Speaking for the Dead: Super-storytellers in Castlevania
Starting as a singular side-scrolling video game from the mid-eighties, Castlevania has since bloomed into a long-standing franchise with a large cast of characters and intricate lore. A gothic adventure, the story mainly focuses on a family of vampire hunters and Dracula, whose eternal evil and hatred allows him to arise every few generations. A few years ago, the series made its jump into an animated Netflix series, and has been an uncommonly successful video game adaptation. Headed by comic book writer and novelist Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan, Planetary), the series is an action/ horror adventure imbued with macabre humor and attention to world building).
But this isn’t a review of the series, but a look at one of its particular elements: the function of storytellers within a story.
Within Netflix’s current Castlevania series, much history – stories of things that have transpired—needs to be deciphered by the heroes to understand how to combat the situations they face in the present. This trope isn’t exactly new; most lovers of the sword and sorcery fantasy genre know how often ancient histories or old legacies drive the plot . But I watched the series it became very clear how often the importance of remembering or discovering a story – pieces of information, or a history, or knowledge – popped up in Castlevania’s plot. For instance, the trio of heroes have to go to a hidden library which belongs to a now extinct family of vampire and monster killers. Their library holds hundreds of years of knowledge, and they hope to find a way to defeat Dracula among its shelves.
Appropriately, one of our heroes—Sypha– is a wizard of remembering and understanding stories. She is essentially a super- storyteller herself. Sypha belongs to a monk like group called the Speakers*, who are a group of nomadic and monk-like sorcerers. Their key attribute is their ability to memorize and share entire oral histories, understand dead languages, and taught truth behind myths. They write nothing down, and by training or by aid of magic they know the true histories of all the land. They are also open about it, and they share these truths and histories to anyone who will listen. Furthermore, these monks are nomadic largely due to their quest to continue to collect new stories of the people they encounter and to help those in need; so that if a group people or a town is lost to war, death, or time, their tales and ways of life will never truly die.
Besides these elements making for a clever and entertaining plot point to the series it made me reflect on how fragile and how easily lost stories can be. Just like in our real world, the fantasy world in Castlevania is peppered with tyrannical reigns, invasions, exoduses and war. The stories of a people or true events or histories have many times been swept away, covered up, or altered.
Sypha and the Speakers are then almost like superheroes of a more cerebral variety. They are like the ultimate journalists, truth-sayers, and prophets all combined into one.
It was intriguing to have a main character essential be a storyteller. It gave a well written series a little something extra. Sypha kept me engaged as she continued to enlighten with old stories or share her commentary on situations. Having a storyteller as a charter in fiction isn’t something seen often. If you can think of any from some books, shows, or films that had a storyteller character, share them in the comments.
*According to Castlevania’s Fandom page, the Speakers are similar to an old Gnostic religious group in medieval France. They rejected the Roman Catholic order as corrupt and immoral and believed the gospel should be accessible by all. It also looks like scholars debate the extent of the Cathars’ existence; much of what they did could have been mythicized.
