By Laura Gilkey

Based on Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, copyright 1997, Konami Co., Ltd.

Author's Notes

Of course this story is primarily based on Castlevania, but my take on vampire lore was also influenced to varying degrees by Buffy: The Vampire Slayer and Vampire: The Masquerade. While I hadn't read Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, I did have some working knowledge of it from the Cliff's Notes, as well. (Don't talk to me about the movie Bram Stoker's Dracula. I hated it. I came through the experience unscathed only by visciously MST3King it, and even then, one knows something is wrong when Count Dracula appears in one's head to say "I never did that! That's sick!")

It seems most of the really good fiction I’ve written lately is (at least partially) in the first person and takes advantage of the narrative voice. This is more true in The Demon’s Tale than here, but still important.

As you can see, this story is told in two “tracks,” the presentational/narrative track, and the representational/scenes track. I can even tell you why I did this (although I only realized it some time after the decision had been made). The story covers such a large span of time that coming up with enough representational scenes to tell the story smoothly would be cumbersome in the extreme, and would probably have bored both of us to tears. Exposition was needed, but flat exposition would be insufficient for the job. There’s a reason writers are known for saying “show, don’t tell.” So, I used the first-person narrative format so that even the exposition would be emotionally engaged in some way. In fact, I think there are some events whose import is expressed more fully by the way Alucard tells them than it would be if the events were “shown.” Conversely, his narration could not have done justice to the scenes included. Notice that he only relates dialogue a couple of times, and then it’s hearsay. And then in the case of several of the later scenes (the meeting with Maria, the Succubus, and the fake cast of Castlevania III), there could be no narration because either the listener already knew all about it or Alucard literally refused to talk about it.

Speaking of those, the coverage of Symphony of the Night is admittedly spotty. This is mainly because of the differences in demands of the medium between video games and fiction, and these are vast. They can be seen not only in my omissions, but also in my handling of some of the scenes that were included. The final battle with Dracula here bears little resemblance to that in the game. The fact is that video games are combat oriented. The game would have been remiss if Alucard didn’t go around killing scads of monsters, perhaps even moreso if it had not ended in an epic battle with Dracula appearing as some huge multi-headed monster. But the other fact is that in prose, prolonged or frequent fight scenes are boring. If you don’t believe me, then I don’t know what to tell you, but that’s been my experience. But just imagine that in this story, instead of the “head job” that Alucard got from the Fake CV3 Crew, that they had just, as in the game, shown up and started pounding on him, and he’d pounded them back and eventually killed them. I imagine it still would have had some effect of pointing up Alucard’s sense of loss and isolation due to his temporal displacement (God I love those $64 words...), but it wouldn’t have been nearly as extreme or as meaningful.

So anyway, most of SOTN gets skipped over here because the fact is that Alucard had no one to meaningfully interact with for most of it. From the literary point of view, nothing particularly interesting was happening. As I envisioned it, even his relationship with Maria didn’t develop much until after it was all over, and as mentioned above, her scenes could hardly be narrated anyway because the listener--Maria--was there for them when they happened, making it ridiculous to tell her about them. The Demon’s Tale notwithstanding, the familiars don’t appear here either, because I didn’t think “animal buddies” would fit the mood of the story at that point.

Throughout the story, Maria occasionally asks questions or makes comments during the narration. I apologize if this is jarring because her comments are not actually inserted, and just all of a sudden Alucard acts like something has been said to him and it’s anyone’s guess what it was. I think this was important in establishing that he is talking to someone, not just talking from some timeless narrator vantage-point, and the format just had no place for someone else’s speech, until at the very end, the two tracks of the story meet, and you see my sort of desperate transition into the final scene.

As mentioned in my page of ramblings, I disregarded a certain amount of accepted Castlevania canon when I did this. The original Castlevania timeline holds that Alucard is significantly older than Trevor for one thing. It also seems implicit that Alucard did some evildoing with his father at some point, and here you can see that as Maria says, he never really did anything bad enough to justify how much he hates himself.

That is, perhaps, my greatest insecurity about the story. I like it this way, but one can’t help but worry what readers will think, and my fear is that this story made Alucard seem too virtuous, victimized, indecisive, young, weak, depressive, friendly, pathetic, rebellious, dependent, fearful, emotional, intellectual, shy, and wordy all at once. However, while I can’t quote her word-for-word from memory, my best friend Kati (the story’s first reader other than myself) put my mind at ease about this when she offered her opinion:

“The ‘problem’ is that you made him seem human.”

I can only hope that I did.

Return to the Castlevania Index