Castlevania Animated Series - On Netflix

[evil wasabi]

I think season 3 is great. I don’t watch a lot of new anime, so what do I know.

Other than the last season of Berserk was garbage

 

[LoneSage]

Saw the first episode, man what a slog. It has this weird pacing issue where I swear the voice actors are talking slow, and then when they finish talking nobody moves or does anything but it's like the camera is still rolling on them? It's like watching slow motion. I'll watch the rest of the episodes when they're uploaded but yeesh.

 

[evil wasabi]

Well, Nflx finally did it.

They made Alucard a faggot.

Because every Nflx show needs to have gays.

 

[Taiso]

Finished up Castlevania Season 3 this morning.

Short version: Despite being plagued by some pretty bad pacing issues, it's the most intriguing season overall. The focus on the character arcs elevates the material beyond mere 'video game adaptation' and attempts to invest the audience in the paths they are all on. It's the darkest and most violent season out of the three, feels like the second act of a three act structure and promises a number of redemptions and resolutions when the inevitable fourth season debuts in the next 1-2 years. There isn't much action to speak of early on but the final episode shows us how imaginative the choreography is, and feels more inspired and meaningful and less distracting.

Spoiler:

To elaborate on a few points, Hector is emerging as the sentimental favorite. The guy's big problem is that he just wants love in his life, in one way or another, and this makes him perpetually vulnerable. I'm not sure where they're going with him but if Shankar remains, ostensibly, faithful to the source material (as I believe he has) while injecting some new ideas into the property, then at some point Hector will free himself of the situation he's in and, somehow, form a vendetta against Isaac, who is his enemy at the beginning of Curse of Darkness, a terrible game that this show has somehow made more interesting.

Isaac is not my cup of tea. The character is fine, but I just don't have any idea what the hell he's doing. I mean, I understand why he's travelling to Styria but his conversations with others are so boring that I just don't care. This is a guy that had it all figured out. He was intelligent, informed by his life's experiences and committed to the point that he was a self flagellant. All it takes is one conversation with a pirate captain to get him to doubt his positions and, to me, that shows pretty bad writing by Warren Ellis, who is clearly just looking to fill time with this character while he works his way through finding a purpose for him. Likewise the Dark Souls style side quest where he happens upon a decimated village and speaks with a deranged old woman who rambles and chuckles the whole time. This felt to me like something From Software left on the cutting room floor. Getting to the top of the tower and fighting Rando the Necromancer felt like the end of a zone and not an organic story driven series of events. It sticks out because the series has avoided completely mimicking a video game to this point. At least at the end of that encounter, Isaac has an actual experience to shift his perspective rather than weirdo pirate captains dispensing bizarre wisdom.

Alucard's storyline was in danger of really turning me off this series. I was fine with it until the orgy scene with the brother and sister once I saw what the endgame was. I like how they framed the siblings as being sympathetic towards Alucard for being so guarded and self loathing over everything that's happened, but it turns out that their observations are rooted in something far more devious and cunning. They pulled the wool over my eyes and, for a half hour episode format, I think they pulled it off rather well. You don't even know if they were ever telling him the objective truth about their existence under Cho's thumb or if that was just a carefully crafted interpretation to earn his trust. At the end, I love that Alucard's heart was broken and he is left all alone again because that is how the character feels when we see him in Symphony of the Night. He only comes out of his rest to help Richter and defeat Dracula, who should not be back. When he's interacting with Maria at the end of the game, she's attracted to him but he confirms that he will ever be alone. I like that this series is putting him on that path in ways that actually help you buy in. He can consider people be friends, but he will never let himself get close. It makes sense. There is the hint that he may take a dark turn later, which would clearly require Trevor and Sypha to pull him out of that funk. Are we going to get a Trevor vs. Alucard fight? I really hope we do. The cool thing is that this time, it will be the result of friendship and love tested rather than arrogance and one upsmanship.

But I will fucking kill someone if the solution ends up being to fuck Alucard back to the side of good.

Shankar and Ellis will not be safe from me.

