Localization Drift and Hidden History in Castlevania: Nocturne

This post has minor spoilers for the first season of Castlevania: Nocturne, except for one paragraph that goes into the end of the season in somewhat greater depth, but I’ll throw in an extra spoiler warning for that one.

The English localization of Final Fantasy VI features a boss called Wrexsoul that, once defeated, yields the summon Alexander. It’s just one subquest of many in the game that rewards you with a summon, so there’s no reason to read a special relationship between this particular boss character and this particular reward, but it seems like there actually should be one. In the original Japanese, Wrexsoul’s name is アレクソウル or Arekusouru — or literally “Alex soul,” the implication being that defeating this boss somehow frees up Alexander (アレクサンダー or Arekusandā) to lend you his power. You are, I suppose, fighting the soul of Alexander.

The English version may lose the boss’s connection to Alexander, but it still works as a pun, though your mileage of it may vary. In the sequence where Wrexsoul is encountered — a nightmare being had by Cyan, one of the party members — you’re told that Wrexsoul is the amalgamation of people who died in a war. Furthermore, Cyan is having this bad dream because he’s tortured by the death of his wife and son. Souls aren’t being wrecked, exactly, but they’re not thriving. And maybe because it works on this level, Ted Woolsey’s rendering of the name has remained in subsequent English localizations even when other text has been changed to better reflect the original Japanese script.

To me, it’s a good example of how localized names can sometimes diverge so far from their source, whether by accident or by design, that someone experiencing the translated product may not understand what is being referenced. That might seem like a bad thing, and I’d wager there are some purist gamers out there who grit their teeth when they encounter a localized name that obscures the creators’ intentions. From my perspective, however, these localization choices can result in a new name and maybe even a new entity — and that can open the door for more creativity.

Take Super Mario Bros. 3, for example. In-game text refers to an item as Kuribo’s Shoe, which made young Mario obsessives like me think there was a hidden character named Kuribo somewhere in the game. Eventually, it was clarified that this item was actually Goomba’s Shoe, Kuribo being the character’s Japanese name. For some reason, it did not get switched by whoever made the English translation of Super Mario Bros. 3. Ditto for Jugem’s Cloud, which was actually supposed to be Lakitu’s Cloud, and in retrospect this actually seems obvious. Not having any knowledge about the Japanese names for these characters, I assumed Kuribo and Jugem were new characters, and as a result, I made some very bad fanart of what I thought Kuribo and Jugem should look like. Had the names been translated appropriately, I wouldn’t have thought to do this. (I would have still made bad fanart, just of other things.)

Because so many video games are experienced in localized form, this sort of thing is common. This is why people used to think that Shen Long was a hidden character in Street Fighter II. This is why there was at one point a split in the Zelda series between Zora, the green mer-creatures that were nice, and Zola, the green mer-creatures that were hostile. This is why it doesn’t make sense why Mega Man’s girlfriend is named Roll until you realize that he has a different name in Japan that makes him and Roll a cute matching set. And this is why the second-most famous family in the Castlevania games is usually the Belnades clan but in some games they’re the Fernandez clan. (It’s a mystery you can solve with linguistics!)

And that brings us, five paragraphs in, to the thing I wanted to write about in the first place, the new Netflix series Castlevania: Nocturne. It’s a loose adaptation of Castlevania: Rondo of Blood and other games focused on Richter Belmont, and the changes verge from minor — Maria Renard is a teenager rather than than a child, and she fights with a sword now in addition to using magic — to much more substantial, including the introduction of a big bad that is completely different than the one Richter faces in the Rondo of Blood.

For the purposes of this post, I’m most concerned with two of the series antagonists: Olrox and Drolta. Both come from the games, and their game counterparts come from real-life sources outside the scope of Castlevania continuity, but you’d be forgiven if you didn’t connect either Nocturne character with the real-life inspiration.

