WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Castlevania Season 3, streaming now on Netflix.
Netflix's Castlevania certainly pushes the envelope when it comes to politics, religion and sex, which is no surprise given that the thought-provoking Warren Ellis is the chief architect behind the series. Through the Forgemaster Isaac in Season 2, we saw an intriguing intersection of race and homosexuality as reasons why he wanted to harm humanity, after years of abuse from being viewed as "the outsider."
Season 3 follows up on the latter theme, using LGBTQ relationships as a window onto Castlevania's world, and while it's a stance that's a bit strange at times, it ends up being very powerful when you analyze the depth of what Ellis is trying to convey.
Firstly, with Alucard, we have the bisexual Japanese siblings, Sumi and Taka, who wanted to train under the handsome son of Dracula to kill monsters. They forge a close bond but by season's end, they seduce and try to kill him during sex as they feel he isn't giving them the weaponry and proper mindset to go hunting creatures. Now, we can understand if you're weirded out by the incest in this sequence, especially as Castlevania doesn't censor anything, but hey, we've watched the Lannisters on Game of Thrones for years, so this is a walk in the park by comparison.
That said, outside of them actually having a threesome, there's a lot to be detailed in how the romance blooms. The orgy's just the climax -- no pun intended -- as the trio represents so much more in the grand scheme of the story. Alucard sees the trainees as a duality, a love for man and woman, which shows he does want to embrace everything and everyone humanity has to offer. He hated them for killing his mom, Lisa, and turning his father into a villain, so for him to fall in love with them, or even lust for human contact at all, says a lot. He finally starts believing in humans again -- a faith he didn't quite have even when he met Trevor and Sypha.
The siblings, at first, represented the best their species has to offer in his eyes, and it's an elegantly done and poetic romance, one filled with substance more than style. Unfortunately, it goes to hell and he murders them, which will test how he embraces Trevor and Sypha in the future, and people in general.
That isn't the only nuanced LGBTQ angle, though, as there's also Morana and Striga -- the philosopher and warlord, respectively -- in Carmilla's royal cabinet at Styria, currently charting a course forward in the wake of Dracula's fallen empire. His death leaves the sisterhood to conquer Europe unchallenged but Carmilla admits she's only the face; the others, including Lenore, are the brains of the operation. In Morana and Striga's case, the series crafts a remarkable romance between the two women that makes them shine as heartbeats of the new vampire kingdom. What makes this weird is you'd never expected any members of the cabal to be so compassionate -- albeit in their own dark, warped way -- about the world at hand.
They're a power couple but it's not too heavy-handed. When they're with each other, they're surprisingly tender, loving and caring. They don't bring work home, so to speak, and you can tell they do want a better world and express this through their love for each other. This is, perhaps, Ellis' statement about Earth being a woman's world, and women having to fix the crap men did to the planet, Dracula included.
In fact, both of Castlevania's LGBTQ arcs in Season 3 are intimate and personal in nature in a way that shares a perspective on the good within people. At the same time, though, they're also about course-correcting the bad when you leave evolution up to hypocritical humans who inevitably become the same monsters they claim to fear.
Castlevania Season 3 is streaming on Netflix. It stars Richard Armitage as Trevor Belmont, Alejandra Reynoso as Sypha Belnades, James Callis as Alucard and Graham McTavish as Dracula.