#and that line vlad says to lisa and greta ended up saying it to alucard | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

a-deadly-serenade · 3 years

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overall this season was pretty decent. i have some thots whats new so im gonna share them below the cut if anyone’s interested :)

so!! first off i’ll say that there were a lot of things i did really enjoy from season 4!

the action was super fun as always!! i loved all the crazy enemies and callbacks! the skeleton fight and all those little goblins they kept killing throughout were a nice touch ;) sypha’s use of her powers is INSANE her ice-chainsaw?? her WALL of fire?? electric balls?? come on. and the animation was NICE. i really wanna know who did most of the fight scenes bcuz the style is so different and it just POPS but in a really good way?

my favorite fight has to be ofc when everyone is REUNITED yes im basic. but the THEME song going off and well, im a whore for sotn references and i CAME when i saw the leap stone ref w the winged cape or when alucard turned into a hoard of batss AND THEN HIS WOLF FORM OOOOHH BABY!!! actually episode 9 is just a straight banger.

STRIGAAA. STRIGA. oh mama i was sweating during that fight. mad kudos to her va for them growlsss

carmilla vs isaac was a lot of fun and i loved the visuals but my hype was instantly ruined when i saw her kill herself 😭but thats smth i’ll complain about later.

not all the lines were bangers, some of sypha’s swearing seemed even a bit too much at times, and it was especially jarring to be having a face-to-face death-math with literal Death and hes acting like a naughty little 5 year old thats just learnt to swear. maybe cut back on the fuck-isms? just a bit? BUT when they hit they did GOOD. “the fuck what now?” yes

ISAAC. you weren’t in this season as much but man do u still shine through. i loved his introduction back in the town where he has his night creatures digging graves and rebuilding the city 😭 and then the conversation he shares w his flyman?? obsessed.

Hector chopping his finger off and giving lenore and carmilla a good ol FUCK YOU!! as he helps isaac. we love to see it

Trevor and Sypha’s “I love you!” “I know.” <3

DEATHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

oh! alucard actually having a story & purpose in the plot? :) luv it love to see it. that being said... the Plot.

its... ok? it’s kind of split up into 3/4 parts, as the story progresses, one eventually merges with several of the others kind of? cohesively? while leaving the other to sort itself out.

now, i didnt have too many qualms with it, it was pretty straight forward. dracula is going to be resurrected and we have sypha and trevor looking in on it, while alucard helps the nearby village and hector and isaac go on about bringing on their inevitable showdown. however, the way the story was paced and some of the decisions they made... werent so great.

st. germain for example, brought the ENTIRE momentum from the last few episodes to a halt. you have sypha and trevor fighting through heaps and heaps of monsters only to find themselves back in Targoviste where they meet the mysterious Zamfir!! and Alucard!! he’s been asked to help save this village!! all jam-packed with crazy action and animation that leaves you fired up!! and then episode 5 comes to a screeching halt and we spend nearly the entire thing on st. germain’s backstory and explaining his motives for the rest of the season

like. imma be real with you chief: he didnt need to be here lol. you could have just left varney as the main vamp in charge of bringing back big daddy drac and he could reveal to his.. idk henchmen or something that he’s death. but u gotta fill them ten 20 minute slots somehow!! he just fell so flat and unfortunately, a lot of the side-characters suffer from this this season.

i enjoyed great and zamfir, i love their desgins esp, but they really could have been fleshed out more. zamfir is shown as nothing but a spoiled brat the majority of the time she’s on screen but they wait till she’s about to die to try and turn her character around? huh? greta is given a bit more screentime but this sudden confession of feelings in the last episode felt so... huh?? why couldnt she just be dedicated to her people and show that u can love someone w/out necessarily being their partnr? i thot that was her whole thing; taking care of her people. it’s like. where did this come from. they cant have known each other more than a week at most dog 😭

it sucks they dedicated to much time to scenes that didnt really need to be there where we could have gotten this proper development, like maybe have a scene zamfir and sypha connect over struggles they’ve dealt with in the past and that has her open up about how traumatizing dracula’s attack on her city was. u could have expanded upon her role in the court and WHY she worshipped the monarchy so much instead of making it a throwaway gag about her being “crazy”. but why have that when we could instead spend the first 5 minutes of said episode watching a monotonous back-and-forth b/w varney and that big burly russian vampire who’s name im sure mor than 98% of the audience cant even remember?

just a lot of fat that needed to be trimmed so that the actual MEAT of the story could be slow cooked to perfection. people really arent kidding when they say less is more.

