#[more than eve bc rly bitch another dead wife story SICK OF IT LOL]

[executare]

Same. The romance doesn’t seem that interesting. I was hoping Carvel and Eve would have a good romance, but that doesn’t sound like it will happen. I pretty much just like the characters and the plot.

I love Vampire Library dearly for its innovative ideas on vampire species and introducing a new godly Dracula figure with Ayin while simultaneously not leaning on many of the usual conventions of vampire fiction (for example, the fact that humans are the primary antagonists getting in Carvel’s way) but my oh my, the romance is...boring. Very boring. More boring than I’d expect from a series as novel and interesting as this. I am fed up with the dead lover trope enough as it is, because I am fed up with male protagonists’ only motivations being a dead woman (I make exceptions for my boy Leon Belmont purely because Sara’s death served a massive purpose TO THE ENTIRETY of the Castlevania franchise in that she chose to die and become the Vampire Killer, the single most powerful weapon the Belmonts could hope to wield in their quest to conquer the night. Her sacrifice at least had huge consequences besides making the protagonist sad enough to propel the plot. Plus Leon’s motivations were based around Mathias as much as they were Sara; she was not the only contributing factor.)

I suppose you can argue that I can’t rag on VL to the extremes for having the Dead Female Love interest too hard when the reincarnation angle is present and his relationship with Mano is so hilariously entertaining and genuinely heartfelt, but my grievances exist no less because the underlying principle is the exact same. A woman dying to propel the main character’s man pain plot into the stratosphere. I just think Carvel could have been a complete and compelling entity without the shoehorned romance that serves basically 0 purpose at all when you consider that Carvel literally becomes possessed by his horrible alter ego and MASSACRES VILLAGES every few hundred years, y’know? I feel like his stakes were plenty high without Eve’s death being the signature driving force behind the whole story. It doesn’t even add anything to Mano’s character if you ask me. If you deducted all of that from the story, it’d still come to the same conclusion. Ayin comes back, he has to be destroyed, the library was built for the purpose of hunting him down, everything is the same just without the added melodrama that isn’t even really that interesting anyway. Mano is such a charming and likeable character all by himself and so dissonant from Eve that he might as well not have any connection to her at all. I suppose erasing the Eve subplot would also erase Carvel’s weird impulse to make him his contractor and to protect him, but that kind of doesn’t make sense to me even in the canon of the story since Mano can actively reject Carvel’s attempts to use their telepathic bond to locate Mano if he wants to, so...you tell me. Also Carvel did not even believe Mano was her reincarnation at the start of the story SO THATS ALREADY INVALIDATED.

I don’t even hate reincarnation stories. I usually tend to like them when done well! But I feel the romance element just detracts more than it adds in this context, I really do, especially when the romance is so boring and surface level, and not to mention completely obfuscated from the audience for drama purposes for about 80 chapters of the whole god damn story. We never get to care about Eve and Carvel’s relationship. It’s rendered completely trivial despite being the most pivotal driving force in Carvel’s story, as most shoe-horned in romances always are. Seriously, put your creativity hat on guys, we need better motivations for our male protagonists than Woman Dead, especially if your character has OTHER VERY PRESSING MOTIVATIONS BESIDES WOMAN DEAD ALREADY EXISTING IN THE STORY AHSDFJK