The Grief Man

A love letter to Castlevania: From The Duty to Grief to it's Optimism.

Out of all the DSvanias, Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin is weird in nearly every respect. From its two-protagonist duo, weird anime-portraits that aren’t quite the stages from Order of Ecclesia and it being a tie-in to one of the lesser-cared about titles of Bloodlines. For now what I want to extrapolate is that out of all the games, Portrait is the one that brings to light something that boils underneath the IGA-lead games: grief. The main antagonist of the game: Brauner. He sits rather strangely in the cannon, what he actually invents and does is much more good and, debatably, only slightly less ethical than what Albus was up to in Order of Ecclesia. Yet not only gets less sympathy from the protagonists. He’s shown in such a strange defilement that even Death does not take pity on him. While you can boil this down to “Oh Death wants his buddy back” in the Big Drac, I think there’s a little more of an interesting taste here. An exploration of what Michael Cholbi calls “the Duty to Grieve”. We’ll get to what that means, but it’s easier to set the scene and see our chief anti-griever.

For those unfamiliar, a man bites into another man’s daughters to claim them as his own, driven by the grief of losing his original daughters in World War One. A war that caused enough darkness in humanity to call forth Dracula again and rebirth vampirism once more. Brauner, however uses his newfound vampirism to create dimensional paintings, all layered on each other in a way that even the genius second protagonist can barely follow - strong enough to prevent Death from getting at him. In return, he takes the daughters of a partner to a previous games protagonist. It seems, almost fair does it not? Brauner achieved more than what countless sacrifices, dodgy experiments, grooming and eventual Dracula-resurrecting of Order of Ecclesia ever provided for humanity. While, because Konami is Konami, we’ll never know the full details of Aria of Sorrow’s Battle of 1999, yet Brauner had done the same plan that Julius did – using the eclipse to separate Dracula from Chaos enough that Matthias could be killed for realisies. Was the price Brauner asked for not close to the equivalent of the price Leon Belmont paid in Lament of Innocent to make the legendary Vampire Killer as powerful as it is now? That whip gets it power from the tragedy of lost love, the tragedy of trauma, the tragedy of taking another man’s love. It’s seen as almost inevitable in Lament of Innocence with the crusade-PTSD-stricken Mathias who is unable to grieve or love succumbs to becoming Dracula. Grief has always been embedded in the series. The absolutely irony of Dawn of Sorrow’s Julius mode having a fight with Somacula next to a portrait of Mathias – to kill a man turned into Nu-Dracula because of the murder of his loved one, with a whip crafted by the death of a loved one.

The difference is, near consistently, is grieving. Leon grieved. Johnathan grieved. Shanoa grieved. An ego-centric grieving that becomes a type of Kantian-duty you owe not to the loved one, but to themselves. Leon grieves, and turns his grief into love. Shanoa grieves and vanquishes the dark. “Sadly for you, they’ve regained their senses. Thanks to my magic” Charlotte quips, after ending Brauner’s studio portrait. After she used sanctuary to “cure” the daughters, the same way you can cure the shop keeper who never turned full vampire. Vincent never became full vampire, he had to be saved from the physiological effects, not the grief. The sisters, upon accepting their bloodline, their dead father and eventual fate with the protagonists are cured. There’s this theme that everyone in this game (aside from Charlotte) has to acknowledge their duty to the past.

And so “Sadly for you, they’ve regained their senses. Thanks to my magic” Charlotte grins. Brauner’s simple response is that they are his reincarnations of his daughters, and humanity has taken away his daughters again. He’s not even mad at destroying the paintings, but that you are putting him through grief again. Johnathan gives his whole “what is family” about the sacrifices the Morris family made. Brauner is clearly the antagonist, but there is not an inch of movement on the protagonist’s sides. In fact, Wind (Eric Lecarde, previous protagonist and father of the stolen daughters) shows more mercy about his daughters being replaced, even if it meant he will always be a ghost. The two characters who refused to face their own grief – to ignore their duty (Eric even gives up his name in nod to breaking this duty.) – find empathy with each other.

I try set the scene because it’s really quite astounding how callous the protagonists are to Brauner - not always directly about his consent crimes. Brauner’s ultimate crime is avoiding his duty to grieve. It’s not quite a Kantian-type of duty, but something that is certainly Kant-adjacent as Cholbi himself is a Kantian Duty fan. It makes sense, why his essay won an award, because it’s becoming quite in-vogue to not grieve. Since in the modern age of remembrance Facebooks, ai chatbots and personalised online “graveyards”, the world has been pushing towards making virtual ghosts or trying to make trauma nice and pretty.

