The Vampire as Queer Allegory and The Mystery of Wall Meat
In 1872, 25 years before Irish author Bran Stoker would publish Dracula, fellow Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu published Carmilla. Taking inspiration from both folklore and the story of Hungarian noblewoman, alleged serial killer, and skincare enthusiast Elizabeth Báthory, Carmilla tells the story of a vampire both in love with and preying on another woman. Even by modern standards, the story is very overt about the sexual tension and affection between the two women. Historians consider Carmilla to be not only one of the first literary instances of the vampire but also one of the first instances of lesbianism in British fiction. As a work, Carmilla solidifies two things: that there was nothing the British wouldn’t try to steal from the Irish and that vampires, since literary inception, have been tied to queerness.
In fact, it’s hard to write vampire fiction without stumbling into some kind of queer allegory. The person who thinks Invasion of the Body Snatchers is just a movie about some creepy plants may also think that Dracula is just about the horror of buying real estate, but it doesn’t take much effort to read it as a story about gay panic and sexual insecurity in the Victorian era. It’s something the recent remake of Nosferatu, itself an unlicensed remake of Dracula, makes even more explicit with lines like “He told me about you. He told me how foolish you were. How fearful. How like a child. How you fell into his arms as a swooning lily of a woman.” or otherwise said “My BFF Count Orlok called and he told me you’re an f-slur.” Even Orlok himself is easily read as a personification of the destructive force of repression in the lives of two closeted queer people dissatisfied with their lives within the confines of victorian era heterosexual marriage.
Spoilers ahead for Castlevania
Of all vampire fiction out there, there is one particular work I want to focus on: Castlevania. specifically the animated adaptation the series has been receiving via Netflix. As a franchise, Castlevania has existed for over 40 years – meaning that I have never known a world where there wasn’t a game about someone with the last name Belmont eating floor snacks while climbing Dracula’s seemingly infinite array of staircases. Despite that, my history with the series is relatively recent. As a child, the games were too hard and my ego too fragile to endure being laughed at by skeletons for not being able to climb Dracula’s many stairs. As an adult, the games are still pretty hard but I am older, wiser and unphased by the cruel mockery of skeletons (usually).
Dreams really do come true
With some exceptions, the games revolve around the generation-spanning battle between the Belmont family and Dracula. Every hundred years, Dracula and his castle (the actual Castlevania) are resurrected, and whoever the current Belmont is gets to live the dream of eating food off the floor on their way to teaching that old man a lesson. Much of the texture of the games is pulled from a combination of history, classic horror movies and Victorian fiction. The events of Stoker’s Dracula explicitly happen in the game’s timeline, and both Carmillia and Laura appear as recurring characters across titles.
The Netflix adaptation of the series is by and large a fairly straightforward adaptation of Castlevania 3: Dracula’s Curse for the first two seasons, and takes more liberties from then on while pulling elements from elsewhere in the series. The biggest departure being the reimagining of Dracula as a Hallmark Woman. Dracula was just a lonely man of science until a fiery blonde turned his world – and castle – upside down. Then, she was brutally murdered for sharing medical science with the people of Wallachia. Dracula resolves to commit a genocidal revenge campaign against humanity thus completing the Hallmark Movie Woman to Lifetime Movie Woman pipeline.
When all is said and done, Dracula has been defeated, resurrected, defeated again and finally resurrected again alongside his wife, giving the two a chance to spend the rest of his eternal life trying to repair the damage he has done. Personally, I really enjoyed the sympathetic character arc for Dracula, and it wrapped everything up neatly enough that I not only didn’t feel a need for any more Castlevania adaptations but couldn’t imagine how one could even work narratively. How do you adapt a story from a game about Dracula without Dracula?
The sequel series, Castlevania: Nocturne, is an adaptation of a story from a game about Dracula without Dracula. Nocturne very loosely follows the games Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night. In Rondo, Richter Belmont must defeat Dracula (and rescue his love interest Annete, unless you think she's happier as a vampire). Along the way, he can save three other maidens who get an iota of characterization apiece, and that’s basically it.
Even before Dracula quit to become an eternal wife guy, the story was a few bones short of a skeleton on a motorcycle. Without being able to lean as heavily on the story of the games, Nocturne ends up less a story about Belmonts and Dracula and more someone's Castlevania-inspired World of Darkness Campaign. Set during the French Revolution, Vampires have aligned themselves with the French aristocracy in a move that shows metaphor is truly dead. Add in themes of identity in the face of social upheaval, class consciousness and colonialism and you’ve got a mix that only be more directly targeted at me if there was a musical rendition of Do You Hear the People Sing.
Of course, as with any good vampire story, there are queer storytelling elements threaded throughout both Castlevania series. The original series had a character in a relationship with a boyfriend and girlfriend at the same time (it did not end well) before finding a much healthier relationship with a woman who had done the same and also lived to tell the tale. It also had a pair of lesbian vampires who hit the bricks when things went south and presumably are still out there wistfully looking into each other's eyes to this very day. Nocturne keeps the ball rolling by prominently features a developing sexual, and increasingly romantic, relationship between two men.
