In 1872, 25 years before Irish author Bran Stoker would publish Dracula, fellow Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu published Carmilla. Taking inspiration from folklore, other works such as Polidori’s “The Vampyre” and Coleridge’s “Christabel” as well as 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 overt about the mutual attraction between the two women. In fact, when Hammer sent the script of their 1970 adaptation of Carmilla to British censors, they were warned the depictions of lesbianism were going too far. Hammer replied by pointing out that it was all in the then nearly 100 year old original story and the censors gave it a pass with a shrug and a “well, so it is.”
Historians consider Carmilla to be not only one of the first literary instances of the modern vampire but also one of the first instances of lesbianism in British fiction. As a work, Carmilla’s depiction of complicated love between women 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 closely tied to queerness.
In fact, it is hard to write vampire fiction without stumbling into some kind of queer allegory. Sure, the same person who thinks Invasion of the Body Snatchers is just a movie about some creepy plants may also swear that Dracula is just about the perennial horrors of the London real estate market, but putting the blinders on can be even more effortful than reading it as a story about gay panic and sexual insecurity in the Victorian era.
It’s something the recent remake of Nosferatu, the original film 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 tearing through lives of two closeted queer people dissatisfied with their positions within the confines of victorian era heterosexual marriage.
There are a lot of works of vampire fiction out there, many of which have won wide acclaim and feature either central or allegorical queer elements. Of those, there is one particular piece I want to focus on: Castlevania, specifically the animated adaptation the series has been receiving via Netflix. So, spoiler warning. 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 named 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 simply too hard and my ego too fragile to endure being laughed at by skeletons. As an adult, the games are still pretty hard but I am older, wiser and unphased by the cruel mockery of skeletons at least most of the time.
With some exceptions, the games revolve around the generation-spanning battle between the Belmont family and Dracula. Every hundred years, Dracula and his castle, for which the series is named, are resurrected. Whoever the current Belmont is gets to step up to the plate and live the dream of eating wall meat on their way to teaching that old man a lesson. Much of the aesthetic of the series pulls from a combination of real world history, classic horror movies and Victorian fiction.
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 begins to take more liberties from then on while pulling in disparate elements from elsewhere in the series. Perhaps the biggest departure the series makes from Stoker’s image of Dracula being his reimaging 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 executed under suspicion of being a witch by the people of Wallachia. Dracula in turn resolves to commit a genocidal revenge campaign against humanity thus completing his own transformation from Hallmark Movie Woman to Lifetime Movie Woman.
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 not only didn’t feel a need for any more Castlevania adaptations but couldn’t imagine how one could even work narratively. How would you adapt the 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. The narrative of Nocturne very loosely follows the games Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night. In Rondo, Richter Belmont must defeat Dracula and may rescue his love interest Annete along the way (unless you think she's happier as a vampire. Which, hey, maybe she is). He can also save three other maidens who aside from the playable Maria each get only approximately an iota of characterization apiece, and that’s largely it.
So even before factoring in Dracula retiring to become an eternal wife guy, the story was already 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 that metaphor is truly dead. Add in themes of identity in the face of social upheaval, class consciousness and dash of anti-colonialism and you’ve got a mix that could only be more directly targeted at me if there was a musical rendition of Do You Hear the People Sing slotted in there somewhere.
Of course, as with any good vampire story, there are queer elements threaded throughout both Castlevania series. The original had a character in a polyamorous relationship with a man and woman simultaneously. 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 has kept the ball rolling by prominently featuring 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 noggin 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 awash with an allegorical queerness of a particular flavor that I adore and can never seem to 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 and shows up in the ending graphic. 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’s design. She’s warm. She’s maternal. She’s giving crow’s feet and she 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 the aforementioned skincare super-guru Elizabeth Bathory. Her sister was kidnapped during the attack and turned into a vampire. During an attempted rescue, Tera finds her sister transformed and kills her before fleeing across Europe. She settled in France where, it’s implied, she supported herself through sex work. Eventually, she began an illicit relationship with the local abbot who can be neatly summarized 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, refusing to be part of the child's life and marginalizing both Tera and their daughter. Honestly, it wouldn't be that much of a reach for Tera to sing both I Dreamed a Dream and On My Own in this Castlevania Les Miserables crossover I'm cooking up.
During the main events of the story, Bathory arrives in France to work with the aristocracy against the revolution. Gormless Frollo is so threatened by his potential loss of social capital in a post-revolutionary France that he allies himself with vampires and makes a deal with a literal demon to avoid even the possibility that he might be lonely on a Sunday. At the climax of the season, Bathory demands that Boneless Frollo make a show of good faith in their arrangement by allowing her to turn someone he loves into a vampire. Though she initially demands his daughter, Maria, Tera offers herself – which Bathory accepts, having recognized Tera as the woman who killed her own sister. So yeah, she’s slightly different from her church girl video game counterpart.
The closing scene of Tera ravenously drinking blood from Bathory’s arm as she becomes a vampire activated sapphic neurons in my brain that have been dormant since I was really into World of Darkness in High School. Apologies to my brave and beautiful wife/editor who is only learning this about me now. The eruptive force of those neurons reactivating was powerful enough to manifest a concrete release window for Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines 2. You can hold your applause.
