#would have also been less offensive wrt the handling of did

[goblins-riddles-or-frocks]

Moffat Dracula Review

Plot Summary For People Who Don’t Want To Watch It:

Dracula corners Jonathan, Mina, and Sister Agatha Van Helsing in a secluded convent in Budapest following Jonathan’s escape from his castle. The castle sequence itself is explained in flashback as Jonathan recounts his experience, leading up to the realization that he himself had died during his stay there. 

Realizing he’s now become some form of undead creature, he attempts to kill himself via a stake but is unsuccessful. Despairing at this, he invites Dracula inside the convent in exchange for a true death.  Agatha and Mina are able to stay safe within a circle of sacramental bread but everyone else is massacred. 

When Mina sees Dracula disguised as Jonathan approaching them, she invites him inside the circle. He of course reveals his identity immediately after. Agatha bargains her own life for Mina’s, so Dracula allows the other girl to go free.

Some time later, Dracula sets sail for England aboard the Demeter, a Russian ship with a strangely high number of wealthy passengers and a bluebeard’s cabin no one is allowed to enter. He quickly picks off the passengers one by one, meanwhile himself leading the effort to find the murderer onboard. 

This culminates in the remaining passengers finally searching the ship— and the mysterious cabin which is revealed to have been hiding a sickly Sister Agatha inside. She explains that Dracula is a vampire and together with the passengers they attempt to kill him by setting him on fire. But it is unsuccessful. Agatha urges everyone to escape on lifeboats because she intends to blow up the ship with her and Dracula in it before it is able to reach England. 

Dracula does not die but remains dormant under water. He reaches Whitby roughly 100 years later and is immediately captured by the Jonathan Harker foundation, lead by Agatha’s descendant Dr Zoe Van Helsing. He leaves captivity fairly quickly however with the help of Frank Renfield— a lawyer he hired over skype. 

Zoe is revealed to be dying of cancer. Dracula offers her his blood to heal her but it doesn’t seem to work. It instead gives her a bond to communicate with her dead ancestor Agatha, which gives her more insight about the vampire. 

Meanwhile, Dracula begins preying on Lucy Westenra, a young socialite. Despite leading a seemingly perfect life, she is wholly apathetic and disgruntled with her situation. She allows him to feed on her in exchange for the high a vampire’s bite can give her. He attempts to turn her into a vampire but she’s burned horribly once she’s cremated following her funeral.

Her death leads Zoe and Jack Seward to where Dracula has been staying. During their confrontation however Lucy returns, and after learning about her appearance, begs Jack to kill her, which he does. 

Zoe asks Jack to leave so she may speak to Dracula alone. She surmises that all of Dracula’s weaknesses are actually ineffective. The only thing he fears is death, and humanity’s willingness to die, She then... resolves to sit down and die right there. But at the last moment Dracula drinks her cancerous blood which should in turn kill him... they make out while dying... The end?

If that sounds like it makes no sense, it’s because it doesn’t. 

Final Thoughts:

The plot was nonsensical and the pacing was very poor and completely unstructured. The story itself bore little to no resemblance to Dracula at all, to the point where I wonder why they even bothered to keep the names. 

Most of the characters were new, and the few that were ported over from the Stoker novel had hardly anything in common with their original versions, Dracula included. 

Jonathan was the most in character of the bunch, if he was fairly more genre savvy while stuck in Dracula’s castle. Mina’s characterization seemed to be confined to a single flirtatious letter, an endless well of trust for Jonathan, and constant sobbing. She was more of a liability than anything else. 

Agatha served the role of a genderbent Van Helsing, though her manner was entirely lifted from the Coppola film. This could’ve been very cool if they hadn’t randomly made her a nun without actually committing to it at all. She was not really portrayed as having any actual lived experience as a nun in the victorian era. And faith as a concept was only touched on for her to dismiss— hilariously casually given her position.  

I think the actress’s performance was fairly decent, and she def grew on me in the second episode when she’s not actually in a convent to constantly remind us how dissonant of a nun she is. But it would’ve been nice if they would’ve either committed to actually making her a nun, (a legit vampire hunting nun could be so cool!) or just abandoning the concept altogether. Because the way it was presented just felt like window dressing. 

