#NOT ‘damn it’s fucking upsetting that this excited replay i’ve been doing of the previous games and all the recommending i’ve been doing

[transtief]

i really don’t think it’s “typical dragon age fandom nonsense” for people to be genuinely upset about the world state choices. combat, level design, art direction, gameplay gimmicks, those have all varied across each dragon age game. the one thing that’s remained constant are nods to our previous choices.

i wasn’t expecting my HoF to come riding in on a griffin, but i can’t find a monument dedicated to warden tabris somewhere around the anderfels? lucanis couldn’t have some lines about the time that one arainai boy was stirring up trouble in antiva city? you’re gonna tell me that making a mage the new divine wouldn’t have some impact on nevarra and antiva? on the anderfels, the supposed most devout militant andrastian nation in thedas? you’re saying nobody in the north is paying attention to who rules orlais or ferelden? come on.

[oodlyenough]

some disorganized thoughts on bly manor now that i’ve had some time to digest it

i’ll start with things i liked:

-obviously i appreciated a lesbian love story front and center. that was a great pleasant surprise -i liked the idea of hopping between memories and the memories warping and changing and replaying -the dollhouse was creepy af and frankly underutilized -the kid who played miles cracked me tf up -i watched a single season of izombie years ago and have liked rahul kohli ever since so it was nice to see him in something! -i like these anthology ideas with different actors reappearing. i spent most of the season like “i’m sure theo is in this but where is she??” hahaha

i think this felt like a solid B draft to me... like not a first draft, but not quite as good as it might’ve been had it gone through another round of reworking. i like a lot of the fundamentals -- most of the characters are likable except the ones you aren’t meant to like, i like the cast, i like different bits of the concepts, i like the twist of “it’s a love story”.... but many of those separate threads never fully came together for me

we saw almost every major twist coming, literally from ep 1 we were like “hannah’s a ghost”. i dunno if i count this as a point off or not, because you want stories to be logically written and have foreshadowing you can follow, but it would’ve been nice to have any big surprises a la Nellie/Bent Neck Lady. plus, in the case of edmund i correctly guessed it was headlights/taillights reflecting off glasses, but i was disappointed because i thought Dani’s dark secret would be murder~ (or manslaughter i guess, accidental) and perhaps she’d backed up into some guy, and she’d seen it too late in her rearview mirror, which is why he always appeared in mirrors... but nope. the mirror connection was arbitrary and she was not at fault at all. i mean, i get why she was upset, but considering we spent several episodes thinking dani had murdered/accidentally killed someone, the reveal of “he got hit by a car in front of me and i had nothing to do with it” was an anticlimax lol. 

every character got a really long soliloquy that was Too Long. hill house was prone to pretentious dialogue as well, but when it’s pretentious dialogue for a solid 5 minutes of one character talking, it got to be a bit much. and I like these people! so it’s not like the basic level of my interest wasn’t there, it just ...stretched on. a lot of this website probably disagrees, but jamie’s moonflower speech is the key example of this for me. i feel like we got the gist of what her life had been like and why she was the way she was in the first third of it, and then it just went on... and on...

then other things that just felt like they came up but weren’t tied together satisfactorily: peter and rebecca. i loved the turn at the end of... what, episode 7 I think?, where peter-miles leaves and you find out rebecca is undermining his plan and wants to save the kids and dani. that was a relief, since i spent the previous episode like ‘why the FUCK is rebecca on board with this’, and i thought we were building to some sort of peter/miles-rebecca-flora-dani confrontation... but then the lady of the lake interrupted and dominated the entire end of the series

which in some ways of course she did -- you don’t hear about “the lady in the lake” at the start of a haunted show and not have her center stage at some point -- but could we not have tied those two things together better?

i’m also not opposed to sad endings in this genre -- i am one of the people who thinks hill house should’ve gone with its original bleak ending lol --  but the tragedy felt a little strangely doled out. owen & hannah needed more screentime towards the end with actual-owen, I think? owen needed more to do writ large. rebecca’s story felt unfinished and rebecca in general never felt like a fully realized character -- which is part of why i was so excited when she was revealed to be working against peter, but then it barely went anywhere! (sensing an uncomfortable pattern...) 

i found viola’s story strange... ok, so she’s lost her memory of everything except her walk, and she’s stuck there by sheer will, but when she’s in dani she doesn’t... change at all, or... she still just wants to be in the lake? no one ever dragged that damn lake when there’s so many bodies in it lmao? maybe finding a way to make viola at peace would’ve been too trite but i felt like the show had kind of set up for that and then didn’t go all the way with it.

ALSO... i get that bride flora “didn’t know” or whatever... but god her bawling @ this widowed lesbian the night before her marriage because what if he diiiiies one daaaaaaay we’re so perfect and happy waaaaaaaah was like.... obnoxious to me. lmfao 

also it just wasn’t very scary imo. i apparently missed every background ghost because i saw, like, two, whereas in hill house i was ALWAYS on edge looking for them in that damn house lmao. in this one, there were a couple early scares but not many. dani’s fiance became routine, lol. peter quint was obviously just ghost peter quint. hill house did something similar, where the ghosts were slowly revealed and in essence became less scary -- ESPECIALLY bent neck lady who was terrifying af to start with lol but ultimately becomes tragic -- but i feel like hill house maintained the post-reveal scariness more effectively.

anyway I dunno, despite the above I didn’t hate it! I had fun watching it with friends and I will absolutely watch s3 The Haunting of Whatever to see this cast do other ghost stories. but it’s like a 6/10 for me. mostly it made me want to rewatch hill house. and maybe oculus.