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 relationships 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 as of writing this. I wanted to get this all written down while it was still fresh in my mind. My skeleton-mockery-proof heart also wasn’t quite ready to take the risk of yet another series making a woman in her 30’s or 40’s the most interesting character before pushing her aside.
The second season picks up barely a day after the end of the first. In the eyes of the main cast, 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 something more akin to an animal. Tera’s daughter Maria confesses that she had never thought about killing vampires as anything more than a fun game. Later, when Dollar Store Frollo encounters Tera not even a full 48 hours after offering her up as a sacrifice to the actual factual woman of her nightmares, he openly questions her on whether she is even capable of loving their daughter anymore and later admits that he doesn’t believe vampires, including this woman he claimed to love, have souls.
“When Lucy-I call the thing that was before us Lucy because it bore her shape-saw us she drew back with an angry snarl, such as a cat gives when taken unawares; then her eyes ranged over us. Lucy’s eyes in form and colour; but Lucy’s eyes unclean and full of hell-fire, instead of the pure, gentle orbs we knew. At that moment the remnant of my love passed into hate and loathing; had she then to be killed, I could have done it with savage delight.”
This passage from Stoker’s Dracula is taken from the diary of Dr. Seward; a man who was in love with this woman and sought to marry her. Regardless, he has an immediate and powerful maybe even instinctive revulsion to Lucy’s vampiric reappearance. Not only does he immediately accept that she must be destroyed but also that he would be delighted to do it himself. To be fair, Lucy has taken up the hobby of serial child murder in her undeath but setting that aside!
What I find so compelling about this section of Dracula in particular is how there is a question to raise about how reliable he is as a narrator. We only hear about the events in the past-tense and in the first-person. Unfortunately, as a result of the short-sighted decision to bury Lucy without a pen and paper, we have no way of knowing her own account. Dr. Seward’s description of Lucy is perhaps the most monstrous thing in the story but could he be exaggerating to justify his actions to himself, to distance himself from the memory of the woman he loved or even just simply misremembering? People aren’t great when it comes to memory and even just framing a video clip as two cars either bumping into each other or crashing into each other can cause people to give wildly different recollections of the same video.
Once again setting aside the serial child murder, there is some commonality here with how the other characters in Castlevania react to Tera. The immediacy and severity of their reactions makes it seem like Dr. Seward’s line
“At that moment the remnant of my love passed into hate and loathing; had she then to be killed, I could have done it with savage delight” is something that could be said by a number of characters in the cast.
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.”
A key difference between Lucy and Tera is the shift in storytelling perspective. Stepping outside of the first-person limited gives us the opportunity to witness a more nuanced and perhaps even more horrifying scenario. Given how her relatives feel about vampires and how many she’s killed herself, I can’t imagine that Tera 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 realize that it was also true for her sister whose eternity Tera ended herself. For someone in that position, having a brain that can think and a heart that can love might be more a burden than relief.
As the old saying from a video game released in 2015 goes “Despite everything. It’s still you.”
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 a bit in other videos 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 upped the ante from my sister who simply hung up the phone; they found something even crueler. Without a word, they set the phone down and walked away leaving me to talk to myself until I finally hung up. For months afterward, they wouldn’t answer 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 to the contrary, 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 ex-fiancee who had been initially supportive would eventually end our engagement saying something similar; she could no longer see 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. Those are like flipping a switch. 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 but once you get those big immediate things, what's left is actually kind of boring.
I remember filling my first estradiol prescription and letting it sit on my desk for months while I became 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. I swallowed the pill and…there was no magical transformation. There wasn’t even a 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 and always will be.
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 the same fundamental 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 viewer, 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 stopped to explain the concept of a “blorbo” to me while I was talking through some of the ideas that have ended up in this video.
There is an episode of the Slate podcast “Hi-Fi Nation” that brushes against some of this same ground but instead opts to look at the vampire as an allegory for general transformative decisions; the hosts opting to focus on the decision to have a child. While there are legs to the idea, overlooking, or even ignoring, the unique queer history and appeal of the vampire as allegory is like ignoring the part of the iceberg lurking below the waterline. Historically, that hasn't worked out great. Not that it doesn’t happen but it’s just a little more common for someone to be ostracized and called a monster for coming out as queer than for deciding to have a kid.
Wrapping up, I’m genuinely invested in finding out how this take on Les Miserables, where Fantine is a vampire and Valjean wears a boob window coat resolves. 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 “booty call” 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 manipulating 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 centering 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 could there be than taking a nap in the lap of another woman?
Anyway, now that I’ve finally got all this out of my brain, I can finally get back to watching the series. I’ve got the brainworms bad enough that I even went ahead and bought fabric to make a cosplay that I may or may not finish once I dig myself out of this hole of learning about historical corestry and figuring out how to actually sew these 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.
Hey there, it’s me again in the post-edit. This video started as a blog post on my neocities page. There’s a link to it in the video description. Work and life have been making it hard to find the time to work on bigger longer form videos lately so I’ve been using that to turn over some thoughts and ideas with the aim of using those as a launching point for videos later on. The first of which is this one right here. I hope you enjoyed it. As always the best way to support the channel is just to share it if you think someone else might be interested or just interact with the video. Likes and comments actually do go a long way to boosting the videos you like in the algorithm so other people will see them too. Do what works for you though, I’m not a cop. More importantly, I hope you’re doing well and I’ll have another video ready when it’s ready. Until then, take care.