(chill music)
- Ay yo what up, Wisecrack?
Kris here to talk about the show
that made vampires cool again.
And we're not talking about Vampire Diaries.
- Tell me something, when's the last time
you had something stronger than a squirrel?
- Instead, we're talking about Castlevania.
Now this show is everything we could have wanted
from an adaptation of the beloved video game.
It's a show that effortlessly blends
the source material's lore.
- What on earth is that ugly thing?
- I don't believe they hid it.
It's the Morning Star.
- [Kris] With brilliant character work
and breathtaking animation.
- That's right. Idiot (beep) livestock.
- [Kris] And to top it all off, it's really really funny.
- I'm (beep) talking here.
- [Kris] And this got us thinking,
how did Castlevania managed to succeed
where so many previous video game adaptations have failed?
- Aliens? What, we got to deal with aliens too?
- Luigi, we're the aliens.
- [Kris] We think the biggest reason
comes down to narrative, or perhaps the lack thereof.
We'll explain in this wisecrack edition
on how Castlevania tells a story.
And as always, spoilers ahead.
To understand what makes Castlevania so great,
we need to establish the differences
between video game stories and more traditional narratives
like books, TV, and film.
According to philosophers Jon Robson and Aaron Meskin,
video games can be classified
as "self-involving interactive fictions" or SIIFs.
By this, they mean that the story of a video game
is designed to be interacted with,
and affected by the players.
Whereas a movie obviously won't change
no matter how many times you watch it
or what your reaction to it is.
A video game changes based on your decisions.
Whether you max out stats or speed run a game,
how you play is drastically going to alter your experience.
And historically studio executives have underestimated
how difficult it is to translate SIIFs
into more traditional mediums like film.
Because if you cut out the gameplay
and stick to your cut scenes,
power riveting is the underlying story.
How much can an audience really identify with the character
now that they're not actively inhabiting them?
And this presents us with the problem,
most video game adaptations face a plot
borrowed from a game,
but without any of the game mechanics
to make it interesting.
It's why movie adaptations of Prince of Persia
and Assassin's creed failed to grip us.
We're stuck with flat characters following weak plot lines,
all of which results in films that only seem vaguely related
to the original games.
But how does Castlevania address these problems?
Well for starters, the show decides
to strip back the plot of the source material
in service of developing the world and its characters.
Take the show's first season, whereas Castlevania III
followed Trevor, Sypha, and Alucard's journey
through Dracula's castle to kill
the big bad himself, season one of Castlevania
does away with that plot line entirely.
In fact, the whole first season of the series
has little to do with actually stopping Dracula.
After giving us a surprisingly emotional backstory
for why Dracula wants to kill all of humanity,
hint, they murdered his wife.
He disappears for the rest of the season.
Instead, the series pivots to show us the impact
this war is having on one particular city: Greisit.
Dracula went off the deep end and night hordes
now roam Greisit's streets
while the city's less than upright citizens
look for innocent scapegoats to blame.
- How's the defense effort?
- Don't need it.
We got a tribe of speakers in the city.
Once we've done what needs to be done,
the demons will leave us alone.
- While none of this was in the game,
this setup evokes both the characters
and the tone of the Castlevania world.
The corrupt clergy and the angry mobs they foment,
for example, paint a picture of a morally nuanced world
in which no one, vampire or human alike is totally good.
- Targoviste is gone.
The other great cities are lost or losing.
Greisit will be the last major city in Wallachia.
To all intents and purposes,
I will be the church.
- [Kris] And its characters largely continue this theme.
Trevor Belmont, the last son of a famous
vampire hunting family, is a cynical drunk
who can't quite give up on the people
his family swore to protect.
- No, keep walking.
- [Kris] And Alucard, far from being the anti-Dracula,
is kind of like Trevor.
Aloof, nihilistic, yet unwilling to abandon the world
his human mother loved.
- And so here I am.
Choosing to honor my mother by killing my father.
- Even Sypha our know at all idealist
must learn to adapt a morally gray point of view.
while she learns that the sleeping hero under Greisit
is no knight in shining armor, but Alucard himself,
she prioritizes saving Trevor over adhering to legend.
- I will incinerate you before your fangs
touch that man's throat.
