shock value to make those social points. It's enough of a stretch to bend Castlevania to be a social platform, I think, but sometimes more harm than good can be done depending on how these things are presented. The extremes aren't so useful and come off as crass and tasteless. Let's start from the top, that's on everyone's mind:

Alucard's bisexuality - this could have been revealed in a number of positive or well-written ways. Instead, two throwaway characters took advantage of him in his childlike innocence, in what was a rape scene. He cared about those two and didn't want to harm the relationship he had with them, so he let them do something to him he didn't understand. It's not unlike when an adult relative engages a young relative in sex - the younger one may have the capacity, strength or ability to say no, but fears and respects the relationship and trust they had, so they let it happen. That still makes it definitely wrong (edit: and note that, turns out, this and the abuse of Hector also echo the activities that the writer, Warren Ellis, was engaging in IRL. How people can still think this is ok is beyond me). Of course, these two characters were killed and now have been impaled a la Vlad Tepes himself, which poses another problem of writing - if Alucard could restrain himself from avenging his mother, the most important event of his life and linch-pin of his character design, why would he do it now? He may still be young and immature, yes, and not completely the stoic (and quite asexual) SotN Alucard we know, but everything in Alucard's side of the story for season 3 functioned for seemingly one reason: to be shocking and keep him sad.

Treatment of religion - the sentiment may as well be that "sure God is real/out there, he just doesn't care". Everybody is in/goes to Hell, so the characters are figuring (on screen, through dialogue presented to us) that they may as well embrace sin. It's a reflection of what the writer feels about life (the most "atheist" way to write something would be that yeah sure God is real, but he has abandoned you. Eat shit). Not a whole lot to do with Castlevania's portrayal of all that, though.

Lisa *could* be in Hell simply because she didn't believe in Christ, or any/whatever other religion the show would propose as the "real" one, but I'd bet good money no religions are going to be propped up in any kind of biased way like that. She was the closest thing to a truly good and pure character we've got, and her insistence was that Dracula was more dangerous than Satan because "Dracula is real". Sypha would be next (originally a character raised by the church), and in this she's just a scholar who doesn't particularly adhere to anything but vaguely what I've described;. as said by her in conversation, some of the humans on Earth who allegedly represented God were good people i.e. Yeshua and Mohammad, but God is bad and left us.

Pretty wild how that may be the case about "no Satan", but otherwise everything is all about Hell. What we're left with is a situation where no God is real (or good, or relevant), but all Hells are. Why this is, is to most easily push a humanist view. Meaning - humans are the only source of good that can/does matter. Everything else is more a pure evil or neutral. This is fundamentally not the case in Castlevania, but the writer is again known for pushing this in his works.

Most specifically, as you may have heard, the canon background for CV3 is that the church (eastern Orthodox, as the JP manual says specifically) sent out hunters to try to take care of Dracula. Sypha was among them, as she was raised there among the monks in secret after she survived witch trials set on by Carmilla's influence (yes, Carmilla, not the church themselves) and those hunters failed. The people at that point needed to turn to a family that they were afraid of, who were socially exiled (but not explicitly "excommunicated"), so the church approaches Trevor Belmont and asks him for help. Ellis felt that magic-users working with the church didn't make sense to him, so he separated them to make the church a conglomerate villain. The implications of this change are that it doesn't extend to only Sypha, but any Belnades in the future. I guess Yoko will be a modern day gypsy person or something?

The unnecessary part to all of this is how *there are zero positive religious characters*. Religion is monolithic bad-ness with no exceptions, to a comedic degree. There isn't a character practicing the most prominent religion (the ignorant Christianity) who has shown us any amount of on-screen redeemable quality. They are all only ignorant, have died or are overtly evil - or perhaps were okay previously and convert to a different evil (the Hell monks in Lindenfeld). A case used to exist in our minds for the season 1 priest who blessed the holy water off-screen, as Trevor makes a single comment on "ha, guess that guy was really ordained" or some such. The issue with this is, in season 2, the main antagonist of the beginning of the show, the incredibly dickish bishop (the one who presides over burning Lisa), blesses an entire river as a zombie/Innocent Devil. This goes to show that the season 1 "good priest" was merely, if anything, able to do it because he knew the necessary neutral non-holy spell to do it, from being ordained - not that he was a "good believer" or something. If a zombie can do it, the method of which it is done is apparently neutral. Probably an Enochian spell, as the series hints.