another big problem i had was there... i dont even know what to call it, re-humanization? redemption? of Lenore. like lmk if im wrong but she manipulated hector, yeah? coerced sex to slip on that ring that binds him to her?? orr whatever weird shit warren’s into. but the way they interacted, ESPECIALLY in their first major scene together was sooo uncomfortable to watch lol at first i thought perhaps hector was only playing along because well. hes enslaved to do her and carmilla’s bidding. but no, he actually LIKES her. he spares her when isaac comes around, he says that he wants to keep her as his own. and in the meantime, lenore finds time to complain to a man that’s been beaten and enslaved how upset it makes her that carmilla got angry at her 😭 or says thats she tired of isaac keeping tabs on her and wants to escape this ‘cage’. to aman thats literally been imprisoned since youve known him 😭her death is seen as peaceful, calm, they even try and tug at ur heartstrings by swelling this sad, dramatic music as the sun rises. really? LENORE?

and carmilla’s death happened WAYY too early imo. she was the villain for practically 3 seasons and this is how she goes? isaac couldnt get more than a stab at her? his night creatures couldnt take a nibble? HECTOR couldnt even be given a chance to do somethng like come on

the resolution was... strange? it was cute!! and happy!! but i dunno if they really needed to have lisa and vlad coming back, but, like i said; it was cute! definitely not the ending i was expecting.

i’m glad that they put their focus back on what made the show so much fun and that was the FIGHTS. they definitely helped add some much needed spice to things when scenes started to drag, but im a gal that really luvs a good story and even though reviews were raving that this season helped closed the lid on all the themes theyd been exploring, i just didnt really see that. which isnt necessarily a BAD thing, i knew i wasnt gonna find some deep introspective themes in this hack n slash horror-fantasy, its just what can turn somethng like this from an ok show to a GREAT one.

in the end, im glad they stopped at this one and im curious to see if they really DO go ahead on making spin-offs. bcuz unfortunately, i will always be down for som new castlevania content

#cv4 #this is REALLY long #and BRIMMING with spoilers #so read at ur own discretion #otherwise ty for spending ur valuable time to hear what a random sob like me has to say <3

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cynicaldesire · 3 years

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So what are your thoughts on season 4? Lay them on me!

My husband and I binged the entire Season 4 over the course of the weekend. We watched 6 episodes, then the last 4. We had a lot of feelings on it for a lot of reasons, mostly because I’m a writer, my husband is an artist, and we’re both critics because we have created work in the past.

My husband’s final rating was 6/10, wouldn’t watch it again but he wanted to give credit to the animators and staff that worked on it. I said I would give it a 4/10. It was so... disappointing. I’m gonna go on a bunch of rants about why I was displeased, so if you want to maintain your positive experience, you don’t have to continue.

So, before I get into the writing, I just want to point out that the sound design, music, and voice acting were all either poorly mixed because of COVID in-home booths or just shitty. The music didn’t pop off with any homages to actual game music and I couldn’t hear it most of the time. The voice acting of most of the cast was pretty great, but I hate Alucard’s voice. The murmuring breathy whispers of most of the cast is just annoying to me, but that’s a personal preference, I know. But a lot of other things didn’t have proper weight or punch to match what was happening.

The animation was also wildly inconsistent. My husband pointed out, again, COVID, so the animators were all probably working from home on deadlines and the Art Director, the guy meant to keep all the art on-model and consistent, probably wasn’t available to check work and send it back to the animators for changes. Or, there wasn’t sufficient time between when the animators sent there work in for changes to be requested. Don’t get me wrong, like with the voice cast, some of the animation was fucking sick, but it was just weighed down by all the poorly masked 3D shortcuts or off-model art.

(One of the things I kept thinking of when gore would happen was the Mortal Kombat devs that got PTSD from having to look at images of gore for the Fatalities. And I was like this isn’t worth all that. Fuck.)

Greta was fine, but she seemed flat. I’ve made her character before and been disappointed in how cool and nonchalant she is. She seems to be too good and relaxed at everything going on. That might’ve been the voice actor, but honestly? She fell flat for me. I didn’t not like her, she just didn’t feel very... well written? Like I said, she reminded me very much of a character I would make at first pass. And while I don’t mind or disagree with the choice to make her a love interest or even a close friend of Alucard, there was not enough buildup for it. Probably because she felt so flat to me.

Overall, on the writing front, I will say that it felt very... first draft. Like no one had an opportunity to look it over and say “Maybe don’t give Saint Germain’s whole motivation and backstory in episode 3?” Or not telegraphing the Death inclusion, or like... There’s so much that was just so poorly handled to me. There’s so many ways I personally would have done it differently or how it could’ve been handled better. There were so many characters that just stated their motivations and repeated them over and over again.