Trevor and Sypha remain the heart and soul of this series. I love that Sypha's naive desire to have adventures and experience avenues of life denied to her living the life of a traditional Speaker aren't portrayed as a positive at the end o the season. Emotional validation for female characters is a big trope, and a big problem, with YA fiction and in comics right now and that is not how you create memorable characters that connect with audiences. Early on, things are easy for Sypha because she's so much more powerful than the threats she's facing. But at the end, it's the subtle evils that she either dismisses (the alchemy symbols on the houses-I'll get back to that) or that she never noticed (the Judge) that are the real challenge. Life isn't a breeze, and real evil creeps where you don't notice and where you choose to neglect it. When Trevor tells her, essentially, that the world he's lived in is one of disappointment, frustration, sadness and betrayal, that is the world they live in. The 'real' world. It's not a place of fanciful adventure, learning and hope-it's not a garden to play in. Hope must be forged, and it's always tinged with melancholy. Gardens must be grown-they don't exist for people to wander into and do as they will. Someone always plants weeds in them just to fuck with them.

The four vampire sisters are a mixed bag. Lenore is my favorite of the four because she is, pretty much, a perfect character. She's attractive in her demureness, never looks 'off' and you can never tell if she's playing games or if she's earnest in her feelings or both at the same time. As for Morana and Striga, they are pretty much cookie cutter two dimensional characters that fill roles. Carmilla, voiced by the always excellent Jaimie Murray, is criminally wasted in this season. But Lenore is, really, very strange and demented and I love that about her. I don't think she's cruel by nature-I just think that in her own head, all of this makes perfect sense. The character oozes vulnerable sexuality, and I'm sure she's already 'best girl' in a lot of weirdos' minds.

Bill Nighy kills it, again, as Saint Germain. My only problem with this character is that he feels like he should have had his own story. I thought he was going to be the merchant from SotN. He still might. I like his performance, I like his character and his behavior. What I couldn't get behind was his motivation. This, like with Isaac, feels like a writer working through finding ways to make the character interesting. I suppose you had to have an altruistic motive for him-having him being a voracious scientist/alchemist would have made him less trustworthy. I feel that this is a case where Nighy makes the character more compelling than he actually was because it was such an earnest performance. I hope we see more of him.

The Judge is very apropos for this series, if only because his true motivations help hammer Trevor's reality home to Sypha in the end. My only problem with it is that the plot of the character only exist to add to the cautionary aspect of Sypha's flightiness. You could have made an entire season where this was the antagonist. They made him more complex than that, but the dark secrets he kept almost feel tacked on at the end just so we can have a Shyamalan style twist at the end that serves the themes.

Sala and the mad monks were pretty interesting. What they were doing in the priory was actually pretty awesome from a storytelling standpoint. I loved the 'mirror crucifixes' and what that represented. Sala also has the best line in the entire season when he looks to the night creature in the priory's basement and says 'God has abandoned Earth.' Well, that certainly explains a lot about how shitty the world is right now. I do wish this show took a page from Lords of Shadow's book and leaned a bit more into Trevor's role as a 'holy warrior'. Removing God, and Christianity, from this series almost feels resentful, Weiss and Beniof levels of disdain for the source material's core concepts. Not that the Belmonts are portrayed as pious paladins or anything like that. But they use holy water, boomerang crosses, bibles and whatnot to fight evil. Trevor is praying to a cross at the start of Castlevania III. The material is there and it shouldn't be ignored. I'm not saying religion is only a pure good. But in this series, it's portrayed as deceitful and worthless and everything can be explained as 'magic' and 'science'. I'm kind of getting tired of aetheists being so resentful of something that they can't help but reinforce their views in their work. We get it. You hate God. But...Trevor Belmont probably doesn't. Write the characters more and project yourself less. And I say this as an agnostic. The show doesn't have to, and shouldn't, be a Christian recruitment video. But it shouldn't hate religion as openly as it does.

Briefly, let's talk about the alchemy symbols on the houses. So you're telling me that Trevor, Sypha, the Judge and Saint Germain ALL see these weird symbols on the buildings, they ALL know weird shit is happening in the priory, which Saint Germain CONFIRMS at one point, and they never think to get rid of the symbols? They don't anticipate this might be a problem, when Saint Germain is an ACTUAL alchemist, Sypha is a Speaker with magic powers and Trevor knows the dangers of dark ritualistic enchantments, and....they don't destroy or otherwise mar these symbols?

Lazy writing with a simple fix: the mad monks carve the symbols into the walls and then cast a simple spell, taught to them by the night creature, to hide the runes so that the question is 'what the hell are they doing wandering around town', and only too late discovering that the runes are there when they suddenly appear moments before the ritual kicks off. It's not perfect, but it's a damn sight better than what they did on the show.

