Webtoon Review: Castlevania Seasons 1-3 created by Warren Ellis
It is the 1470s, and Wallachia is experiencing a record low number of vampire and monster attacks. The Church decides that this is due to its religious fervor and tightens its grip on the citizenry. The Church hierarchy decides it no longer needs a pandemic response team dedicated family of monster hunters and excommunicates the Belmont Clan, burning down their home and leaving only one known survivor. And of course they pursue a zero tolerance policy towards “witches.”
Unfortunately, the real reason for the reduced number of monster attacks is that Vlad Tepes, better known as Dracula, got married a while back and has been busy getting laid and raising a son. His wife, a healer named Lisa, wanted to access Dracula’s vast storehouse of medical lore and love just kind of followed. Now Dracula is off getting back in touch with humanity, while Lisa takes her doctoring skills to a small village near the capital.
Lisa’s science is mistaken for witchcraft (the local Church officials are not into that intellectual stuff) and she is burned at the stake. Dracula is understandably upset when he finds out, and gives all humans in Wallachia one year to vacate the country or die. Humans being foolish, they do not choose the first option.
With an invincible army of vampires and night creatures slaughtering any human they can catch, and the Church woefully unprepared, opposing Dracula comes down to three ill-assorted misfits. Trevor Belmont, surly alcoholic who’s the last of the Belmont line of monster hunters; Sypha Belnades, a skilled but naive magician of the Speakers (a crypto-religious nomadic sect that fills in for the Roma for this story), and Adrian “Alucard” Tepes, half-vampire son of Vlad who has severe daddy issues.
This Netflix Original series is loosely based on the popular Castlevania series of video games, none of which I have ever played. The adaptation and much of the writing was done by Warren Ellis, who you may remember from my review of No Hero. From what I understand, most of the plot skeleton for the first two seasons is taken from the third game but great liberties have been taken to make it a continuing series.
The first short season sets up the situation and gets the protagonists together in a room. The second season has the protagonists setting up to fight Dracula, while we also learn more about the forces of darkness. Important characters introduced are Hector and Isaac, two humans who hate humanity and will presumably be the last humans alive as Dracula needs them for the moment; Godbrand, the Viking vampire who really enjoys being a bloodthirsty reaver, and Carmilla, the only female vampire with actual lines this season and is tired of crazy old men ordering her around.
Dracula’s stated goal is now to commit genocide on not just the humans of Wallachia, but all humans. He just doesn’t seem to be very methodical about it. And Godbrand has noticed a small flaw in the plan–if all the humans are dead, what is he, Godbrand, going to do for blood?
Season Three opens with Dracula vanquished, at least for now, but with several major threats still at large. Trevor and Sypha meet the Count St. Germain, an alchemist and con artist, who is looking for something buried in the basement of a priory. There are a couple of problems. First, the monks in the priory have recently changed religions. Second, there’s more than one thing in the basement.
Several other characters have their own plotlines, and Carmilla’s homeland of Styria and its ruling cabal are introduced. The season ends on multiple bitter notes, setting up another major clash in Season Four.
It should be noted that this series takes place in a seriously alternate history–the real life Vlad the Impaler wasn’t even dead yet in this time period, let alone a centuries old vampire!
Good: This series is well-drawn and animated, with both exciting, fluid combat scenes and beautiful nature shots. The characters are intriguing and I want to know what happens next.
Less good: I could do without most of the foul language, which often feels less like being in character and more like “we can get away with it because of the mature rating.”
Content note: As you might expect, there’s a lot of violence and gruesome corpses, sparing no man, woman or child. There are on-camera sex scenes (no genitalia) some of which have dubious consent issues. The Church is uniformly depicted in a negative light, and the somewhat nicer Speakers consider themselves the “enemies of God.”
Overall: A well done game to story adaptation for those who enjoy their vampires monstrous but sometimes conflicted. Not for those with weaker stomachs.
