Castlevania has some multi-faceted villains. The characters don’t stop at being simply the big bad. They have received character arcs that have helped them develop forward from their game counterparts. Be it Dracula or Carmilla, the villains in Castlevania aren’t just one-dimensional characters.
Carmilla, in particular, felt like an extremely interesting character to me. Yes, she is hell-bent on bringing down Dracula, but at the same time, her motivation behind it can’t entirely be doubted. After all, Dracula was indeed too blinded by rage to see reason.
Carmilla’s worldview stems from her traumatizing past in Castlevania
Carmilla might be an evil villain for most of Castlevania, but one look at her past will tell you everything behind her motivations. She is a survivor of abuse. The man who turned her into a vampire promised her a great many things. But then, as enough time passed, he turned into a cruel old man who oppressed Carmilla.
Carmilla understood then and there that if one lives long enough with uncharted powers, one tends to go insane. At first, the series dupes me and plenty of its viewers into thinking that the villainess is freed of her past trauma. But in season 3, it is revealed that Carmilla is still haunted by her life of servitude. The nightmares had never stopped.
Despite killing her oppressor and freeing herself, she faced one hardship after another from similar people. All the while, she was helped by absolutely no one. Carmilla realized that there were always old and powerful men in power who would turn insane and threaten others. Her rage against these perpetrators helped her become her latter self.
Carmilla is a feminist icon
When Carmilla learnt of Dracula’s plot to kill all humans, she was able to logically analyze its consequences, something that Dracula never did. By killing all humans, Dracula was taking away the primary source of food for all the other vampires. This would have caused an entire life’s worth of hard work of Carmilla to have collapsed. Instead of getting washed away with Dracula’s grand plan of revenge, she realizes that Dracula is now a threat to all of her grand plans.
Suddenly, I realized that, Dracula is the new senile old man who has gone insane with his power. Her motivation was to make sure that no one else would suffer as she did, and she tried her best to perform accordingly.
Carmilla is also a powerful and independent woman. She challenged the power structures of her era and refused to back down against old men who were too stuck up to see the horrors they were committing. (Admittedly, she also committed quite a few of them.)
Castlevania animated series is available to stream on Crunchyroll.
This post belongs to FandomWire and first appeared on FandomWire
