Maria Renard (Pixie Davies) was not my favorite character in the first season of Castlevania: Nocturne. While I didn’t think that she was interesting, she didn’t take up the show’s central narrative until the very last episode. As Maria fell into the background, intriguing but still too thinly followed, I wasn’t sure where she would fall next to other powerful Castlevania characters.
That said, in Castlevania: Nocturne Season 2, her story is kicked into high gear, and the growth she experiences stands head and shoulder above many other secondary characters in any other media. On top of that, the series gives her trauma to process, grief to navigate, and a stable support of loving people around her. It works to great effect to paint a life worth exploring.
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She’s the youngest of the group and essentially treated like Richter Belmont’s (Edward Bluemel) little sister. But she has the most growth of the season. So, here’s everything to know about Castlevania: Nocturne’s youngest main character. This article contains spoilers for Castlevania: Nocturne Season 1 & 2.
What Castlevania game is Maria Renard from?
Featured in Castlevania: Rondo of Blood & The Dracula X Chronicles, Symphony of the Night, Nocturne of Recollection, Portrait of Ruin, and Grimoire of Souls. Maria Renard’s design is the most faithful of any of the characters of Powerhouse’s animated series, inspired deeply by her appearance in the Dracula X Chronicles.
Castlevania: Nocturne is deeply inspired by Rondo of Blood, and this inspiration continues in Season 2. The first game where players were introduced to Maria Renard and her story. She is a 12-year-old vampire huntress. She fought Dracula’s minions with her magic powers but ended up being caught with Tera (a nun and not her mother in this iteration) and Annette (Richter’s fiancee in the game). A distant Belmont relative, Maria, is rescued by Richter and made fun of for her youth. Only after she accidentally summons a dragon during a tantrum does Richter finally agree to let Maria join in on his journey.
Using her appearance in Rondo as the base, her time in The Dracula X Chronicles creates something larger. While held in captivity in Dracula’s castle, Maria and Annette formed a bond in captivity. This is where Maria started referring to Annette as her “big sister” and where Annette championed Richter’s power and that he would save them.
While this is who she is in the original Konami game, Maria has developed over time in the franchise and even more in Castlavania: Nocturne. Maria Renard is still young, pretty, decked out in pink and frills, and severely underestimated. That said, like what has happened with characters like Annette, she’s been elevated past just being a character on the outside and instead is integral to the narrative of the Castlevania: Nocturne seasons.
Maria is young, but her powers are expansive.
A Speaker like her mother, Tera (Nastassja Kinski), Maria is Richter Belmont’s cousin and has the power to use magic as we’ve seen in the past. She can wield the elements in combat with ease. But her powerset goes one step further. She can create a portal and summon creatures through it.
In Castlavania: Nocturne Season 1, the creatures she summons from her bright light portals are fairly normal. The joy that the character brings and her youth makes her seem almost like a Disney Princess with some grit in her first appearance in the series.
She commands the animals that she summons to scout areas for her, assist her with flight and traversal, and, of course, fight for her. Extensions of her being, she feels deeply when they’re killed and does her best to heal and protect them. The animals aren’t there to be fodder.
But when Maria is mentored by her now vampiric mother, her power grows in her fury—seeing her mother as someone different, someone angry and resentful changes Maria. Maria’s despair morphs her powers from rings of light summoning animals familiar to this world to rings of spiraling darkness pulling monsters from another realm entirely. Beasts, dragons, and their terrifying ilk are in Maria’s hands. But she can’t control them.
Ultimately, they don’t know where those creatures come from, the darkness that Maria Renard is tapping into, and ultimately, it makes Castlevania: Nocturne Season 2 all the more interesting. Richter and Annette (Thuso Mbedu) may come into their heroism this season, but Maria is growing up.
Who is Maria in Castlevania: Nocturne?
The youngest of the new trio with Richter and Annette, Maria is also the most idealistic, giving inspirational monologues to revolutionaries. Stronger even than what we see in the games at this age, she is a vampire huntress who is pulled into the events of Castlevania Nocturne because of her relationships with the other characters.
In the last couple of episodes, her importance grows when her lineage is revealed to her, and she directly confronts the Abbot(Richard Dormer) in an attempt to stop him from creating nightcreatures and to turn away from the vampires. With three games of power and character development, I can’t wait to see how she develops in the series, especially now that she’s lost her mother.
The daughter of Abbot Emmanuel and Tera, the end of the first season has extinguished whatever innocence remained in Maria’s life. She was almost sacrificed to Erzsebet by her father and is now only alive because her mother sacrificed herself. Now the daughter of a vampire, Season 2 of the series has brought Maria to a crossroads.
In Season 2, Maria’s journey is dedicated to staring into the abyss. She is grieving her mother, grieving who she thought he father was, and ultimately being eaten away by that despair. Tera may be a vampire now, but she is still around and incapable of removing herself from her daughter’s life. Tera’s vampiric self knows less kindness and prods her daughter to experiment and explore the darker and more powerful side of her power.
Maria ignores everyone who tries to calm her. She rebukes Richter Belmont. To her, he abandoned her mother and is now a coward. Mizrak is just a stranger and a former pawn for the father she hates. And there is Juste Belmont. While Maria is Richter’s cousin, she is not a Belmont, at least not to her. She is her mother’s daughter and is ultimately detached from their legacy. But as Juste sees Maria barrelling further into a dangerous power spiral, he tries to stop her.
When Juste reaches out to Maria, he says that her despair will rot her from the inside out if she allows it to drive her actions and magic. Her darkness is all-consuming, and Tera is fanning the flames of revenge. Maria is at odds with herself this season, and instead of making it an easy road, it’s winding and unsettling. Juste pleads with her not to let the darkness stop her and to, more importantly, choose life. But Maria is ready to choose death until her mother steps in, stepping back and deciding to leave her daughter finally alone in this world.
Maria kills her father, loses her mother, opens up a portal to hell knows where and pushes back against every man in her life that comes in attempting to take care of her. Maria is the youngest of the series, but her strength isn’t in conjuring dragons from the abyss; it’s her resiliency and focused approach to survival and walking the path that makes her become a character that excels far beyond what I thought she could be in the first season.
Castlevania: Nocturne Season 1 and Season 2 are streaming now exclusively on Netflix.