- I thought I was your legendary savior.
- So did I, but he saved my life.
- [Kris] Of course, all of this
might just seem like good writing.
Why lean so heavily on the plot of the original video game
when you can recreate an entirely new story
to emulate the feeling of the game and its characters?
After all, detective Pikachu and Sonic the Hedgehog
functionally did the same thing.
Discarding much of their original stories.
And of course, these decisions were likely motivated
by the fact that, stripped of gameplay,
these stories can't hold their own weight.
But as strange as it might sound,
we think Castlevania's disregard
of the game's original plot might be motivated
by something more philosophical.
By which we mean its guiding commitment
to something called anti-narrative.
To understand it, we first need to talk
about traditional narrative structure.
According to scholars like Seymour Chatman,
every narrative has two levels: story and the discourse.
The story, Chatman explains, is the plot of the narrative.
The events that happen.
In Lord of the rings, for example,
Frodo takes the ring to Mordor.
Boom, simple.
Discourse on the other hand,
refers to how the story is told,
which, if you're J.R.R Tolkien,
includes literary techniques,
such as writing super long boring songs.
♪ Chip the glasses, crack the plates ♪
♪ That's what Bilbo Baggins hates ♪
♪ So carefully, carefully, with the plates. ♪
- [Kris] Now, we human beings gravitate
towards traditional narrative.
And according to scholars like Laura Rascalori,
films do everything they can to take advantage of this fact.
She writes "The darkness of the auditorium;
the comfort of the chair,
which induces the spectator to relax and fantasize;
the passivity and absence of movement,
inviting a psychic and a motive participation."
All of this in service of making us nod along
and buy into the comfortably predictable narratives
on the screen.
But what happens when a plot
goes in a totally unexpected direction?
Or the discourse just completely breaks the mold
for storytelling?
Welcome to the anti-narrative.
According to Robert Scholz, anti-narratives are stories
that "force us to draw our attention away
from the construction of a [narrative meaning]
according to our habitual interpretive processes."
In doing so, anti-narratives not only force us
to critically reflect on the rules
of traditional storytelling, but they also remind us
that stories themselves are simply told as codes
rather than aspects of human nature or the world.
In other words, anti-narratives tend to break us out
of our cinema induced stupor.
Instead forcing us to think about how the story
is being told and how our brains are understanding it.
Consider one of the most drastic anti-narrative films
in recent memory: Memento,
which, by virtue of being told backwards,
forces your brain to engage with it in a very different way.
Now Castlevania is no Memento,
but it employs a good deal of anti-narrative.
While we already touched on how season one
defies expectations by choosing to forgo
the whole "let's kill Dracula" plot,
multiple plot lines through multiple seasons
similarly defy our expectations.
Consider season two, for example,
where our team actually sets out to kill the king of night
and where we first glimpse the political machinations
of Dracula's court.
But instead of being your traditional proactive antagonist,
Dracula does a whole lot of, well, nothing.
In fact, he does so little to advance the war
against humanity, that his subordinates
are actively pissed off at his apathy.
- There's no plan.
Dracula doesn't act on our recommendations.
He barely listens to you and Hector.
We're just thrashing around the country randomly.
- [Kris] But even more telling,
when Trevor and company finally storm the castle
and take on our villain,
it's not the epic climax we were expecting.
Sure. it has a hell of a buildup
with amazing set pieces.
However, the battle doesn't end with a climactic bang,
but rather with a whimper.
Dracula comes to his senses and realizes
that he's killing his own child.
- Lisa, I'm killing our boy.
We painted this room. We made these toys.
It's our boy, Lisa.
Your greatest gift to me, and I'm killing him.
- [Kris] And this leaves Alocard with no other choice,
but to slowly walk up to dear old Dad
and drive a stake through his heart.
It's quiet, it's subdued and it totally subverts
our expectations for the storyline.
Unless of course you play Castlevania,
Symphony of the Night.
- There was a small battle.
- It must have be a legendary battle.
- Mostly just desperate and sad.
- [Kris] Of course, this is far from the only example
of how Castlevania seems to eschew
our traditional understanding of narrative.
In season three, we're introduced to the judge.
A harsh but seemingly fair town magistrate,
who we grow to begrudgingly love.