Feminism - For the next unnecessary extreme - I consider myself a proponent of feminism. My issue here, as I'll keep it short, is the visceral treatment and downtrodden status of prominent Castlevania men. I think it is a good and well thing to prop up female characters, obviously, but ideally not to where beloved characters are literally beaten, enslaved, raped, depressed, drunk and border on giving up on life. The one who fares the best is Trevor, and he so far has not exactly been dealt a great hand. Were it not for Sypha being in his life, you'd just as likely find him on the floor somewhere. I think good and positive feminism doesn't have to and shouldn't involve the beating down of males. It's about equality and not a different flavor of inequality. Most of my favorite CV and video game characters are women for non-attraction or sexual reasons, so I like seeing progress here, but not like this. Hector is reduced to merely a beat-up lump of irrelevance. He doesn't even have a fight scene x1, and season 4 update: the Trevor/Hector sides of the story never meet or have any meaningful interaction between them.

Minor cases - would be language, visuals and the remainder of themes that seem thrown in and unnecessary. I don't take much issue with "fuck" and all that, but much of the dialogue itself and its context is questionable. I don't think things like "walkies" and "what the fuck" make a lot of sense to say in the 1400s, but that can be chalked up as a style choice, if maybe a pretty silly one. It just lends more to the overall feel that this is an extremely well-produced bad story.

I don't mind that Ellis hasn't played the games. I think that many successful and good writing has come from people who made adaptations of things they had no first hand experience with. It didn't need to 100% follow the games. Those are unrealistic expectations - how many people in the business can really know the boring ins and outs of a relatively obscure franchise? However, it could be mostly different, but respectful - maybe much like how the MCU is vs their comics. What we have instead here is something more like Captain America being in a story about all superheroes are actually evil, and Red Skull isn't so bad and misunderstood - so along the ride Cap is beaten up and put in a cell. Next season, he's beaten up some more in the cell and gets a leash. Make the nazis sexy and it's fine.

So far we haven't observed much character development. Maybe Trevor and Sypha had some development, though? No, they really didn't, I'd say. They went from wandering around aimlessly at season 2's end to, at the season 3 end, back to wandering around aimlessly - just more depressed-edly than before, of course. Lindenfeld may as well have not existed, because I can't pinpoint any one thing that happened there that mattered, aside from St. Germain existing and going into the portal. Everything else was just more baseline bad-ness and philosophy about how things are meaningless and bad. S4 update: I recall thinking like everyone else that maybe the woman St. Germain is after is important? No, turns out she wasn't. They didn't even give her a name.

Did Isaac get anywhere, then? I would say not. He went from "on a journey for revenge" to "still on a journey for revenge, was briefly considering things and people weren't so bad, but decided that yeah, things and people were definitely bad". Not a surprise, considering, huh? S4 update: I guess Isaac DID change his mind, sort of? I think he's the only character with something resembling a complete story.

So what did happen, even? Controversy. Shock value. Clever built-in defenses. Perhaps most frustrating of all, the average fan feeling like "eh hey these games were just 8-bit antiques about whipping vampires and didn't have a story anyway so who cares? Also you're probably just a bigot if you have a real problem". They were banking on people being like that, and unfortunately they were right. This may as well be what Castlevania is now. Perception of what's canon is canon, not the obscure and trivial details that don't matter - i.e. all the things I've been bemoaning. The series "didn't have much of a story before and does now", and that's not a good feeling to me if this is the story.

You make some good points; thanks for the type up. I think if I had watched season 3 without knowing much about the Castlevania franchise, I might have been able to enjoy it more. I still felt like something was missing.

update: I just saw this and thought it might have some more interesting details/give her a name. It doesn't lol
ah, the very memorable character, Adventurer Lady



What is...interesting about it though is that this was the case even as far back as late 2019. So...I guess perhaps a lot of this was indeed the plan. Wouldn't have guessed

Spin-off has been discovered. However, what does RoB have to do with the French Revolution?

nichegamer.com/2021/06/11/netflix-announce-castlevania-spin-off-starring-richter-belmont-and-maria-renard/

