Engaging with Research

Defanging Dracula

Citation

Fernandez-Vara, Clara. Dracula Defanged: Empowering the Player in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Simon Fraser University, 1 Jan. 1970, dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/100408.

Define

Close-reading: Fernandez’s journal is saturated with information, all of which are used to further strengthen her argument about the shifting connotation of vampires.

Vampires and the other: The author identifies the stark differences between Dracula and modern vampires when comparing their attributes, appearances, and goals. Not to mention, when speaking of the “Other”, Fernandez emphasizes that it’s anything bizarre but intriguing, which applies to the way vampires are shown in modern media: different but beautiful. These modern seductive vampires are dubbed as “glamourous”, while Count Dracula has stayed in the past as the stereotypical villain or “stock character”. It becomes more apparent that people move on and are not scared of what a “stock” vampire used to be.

Horror games: Fernandez clarifies that C: SotN is not a horror game because of its mechanics, for example, platforming and constant amount of enemies. Fernandez also compares C: SotN to Silent Hill 2 to solidify her argument on the Castlevania series not being a horror genre.

Comparative media: Throughout the article, the author gathers different media both digitally and literal, shedding light on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Polidori’s The Vampyre, Murnau’s Nosferatu, and other media examples that focus on vampires which connect to a part of her main argument over the kinds of vampires that exist.

Understanding

Vampires have lost their original impact of fearsomeness due to the media and, video games further exemplify the shift of connotation from fear to desirability: thus “…the different vampire figures, as well as the thematic and audiovisual elements that link [Castlevania: Symphony of the Night] to the horror genre, are at the service of empowering the player” (Fernandez 2).

The author argues in the article about this particular Castlevania game borrows elements from horror films and includes some disturbing visuals, namely a couple of the bosses, but it is not built the same way as a horror game; Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is built as a platformer. Although the player character, Alucard, is half-vampire, key abilities that Dracula doesn’t have in the game as a boss (turning into a bat, wolf, etc), are given to the player as a means to empower their experience in the game-world. Moving on, a nuance I found was her shift to speaking about Dracula and his appearance in the media has changed drastically to where he as a character is only a “stock” villain, while the player character Alucard in C: SotN and other modern versions of vampires are the “Glamourous Vampires” (Fernandez 4, 8). Fernandez makes valuable arguments about vampires becoming very desirable and how the existence of both this “stock” villain and “glamorous” idol of vampire appear simultaneously in a battle between the old and new vampire: “Dracula haunted the present, but refused to be part of it, and he avoided being represented in its media. The glamorous vampire partakes of the modern age by using the media to represent himself” (9).

Evaluate

Considering that this article was written by a student at MIT and was academically published, it must have some importance. The journal is logical and provides substantial evidence to support the arguments made. I don’t know if it’s groundbreaking, but I did not find many scholarly articles that focus on vampire games and point out that those kinds of games are correlated to the shift in the connotation of vampires in the modern era. Despite the title including a specific video game based on the existence of vampires, the subject covered is that of vampire representation in the media from something to be feared into something that one would want to be. I don’t know for sure what field this research is part of, but whether it be for psychology, sociology, videogames, or whatever, the way Fernandez connects the change of the vampires and a video game goes to show how much video games reflect other forms of media.

Distinguish

I don’t know if I want to continue with the same argument because after I tried explaining it to one of my apartment-mates I realized that I could not encompass everything I wanted to say in a few sentences, thus my argument is over scoped. But from what I have so far I’m almost piggy-backing on this article, although my focus was more on empowering creativity from a video game, not empowering the player in-game. In comparison to Fernandez’s work, I would like to focus on something related to video games, but I’m not sure anymore of what to do.

Create

I have no knowledge of the Castlevania Series so this article was rather eye-catching mostly from its point expanding outside of video games and into the broader topic of the types of vampires that exist in media. It gives me the idea of either shifting my work entirely out of video games or at least fine-tune my current thesis so I can make a stronger argument without worrying about scoping things too far.