But after he nobly sacrifices himself in a battle
against some religious nut jobs,
he relays a dirty secret to our heroes.
- Burn my house down.
- [Kris] Yup, the hero that we've grown to love
and root for turned out to be a prolific child killer.
It's so over the top and dark it's almost as if the show
is thumbing its nose at us.
- He was the judge. But he found his little pleasures.
- [Kris] Like any good anti-narrative,
it's forcing us to re-examine how easily
we buy into traditional hero stories.
But Castlevania's pension for anti-narrative
doesn't just force us to take a good hard look
at what narratives we buy into.
It also questions the very idea
of narrative storytelling to begin with.
While movies and TV tend to resolve problems
in a satisfying way,
real life obviously doesn't play by the same rules.
Or as our favorite depressed horse put it,
- Closure is a made up thing by Steven Spielberg
to sell movie tickets.
- [Kris] And Castlevania seems to acknowledge this as well,
Consider the fourth season in which we follow
Count Saint Germaine's convoluted plan
to bring the love of his life
back from the infinite corridor.
- You're claiming that the final victory
of the alchemical process is using a rhebus
to control the infinite corridor?
- Strangely, we never get any backstory.
Why is this woman continually running from it?
What are her true feelings for him in the first place?
While we might expect to get answers to these questions
in a traditional narrative, Castlevania never gives them.
even on Saint Germaine's death, all we're given
is the cryptic image of his loved one
watching him from the infinite corridor.
The show offers zero closure.
But the plot isn't the only place
where Castlevania bucks narrative convention.
It also makes some sizeable departures
in it's discourse, or the way the story is told.
The most notable one is how the show handles dialogue.
If you listen to any of the Hollywood screenwriting gurus,
you'll learn that dialogue should be kept lean.
In the words of Robert McKee, "do not drown your script
with endless dialogue and long speeches."
Castlevania of course, does not stick to this Maxim at all.
In fact, characters are downright loquacious.
Conversations about inappropriate relations
with farm animals can stretch on for minutes.
- That was indeed the most suave tale about sexual congress
with livestock that I ever heard in these parts.
- And sometimes characters just talk
for the sake of talking.
- I once observed the cipher though not as that God
had quite gone out of fashion.
God is now standing right in front of you.
And soon, very, very soon.
He's going to have sex again.
- The end result is that we often spend
large chunks of time searching for a narrative thread
in a conversation that is simply that - people talking.
It's not about moving the plot forward
so much as showing us a grounded, nuanced depiction
of realistic characters.
Now I know what some of you might be saying,
"Kris, for all this talk of anti-narrative,
doesn't Castlevania employ
some fairly standard narratives throughout?
And the answer is yes, of course it does.
The series finale, for example,
does ultimately give a lot of narrative closure.
Trevor ends up surviving his literal fight with death.
Sypha is pregnant,
- You know what scared me the most?
- What?
- That you might end up calling the kid Trevor after all.
- [Kris] And Alucard has finally found a person
who doesn't want to impale him.
- I knew you'd be strange.
But I didn't think it would be something like this
that brought you back to life.
- It's always something like this.
- Pretty much as close to a happily-ever-after
ending, as you can get.
That being said, it would be nearly impossible
to create a TV series that flips the bird
to narrative altogether.
If we did that, it would never get past
the suits at the studios.
But perhaps more importantly, this selective
use of anti-narrative seems to compliment
Castlevania's video game roots.
There's something about a conversation that drones on
for way longer than a normal scene
that evokes the endless dialogue chains
you'd have with an NPC.
And there's something about the lack of closure
to Saint Germain's story that makes you think,
if you only could have played the TV show like the game,
you could have unpacked more of that story.
That if you had the chance as a player
to interact with these characters, you'd dive even deeper
into their already considerably deep psychology.
But maybe that's the brilliance
of Castlevania's use of anti-narrative.
It stops the show from being a carbon copy
of the source material, and in the process,
it becomes a much more interesting adaptation.
But what do you guys think?
Does a series strength lie in its willingness
to embrace the anti-narrative,
or are we just excited to finally get a quality
video game adaptation?
Let us know in the comments.
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And as always, thanks for watching. Peace.