#I get a 10min long flashback to everything I dislike about the series and how Im gonna cringe at them and be unable to finish

[lynksease]

its hard to be incredibly attached to and obsessed with a character in a series that I have a long term grudge against but also still kind of like sometimes

[whisperofthewaves]

@bies-from-wildland this is for you (I’m sorry for one spoiler, but if you start watching you will know the second this one shows up that it was very predictable):

(edit lmao I forgot under the cut exists)

gods dammit I have such mixed feelings about this series. did I like it? No. were there moments I enjoyed quite a lot? yes. <- and this is what makes me dislike it even more.

the music was over the top dramatic and it was great until it was too much and wasn’t nice anymore. like, how much drama and patos can you squeeze out of every other scene in all 8 episodes?? a bunch of peasants is getting burned to death and you feel like you should be watching the battle of helm’s deep or something. EVERYTHING IS DRAMATIC. EVERYTHING. NO RESPITE.

and the thing that makes it worse is the few attempts at humour in like last three episodes or something. in castlevania it worked because the whole thing felt like a dirty RPG and the humour was there form the beginning, but here? with the dramatic choirs every 5 minutes? gods no.

character designs - some were cool, some were ok, some were terrible, I guess. I couldn’t stop low key laughing at zeus because he literally looks like the straightest 80s/90s american cartoon hero. he looks like mr fantastic from fantastic four and it was so distracting. edit: lots of them were SexyTM

spoiler// and the second you see **** you know she’s a villain/antagonist because she has pale eyes and her main colour is purple. I can swear I’ve seen her in some other american 90s cartoon playing a villainess too. //spoiler

the art style screams american comic/cartoon so hard every time I saw the “netflix anime original” I would get more offended. I’m also very much on the fence about wether I like it or not. I’d say 90% not, but there were moments I appreciated.

the animation - idk man. I wasn’t a fan of it in castlevania either, but there it somehow worked better. at least the fight scenes were cool afair. here there’s one scene in some early episode where a whole bunch of people literally disappear between the shots. and most of it feels clunky in some way. and kinda static. and sometimes there’s this weird feeling like when a character’s head moves some of their features are not quick enough to catch up with the movement. idk if 2D was always like that or if I’ve been watching too much 3D, but I was noticing it in multiple places.

and I don’t know how much of that is because of direction. wow there was an amount of characters staring dramatically at each other for too long. I feel like they were supposed to convey emotions in those moments but their faces had none showing, at least I definitely didn’t see any. also because the faces were mostly static in those shots.

it was straight up painful seeing a closeup of a face, the eyes going to the side, dooown, sideee (or something like that) and it felt so. not. natural and forced I could see the people who worked on it muttering to themselves, very focused “yeah, so she looks there and now we will have her look this way, and then--”

I’d sum up the last 4 paragraphs as: some shots as standalone images were aesthetically pleasing, but I had to suffer the rest of the series between them.

and for the last, my personal favourite in any case: the dramatic flashbacks of things said 10mins earlier. I will not elaborate, this is already too long and I haven’t even touched the plot bc I don’t want to add spoilers.

mmm yes, forgot the I Will Now Provide Your Backstory moments.

anyway, the plot was Basic verging on Not Great. I can’t say how much of it was based on any specific mythology, but that shouldn’t matter, it could’ve worked if everything else wasn’t terrible.

(since I’m putting it in the tag: obviously these are all subjective opinions of mine)