#i like bly manor i like hill house. i think they had very powerful throughlines to guide where they wanted to go where this (probably due to

[quietwingsinthesky]

please give more usher thoughts as you progress through the show ive been hyperfixated on the horrors since i watched with my bf

my friend, i really don’t want to disappoint, but i am very much not enjoying this show alsjdkfksi. i’m gonna finish it in hopes that it gets better, but so far, i’m really not seeing why this show is about the fall of the house of usher.

the masque of the red death section obviously had a little more ties to the original poe story, both in the imagery and the themes, even if i think it’s a little bit weird to have the adaptation story about the rich people avoiding the plague and partying it up not even mention Covid once. Not that that’s required, it’s just a bit of an odd choice. A subversion of expectation, maybe, to burn them all with acid instead? I was vibing with it up until that point, and the scene itself is nicely horrifying, but I don’t know.

I’m on episode 3 now (Murders in the Rue Morgue 😬 dear god, please let this not carry the racist undertones of the original story forward, please let them address and/or change that or something.) and so far my thoughts are: this is like succession if succession was boring and sometimes flashed a ghost on the screen to make you jump.

(oh one last thought. the framing device, roderick narrating everything. I’ll admit I was soured on this beforehand because I’m fond of the fall of the house of usher’s narrator and his quest to save roderick that ultimately fails as he is drawn into the web of paranoia and ruin, so having the relationship between roderick and auguste be instead antagonistic threw me off, but that’s besides the point. That bit still works fine enough for the story that’s being told here.

What I don’t like is how we’ll be pulled back to the framing device out of nowhere sometimes, completely deflating the tension of the story to stop and have roderick give a monologue and then go back to the story. It’s not adding anything, really, nothing that couldn’t be inferred from what we see on the screen or could have been worked into the story instead without being so jarring. It also just ends up reminding you that, oh right, this is supposed to be something roderick is telling someone else, but obviously what we see is full of details he couldn’t possibly know about. which, without being yanked back to remind us he’s the one telling it, would be easier to suspend disbelief about.

I do like the ghosts standing just behind Auguste, though. that’s a nice touch. i wish even less attention was called to them. i really wish there would be less fucking jumpscares overall in this show.)