#it’d be kinda funny but nahhhh I think starting random fandom anger is unnecessarily cruel hmmm

[chibishortdeath]

Alright I’ve thought about, I’m gonna actually start posting some of my criticisms of Netflixvania starting with the first season. I actually have a notepad document on my computer somewhere that’s just various rants about it that I’m gonna take from lol

Rant under a cut cause it’s long, spoilers, and also cause uh tldr I do not like the show 💀

Ok let’s start from the beginning of the show, episode one.

The first episode isn’t terrible, it’s a bit rocky, some red flags here and there for what was to come, but that’s kinda expected of animations like this. It usually takes them a couple episodes to pick up and grow into their own, so I was skeptical, but not gonna knock it entirely when I first saw it.

My biggest criticism of this episode was the complete missed opportunity to introduce certain characters from this section of the series’s story. Imagine if they had shown Isaac and Hector in the background of the castle or something at this point for foreshadowing later, as they would’ve already been studying under Dracula at that time. Imagine if that old woman Lisa helped ended up being one of Lyudmil’s family members, cementing them as friends of her for later. Alas, Netflix just decided not to use most of the already written backstories for most characters. But eh, that’s getting into nitpick territory.

And then the second episode happens… I honestly genuinely hate the concept of the Speakers and it’s because they completely replace a much more interesting (especially for the tone and themes they were going for) group for Sypha to be a part of: The Church. In the game, Sypha is a witch, something that’s currently not very good to be at this time, however the church employs a bunch of male wizard soldiers. This is already a perfect opportunity set up and ready to go for them to make their points of the church being hypocritical, add some intense dramatic irony with maybe the audience getting to know Sypha is a witch before anyone else does and seeing her interact with a bunch of people who would have her dead if they knew, and create a super conflicted situation where these church soldiers all die during their encounter with the cyclops, but yet they scrapped it for uh random group of magic users that kinda exist entirely for a plot that didn’t need a new device to work. And Sypha just being all hood down and no hiding just takes away something interesting about her character, making her kinda bland in the process. Like it’s one thing to have the Girl™️ who owns the braincell trope and another to have a character with some actual immediate conflicts. They totally could’ve played up the “oh no if Trevor knew would he kill me” dynamic, especially with witches being commonly lumped in with ‘monsters’ in a lot of other media and Trevor being ya know a monster hunter. And already just from this one design choice she completely loses her symbolic putting the hood down scene for much later in the story to show that she actually trusts people and feels safe enough to not need to hide anymore because she’s got people on her side now.

Also the lack of Grant is just a crime in itself. Grant could’ve worked perfectly as like the everyman of the group. Hell, with his background of being a former noble turned thief presumably after hard times to straight up losing his entire hometown to flames and leading a revolution about it, Grant literally has like almost every common not magical vampire hunter person experience. He could’ve given the group any of those perspectives and been told the perspectives of the vampire hunting life he hasn’t had, ya know? And he’d help differentiate the personalities and humors of the group in general. I literally can’t think of a negative to having Grant in the group.

So we were robbed of character development for Sypha and the existence of Grant, what’s next—

The Bishop character is someone that could’ve been interesting if he was written with any kind of nuance, but instead he’s extremely on the nose and blatantly laughably evil. Otherwise this guy is pretty forgettable besides how lame it was that they used Blue Fangs to kill him instead of ya know an actually recognizable enemy. Like the Blue Fangs design wouldn’t be bad if it was in literally anything else, but compared to the designs of most Castlevania monsters it’s just really lame. I’d’ve even accepted a Warg or something, idk. Personally I think having Death walk in taking the form of Zead and going through that speech while eventually turning into the skeleton form we know him as woulda gone hard but for some reason Death isn’t a thing until seasons later which sucks.

I also absolutely hate Alucard and the Cyclops being in the catacombs! Hate it! The Cyclops kinda had like a courtyard area for it and made sense being there since it was standing guard on the way to the castle. Literally what it is even doing in the catacombs 💀💀💀. Standing guard for… eepy Alucard? Why??? And the whole sleeping soldier thing or whatever they called him is just so obviously an excuse to have him appear faster and make it seem like it tied into the plot. Alucard absolutely should not have been introduced to the main group this early on because again that robs him of a bunch of opportunities for background and character development. He got maybe the one oh no dad don’t commit mass death that’s bad scene and nothing else when they had plenty of time to show him initially following his fathers orders and eventually growing to stand against him. And again??? Missed opportunity for anything radio drama related??? Like if there’s any opportunity to get any of that story more known it’s in an animation? And besides, it’s less work to just use whatever materials and supplemental materials already existed for the game!