However, none of these are what I’d like to focus on. The queer element that’s been resounding in my brain like an pipe organ echoing throughout a haunted chapel comes from one of the least identifiably queer characters in the series: the, presumably heterosexual Tera. Even though there is no textual queerness in her characterization (we can’t all be perfect), the arc she goes through between the end of the first season and the start of the second is dripping with allegorical queerness of a particular flavor that I adore and don’t get enough of.
Outside of her name, Tera has almost no relation to her in-game counterpart. In Rondo of Blood, Tera is a church girl that go to church and read her bible. Dracula has kidnapped her and the player has the option of rescuing her. If you do, she’ll mistake the player for a divine apparition in a short cutscene. Beyond that, she’s basically a non-character. In the show, she’s reimagined as Richter’s adoptive mother and Maria’s actual mother. She’s also visibly older, probably in her mid 30’s to mid 40’s, which we do love to see in a character design. She’s warm, maternal and could only be more marked for heartrending tragedy if she wore her hair in a sidetail.
As events unfold, we learn that Tera is a speaker magician whose family was attacked by none other than Legally Distinct Elizabeth Bathory. Her sister was kidnapped during the attack and turned into a vampire by Bathory. Upon seeing the state of her sister during an ill-advised rescue attempt, Tera killed her without hesitation and fled across Europe. She settled in France where she was distrusted by locals, and, it’s implied, supported herself through sex work. Eventually, she began an illicit relationship with the local Abbot who can be neatly summed up as Sauceless Claude Frollo. They had a child together but he was too attached to the status that comes with priesthood to be a father and instead pushed Tera and their child back to the margins. Honestly, she’s Fantine (Les Miserables) coded.
During the main events of the story, Legally Distinct Elizabeth Bathory arrives in France to work with the aristocracy against the revolution (wow that was a sentence to type out). Gormless Frollo is so threatened by his potential loss of social capital in the revolution that he makes a deal with a literal demon so he can make an army of monsters to avoid even the possibility that he might be lonely on a Sunday. Men really will do anything instead of going to therapy. At the climax of the season, Not-Bathory demands that Boneless Frollo make a show of good faith by allowing her to turn someone he loves into a vampire. Though she initially demands his daughter, Maria, Tera offers herself – which Not-Bathory accepts, having recognized Tera as the woman who killed her own sister and escaped years ago. So yeah, slightly different from her video game counterpart.
The closing scene of Tera ravenously drinking blood from Not-Bathory’s arm activated sapphic neurons in my brain that have been dormant since I was really into World of Darkness in High School. I apologize to my brave and beautiful wife/editor who is only learning this about me now. The resulting force of neuron activation was powerful enough to manifest a release date for Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines 2. You’re welcome.
Across vampire media, there are a number of different ideas about what happens to someone when they become a vampire. In some stories, the person’s soul departs and something else takes over their body. What’s left may be anything between an animalistic creature driven by predatory instinct, or something intelligent, like a demon that's taken over the vacant body. But either way, the original person is gone, and whatever is left is fundamentally different from who they were. In others, the person remains fundamentally the same – albeit now burdened with ethereal sexiness and a need to consume blood. While the Castlevania series has shown a range of vampires with different feelings towards humans and their own relationship with humanity, it has never staked down what becoming a vampire actually does to a person. This is also where that queerness starts to come into play.
I must also confess that I’ve only watched the first two episodes of the second season while writing this. I wanted to get this all written down while it was still fresh in my mind, and I wasn’t ready to take the risk of yet another series making a woman in her 30’s/40’s the most interesting character before pushing her aside.
The second season picks up barely a day after the end of the first as the main cast reflects on Tera and what she may or may not be now. In their eyes, Tera is gone and what is left is an ontologically evil creature that looks like her, sounds like her and may even have her memories but has no emotions, and is best thought of as sometime more akin to an animal. Maria confesses that she had never thought about killing vampires as anything more than a fun game to play with Richter. This is what the decline of third spaces has done to our youth. Later, when Dollar Store Frollo encounters Tera not even a full 48 hours after offering her up as a sacrifice to the actual woman of her nightmares, he questions whether she is even capable of loving their daughter anymore and later admits he doesn’t believe vampires, including the woman he admitted to being in love with like a day ago, have souls.
The only empathy Tera seems to get is from another vampire who acknowledges that she is still fundamentally the same person with “a brain that can think and a heart that can love.”
As the old saying from a video game released in 2015 goes “Despite everything. It’s still you.”
Where it gets extra spicy is how Tera herself makes sense of all this. Given how her relatives feel about vampires and how many she’s killed herself, I can’t imagine that she feels any differently. When she offered herself in place of her daughter, I can only assume that she expected that she would effectively die. Her soul would depart and whatever was left over would be something else; a fundamental break between who she was and would be. Instead, she finds herself facing the prospect of an eternal life with the trappings of consciousness, memory and emotion; still fundamentally the same person. If that’s true for her, then she must also realize that it was true for her sister as well. The last thing that sister saw being Tera dispassionately ending her eternity without a word spoken between them. For someone in that position, having a brain that can think and a heart that can love might be more of a burden than a relief.