Also I’m not normally averse to shipping Van Helsing/Dracula but having to genderbend one of the two just to do it is like... hm. Also the weird tension they had going on was very badly executed in general. 

Speaking of Dracula, he had to be the weakest part of the show. He was written in the smuggest, most infuriating way possible. And it might have worked with another actor but this dude just did not have any gravitas or stage presence whatsoever. And it certainly was not helped by the fact that his costuming and makeup were so fucking lackluster. 

Despite being the linchpin of the story, he had no goals nor any particular drive. He was just out there doing Stuff for Reasons and none of them were compelling. It seemed like he was just killing to kill and the writing was not good enough to actually carry any of the vague themes about how he’s looking for new brides (why?) how he’s searching for a The Perfect Fruit (what???) or anything at all really. He had no depth whatsoever beneath his stupid quips and self-satisfied demeanor. 

There was an interesting implication that he needed to choose who he drinks carefully in order to maintain his own personality/sanity/sentience and that without blood he’d… apparently just become like any of the zombies we saw in the show. And that is such a cool concept! But it was not really  explored, nor was it written all that well. Even though it could’ve been (and I think was maybe intended to be???) an excellent source of existential dread! 

But yes, in general there was hardly any depth to this show. They played almost every possible card they could for shock value, and included many unnecessary and frankly underwhelming esoteric concepts that went nowhere. There was so much gore and random effects. We had zombies, vampire infants, and Dracula legit wearing people’s skins. The lore didn’t make any sense either, apparently people just… being unable to die despite their body’s so called death is a common occurrence? It wasn’t clear whether Dracula even had much control over who he changes and whether or not they become proper vampires. The entire thing just seemed poorly thought out. 

There were a lot of easter eggs and references to previous Dracula adaptations (and even some unrelated vampire media). I definitely noticed nods to the Hammer Horror movies and the Lugosi film, which was fun. The biggest noticeable influence however would have to be the 1992 Coppola movie. I have never seen a show try so hard to be another movie lmao. They even went so far as to make a spiritual successor to the film’s main theme that’s about as close as you could probably get without actually licensing the music. 

However, while the Coppola film at least had skill with regards to the costuming and cinematography to carry its aesthetic, this show simply did not. The costumes, the makeup, and the special effects were all lackluster. The set was nice enough but was not shot in a way to really leave much of an impression. 

The first episode was abysmal— mainly due to Dracula’s awful performance (those disgusting fungus covered fake nails, that age makeup, that ACCENT) and the entire awkward af scene where he terrorizes a convent of nuns while naked and covered in blood. But it was at least so bad it was funny.

The second episode was the most tedious to me because it was less offensively awful so I couldn’t even enjoy the badness. There was definitely a sharp uptick of quality whenever Dracula was offscreen for any notable amount of time though. The passengers were rather boring but I liked the crewmen. And Agatha honestly killed it for the latter half. 

The last episode was by far the worst and yet the most entertaining because they just stopped trying at that point. 

Renfield was amazing and an absolute delight every time he was on screen. Dracula found him over skype for God’s sake, how can that not be fantastic? He actually utters the words “Dracula has rights,” and his argument somehow actually fucking works.  

And even Dracula himself was far less insufferable with the shift in dynamics. By being forced to cope with the modern world, he could no longer act like such a smarmy, self-assured know it all. Seeing him freak the fuck out at the sight of helicopters was genuinely fun. 

Lucy’s handling was misogynistic af though. It was bafflingly, needlessly awful. And the way she was vilified at the very end was appalling. They almost had an interesting deconstruction wrt her utter malaise for her life, and the implication that she actually resents her beauty. But then of course she gets burned alive, and then is treated horribly for it by the protagonists. 

Even though it’s clear she has no idea what’s happened to her body, Zoe doesn’t even bother to explain it to her. She just makes her take a selfie of all things so she can see what she really looks like. It didn’t seem like the show had a shred of sympathy for her, because “oh, clearly she was a narcissistic bitch and she deserved what she got” or something like that?? 

The utter indifference everyone has to her death is baffling. It was an afterthought, that seemed like its only purpose for existing was yet again just shock value. The scene, after her death, immediately shifting the focus back to whatever weird personal rivalry that borders on sexual tension  Agatha/Zoe and Dracula have going on.  