Dracula’s Curse and CoD have:

Two games

Two manuals

Three manga (TokyoPop and Preorder)

A couple game guides

Flashback sequences in a radio drama

Flashback sequences in SotN AKA: the game everyone knows

A ton of references in later games cause IGA is a big Dracula’s Curse fanboy

Pachinkos

That is plenty of material to make an animation based on, especially because most games don’t get half of that, especially not NES games. They were literally handed like the NES game to adapt lottery and decided not to scratch like half the ticket 💀💀💀.

Alucard also being able to levitate kinda negates a lot of things. Like what the hell is the point of having a bat/mist form and a double jump then? If he can just be flying vampire Jesus immediately or whatever people call him idk. And you can’t tell me Alucard wouldn’t be painfully embarrassed if someone ever saw him shirtless come on this is the guy that wears like 5 layers of clothing in every game he’s in to the point that even in the modern era he’s choosing a suit over casual clothes. Every action he makes in this introduction to him is obviously fanservice for the sake of fanservice with very little thought behind it, except I’m not feeling very served right now. And having Trevor kinda lose that fight is a reoccurring problem this show ends up having: putting down other characters just to make certain ones get the cool fanservice moment. Contrary to what the writers of this show may believe, it actually doesn’t make me go “oh wow, Alucard is so cool and much badas”, it just feels weird and uncomfortable that Trevor is getting cheated out of one of his canon achievements because the writers preferred one character’s tits more than him.

So, basically, the show starts out with missed opportunities, concepts and characters getting cut out, watered down versions of characters that did make it in, cheap fanservice, poor explanations for things, etc etc. this all culminates into a resounding m e h + dread for later seasons being worse (boy was I correct on that fear lol).

Here’s some other things for the first season I didn’t know where else to fit:

None of the humor hit for me at all, like not a single joke. The humor was either a no response at best, but definitely a physically wincing from secondhand embarrassment at worst. Related to this, I feel like most of the dialogue reads like either someone who just learned what swear words are and thinks they’re really cool and funny or genuinely forced. At times most of the characters talk with the same delivery, cadence, personality, etc, it’s really obvious they were all written by the same person or group. And that even goes for background and side characters, too. This is a criticism I’ve never seen said: I really don’t like the voice acting in this show. I’m sure it’s no fault of the voice actors at all, but there were times in this where I either could not hear characters properly or could not understand characters properly and I had to watch it with closed captions on. The clearness and volume of the characters voices varies A LOT even just between scenes sometimes. And that combined with all the characters having really similar speech patterns, there were a lot of times where if I looked away from the screen, I genuinely could not tell if it was Alucard or Trevor speaking cause it sounded like it could reasonably have been either of them (and in some cases it literally didn’t even matter that much which character was saying what). It’s an absolute tragedy that the color schemes in this show are not remotely similar to Dracula’s Curse too. I understand why some color combos wouldn’t make it for eyestrain reasons, but the pixel artwork in all the NES titles is beautiful. Same goes for music, like I am never going to forgive this series for using Bloody Tears for a Dracula’s Curse ‘adaptation’ and not Beginning or Aquarius or Dead Beat or Ghost Ship or Clockwork or— ya know? These are two things that the series are really known for so you’d think with some of the fanservice they did they’d be all kinds of ready to use stuff like that for more of it.

Anyway, past season one is when I started watching the series primarily through clips/episodes reposted on YouTube or elsewhere cause I had completely lost any interest in it. I’ll probably go through synopsises online again for season 2 just to try to better remember what happened in that one because I do remember having very little good to say about season 2 as well and I gotta do that research so I can hate things properly :3.

There’s a certain part of this where I just kinda blanked on things to even say, partially because Season one is kinda bland in general, but partially because I started getting sleepy while typing. So if I feel like I missed anything season one specific I’ll just put it in the beginning of the season two post. d(_ _ )