Reaction Shot: Castlevania S01E01 (or: LISA DESERVES BETTER)

[spindizzy]

"Wait, no," I said when sithe first explained it to me. "Go back to the bit where Warren Ellis, the Transmetropolitan guy, is writing an anime about the game with the whips and hunting Dracula. Go back and explain it so that it makes sense."

And lo, here we are, where I have a lot of feelings about my OT3 working together despite all of the gore and weirdness it took to get there.

So yes, because I'm excited about Castlevania series three, BEHOLD! I have the tweets and shouting about Castlevania instead of all the other shouting I meant to do because of who I am as a person! Caution warnings for... Everything, but off the top of my head: murder, gore, body horror, mutilation, women getting fridged, persecution of minorities by villains, religiously-motivated persecution, witch-burnings, animal death, discussions of goat-fucking... There's a lot, okay.

• Wallachia, 1455. THAT is a lot of skeletons. Like, I know that's Vlad the Impaler's THING, but still.


• Lisa just fucking cutting a bat out of midair, like... Damn woman, you came prepared for this.


• And she just walks up to his castle and bangs on the front door, because Lisa fears NOTHING AND NOBODY, especially not melodramatic vampires. I love her. She wants to be a doctor, she knows all of the science that she can learn on her own, and she's just decided that Dracula is going to teach her more whether he likes it or not. YES LISA, YOU TELL HIM.


• Dracula, looming ominously: And what do you have to trade for this knowledge, Lisa from Lupu?
  Lisa, giving not a single fuck: Perhaps I could help you relearn some manners.


• I AM A SUCKER FOR "BEING WITH PHENOMINAL COSMIC POWER WHO STRIKES TERROR INTO THE HEARTS OF MEN GETS FUCKING ROASTED BY THE ONE (1) PERSON WHO DOESN'T CARE HOW SCARY THEY ARE," OKAY, THIS IS PRETTY MUCH HOW YOU GET ME TO SHIP THE HET COUPLE.


• "I might have eaten some roasted garlic earlier, was that rude?"


• "Maybe I could teach you to like people again. Or tolerate them. Or at least stop putting them on sticks."


• His castle moves! I don't know why, as a vampire with the ability to live anywhere, you'd choose a sun-baked plain full of skeletons, but I guess it goes with the clockwork horror aesthetic you've got going on there.


• "I've known you for two minutes, and you offer for me to walk the Earth like an ordinary peasant, while I give you the knowledge of immortals." THAT EYEBROW THOUGH.


• All of Lisa's birthdays come at once in one alchemy lab, amazing. Look at her face. Look at how HAPPY she is, and how much she wants the people around her to live BETTER LIVES!


• "Start with me, and I'll start with you." That's it, that's the ship. Fearless mortals going "No, you have things to learn from me too, you miserable bastard" is where I live.


• Oh my god Dracula's character arc is LITERALLY "I have known this woman for five minutes but if anything happens to her I will kill everyone in this country and then myself." That's it. That's LITERALLY THE PLOT OF THIS SHOW in one meme! HOW DID THIS HAPPEN. This thought brought to you by my "Awww, look at that, he LIKES her!"


• Targoviste, Wallachia: 1475: Something happens to Lisa.


• I am so annoyed by this, because I KNOW that it's deliberate - that they gave us EXACTLY enough information to make it clear that Lisa is funny and smart and an excellent protagonist and then toss her into the fridge to explain why Dracula is going off on one, and I fucking FELL FOR IT ANYWAY.


• I don't know if it annoys me more or less when we get to series two and actually get to see more of her point of view, because LISA DESERVED MORE SCREENTIME AND ALSO ENOUGH DEPTH TO NOT JUST BE A SNARKY FRIDGE-FILLER.


• OF COURSE some schmuck is doing this to improve his public standing, of COURSE. How much says he's probably done this to other inconvenient people in the past?


• Oh no, he's a witch hunter, he's DEFINITELY done this before.


• "The archbishop prefers that life in Wallachia be kept simple," translated from douchebag to English is "I prefer a cowed, fearful population that I can control, because I'm an awful human being."


• And Lisa crying out with her last breath for Dracula to not murder everyone in Wallachia is very "Saintly woman being stuffed into a refrigerator." Like, I'm assuming the biblical parallels of her trying to tell a powerful unseen entity that the mortals don't know what they're doing is intentional! But also uggggggggggh to the saintly woman dying trope.


• I JUST WANT A) ALL OF THE LISA LIVES AUS, AND B) ALL OF THE DOMESTIC FIC WHERE LISA AND DRACULA ARE A FAMILY AND DRACULA SPENDS A LOT OF TIME GOING "?????????" AT EVERYTHING.


• I am distracted by how lumpy all of the minor characters are. I don't know if lumpy is the word I want, but all of the protagonists (and Dracula) have very smooth, traditionally attractive faces, and all of the other humans have lumps and wrinkles.


• NETFLIX HAS SOMETHING CALLED "PICTURE IN PICTURE MODE" WHICH MEANS IT WILL JUST AUTOMATICALLY PLAY AT THE BOTTOM OF MY SCREEN AND I DON'T HAVE TO FAFF ABOUT WITH EXTRA WINDOWS. EXCELLENT, THIS IS A PLEASANT SURPRISE. I can't figure out how to make it show me the subtitles when it's hanging out in the corner of my screen, but honestly I'll take what I can get.