This doesn’t mean paying respects to your dead elders or even grieving a celebrity, but reforming your identity. According to Cholbi, this type of grief is egotistical, you owe it to yourself to not just say goodbye but reform your relationship, your identity. This two-way intimate relationship (which debatably extends to pets) is why parasocial relationships don’t entirely count even if you make your fandom identity about David Bowie. That’s not to downplay the hurt, but to distinguish between private-identity-forming relationships and social profile-forming-relationships. My father, who wished not to go to his biological mother’s funeral, found great reprieve not to say “fuck you” one last time, but to reconstitute the parts of identity tied to the relationship. All the things unknown and his history could be reformed without her.  Precisely because it’s an egocentric duty, is why it’s been such a target of protecting the Laschian Narcissism which we will see when we reach the Castlevania anime talk.

Saying that, you wouldn’t dare call a grieving mother “a coward” like Jonathan called Brauner for setting up a small private talk chat-bot to talk to her son. Hell, even that one Black Mirror episode, portrayed the resistance to these grief-inhibiting things as unable to truly prevent the dereliction of duty. You could probably draw a line that Brauner did something unnatural in becoming a vampire and taking the daughters, but I think it’s more simple than that.

It's not like this hasn’t been the case in literature before. At a talk by Michael Cholbi, he brings up Camus’s The Stranger. Keeping focus on the character assassination towards a man who did not grieve, yet even in that there exists a sympathetic edge; The concession that not everyone has a perfect relationship with their family. In this, as many of the analytics in the room had questioned, they don’t see a duty, and it crosses a line in the sand to hold it against someone. I disagree with this, I also disagree with Cholbi’s answer. Pain, hurt and trauma is not something that is merely a surface level wound, it becomes your identity.

Interestingly, a German philosopher in the room – the bane of that year’s MA students for saying psychology exists because of “autists” – could not see this duty to grieve. Yet he had taught a module on empathy, and wrote on the ethics of long term psychological trauma, unable at any point to put any sort of responsibility or onus on the patient’s side. Which is fine to an extent – healing is hard ones jonesome. However, these do maintain two way responsibility, as much as a patient must take their medicine, a grieving person must reconstituting their identity. You’ll never see the duty to grieve, unless you put down the Hippocratic oath. Unless you relinquish some of the authority of healing to the person. In Castlevania, this is shown multiple times where a character’s identity is reconstrued, but is never fully healed without the other parties. Leon reconstitutes his identity, and then is healed when the alchemist turns his love into the Vampire Killer. Wind doesn’t just move on when the protagonists tell him the twins are saved, but after the game when he reconstitutes his identity as a father to his daughters and says thank you. The sisters themselves don’t fully grieve for their father until the end of the game when they reconstitute their relationship not just their individual roles – with Stella playing the tough older sister but how they interact with each other. As much as Cholbi sees it as individualistic, the duty to grieve, to go through the cycle probably requires a relinquishing of healing. IGA’s newest game Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, contains this in the most bare basic simplistic form. Miriam, upon grieving for Gebel, reconstitutes her identity, and with Johannes, heals through the deception caused by the games’ antagonists.  

IGA dropping a judgement down, is funny in comparison to other philosopher’s have been steady whether to commit or not. Robert Solomon, for example. in Grief and Gratitude walks a fine line between the demand for grief, and not really committing to any arguments for a moral failure of duty. For him, Brauner should be placed and understood in the realm of trauma, relationships and the gratitude towards his daughters for making him the man he was then. This wasn’t really expanded upon in Portrait, but I still find it unsatisfactory. Brauner had nothing but gratitude and love for his daughters, he blamed humanity, and who wouldn’t from the horrors of World War I? There’s an interesting quote from him that puts this into perspective and why you can’t just The Stranger Brauner: “Perhaps justice wasn’t on my side, but I’ll never admit it was on yours either.” Jonathon replies back about how justice is all about perspective, but that doesn’t really fit either. Brauner is asking here to be like The Stranger, he is beyond being judged on a moral failure towards some sort of society, or human instinct. Hell, he never even gloats about being able to outwit both Dracula and Death. Any sort of moral-society fails on him, you can say that’s because he’s now a vampire, but it’s beyond that in my personal opinion. In pure anti-humanity, in pure classical narcissism, in pure intentional gratitude Brauner exclaims “I just wanted to protect my family” before Death kills him, still with no sympathy from the protagonists. There’s a selfishness, a love there that goes far beyond mere gratitude, beyond society. Let us not forget he willingly became a vampire in despair, he wasn’t converted like Mathias  in a state of PTSD delusion, he wasn’t forced like Soma to unlock emotions by the crucifixion of a loved one. Brauner doesn’t show a lot of complexity but the added things of being a coward, inhuman and the difference between the “sacrifice” of Jonathan, makes for a way of looking at grief that is better than anything the Netflix anime ever put out.          