This narrative and the language used by the characters in it hit me as a compelling allegory for how I view the process of transition. I’ve talked on this blog in videos over on my youtube channel about what that process was like for me. It was particularly hard on my relationships with my immediate family and even nearly a decade later those wounds have not fully healed. When I first came out to my parents, they somehow found something crueler than hanging up the phone on me. They set the phone down and walked out of the room leaving me to talk to myself until I hung up. For months afterward, they wouldn’t answer the phone when I called so I made like a repressed homosexual victorian author and wrote them a letter. To my surprise, I got a reply back.
In that reply and the exchange that followed, one issue kept coming up. To my mother, I was now fundamentally a different person that she not only didn’t recognize as her child but did not know how to interact with. Despite my insistence, she could not reconcile that the person she thought I was and the person writing her those letters were the same person. It pained me immensely to be not only rejected by my mother but denied in my own understanding of who I was as a person. My partner at the time would eventually end our engagement saying something similar; she could no longer accept me as the same person and needed to move on.
From my perspective, not a lot had actually changed. That’s kind of the funny thing about transitioning. Some things change immediately. Most of those were on the front end for me like changing my name on legal documents and coming out to people. You make big social media posts and get hundreds, maybe even thousands, of likes and everything feels like it’s happening so fast. Then the rollercoaster runs out of track and you pull back into the station. Other things change slowly and some don’t change at all. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the excitement and attention but once you get those big immediate things out of the way, it’s actually kind of boring; kJust lots of waiting and nearly fainting when your chest bumps against a door frame.
I remember filling my first estradiol prescription and letting it sit on my desk for months while I let myself become a pressure cooker of anticipation. When I finally made up my mind and decided to take my first pill, I was hoping for, and maybe even expecting, some kind of drastic immediate change in how I felt about myself. There was no magical transformation. There was no diegetic theme song. All that pent up emotional anticipation vented out and all that was left was just me sitting alone in my apartment with two cats trying to convince me they had never eaten before in their lives. Despite everything, it was still me. For better or worse, it always is.
It’s been nearly a decade now and while things are better, I still don’t know whether my parents think of me as being fundamentaly the same person and, honestly, I’m afraid to ask.
While watching Castlevania, I was surprised how much of a reaction I was having to Tera’s character arc. It wasn’t until a scene where Tera tries to reconnect with her daughter that I realized just what chord this was striking for me. Maria is searching through her home looking for supplies when she finds herself in Tera’s bedroom. The camera shifts to a wide shot of Maria in the unlit room but you can barely see Tera standing in the shadows in a way that had me turning to my brave and beautiful wife, who has not seen Hereditary, and saying “Ok Ari Aster.”
I don’t think she understood the reference but you, dear reader, you understand how insightful and clever I was right? Of course. Anyway, back to the point of departure.
Maria asks what it’s like being a vampire to which Tera dispassionately responds that her world is now brighter in some ways and in others impossibly dark. Honestly, if someone were to ask me what my life is like now compared to a decade ago, I’d probably say something similar. In some ways, things are easier. In other ways, things are harder. It’s almost more surprising how it can sometimes feel like very little has actually changed. Something about this scene and everything running up to it got a reaction out of me that few pieces of media do and I’m not even confident that this allegory was intentional. That’s the magic of vampire fiction. Someone sits down to write genre faire and the gays act like my dogs when I open a can of tuna. Even ostensibly “trans” art that is more intentionally allegorical to the process of transition usually misses me, but here I am moved enough that my brave and beautiful wife had to explain the concept of a “blorbo” to me after listening to my talk through my ideas for this post.
I’m genuinely invested in finding out how Les Miserables but Fantine is a vampire and Valjean wears a boob window coat. I can imagine an outcome where being rejected by the people she loves and sacrificed for drives Tera to anger, despair and potentially into the role of an antagonist. The pain of rejection eventually turning her into the monster her family feared she had already become. It’s not like she hasn't opened a portal to hell once already. God forbid women have hobbies.
Now that I think of it, it’s very funny that Richter questions why Tera knows about the secret “calling your ex” tunnel into the church but no one questions why Tera knows how to read the language of hell.
I could even see her manipulating her daughter ala Shaft and Richter in Symphony of the Night which the series creators have already expressed a desire to adapt more directly. It’s also not like people haven’t been cured of the curse in other games so there’s always the prospect of a resolution about the redemptive power of love and acceptance. Either outcome still fits with the trans allegory or maybe we’ll see a mixture of both.
Heck, maybe those two lesbians from the first series will teach her the ancient Austrian healing art of wömankissen. What greater source of healing is there but taking a nap in the lap of another woman? Clive Bradley, I know you’re reading this. Are you picking up what I’m putting down here? Do you hear the people sing Clive?
Now that I’ve finally got all this out of my brain and onto a page, I can finally get back to this series. I’ve got the brainworms bad enough that I even went ahead and bought fabric to make a Tera cosplay that I swear I'll make once I figure out how to sew those dang sleeves. No matter what happens though, I will still be me and you will still be you for better and for worse so let’s try to be nice to ourselves.