Unpolished entry but I just have words I need to puke out. I've been trying to rewatch Netflix Castlevania and have been unexcited about it; a really stark difference to the way I went into the show when it first came out. Genuinely anything past episode 3 just... Sucks.
The show attempts to juggle world-ending plots, magic, slavery, historical fantasy, soul-crushing grief, and characters falling in (and out of) love. It fails spectacularly in all of these endeavors. Character arcs that are resolved in really unsatisfying ways, depictions of slavery (for THE ONLY TWO characters of color, for that matter) that aren't sure if they want to be tragic or sexy, vampires with confused motivations and monsters that just exist to trigger the next fight scene. Dracula suffers most egregiously in my opinion (how do you fuck up Dracula??). He falls in love with a human, Lisa, who is then murdered by some townspeople for witchcraft. Drac is then pulled along by the most tired of writing cliches; dead wife revenge narrative. Come onnnnn. This one's been done to death with Dracula! Could they not have put at least a neat little spin on it somehow? Have her die of old age by her own choice? Kill her by mistake?? I'm so used to the Dead Wife Revenge Plot that I honestly barely registered it on my first watch. I understood that we needed a reason for Dracula to be the Big Bad that he’s depicted as in all our pop culture vampire mythology so I just went with it. But upon rewatch, it's so bad I can't ignore it. The cracks really were there from the beginning.
Trevor, Sypha, and Alucard I have little to say about. They serve their purpose as protagonists, initiating sick ass fight scenes once in a while and grinding the plot to a halt every time they open their mouths for what must be the most subdued (derogatory) VA performances I’ve ever heard. I feel bad for people watching without subtitles.
AND THE SLAVERY. Why does nobody talk about the slavery??? Isaac is a character from the games that the show decided to make into a black character. Very nice! …But you look around and he is the Only black character. And we’re shown in gruesome detail his backstory of slavery, torture, and how he loved his enslaver. I feel like Isaac deserves an entire analysis on his own, but I really do have to make an aside for this; Giving your black character a slave backstory isn’t necessarily bad. It’s going to raise a few eyebrows, sure, but if your character is established in a world with a lot of thought put into the dark reality of said slavery, it can be a pretty poignant story beat. If you give your ONLY black character a slave backstory- if you go through the effort to show their torture in excruciating detail and focus on how much they love and forgive their enslaver- you’re doing it wrong. It’s gone beyond the discomfort of facing a historical reality and into the realm of stright disrespect.
Along those lines, in season 2 and 3, there’s a subplot with Hector where he’s enslaved by one of the vampires. The show doesn’t really specify his ethnic background but he’s one of the few brown characters in the show, and the way his slavery is depicted is straight up fetish content. Far be it from me to judge any media for fetish content (hell, most of the time I’m down for it! Hi it's me the Meat Enjoyer!!) but it suffers the SAME EXACT problems as Isaac’s; the only brown dude in the show enslaved by a white person, showing his suffering onscreen in excruciating detail and STILL expecting us to sympathize with his white enslaver just because she’s pretty and sad. What the fuck, Castlevania??
Aside from the racism, I think my biggest problem with both netflix Castlevania and its spinoffs is that they're largely Art First shows. With the best shows, the writing is the skeleton holding together all the otherwise disparate bits of character design, environments, lore, and dialogue. Good writing will carry a show even when everything else fails. but Art First shows? Shows that are put together solely BY the artists with little or no actual script writers? It’s just all style and no substance. There’s nothing to hold onto aside from pretty colors and sexy looking people. Other shows that have historically suffered from these problems (Steven Universe, Hazbin, etc.) create this same hunger for real meat and bones in the story; there are so many empty spaces, plot holes, confused motivations, RACISM. It’s sooo pervasive. And it really sucks because I LOVE the art styles in all these medias. Castlevania is beautiful! Its fight scenes are choreographed really well and its character designs are stunning. I used to follow a couple of its artists on tumblr! It’s just that… There’s nothing else to love about it. The dialogue is lifeless. The story is convoluted and leaves plot hole after plot hole. Relying on clichés and the viewer’s prior knowledge of a (now very) old video game series. Much like a vampire itself, it lures you in with its vibes, design, and its visual aesthetics, but it leaves you feeling hollow.
Castlevania is a cross section of everything I love and hate about modern studio animation. The style is so beautiful, I just… Wish there was something more to it than that. It could’ve been so good if it was good. I don’t even want to watch the spinoff series after I’m done rewatching season 3.
-Loopy
HIIII!!! You may notice my blurg entries are (mostly) GONE!!! This is because I was overcome with a fit of shyness and moved them all to DREAMWIDTH!!!!!! Personal entries like those will be hosted there from now on, while this page will be natively hosting my thoughts on various medias and stuff that's been itching my brain, like the entry below. I'll also be touching up the format of this page because I think it's just a little too bland. Even my real life journal looks cooler. The only problem is I'm so damn indecisive on aesthetics...
-Loopy
I was just watching this video about one of my favorite bands, Innerpartysystem, (really thought provoking vid) and I just kept thinking about how the thesis of it all is "Innerpartystem's lyrical genius was a warning" and how so many of these dystopia-themed artistic works aren't always so much "warnings" as they are commentary on the observed world around them. Like so many commentaters of Orwell's, people have made the distinction between the work being written as a commentary rather than a warning for nebulous future generations. Orwell and Innerpartysystem are direct products of the times they're written in (in this case, a time of rampent capitalist hedonism and disconnection with reality afforded to the 1%). It's like. Orwell and Innerpartysystem aren't trying to "warn you". They're laying bare the depravity of the world we live in through well constructed and easily digestible fiction. It's a tinted mirror held up to the realities of today; the fact that these realities seem to be ever-repeating and their reflections evergreen is less a testament to either artist's predictive capabilities as it is a reminder of the unfailingly banal quality the lack of innovation, imagination, and worship of stagnation that the upper eschelons of society possess.
and all I've said is just instead of telling you that Innerpartysystem's music is really fucking good.
-Loopy