There’s an undercurrent of Hegelian recognition (that this person helps establish your place in society and the world). So when someone dies, the identity-constituting relationship dies, and now you must reform it. Brauner does not, and forces that previous identity so hard he loses his humanity, and therefore loses any claims to a sort of Kantian dignity of persons (Don’t get me started on the weird undercurrents of Kant’s “person”). Brauner is selfish, and he has more of a claim to the duty to grieve than Jonathan had towards the Vampire Killer and the Morris family line. Brauner is being egocentric, and in response reconstituted his identity. “You couldn’t accept your fate, so you just abandoned your humanity to get what you wanted” Jonathan says, without an ounce of sympathy or pity before Death comes in to free his eternal boyfriend.

So what of Jonathan? His “grief” is losing his father, and Jonathan bears him so much anger towards not teaching him the whip “properly” (at the unknown cost of his life.) The game indirectly forces you to understand this, by making Dracula resistant to everything but holy, forcing you to fight the whip’s memory and unlock the true Vampire Killer. This, by the end, is considered enough to satisfy the duty of the grieve. It did, perhaps, let Jonathan grieve in a moral sense, but did he really change his identity? Did he really go through mourning, and grief in the same way Brauner did? Jonathan had already decided he would be a vampire slayer, he already hod his Fernandez/Belandres partner, he was already hell bent to kill Brauner anyway. Even insofar to get aggressive at Eric (as “Wind”) when they find Stella’s locket with a photo of him inside. His grief is reconciling with memory, but he doesn’t really change from it. There’s no reconstituting identity, there’s no egocentric reconstituting of himself. I’m not asking him to become a vampire, but it is funny how Jonathan seems to mistake grief and loss, with accepting one’s “fate”. Yes, Johnathan, you unlocked the whip and now it will eat at your soul until you or your child gives it to Julius Belmont. That was your fate as a Morris, that was the fate your father tried to shield you from in hopes a Belmont came around first.

But that’s not the same as the grief of having your daughters murdered.

Is the Duty to Justice, the Duty to a Bloodline stronger than the Duty to Grieve?

The games equate the two, that avoiding the fate of being a Morris is the same as not taking your duty to grieve seriously. I cannot help but that think they aren’t, and Jonathan is still right in what he says to Brauner, but Brauner’s crime was different to what Jonathan faced. If Brauner’s “fate” was to have his daughters murdered, he should just accept that? Sure, that’s the duty to grieve. If Brauner’s fate was to become a vampire to awaken Jonathan’s fate? Then that’s just cruel to Brauner. Don’t get me wrong here, Brauner is 100% the villain and in the wrong, brainwashing the sisters is terrible. Especially since he did it as Lecarde lay dying on the floor of the studio. Perhaps that too was fate. I do not think that fatalism suffices on its own. Insofar that a lot of villains in Castlevania love to play with the fate of all the protagonists. Ceila, following in the footsteps of the previous games antagonist wields fatalism as a sword above the protagonist, that there’s “more than one way to make a dark lord”, to make the unescapable fate real. Dracula’s cope is that humanity will always be shit, will always not-grieve, will always cause darkness. Even in the non-IGA Castlevanias, we see characters like Saint Germain who can see through time completely, understand everyone’s locked in fate, and sees it as beautiful that Hector will surpass what Death is tricking him into. All this to say that Brauner, who was more successful at keeping Dracula under wraps than his own damned son or an entire line of Belmonts is a villain that never truly does deserve the empathy. The duty to grieve, while not execution worthy, comes with a lot of other interlocking duties that slowly become neglected. We don’t have to look that far for an example of the opposite.