Since my writeups about the earlier Castlevania show are all here, I figured I'd add my Nocturne thoughts to this thread. It's also impossible to put up something this in-depth on twitter, so here we go

In brief, in case you just want an overview and without spoilers, here are some pros, neutral points and cons:

Pros:
The writing is...better! Good? Probably not, but it at least leans less heavily on shock value and dumping philosophy randomly. The edge is still there, but not its forefront. It's a cohesive story that's following a path.
As before, the character designs, art etc is overall great.
More Castlevania music this time (I think it was just Divine Bloodlines, but they used it >1 time, so they get points I guess)
Mentioned in the first point but bears repeating, thankfully sex isn't prominently featured in a show that has Maria in it
There *seems* to be a positive Christian character (??!?!)
It gets better later, episode 7-8 pick it up

Neutral:
As expected, nearly every character is quite different. I was worried Richter would change more than he did, but he's just a falsely self-sure young man and isn't that much of a jerk. Not *too* far from his game persona.
The change of setting, themes, villain, and how this world just has to be completely different in general at this point...just is what it is. They made their bed and are laying in it. No Dracula, no castle. I didn't see any candles even, actually?

Cons:
Big one for me personally - added to how there's of course no Dracula/castle, more by unnecessary choice is that somehow white Christians from western Europe are still a main problem? Come on, we're still doing this?
What the hell are these monsters? There's probably like 20 unique monster designs or something in Nocturne, and not a single one of them remind me directly of anything in Castlevania. They're like dollar store Berserk enemies.
The treatment/involvement of some characters is, again, pretty questionable. One person I was looking forward to seeing how they were involved just ended up being sad and pointless.
The animation is a bit rough at times, and one scene certainly stood out where their legs clipped into the background. This is minor to me

Alright, now to the meat of it. Castlevania Nocturne is okay. It is thoroughly what I expected, thankfully didn't dump on Richter too hard, and changes a lot of stuff out of necessity of its pre-existing story, and also changes a lot of other things that are unnecessary but certainly unsurprising.

One big thing to get out of the way is regarding Annette. Similar to Isaac, I don't really mind this much. Annette did certainly have character and personality in Rondo, and an interesting path in DXC if you didn't save everyone, but I'm okay with (and certainly expected) them to change her. Is the slavery stuff/African god prominence heavy handed? Yeah, sure it is, but it's fine.

It does come off a bit safe in its message, which I think fans of the earlier seasons may have a problem with actually - but more than that, I think their issue with it being "safe" and not pushing the envelope enough is that it lacks as much physical and mental masturbation material. Lenore/Alucard sex scenes and humanist philosophy dumping, respectively. This is because Ellis is gone. And my goodness, I went back to look at some of his old interviews, and it's still crazy to me that even in the mid 2000s he was already outwardly shitting on the existing game's story and themes in his blog. "Church using magic is stupid, taking that out", "Iga remains passionate about Castlevania and it's a pain", "why is a pirate in a landlocked country", etc. CV Season 3, as he said, was his time of writing "mad with power" and it showed. Hope he's enjoying his early retirement from being outed for abuse.

Anyway, back to Nocturne, yeah Annette is chill enough to me. Would have preferred a new/different character play this role, but we're crazy if we don't expect changes like this. I really liked Tera, though she's another character who wasn't allowed to be affiliated with the church and be a protagonist. I guess this solidifies the idea that all positive church magic people will be Speakers, probably all the way up to Yoko. I suspect and actually hope that they make Yoko an East Asian woman. Go for it - the show's Asian representation so far has been pretty terrible (Taka and Sumi, aka the siblings that went after Alucard).

Juste is the character I was referring to re: being the person I was looking forward to seeing their involvement. I like their actor (Iain Glenn, who was Jorah Mormont from GoT), and HoD is a great underappreciated Castlevania game, so I was picturing him coming in as a mentor and father figure to Richter. Instead, he tells him "evil always wins. It keeps growing and becomes stronger, stronger than us, just lay down and die lol". What the fuck is this? Why was he even there? His presence wasn't necessary at all for Richter to awaken his latent magic. The kid already knew him losing it was related to his trauma, and that the Belmonts had it all along. Juste is only there to be sad. He grabs the foot of the enemy of that scene with the VK, and that's nice, but...yeah I hope he comes back to do something, anything, in season 2. What a weird way to write that character in. I have second hand embarrassment for the actor and everyone who cares about Juste.