In Nocturne, Olrox is an Aztec vampire who has traveled to late eighteenth-century France to take part in the big vampire to-do that is the crux of this first season. He’s suave, aristocratic and outright romantic in the way that certain vampires can be. (He’s more Interview with a Vampire than he is Salem’s Lot, let’s say.) Olrox is based on a boss that appears in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, who has the same name but looks very different. In the game, he wears a purple suit and all you can really see of his body is his bald head (also purple) emerging from his high-fashion collar. In Japanese, Olrox’s name is オルロックor Orurokku — or Orlock, which makes the reference a lot more clear. The 1922 silent film Nosferatu was an unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that changed the names of the characters, including the vampire villain himself. Orlock is the stand-in for Dracula in this telling of the story.

It’s an interesting evolution, especially since Orlock, played by Max Schreck as an inhuman menace in Nosferatu, is the antithesis of the debonair, pansexual vamp dreamboat we see more often in horror stories today. If you prefer scary cinematic vampires, Count Orlock is the ur-nastyvamp, so it’s ironic and maybe indicative of the vampire’s place in pop culture that he would ended up being transformed into a character that looks like he belongs on the cover of a romance novel. 

Drolta Tzuentes underwent a similar but maybe even more drastic change. In Nocturne, she looks and dresses a great deal like a Darkstalkers character, boasting a style that seems out of step with eighteenth-century France, even for a vampire. We’re told Drolta is very old, hailing from ancient Egypt, and she functions as the emissary for an even more powerful vampire, Erzebet Báthory. In the games, however, Drolta Tzuentes (ドロテア・ツェンテス or Dorotea Tsentesu) is no such fashion icon. Appearing in Castlevania: Bloodlines, she serves a powerful female vampire, but she’s an old, stooped-over witch — not a vampire herself. This Drolta also doesn’t appear in the game, unless I’m mistaken. She is merely a story element mentioned in the instruction manual to set up the story for this Castlevania adventure. (That might seem weird, but keep in mind that Impa served that role in the Zelda games until she actually started doing stuff onscreen in Ocarina of Time.)

Despite her minor role in the Castlevania games, Drolta seems to be inspired by a person who actually existed. The real-life Elizabeth Bathory had several servants who were tried as her accomplices and executed for allegedly helping her torture and kill countless young women and children. One of these women was Dorotya Semtész, sometimes rendered as Dorottya Szentes or thereabouts. Today, searching for variations on this woman’s name brings up Castlevania-related hits pretty high up in the results, to the point that I was questioning whether she truly did exist or if she was a fiction created for stories of Bathory’s alleged misdeeds. Most texts mentioning her that I could find on Google Books are from the twenty-first century, well after Castlevania: Bloodlines was released in 1994. That may be because more people are writing about her now, and that may be that her name has been rendered differently in older texts and Google just isn’t catching them, but eventually I did find her mentioned in a 1963 book with a whopper of a title: Sex Crimes in History: Evolving Concepts of Sadism, Lust-Murder, and Necrophilia from Ancient to Modern Times. So yes, she did exist before Castlevania, under one name or another.

For her alleged crimes, the woman I’m calling Dorotya Semtész was tortured and then burned alive. As a result, I’d imagine she has more concerns with the mortal plain than how a video game series has interpreted her name and story. (Also: “What is a video game? What is a Netflix? Where did they bury my body?”) Regardless, it would be weird to explain to her that she inspired a sexy vampire character that uses a version of the name she had when she was alive. It would be weird to explain a lot of things to poor old Dorotya, actually.

I assume that the Castlevania: Bloodlines version of Drolta ended up with this version of her name because whoever was localizing the game saw that Japanese original, ドロテア, and didn’t connect it to the western name Dorotea, assuming instead that Drolta sounded like a fitting name for a wizened old hag. And I guess it does? By the time we get to the Nocturne version of the character, however, this translation choice actually works, because it would seem odd for a woman born in ancient Egypt to have the name Dorotea. I don’t know if Drolta sounds Egyptian, exactly, but it sounds like it came from somewhere else, wherever you are. 

And here’s the other spoiler warning. In this paragraph I get into the end of the first season of Nocturne. It’s just this one paragraph, however.