Take Albus for example, from Order of Ecclesia as I mentioned previously. After leaving Ecclesia after knowing the truth about dominus – that it requires the soul of the person to truly remove Dracula since it’s built from Dracula – leaves his duties. He leaves Shanoa in the hands of a master he doesn’t trust, who instantly puts her through a ritual and wipes her memory. Instead of explaining any of this, Albus kidnaps villagers, drains their blood and leaves them in torpor in various monster-filled environments. All this so he himself, as it’s revealed, can die in place of Shanoa. He starts becoming deranged, cryptic, and by the end is fighting to remain himself and not be completely Dracula’d. All this from the grief of facing losing Shanoa. Shanoa even recognises because of her drained state that she’s supposed to grieve; cry, feel sad, she understands Albus’s death by her own hands is supposed to make her reconstitute her identity. Yet she can’t without her memories, and neither really does Albus make an effort too. He just becomes a memory and info dump for her to go do the right thing and tell the master to spill the beans (and release Dracula along the way.) Not once is Albus truly sorry towards the kidnap victims (which included young children and didn’t even torpor the cat who was in a cave UNDERWATER). Shanoa all through this is aware she has a duty to grieve the loss of her adopted brother, her master and her home. Even though she cannot feel, she reconstitutes her identity outside Dracula’s castle as someone who will use dominus and bring the dawn. IGA then plays the full version of her theme, the full motif present in the opening/idle cinematic. When Albus gives his soul up at the end of the game and asks Shanoa to smile, he completes his duty – not to grieve but be the sacrificial pawn and aids Shanoa in giving her back her full identity to make her smile and complete her duty to grieve for him.

This all ties in to the whole twist in the first place. Albus could never hold Dominus because he was the one to lose what he loved, he was the one who would not grieve, he would not do his duty so would become the perfect person to help crack the seal on Dracula. The severing that Shanoa went through is also consistent with what happened with Julius Belmont in Aria of Sorrow, where you lose your identity, memories and emotions when do the Dracula sealing rituals. Grief absorbs all of these things and strips you from them. Shanoa, Julius and Jonathan to a lesser extent, have all done their duty to grieve, and therefore succeed.

So it is almost sad that Albus is given a redemption, apologia and seen as a sad twist of fate in comparison to Brauner. When both would be the perfect candidates for vampires in the first place. Well, we know why, because Castlevania likes to have a dummy antagonist before you have a fight with Dracula.

Nobody plays Castlevania for the plot, despite Netflix’s best attempts to drain all the soul and lore from the franchise. Make it “quippy” with coherent lore, history, connecting full arcs where everything is explained and rational. Nobody has to grieve probably and Dracula is framed as a victim. Makes sense considering grieving nowadays is almost frowned upon, as we are made more and more immortal with ArtStations or Facebooks being turned into memorial gravestones. All connected instead of the traditional abandoned forum accounts. IGA grieved for Castlevania, the Revenant boss in Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is a testament to him letting go, abandoning, reconstituting his identity with the franchise. It’s Miriam’s world now. Let the crows feast on the decrepit corpse that Konami keeps vaguely alive so we cannot grieve for it but throw it tribute money. The vultures will peck at the anime.

The anime forgets the beauty of the way grief causes us to act. The broken snippets we see of the Vampire Killer’s lineage built on a lover’s soul. Matihas is a tragic character, Dracula is not – Alucard tells his father this when his father can no longer love or grieve in Symphony of the Night. Maybe the apologia from the butchered Netflix version is parable enough, but grief itself is never truly addressed in all its grimness. Saint Germain is stripped of his top hats, meta knowledge and colours for a rational alcoholic to push the plot. Even with the animation and colours, the anime wallows in suffering, atheism, quips and slavery. That’s the simplicity of the IGAvanias in comparison, they tell a world, atmosphere, a history and feeling with almost entirely gameplay. Gothic, but never grim. Dark, edgy but understands dawn will come. Anime, but with a dash of human.

“Don’t overdo it” says Eric as he passes onto the next life to his sobbing daughters. He lets them mourn, but also to reaffirm their stations. Loretta will be a stronger younger sister, Stella will be a less harsh older sister. They grieve openly, and re-affirm their identities then close the book. Their story is done. A duty complete. The Vampire Killer falls into obscurity again.

…Then Jonathan and Charlotte have a sappy banter back and forth. ‘cause Castlevania never lets you leave without a smile.