Anyway, everything sets up what comes next and I'm really intrigued by what's about to happen. It's holding my interest and despite my complaints, I am still on board.

 

[Taiso]

Well, Nflx finally did it.

They made Alucard a faggot.

Because every Nflx show needs to have gays.

If he wasn't a depressed, self loathing half-vampire (which are inherently bisexual anyway-vampirism is a mixture of sex and violence and doesn't discriminate its victims except in the habitual heteronormative creative execution of the predator-prey relationships of these stories) and he wasn't terminally lonely and, thus, vulnerable to affection, I'd have a bigger problem with it for the virtue flexing reasons you cite.

The other interesting thing about this situation is how Alucard was the victim of manipulation by a pair of conniving schemers. The vampire became the prey and the prey became the predators. And then his magic sword settled matters.

And I don't mean his dick.

 

[2D_mastur]

The cursing is so unnatural and forced. I am not excited for the next episode... only 2 in .

 

[Dr Shroom]

Well, Nflx finally did it.

They made Alucard a faggot.

Because every Nflx show needs to have gays.

vote with your wallet.

 

[LoneSage]

Finished episode 2.

Beginning was great.

Was bored to death with whatever the women vampire sisters were talking about.

This is just, flat-out, not a good show.

No one's going to rewatch this for years to come like Arrested Development.

It's a flash in the pan and incredibly dull. I can't even remember the last time I described something as dull but that is what this is.

Fucking netflix won't let us talk about this week by week so I guess I'll keep watching because obviously I got jackfuckingshit else to do. You guys like it but it turns me off.

 

[evil wasabi]

Finished up Castlevania Season 3 this morning.

Short version: Despite being plagued by some pretty bad pacing issues, it's the most intriguing season overall. The focus on the character arcs elevates the material beyond mere 'video game adaptation' and attempts to invest the audience in the paths they are all on. It's the darkest and most violent season out of the three, feels like the second act of a three act structure and promises a number of redemptions and resolutions when the inevitable fourth season debuts in the next 1-2 years. There isn't much action to speak of early on but the final episode shows us how imaginative the choreography is, and feels more inspired and meaningful and less distracting.

Spoiler:

To elaborate on a few points, Hector is emerging as the sentimental favorite. The guy's big problem is that he just wants love in his life, in one way or another, and this makes him perpetually vulnerable. I'm not sure where they're going with him but if Shankar remains, ostensibly, faithful to the source material (as I believe he has) while injecting some new ideas into the property, then at some point Hector will free himself of the situation he's in and, somehow, form a vendetta against Isaac, who is his enemy at the beginning of Curse of Darkness, a terrible game that this show has somehow made more interesting.

Isaac is not my cup of tea. The character is fine, but I just don't have any idea what the hell he's doing. I mean, I understand why he's travelling to Styria but his conversations with others are so boring that I just don't care. This is a guy that had it all figured out. He was intelligent, informed by his life's experiences and committed to the point that he was a self flagellant. All it takes is one conversation with a pirate captain to get him to doubt his positions and, to me, that shows pretty bad writing by Warren Ellis, who is clearly just looking to fill time with this character while he works his way through finding a purpose for him. Likewise the Dark Souls style side quest where he happens upon a decimated village and speaks with a deranged old woman who rambles and chuckles the whole time. This felt to me like something From Software left on the cutting room floor. Getting to the top of the tower and fighting Rando the Necromancer felt like the end of a zone and not an organic story driven series of events. It sticks out because the series has avoided completely mimicking a video game to this point. At least at the end of that encounter, Isaac has an actual experience to shift his perspective rather than weirdo pirate captains dispensing bizarre wisdom.