Mizrak is...interesting. Here we have our first potential positive Christian character (wow!), though I find a bit odd the romance between him and Olrox. He quotes Isaiah mere seconds before having sex with him, and seconds after that confidently proclaiming his faith and belief in the one God. Yeah so...did you also not just have sex with a vampire, who you later say that you regard as an animal with no soul? Is there uh...any guilt there at least? Guy seems solid and confident as a rock the whole time lol. I think him having feelings for Emmanuel (the abbot) would have made more sense here, and maybe there is some of that behind the surface as it is, but just a bit weird here. I guess they in part needed a reason for Olrox to show up and help them when Erzsebet transformed.

Speaking of her - I do not like how the Vampire Killer was completely ineffectual against her. I guess there's some kind of Dracula-ish "the eclipse is a shield/source of my power" thing going on here, but still it's not great how downplayed that weapon gets. Has the VK killed any prominent villain yet, even? Dracula was a 3-way effort with Alucard severing the head and Death was bombed with a fancy dagger. The Trevor side of the team had no involvement at all with Carmilla. It's mostly just good for mobs.

I liked the opera singer guy. Some people seemed quite annoyed with or hated the singing, but I'd say it was nice. Reminded me of Demon's Souls' Tower of Latria with the noble merchant singing as you go through the jail. The night creatures having minds of their own is also fine. Only annoying thing there is, again, how specific those designs are while not being anything from Castlevania.

Maria...is certainly a lot different, but at the end of things I guess it's okay. I imagine no one could have reasonably expected her to just be cute and cheerful in a show like this, but at the same time I think a bit more balance would have been nice.

The abbot's motivation doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I don't know how as a person you put that much weight into societal norms and equate it to godliness to the point you can rationalize IN SINCERE PRAYER that it's permissible to use corpses in a hell machine to make monsters for a vampire goddess. Seems like an arrangement God wouldn't use! Just a bit! And then, being willing to give up his daughter as a sacrifice too?

I'd have been more understanding about all of that if he was more clearly like the original show's corrupt priesthood - obviously not seeking sincere guidance from God, clearly seeking power and control for themselves, walking around with daggers in their robes like thugs. This guy ACTED like he was sincerely seeking the best for his community and church, which does not make sense at all. He goes on about the 80-year-old woman down the road who comes every Sunday! Yes, understandable, and you're feeling that way about her while simultaneously also using the Evil Dead necronomicon to make monsters out of dead people for the main villain from Bloodlines? All for Auntie Betsy huh? Sure guy

You don't have to seek out the will of God in situations like this. It's already pretty clear in the Bible that you're being very, very stupid. Just as frustrating on the other end though - Maria hoping all the churches burn to the ground. The vibe when she says this is kind of neutral for the other characters, thankfully, and I guess I am glad Mizrak is around.

Finally, as stated, episode 7-8 are indeed where things get better. I'm looking forward to seeing where we go now, and yes Alucard's new design is much better.

Re: which endings are canon to Nocturne, they could be on to something there with Juste, though I don't think that can be counted on as relevant material? Things are already too different for any Castlevania story after 3 because of Dracula's absence. It seemed that they replaced him with a different vampire that killed Lydie and Maxim, yeah, but I'd say that doesn't change the point of the issue: why is he there in this way? It only answers "oh he's sad because the bad ending happened". Sure, fine, but we can write him something to do, a reason to animate the guy other than to show up and mope around.

I didn't remark on Mizrak's homosexuality.

I get what you're saying about the abbot being like Celia, willing to shoulder the evil so God can be good, but I'm not sure he was seeing it that way. Clearly, he wasn't entirely sure as it was, since he was seen often looking for an answer.

His whole thing was, apparently, thinking that the whole time he was on the side of good and would remain good and justified, rather than willingly giving himself over to evil so that God could smite him and make good come out of it. Nah, he was hoping instead that the smiting would be directed toward the revolution, and that the vampire alliance was a necessary tool for God to use to make that happen. The error obviously is that if God willed that to be so, it'd be God doing it, without vampires.

Good point Mario, didn't even think of that, had already discounted it outright for a different reason lol