yeah, initially i avoided watching castlevania because i thought i wouldn’t like it but thanks to some coaxing from my brother, all it took was the first few episodes to get me hooked. as someone who didn’t play the games and only know the lore through memes, i had a lot of fun despite the violence, which is usually a turn off for me when i’m watching stuff. i tend to say things like ’ i can watch castlevania and jojo but not ____ ’ when gauging if a show’s gore is going to be too much.
anyway, the dialogue and stuff is typical nerd stuff that people like, and while i can understand why someone wouldn’t like it, i don’t think it’s bad, though, full disclaimer: i’ve read like 3 chapters of saga and really like it so maybe i’m just apart of the demographic that’s being catered to.
castlevania esp, checks all my boxes and i was actually surprised that it didn’t seem to get much hype until it was about to end.
I used to follow Kieron Gillen’s newsletter for some reason that is now obscured to me by time and at one point in there he had a breakdown of how he writes comics.
And it suddenly clicked that the current Image Comics original series formula whenever I picked an issue of anything was exactly the same.
IRRC it was something like: Introduce high concept premise promised by blurb->have a bunch of scenes expounding on this premise and basic moving pieces usually with some kind of striking over designed visuals->have something seemingly like the conclusion be interrupted by a new element->last page is a splash page revealing that the status quo was not what you think.
Next issue picks up there, or does a flashback before picking up from there, cycle continues endlessly.
And like I get that if you are a comic you need to hook folks to the next issue if you’re selling floppies but a lot of comics get really transparent about this? Like Gillen broke down page by page the exact pacing he used for every issue he wrote and and it made it impossible to read anything because the structure was so lock-step and shallow.
And it applies to almost all the big ‘indie’ comics image puts out I’ve poked at sold in floppies originally. Honestly it kinda was with supers stuff back when I read that too, but I don’t even bother with that anymore.
i will confess that i didn’t research the history of the phrase, but felt vaguely confident it wasn’t a thing people said prior to the 20th century. i feel like i’d only heard someone say or type it in the last 10 years. but i could be wrong! it’s just not something i’d come across until recently, so that could be my own ignorance
yeah, ultimately i just wanted to poke Felix for fun because a thing he said made me watch something, but it still didn’t click for me. ultimately
kind of covers it! like re: Saga there is a lot about it that is so, so cool to me and i wanted to love it, but the dialogue…it’s just not my thing and i found it distracting to my experience.
i think with Castlevania, i was mostly curious to see how it would interpret the game, and to that extent, i felt like it was more successful than i ever could have imagined. i had a lot of fun watching it. i’m just not really into what it’s focused on, atm. i feel obligated to finish it, though, so maybe i’ll eat my words, eventually.
i maybe unfairly always think of kieron gillen’s comics work as being warren ellis-lite which like, imagine leaving videogames to do something more ignoble, and iirc ellis was involved with the castlevania show as well. i didn’t watch that past the first episode so don’t know if this applies but do feel like a weird amount of contemporary comics and tv has a similar set of tics that can maybe be described as fear of insufficient voice - everything has to be accented and characterised, everything has to be vivid in this particularly writerly way, and since the actual range of “voices” that lend themselves to this immediate vividness is fairly small it can feel like the writers just took a bunch of those prefab voice pattern sets from videogame character creation screens and let them loose on the script (cocky / feisty / aristocratic / sinister).
The other good thing about the Netflix Castlevania is it doesn’t do a lot of overly dramatic fan service stuff, so when they actually do it it does feel really cool. I’m mainly thinking of the one scene where they play That One Song and it’s just people showing off their special moves
Tom and Jerry are supposed to be beating the ever living holy shit out of each other in various circumstances and sometimes there’s a racist nanny/maid there and sometimes Thomas fucking dies at the end
between this and the T&J phone game with Maid Tuffy I have lost faith in humanity
Multiversus remains the most faithful modern interpretation of T&J and 99% of that is sometimes when Tom gets knocked out, he does the scream
Warren Ellis sure did inspire a whole generation of fucking careerist blowhards who have given us absolutely nothing of worth, imagine going over someone’s house and finding one of those paperback collections of his blog posts on their bookshelf, that’s a way bigger red flag than a fucking Scarface poster I tell you what
Imagine how much a person has to suck if they’ve got warren ellis blogposts, hunter s thompson, and pauline kael on their shelf. They probably spend a minimum of 6 hour a day trying to become a guest on Red Scare
I tried to figure out why there’s no english translation announced of the most recent houellebecq novel the other day and the only discussion I could find was on the red scare reddit. deeply embarassing but I am undeterred
Remember when Warren ellis’ great political commentary about George w bush was WOAHHH it’d be awesome if superman flew to the white house and made everyone explode into gibs…