Magic and Castlevania—both the games and the Netflix animated adaptation—have always gone hand in hand. It’s a fundamental aspect of the series, as a long line of Belmont descendants unleash divine powers in their perpetual quest to stop Dracula and his minions across the ages. But while that’s remained true in adaptation, Nocturne has placed a much greater emphasis on magical power than its predecessor show did—using it not just as a way to boost the scale of its action sequences to awesome heights, but as a way for its characters to find connection and better understandings of themselves.
The first Castlevania series largely focused its magical explorations through the character of Sypha Belnades, the Seeker-turned-ally Trevor Belmont eventually fell in love with, infusing the future Belmont bloodline with her magical aptitude. Sypha herself was always an expert with her abilities from the moment we met her; her growth across Castlevania‘s four seasons was less about understanding her magic, and more about its refinement—in particular, how her time with Trevor honed that ability into something more martial, her confidence in herself flowing into just how adept a fighter she became at Trevor’s side. It was never about how magic opened Sypha up as a person, because it was always part of her as a Seeker, instead it was how that side of her responded to someone new entering her life in the way Trevor did (as much as she occasionally moaned about it). And that mostly came in the form of giving Sypha some of the show’s best action moments, as her confidence as a fighter increasingly lead to her being able to throw hands with the biggest foes thrown at her with aplomb, shooting lancing shards of ice and bursts of flame with a not-so-reckless abandon.
Nocturne, however, set generations after Trevor and Sypha, takes a slightly different approach to its view of magic. It’s still a way for the series to evolve its action—the recently released second season has multiple excellent magical fights in it, in particular Richter, Juste, and Maria’s tag-team showdown against Erzsebet in the final episodes, that almost feels like a Dragon Ball Z smackdown at times thanks to everyone blasting streams of magical energy about the place. The same could be said of the moment Richter re-awoke to his own magical ability in season one, delivering one of the best action sequences of 2023 in the process: Nocturne‘s fight sequences are just on another level compared to its predecessor, not just because animation studio Powerhouse has grown more and more experienced as its developed both series, but because the addition of more magic to the whip-slinging, sword-clashing action has just allowed the creative scope and stakes of a fight scene to blossom into something that is an absolute joy to watch.
But magic is more than just spectacle in Nocturne (not to say that it was in the first Castlevania, either, but the dramatic upscale of how its used in fights definitely adds a lot of flash to the proceedings). Throughout both seasons so far, characters being in touch with magic has been about a recognition of a part of who they are, often a part of themselves that they have been isolating for one traumatic reason or another. In the case of both Belmonts we meet in Nocturne, first Richter and then his grandfather Juste, the magical seeker powers that are now nascent to them as parts of this long lineage are things they have denied to themselves after facing a horrible loss: the shared tragedy of the death of Julia Belmont, Juste’s daughter and Richter’s mother.
In the games, Juste was always considered one of Castlevania‘s more magically attuned heroes, but the man we meet in Nocturne initially is anything but. Juste’s distancing from his daughter, and his eventual retirement to France to live out his days away from the life of a vampire hunter, sees his own magic wane. While he remains a capable fighter, his feeling of dismay over not being there for his child, and his inability to help Richter when they first reunite, compounds his hesitance to embrace that side of himself until season two forces him to do so to safeguard Maria after the loss of her own mother. Richter, meanwhile, saw his part in witnessing his mother’s death as taking on a sense of responsibility for it—and that his failure to utilize his own magic to protect her led to him suppressing it as he grew into a young adult. It’s only when Richter realizes the depth of his desire to protect the people closest to him when they’re threatened that he finally taps back into his magical ability, reconciling it to his grandfather as a realization that, for as much as he still harbored the trauma of losing his mother, he has people he loves in the here and now that need the full extent of his power, and an understanding of who he is that comes with it. It’s not so much that both men get a suitably video-game-y power up that lets them do cool fight scenes, but that magic becomes a key part of understanding their full self, their emotional bonds, and their wider connection to the generations of Belmonts that came before them.
This emotional, magical throughline is something that isn’t just explored by Nocturne‘s Belmonts, either. In season two, pretty much all the main cast is reckoning with what their supernatural abilities really mean and say about themselves—even Alucard, who briefly flirts with the darkness of Dracula’s legacy as he helps battle Erzsebet. The aforementioned Maria has much of her arc across season two dedicated to the emotional turmoil she feels over her mother being turned into a vampire, and how that clouds her own magical ability, first in how she gives into wild, dark power to kill her own father for his role in Erzsebet’s plans, and then how, with Juste’s help, she learns to heal herself. Likewise, Annette’s spiritual connection to magic becomes key to winning the battle against Erzsebet, not just for the power it grants her but in how it lets her deal with her own lingering grief about her mother’s death, and the French persecution of her people and her faith in Saint-Domingue.
Tying the magical elements of Castlevania‘s world into these emotional arcs for its heroes enriches the world of the series beyond simply giving its fights an enhanced spectacle. In making magic both a tool for personal healing and spiritual connection across generations of families and cultures, the series makes magic one of its strongest weapons: not just for the supernatural dazzle it brings, but by giving its characters an avenue for introspection and depth that would leave the show far emptier without it.
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