But all in all, this adaptation had me baffled, frustrated, and cringing through most of it. It was unintentionally funny quite often and I honestly enjoyed it, but for all the wrong reasons. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to melt their fucking brain.

#netflix dracula #netflix dracula spoilers #moffat dracula #bbc dracula #long post #I ramble sometimes #tldr: it was BAD #all the salt #this is 1800 words #*writer’s cap*

[dictacontrion]

I saw from your recent tag post that you're reading an Adam Silvera book and it made me so happy! I absolutely love him, both his work and what he's put out there on social media. He has a few blog posts/twitter threads on depression/anxiety/sexuality/etc. that really resonated with me, too. I always love checking out Own Voices books, but his especially. Plus, They Both Die At The End comes out this year and it sounds like something out of a fic, but with his style, so I'm here for it.

THIS BOOK IS SO GOOD!!

Tbh, it’s been aaaaages since I’ve read professionally published fiction - the last published fiction I read was offensively, blood-pressure-raisingly awful (ft a main character who was a straight white cis man with Tourette’s, which only abated when he is having sex with women or touching women’s breasts. just for starters.) and compared to fic - where, even when it’s not the stuff I love most, there are queer characters and their love and attraction matters and is taken seriously - I’ve been dubious about giving published fiction another go, especially since that depiction is not wholly anomalous in ~Literature and I’d encountered less overtly terrible versions of that before and my blood pressure and I were just over it. I also read tons of non-fiction, so if I’m sitting down with a book it’s usually non-fiction, and if I’m sitting down for fiction it’s usually fic. 

BUT. @writsgrimmyblog and @underthetweed have both been telling me about fab YA lit for some time now, and they’ve both got excellent taste and I’ve been wanting to give their recs a chance, and holy crap I am SO GLAD I did.

Because friends. More Happy Than Not? I am like. Agog at the goodness of it. The main character is a Latino teenager living in the Bronx coming to terms with a lot of stuff, including his sexuality, and he is so reflective and astute about the affects of poverty and the writing is so incisive and moving wrt how people’s lives are changed by the places they live and the options that are or aren’t available. Which is a very me thing to love, I realize, but it’s not the only thing by far. The way love and sex and family and friendships are handled is incredible. The way Adam Silvera writes about what it means to be a person and what our histories mean is so moving. I am so bought in to these characters. I’ve plowed through ~230 pages in the last 18 hours and am planning to finish it tonight. Every twist and turn has had me at the edge of my seat. I may have gasped audibly on more than one occasion while reading in a coffee shop this afternoon. And while no one should spoil it for me before tomorrow morning (please! these twists are just like....aaaaaaaaaaaaaah my fucking heart) I would LOVE to hear what other people thought of it!

This has been such an amazing reading experience that it’s also got me working on my YA reading list! A friend and I just agreed to book club Jason Reynolds’ and Brendan Kiely’s All American Boys, and I have a copy of Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe waiting on my bookshelf. Also Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, though that’s in a different place genre-wise. But it feels REALLY GOOD to be reading a book that ignites all sorts of feels and that I am admiring so genuinely and deeply, and just a MASSIVE hats off to Adam Silvera for this amazingness. Def planning on reading more of his work. (And exploring his social media now - thanks anon!)

And if you’re looking for wonderful books to read, v much recommend @underthetweed‘s book recs - she knows of what she speaks, has recs that are great for people who are used to reading fic, and I 100% trust her taste.

Anyway off to finish browsing tumblr and then getting back to reading this amazing book!!

#more happy than not #non-fic reading #yay asks!

