#Sir Grakul

[sepublic]

This is all conjecture about a very obscure bit of Castlevania lore, but in Super Castlevania IV we're introduced to the boss Sir Grakul, an armored knight (or just... armor) that Simon fights and defeats. There's not much to him and based on what the wiki told me, in Japanese he's called Iron Crusher. But in the English instruction manual, his name is Grakul.

What connection does he have to Dracula besides being the boss of his castle's library? By pure coincidence, I realized Grakul's name reminds me of Dracul; The name of the historical Dracula's father. Dracul means Devil or Dragon in English, so Dracula means Son of the Dragon/Devil. It's never specified how Grakul is pronounced, and it's my first assumption that it's with a hard G, like Guest. But in some cases, G is pronounced like J, such as in Giant. The D in Dracul is also pronounced like J, so if we go by that logic, Grakul could be pronounced the same way as Dracul, the father of Dracula.

Was this intentional by the English translators for Super Castlevania IV? Who knows. They did do wordplay puns for Puweyxil and Koranot, as well as the more obvious references of Paula Abghoul and Fred Askare. Even if it wasn't planned, I think there's some compelling fanon you could extrapolate from this idea; Is Sir Grakul the father of Matthias, now haunting a suit of armor? And/or is he Matthias Sr.'s armor brought to life? What if he’s a previous wielder of the Crimson Stone, a predecessor to Dracula?

Is Grakul even necessarily a haunted suit of armor, or is there a skeleton, or even a flesh and blood being, underneath? Based on the presence of haunted armors in Grakul's level, and his death animation where he bursts into pieces of armor with seemingly nothing inside (assuming the body within isn't what's burning), I think he's just armor. But if the show ever considered adapting his character, they could reinterpret Grakul is just a dude wearing armor, with all of the other lore I suggested. Who knows?

[supersunky64]

That knight boss from Super Castlevania IV when it's at low health:

[sepublic]

I love the Castlevania show, but I can't help but be miffed by how much of the source material and colorful bestiary the show tends to ignore in favor of more vampires. I love characters such as Striga and Morana, but then you've got fairly generic ones like Dragan or Nikolai, who are just there to be obstacles and don't have any real personality themselves.

It's just a little confusing, because why do the writers keep trying to come up with OCs when they have plenty to pull from the actual games? In the games, vampires themselves are actually very rare; They're usually only represented by endgame bosses like Dracula, Bartley, Brauner, etc. Otherwise, the vast majority of enemies are night creatures, ghosts, haunted suits of armor, and the like.

But instead of embracing the weirder monsters like the Minotaur or Werewolves, the Castlevania show keeps defaulting to regular old vampires who are basically just humans with pointy ears and teeth. The show keeps defaulting to Vampire melodrama, like it's trying to emulate other pieces of Vampire media, instead of embracing what sets Castlevania apart from those stories. It has a concerning lack of weird castle exploration for a show called Castlevania.

Skeletons only appear in one scene, and I'm sorry but a common staple of a series should not be reduced to a mere fanservice cameo. It's like the Resident Evil live-action films making everything about zombies and reluctantly including a Licker as the ultimate monster. It's like if the Super Mario Bros. Movie barely had Goombas, they made the show too normal from the source material.

That isn't to say the source material is a perfect narrative, far from it; It can get pretty damn repetitive at times, especially with certain character roles and dynamics. I'll die on the hill that Annette's reimagining was justified, and Ortega and Hugh Baldwin are admittedly less interesting versions of Maxim Kischine.

The repetition makes sense! Castlevania's priority is gameplay, and each installment is meant to be its own thing. But when you're doing it as a TV show, a story, and having each story arc play a part in a larger narrative, you have to mix things up in terms of story and characterization, because you can't rely on different gameplay mechanics and levels to differentiate entries in an animated show.

But all that said, it's tiring how much the show will ignore aspects that wouldn't conflict with the writing at all in favor of more generic vampires. I don't want to see vampire politics and melodrama, but it's infinitely more interesting if its melodrama and politics between slimes and minotaurs!

I dunno, it feels like the show is limiting itself on an aesthetical level. What difference does it make in terms of writing if there's a flying Medusa head, or an Axe Armor? I think the writers are afraid of coming across as 'corny' as if Castlevania itself isn't crazy and anime as hell, but this just makes them come across as lacking sincerity. It's like how people complained about a bunch of 2000's movie adaptations of superheroes watering down everything to be more 'serious' and 'realistic' and 'believable', but it just made it grey and boring and cut away what made it unique.

The writers could've easily replaced characters like Dragan with, say, Sir Grakul from Super Castlevania IV, or had freakish looking night creatures be the ones to monologue (instead of treating Flyseyes as the one exception). There's acceptable departures from the source material, and then there's just straight up ignoring it, and then going out of its way to make up new things when stuff is already there to use. It's not as if the animators struggle with animating non-humanoid beings, considering how many unique night creatures they've come up with. So can we please stop being lowkey embarrassed of the source material???

It'd honestly make the show so much more memorable if we got to see Richter fighting a Skull Knight or Mummy. It's just so much wasted potential, especially when they ignore game Richter's compelling narrative of a Fallen Hero, in favor of making up something completely different. I can understand revising protagonists who barely have anything to them, like John Morris from Bloodlines, but Richter HAD a meaningful storyline to expand on, and one that deconstructs his role as a vampire hunter!

Given the show's attempts to be a grittier deconstruction and its suggestion that killing vampires isn't 100% good, I don't know why they didn't go with the idea of Knight Templar Richter whose desire to be needed in battle leaves him vulnerable to Shaft's brainwashing. The deeper, character-driven writing does not have to be mutually exclusive from fantastical and weird elements.