Alucard's storyline was in danger of really turning me off this series. I was fine with it until the orgy scene with the brother and sister once I saw what the endgame was. I like how they framed the siblings as being sympathetic towards Alucard for being so guarded and self loathing over everything that's happened, but it turns out that their observations are rooted in something far more devious and cunning. They pulled the wool over my eyes and, for a half hour episode format, I think they pulled it off rather well. You don't even know if they were ever telling him the objective truth about their existence under Cho's thumb or if that was just a carefully crafted interpretation to earn his trust. At the end, I love that Alucard's heart was broken and he is left all alone again because that is how the character feels when we see him in Symphony of the Night. He only comes out of his rest to help Richter and defeat Dracula, who should not be back. When he's interacting with Maria at the end of the game, she's attracted to him but he confirms that he will ever be alone. I like that this series is putting him on that path in ways that actually help you buy in. He can consider people be friends, but he will never let himself get close. It makes sense. There is the hint that he may take a dark turn later, which would clearly require Trevor and Sypha to pull him out of that funk. Are we going to get a Trevor vs. Alucard fight? I really hope we do. The cool thing is that this time, it will be the result of friendship and love tested rather than arrogance and one upsmanship.

But I will fucking kill someone if the solution ends up being to fuck Alucard back to the side of good.

Shankar and Ellis will not be safe from me.

Trevor and Sypha remain the heart and soul of this series. I love that Sypha's naive desire to have adventures and experience avenues of life denied to her living the life of a traditional Speaker aren't portrayed as a positive at the end o the season. Emotional validation for female characters is a big trope, and a big problem, with YA fiction and in comics right now and that is not how you create memorable characters that connect with audiences. Early on, things are easy for Sypha because she's so much more powerful than the threats she's facing. But at the end, it's the subtle evils that she either dismisses (the alchemy symbols on the houses-I'll get back to that) or that she never noticed (the Judge) that are the real challenge. Life isn't a breeze, and real evil creeps where you don't notice and where you choose to neglect it. When Trevor tells her, essentially, that the world he's lived in is one of disappointment, frustration, sadness and betrayal, that is the world they live in. The 'real' world. It's not a place of fanciful adventure, learning and hope-it's not a garden to play in. Hope must be forged, and it's always tinged with melancholy. Gardens must be grown-they don't exist for people to wander into and do as they will. Someone always plants weeds in them just to fuck with them.

The four vampire sisters are a mixed bag. Lenore is my favorite of the four because she is, pretty much, a perfect character. She's attractive in her demureness, never looks 'off' and you can never tell if she's playing games or if she's earnest in her feelings or both at the same time. As for Morana and Striga, they are pretty much cookie cutter two dimensional characters that fill roles. Carmilla, voiced by the always excellent Jaimie Murray, is criminally wasted in this season. But Lenore is, really, very strange and demented and I love that about her. I don't think she's cruel by nature-I just think that in her own head, all of this makes perfect sense. The character oozes vulnerable sexuality, and I'm sure she's already 'best girl' in a lot of weirdos' minds.

Bill Nighy kills it, again, as Saint Germain. My only problem with this character is that he feels like he should have had his own story. I thought he was going to be the merchant from SotN. He still might. I like his performance, I like his character and his behavior. What I couldn't get behind was his motivation. This, like with Isaac, feels like a writer working through finding ways to make the character interesting. I suppose you had to have an altruistic motive for him-having him being a voracious scientist/alchemist would have made him less trustworthy. I feel that this is a case where Nighy makes the character more compelling than he actually was because it was such an earnest performance. I hope we see more of him.

The Judge is very apropos for this series, if only because his true motivations help hammer Trevor's reality home to Sypha in the end. My only problem with it is that the plot of the character only exist to add to the cautionary aspect of Sypha's flightiness. You could have made an entire season where this was the antagonist. They made him more complex than that, but the dark secrets he kept almost feel tacked on at the end just so we can have a Shyamalan style twist at the end that serves the themes.

Sala and the mad monks were pretty interesting. What they were doing in the priory was actually pretty awesome from a storytelling standpoint. I loved the 'mirror crucifixes' and what that represented. Sala also has the best line in the entire season when he looks to the night creature in the priory's basement and says 'God has abandoned Earth.' Well, that certainly explains a lot about how shitty the world is right now. I do wish this show took a page from Lords of Shadow's book and leaned a bit more into Trevor's role as a 'holy warrior'. Removing God, and Christianity, from this series almost feels resentful, Weiss and Beniof levels of disdain for the source material's core concepts. Not that the Belmonts are portrayed as pious paladins or anything like that. But they use holy water, boomerang crosses, bibles and whatnot to fight evil. Trevor is praying to a cross at the start of Castlevania III. The material is there and it shouldn't be ignored. I'm not saying religion is only a pure good. But in this series, it's portrayed as deceitful and worthless and everything can be explained as 'magic' and 'science'. I'm kind of getting tired of aetheists being so resentful of something that they can't help but reinforce their views in their work. We get it. You hate God. But...Trevor Belmont probably doesn't. Write the characters more and project yourself less. And I say this as an agnostic. The show doesn't have to, and shouldn't, be a Christian recruitment video. But it shouldn't hate religion as openly as it does.