[itsbenedict]

i just finished Horizon: Zero Dawn, which holy dicks, might have been my game of the year if persona 5 hadn’t also come out this year. spoiler-heavy impressions (in the form of chatlogs with zero) under the cut:

god damn this game is just fun to play all the sneaking around and shooting stuff is really satisfying, and it feels great encountering some new machine that you don't know how to handle, and figuring out how to deal with it the balance is just right- strong machines can fuck you up, but nothing's a one-hit kill- if you fuck up, you get to chug health potions and run like hell until it loses interest, and then you try again it welcomes and rewards experimentation you organically develop strategies for taking them on stuff that seems intimidating and impossibly hard at first eventually becomes easy- not because you leveled up and got stronger numbers than it, but because you've done this before, you know how to dispatch these things in a matter of moments the giant crocodiles- scary, but you can knock off two thirds of their health by igniting their blaze canisters, and then play keepaway with their easily dodged ice blasts while you chip off the rest with easy headshots the swarms of hawks- overwhelming at first, but they completely flip out if you shoot two fire arrows at them, and you can keep them all downed while you work on taking them out the giant charging desert bulls- a couple ice bombs from the sling more or less immobilize them and make them take massive damage you always start terrified, trying different ammo on different weak points until you find something that works and then you feel like an invincible badass despite not really being any stronger in absolute terms

Zerovirus: that's the good shit

Benedict: it reminds me of the witness, in that you progress and gain abilities by learning systems and getting good, rather than by getting abstract experience points and leveling up i mean, you do level up, but it's just more health mostly

Zerovirus: health, more inventory, better harvesting abilities is what i think it was? and some jump ambush skills

Benedict: it's health and skill points the skills are pretty cool- none of them feel mandatory, but they all make something slightly easier like one gives you a few seconds of bullet time to line up a shot- it doesn't let you do anything you couldn't before, but now you're more likely to succeed and then there's the stealth melee takedowns that i barely use because everything in the fucking game notices you if you get too close no matter how quiet you're being for the same reason, i haven't used overriding since the game made me for a quest early on my advantage is in staying far away and hidden and able to disengage at will getting in close is always such a bad idea

Zerovirus: on the other hand, i'm pretty sure eventually you can override t-rexes and just watch kaijus fight

Benedict: oh yeah the cauldrons the first time i encountered one of those was incredible like, okay, here's a post-apocalyptic wilderness, but OH GOD TETRAHEDRON SPACESHIP ZONE

Zerovirus: were they disorienting for you as a player?i kept getting lost watching the lper navigate them they were really damn cool though what a great total environment change

Benedict: no not really so far they're pretty linear anyway they'd be cooler if the reward for completing them wasn't "now you can do that thing you never do to more things"

Zerovirus: just do the one that lets you do that thing to t-rexes it's entirely viable to go for an override playstyle with sufficient bolas and big boss monsters to hax i mean, you have the bolas, right the.. i mean, the ropecaster the thing-what-lets-you-tie-robots-down-and-make-them-easy-killings

Benedict: oh, right i uh haven't used that either like at all, i haven't tried it yet

Zerovirus: dude try out the ropecaster the ropecaster is what makes override viable as a playstyle it's basically 'shoot it three times in any part of its body to totally immobilize it for a few seconds' (bigger ones might need more than three i think)

Benedict: honestly i haven't thought about it much since my other weapons are so cool, but huh i think the reason i didn't try was because it seemed too good to be true "yeah, this thing you just shoot and it stops the enemy"

Zerovirus: no dude the ropecaster is easily the coolest weapon really locking down enemies is super effective well, that and setting up wire traps and just letting your enemies walk right into them that one never gets old either

Benedict: i use the tripcaster... probably not as intended

Zerovirus: ==>?

Benedict: like you're supposed to put it in an enemy's patrol path so they walk into it but the problem with that is they're usually around other enemies and if you go in to capitalize, you'll get ganged up on

Zerovirus: what the lper i watched did was set up like eight traps in a ring around himself and then make lots of sound and just watch the mobs walk into his death circle it was, frankly, really amusing

Benedict: i tried that once- it failed because i tried it on sawtooths, who, uh they jump. over. the wires. and kill you. oh my favorite enemy to fight right now is ravagers they're huge and scary, but it's so easy to kill them one tearblast arrow to the exposed gun pick up gun fucking annihilate everything in sight there's only a few things that really bug me about this game so far one is that the voice actors are way better than the writers, and it feels so weird hearing good voice actors try to breathe life into really fucking tedious dialogue there's been maybe two characters with more than one personality trait

Zerovirus: the plot of this game isn't super deep or anything don't worry about it too much it's very hollywood robot apocalypse scifi

