Castlevania (Netflix series)

Has anyone seen the new series, Castlevania: Nocturne?

As far as the animation goes, it's superb, with the characters being even closer to Ayami Kojima's art; most episodes have impressive action scenes and they look awesome, it definitely picks up from the last season. The scene in which Richter puts on his bandana, we hear "Divine Bloodlines" and he finally becomes the badass from Rondo of Blood is just... It's already my favorite action scene from this year, it is a really great translation from Rondo's opening.

But the writing is... Well, let's just say you can feel the difference between writers. It has some very strong moments, like the entirety of episode 5 (after Richter meets a very important relative) and most of the next episodes, but the dialogues between the characters sound much less convincing or cool than the previous series and the first four episodes are not very well paced - episodes 5-8, though, I think they were all pretty good. As for the story itself, it has ups and downs: first of all, I think it was a good idea setting it in France so the French revolution could be the background, its fitting and much could be done with it. But then, this isn't taken advantage of by the writing: we don't see large riots or social turmoil, it basically amounts to a few meetings in which the characters say bland mottos and empty revolutionary phrases. In a similar note, bringing up the Haitian revolution could be a great thing, like they did with Isaac in the first series and his history as a sufi slave. But it was, again, wasted on the writing, which ends up being too explanatory: the scenes in which Annette and the other guy talk about their past, culture and gods feel very unnatural, like I'm reading a Wikipedia entry on those subjects. It sounds like how an American/European would summarize Haiti instead of feeling like Haitians describing their own experience - there's a sense of exoticism that feels very foreign and superfluous to the plot (maybe by being Latin American I can pick on this "look at how EXOTIC/STRANGE/MAGICAL their culture is!" very easily).

Which brings us to the characters. I enjoyed how they translated Richter and Maria. The expanded characters, like Olrox, Tera and Drolta Tzuentes were well handled and creative, but I think Erzsebet Bathory was a bit of a generic villain and can't compare to Dracula or Carmilla, which would be hard to top anyway. About Annette, the previous series showed that a change to a character's ethnicity could work (Isaac), but it was badly done this time for the reasons I talked above; plus, the new character that follows her, Edouard, is just annoying and very out of place (especially when he starts singing), besides his story contradicting how monsters worked in the previous series (again, it's trying to fit the themes of slavery/revolution, but the previous series already did the theme of slavery more organically and well integrated to the plot). There was one character, though, that was a complete surprise and I greatly enjoyed his presence and story, but it's a spoiler (don't read before watching the show):


So these are my impressions. I liked the show, but it's unbalanced and most of its good aspects come from the animation instead of the story, which only picks up by episode 5. One thing that worries me is that I still don't know if they'll bring Dracula back or if Erzsebet is supposed to be the main villain this time; I mean, it would suck to have a Symphony of the Night adaptation without Dracula, so I hope they're thinking about Erzsebet's or (more probably) Olrox's final objective being Dracula's resurrection - or maybe the next seasons will bring Shaft, unless the abbot is already supposed to be him/turn into him. As the season ended on a strong note despite the weak beginning, I'm interested in what will happen next.