Briefly, let's talk about the alchemy symbols on the houses. So you're telling me that Trevor, Sypha, the Judge and Saint Germain ALL see these weird symbols on the buildings, they ALL know weird shit is happening in the priory, which Saint Germain CONFIRMS at one point, and they never think to get rid of the symbols? They don't anticipate this might be a problem, when Saint Germain is an ACTUAL alchemist, Sypha is a Speaker with magic powers and Trevor knows the dangers of dark ritualistic enchantments, and....they don't destroy or otherwise mar these symbols?

Lazy writing with a simple fix: the mad monks carve the symbols into the walls and then cast a simple spell, taught to them by the night creature, to hide the runes so that the question is 'what the hell are they doing wandering around town', and only too late discovering that the runes are there when they suddenly appear moments before the ritual kicks off. It's not perfect, but it's a damn sight better than what they did on the show.

Anyway, everything sets up what comes next and I'm really intrigued by what's about to happen. It's holding my interest and despite my complaints, I am still on board.

I was personally more interested in the Isaac story than the rest of what was happening. Loved the fight against the Legion, which really brought back memories from playing the games. strictly just talking about the show. We have a character who was ardent in support for Dracula, unwavering, and now with Dracula gone, is challenged to ask himself what he wants, and what he thinks is right.

St. Germain and Sala could have been a lot better, but like everyone else, I wondered why Sypha and St. Germain didn't just scratch out the alchemical symbols. Moreover, the metaphysical concept of scratching a symbol is about as convincing as drawing a pentagram with pen and paper and thinking that will achieve some magical effect. Pro tip: it won't. Source: tried it.

The Alucard story was stupid. It sucked. It should have been removed completely. Even if they didn't have Taka licking his deep inner thigh, even if it was just Sumi, it would have been stupid and worthless. I got nothing from it.

I don't want to discourage anyone from watching this through, but don't expect it to be great. It was simply okay.

 

[LoneSage]

3Q wasabi, I will power through. I really enjoyed the first 10 minutes of episode 2 but after that was just...why am I watching this.

It takes itself too seriously.

 

[evil wasabi]

3Q wasabi, I will power through. I really enjoyed the first 10 minutes of episode 2 but after that was just...why am I watching this.

It takes itself too seriously.

I can't really defend the show. I watched it. I didn't love it. I'm completely disinvested from Gaylucard, thanks to NFLX's gender-sexual identity rebalancing.

 

[titchgamer]

The whole alucard orgie thing threw me totally.
Turned into a bit of a hentai thing towards the end there!

 

[LoneSage]

Up to episode 6 (the one where flyguy talks to black guy at the campfire).

Series gets much better after episode 2.

Heavy Berserk influences.

 

[evil wasabi]

Up to episode 6 (the one where flyguy talks to black guy at the campfire).

Series gets much better after episode 2.

Heavy Berserk influences.

Isaac. Ffs you are a lazy fuck.

 

[LoneSage]

It's not my fault the show has said his name once in six episodes.

 

[neo_mao]

You guys are too hard on the show. I’m on season three episode 3 and thoroughly enjoying it.

 

[neo_mao]

Hey look once I spelled out three with letters and the other time I typed the number. Go figure.

 

[GutsDozer]

So far season 3 is great. It's got great animation, story, and voice acting. Plus just the right amount of gore.

 

[neo_mao]

So I watched a couple more episodes last night and saw Alucard’s threesome. The only thing that bugged me about that is when he started to cry. I mean what the fuck? I thought I was the only guy that cried during sex.

Lenore is hot tho.

 

[LoneSage]

Finished it, agree with wasabi on all points. Isaac's story is basically if the protagonist of the video game was a bad guy. It will be super lame if Trevor and Alucard fight next season since that appears to be the set-up.

Also, really didn't gaf about any of the vampire girls except for the one Hector fucked. To me, they could have cut out the other three or combine them and it wouldn't make much of a difference.

They totally lifted the Legion city idea from that Rick and Morty episode with Unity. Not a bad thing, just stating it.