Ironically, Dorotea would have been a thematically appropriate name for this character. This name (and its English equivalent, Dorothy) come from the Greek Δωροθέα or Dōrothéa, meaning “god’s gift.” Because it’s a woman’s name, the word for “god,” theós, takes its feminine form, and therefore you could also read this name as “goddess’s gift.” And it so happens that the character Drolta is most associated with happens to be a female deity of sorts. At the end of the first season of Nocturne, Drolta’s master, Erzebet Báthory, becomes some sort of a vampire god, so it would make sense to have Drolta’s name reflect this connection to Erzebet. It just wouldn’t make her sound particularly Egyptian.

It’s fitting how Olrox and Drolta, as they exist in Castlevania: Nocturne, ended up so far afield from Count Orlock in Nosferatu and Elizabeth Bathory’s accomplice. In the Netflix series, these two characters couldn’t have less to do with the entities that inspired them, and it sort of makes sense that it’s near impossible to deduce where they came from just based on their names. They’re basically new names for new characters; the source material is basically a footnote that has little bearing on how they function now. That’s not a good thing or a bad thing. That’s just how language drifts and changes and the concepts it describes evolve as well, to the point that you don’t realize that two seemingly unrelated things ever had something in common.

That said, now that I’ve thought about it more, I’m leaning toward Wrexsoul being a bad name, but I suppose we’re stuck with it, clunky as it is.

Miscellaneous Notes

See, I told you this wasn’t a Mario blog. Not exclusively, anyway.

The Castlevania wiki says that an alias for Olrox is O’Rourke, but I can’t find what game or adaptation that name shows up in. But yeah, I *guess* you could look at Orurokku and get O’Rourke?

The main antagonist in Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, Brauner, also seems to be inspired by Count Orlock from Nosferatu. There doesn’t seem to be official art of Olrox, but there is of Brauner and you can see both how much he looks like Nosferatu’s main bloodsucker but also how he and Olrox are dressed similarly. In fact, defeating Brauner can yield a special item: Olrox’s Suit, which would seem to be Konami’s way of saying, “yep, it’s basically the same guy.”

If this post sounds like I’m coming down easy on Dorotya Semtész for her role in what amounts to mass murder, it’s because I’ve more recently been introduced to the idea that Elizabeth Bathory may have been innocent — or at least not guilty of the depraved crimes she’s famous for today. Noble Blood is a history podcast by Dana Schwartz, and she has an episode about Bathory that lays out the evidence suggesting she did not, in fact, kill countless people and doesn’t deserve her reputation as Lady Dracula.

One more bit about Bathory: The version of her who acts as an antagonist in Castlevania: Bloodlines is Elizabeth Bartley. Presumably the same person who decided that Drolta was an appropriate-sounding name also saw the Japanese name, エリザベート･バートリor Erizabēto Bātorī, and didn’t connect it to the real-life person, resulting in the incorrect surname. What’s interesting about Castlevania: Nocturne is that it fixes this oversight. Not only does the animated series not use the name Elizabeth Bartley, they don’t even use the name the real-life person is most often referred to in English: Elizabeth Bathory. They use her name as it was rendered in her native Hungarian, Erzsébet Báthory. Again, it’s interesting that Nocturne went with the more accurate name for this character but kept Drolta as is, but then again, perhaps the latter was deemed more fitting despite resulting from an apparent mistranslation.

Also? The storyline for Bloodlines puts the blame for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on Elizabeth Bartley. As if the murders of hundreds of young women and children weren’t enough to blame Elizabeth Bathory for, Castlavania also says World War I is her fault. 

If you enjoy this post, you might be interested in two similar ones I have on the Samurai Shodown characters Charlotte and Sieger. Both are referencing historical entities in surprising ways. At some point, I want to do a post about how Samurai Shodown’s recurring villain, the femme dark wizard Amakusa, is also inspired by a real-life person who would probably also be very surprised to find out what his pop-culture legacy is.

So how did the Bram Stoker estate react to Nosferatu essentially adapting Dracula without permission or payment? Not well! Stoker’s widow successfully sued the German film studio that made it, but by then the studio had declared bankruptcy anyway. Mrs. Stoker also sought ownership of Nosferatu, specifically so she could destroy every copy of it, but she failed to do so, and today it’s celebrated as an important and influential work of horror. When Werner Herzog remade it in 1979, however, the German names were replaced by the original ones from Stoker’s book; the character who looks like Max Schreck’s Count Orlock is just called Dracula.