Isaac: ends last season hating humanity and having no reason to challenge that belief. Hates Hector for betraying Dracula. Full of hate and rage. This season: Opens with all his Night Creatures repairing a city, earing berries, and completely at peace with his past and his life. Flyseyes is there for ONE scene and never heard from again. And Isaac literally goes from that to invading Carmilla’s castle to DISAPPEARING. WHY?

The sequence with Isaac invading Carmilla’s castle was hilarious, too. Who the fuck is the hot demon? Some demon from the Wiki. Whomst were the fuckin human blokes with crossbows? Literally just human blokes with crossbows that they hired from a town somewhere else because apparently they didn’t have enough forces??????? The ring Hector ends up cutting off is never actually shown to force him to do something against his will? The fucking slave ring is also openly displayed in a bunch of other places and never utilized. It’s a useless McGuffin.

Carmilla descended into madness, or progressed through her logical steps violently due to solitude? And then when Lenore asks her what her motivations are, Carmilla tries to be coy and not answer the question so they end up having the same dialogue like 4 times? Lenore is somehow SURPRISED? Like, all of these people were human at some point, and that shit is never addressed, or if it is, it’s not remembered.

Hector was also here. He made a night creature, helped Isaac kill Carmilla - why did she explode so violently? - and then chilled in the castle the rest of the time. Like, nothing bad happened to him other than his finger. Which, show his hand every time he’s on screen, remind the audience of his injury. Isn’t it cool and edgy and shocking?

Saint Germain being just a shitty carnal entity was boring. He had a girlfriend he wanted to save so he could get laid, SNORE. When they showed her, she looked like Maria from Symphony of the Night, which has an ending that heavily implies her and Alucard hook up, so I was irritated that they coopted her appearance for this woman with no speaking lines that led Saint Germain to the Infinite Corridor.

Like, everything around Saint Germain’s story was pretty cool. If they hadn’t shown up literally in episode 3 through a sudden flashback his story and his motivations and also he’s the villain, the mystery of what he was doing was interesting. And for it to all just be told to us upfront? And then he just fucking died?

I had no fucks to give for Varney/Death. Death is not mentioned at any point before this season, he shows up seemingly randomly at the end as the Big Bad, and he’s just a big skeleton asshole. Ratko was at least a little interesting, but also wtf was he there for?

I also didn’t much care for Zamfir. I felt like there should’ve been two characters in her place. If one of them was crazy and the other was following their orders without knowing they were crazy? Cool. If she was crazy and didn’t ACKNOWLEDGE she was crazy? Better than what we got. The knights and the Underground Court and all the shit with Targoviste? Boring. Because, specifically, it demands a lot of suspension of disbelief that I didn’t have at that point.

Who the fuck was Dragan? What were all the monsters attacking the castle? Awful convenient for Alucard to have a shield now. He also had a bunch of skill from the SotN game, like the wolf form and the winged cape. Why did that one vampire have big bat wings and never again? Why did Varney call like literally everybody on the mirror phones? Why did he know to do that? Why did Saint Germain know him? WHERE DID TREVOR GET THE OTHER WHIP?

Trevor and Sypha were honestly probably the best handled. Sypha was herself but bigger and stressed. Trevor was also very tired and still a monster hunter. My husband was very happy with the “We’re just two sides of the same coin” philosophy Trevor had with Death, like Geralt feeling like a monster because he’s a Witcher. The idea that they aren’t exactly human and cause so much death but to the monsters. He wanted that explored. I was too busy being frustrated at the huge flashy animation fight to even remember that Trevor had said anything like that.

The magical weapons in Targoviste were cool plot devices. Much like with Varney and the mirrors and so many other things, it felt like they were there because the plot demanded it, not because there was some natural story for it outside of when Trevor and Sypha showed up.

But the single most disappointing thing was Vlad and Lisa living at the end. They didn’t want to see Alucard, absolute shit move regardless of their reasoning. The fact that they still went by Vlad and Lisa Tepes was bound to get back to Alucard somehow. And I... Being in Japan and engaging with a lot of Japanese media, I understand the way they use God is similar to the way they use Spirits, or Kami or something. God being used by a Western author makes it so wildly different. But I’m also... pretty against the idea of God in general, so the whole idea that “God” said Dracula and Lisa deserved a second chance is boring. Like, there’s so much wrong with this ending. It was only there for the shippers, probably.

Anyway. 4/10, wouldn’t watch again.

#arandomshotinthedark

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