Benedict: yeah, i'm not- i'm here for the cool robot hunting the game does some pretty ham-fisted stuff to explain why the player is the only one who can do a quest 90% of the time it's "this area is taboo, and everyone but you is too superstitious for some reason" also: the inventory screen is bugged out wrt the little exclamation points to indicate you have new shit i can't discern a pattern, they just seem to be placed at random 

SEVERAL DAYS LATER

Benedict: so zero you told me not to worry about the writing, the plot isn't super deep or anything but holy fucking shit almighty horizon zero dawn got so damn cool i think my gripes with the writing early on were a product of how the nora suck they're an offensive native american caricature, a bunch of nature-worshipping tribal dimwits with more superstitions than brain cells as soon as the writers stopped writing the nora, the writing improved immensely and i'm pretty much almost done with the plot at this point i reached zero dawn and went and heard gaia's message in all-mother mountain and holy fuck this plot got so cool i honestly wasn't expecting explanations for stuff the beginning of the game got me thinking they'd be more interested in treating the whole sci-fi backstory as a mythology for the world like yeah cauldrons make machines, they're like, some fuckin factory whatsit the Mysterious Ancients made instead of what i got, which was several extended sequences of crawling around in ancient ruins and getting a meticulously thought-through backstory through audio logs and stuff my jaw was hanging open for like the whole zero dawn facility section "no, they didn't stop the robot apocalypse halfway- they let it play out until the robots ran out of biomass to eat and reduced the earth to a lifeless hunk of rock, and then deployed a friendly AI to re-seed it with biological life" holy shit incidentally: holy FUCK was the Hades subsystem a phenomenally shitty idea hey gaia try this: if you fuck up, reset things yourself!! you don't need an autonomous ABSOLUTE DEATH GOD that fucking takes over your systems and fights you for control!! it was just such a terrible plan that it breaks my suspension of disbelief a little with all the audio logs in the zero dawn facility with candidates second-guessing and questioning the entire project, no one thought to bring up "hey, maybe the WIPE OUT ALL LIFE AGAIN adversarial subsystem we're building carries a few inherent risks" the conflict here kinda seems like a diabolus ex machina, honestly they could have easily just had Hades be an accidentally reactivated Horus unit- the Faro robots kind of already have a wipe-out-all-life directive that would make perfect sense technobabble your way into saying the Faro plague hacked Gaia somehow, and boom but fucking Hades the whole conflict driving the plot is the equivalent of the supervillain who builds a big red self-destruct button on his machine that aside, this game's plot has turned out to be really fucking cool i came close to tears a few times in the zero dawn facility humanity's best and brightest having various visceral reactions to the shock and despair of the project's nature god damn was that one of the coolest reveals i've ever had in a video game i'm really pleasantly surprised by how much detail it gave me- it really made "find out what the fuck is the deal" the player's central motivation i think the nora shit in the beginning got me expecting that their worldview would be more or less validated by the narrative but now i come back to the starting area to save all their asses, and it becomes abundantly clear that these people are small and backwards and the world is so much bigger than them likewise the moment where fuckin whatshisname dadmurderer captures you and puts you in the sun-ring right on the heels of all the huge plot reveals he's standing there monologuing about prophecy and the sun and how important he is and following what i'd just gone through, it was so, so pathetic to watch this half-naked thug go on and on about how this, this moment of knocking me out and capturing me for some gladiatorial shit, was the most important moment in the world and i'm just sitting there shaking my head at him like, dude, you ain't shit. you ain't even in the vicinity of shit.oh, you've got a corrupted behemoth for me to fight, totally unarmed? don't make me fucking laugh, i eat that shit for breakfast (sorta took the wind out of sylens' rescue at the end when whathisface sicced two corruptors on me) (like dude i had this. two corruptors is god damn child's play.) i'm so fucking overpowered right now, i've completed every single sidequest save the armor one, where i still need the core from the last area oh, corrupted thunderjaw pinning down the entire nora tribe? Y-fucking-AWN ice bombs plus actual bombs, dead in two minutes not that the combat has become boring- attacks still hurt, i have to dodge and get the fuck out of the way and heal off hits that take off more than half my bar, it's really tense- but i can always heal, can always dodge, there's a great rhythm to attacking and dodging and attacking and dodging

#horizon zero dawn #hzd spoilers