• I like the intro, ngl. I think the way it's all shaped from lines that shift into each other is very pleasing!


• ... He has a coat and a wedding ring, and I don't know why those of all the details of his costume change have got me where I live, but they HAVE.


• ... Oh. Oh they destroyed everything.


• "Mister Tepes" oh my god I die. Especially because now I'm picturing Lisa chatting about her husband and his travels while she works and oh noooooooooo where is all of the fic for this.


• I will also take the fix-it fic where Dracula comes back in time and goes on a rampage that only targets the people who are ACTUALLY the problem while Lisa rebuilds her lab.


• "I won't take joy in that woman being killed." This old woman is the only valid person in the entirety of Targoviste. And I don't know how she can be so confident that Lisa will be dead by that time, but the fact that Dracula is ready and willing to storm a cathedral to get her back is good husbanding.


• "She said to me 'If you would love me as a man, then live as a man. Travel as a man.'" Oh. Oh he's crying blood and fire, oh no. And holding a cross as he burns. OH.


• "I do this last kindness in her name."


• That must have been burning for a while to have got to the skeleton stage, but there's still a crowd. A crowd that APPLAUDS. ... If Dracula had struck down everyone who watched his wife burn without helping her, I don't know if I'd blame him to be honest.


• "Quite a show" YOU WILL BE THE FIRST AGAINST THE WALL YOU COWARDLY FUCK! YOU LET HER BE BURNED EVEN THOUGH YOU DO THE SAME THINGS AS HER BUT WITH LESS SKILL!


• I know that the Bishop is supposed to be representing a structural evil rather than his own personal evil, but every time he speaks my hackles go up.


• The fire effects are really cool though! LOOK AT THEM! ... Although holy fuck he's bursting through the pyre that Lisa died on. Oh no.


• "Lisa Tepes was a woman of science and the one thing that justified humanity's stench upon the world." ... I don't want to know why I love the "There is one (1) human that makes the world worth living in" trope, but I doooooooo, no one look at me and my shame.


• Do we ever find out what Lisa's name was before she got married?


• The Bishop, looking at a head the size of a man made entirely out of fire that is yelling about the wrong humanity just committed: You're not real!


• "You took from me everything that I love, so I will take from you everything that you have and everything you had." As exit lines go, that's pretty good!


• Dungeons and Dragons movie voice: BLOOD AND FIRE SHALL RAIN FROM THE SKIES!


• The mirror effects are so good as well. They're so pretty.


• "It will take me one year to summon an army from the guts of hell itself." OKAY I did wonder why he waited.


• I do like Dracula's voice actor in this scene, I think he does good snarling.


• Bless Alucard, because his argument is that Dracula should murder the people who actually killed Lisa instead of, y'know, an entire country, rather than "don't murder people." (... I don't disagree with Dracula that anyone could have objected, but I'm with Alucard. Proportional amounts of murders.)


• WELL I'M SURE THIS FIGHT WILL END WELL FOR ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE INVOLVED.


• Oh hey, was that the inevitable Warren Ellis stand-in warbling there? Because I'm pretty sure that every single Warren Ellis thing I've read has a bald-headed kook to be a Warren Ellis mouthpiece.


• Targoviste, 1476: TIME TO PARTY TO CELEBRATE US NOT GETTING MURDERED BY DRACULA BECAUSE WE HAVE NO SENSE OF SELF-PRESERVATION!


• I don't judge anyone for not fleeing the country, but I feel like maybe bunkering down in a basement or something until AFTER the deadline for your execution has passed would be... Safer...?


• The backgrounds are very pretty! Kudos to the art team working on those!


• ... Are they doing the thing where your morality is reflected in your physical form? Is that why everyone is lumpy and the Archbishop is shot in a way that maximises how grotesque we're supposed to find him? Because that's a gross trope that I thought we'd moved past, but maybe not????


• So this Archbishop has been in power since about the time Lisa started studying under Dracula? I don't know why that's pinged at me, but I can't help doing timeline maths.


• Is he seriously doing a speech about how great his city is and how god has protected them? On the very day that Dracula promised to to murder you all? SERIOUSLY MY DUDE????


• ... Did you not notice the ominous red clouds. Is your genre savvy not tingling at all. Oh no.


• Is THIS where I got "I will know you for a liar" from? I speak almost entirely in quotations and references and don't cite my sources, I genuinely can't remember.


• "We are the righteous of Targoviste," says man who's cool with letting a murder-hungry bishop run riot.


• Ah, rain of blood. That explains why the clouds are red.


• Okay, but that crowd shot under the blood rain DIDN'T work. I think the red appeared on them too suddenly, whereas on all of the other shots they could match it up properly.


• THE REFERENCE TO THE OTHER GAME ABOUT VAMPIRES IN EASTERN EUROPE WASN'T INTENTIONAL.


• ... Is it raining blood and gobs of meat now? Because if so what the fuck.


• Oh, nope, baby demons? Baby dragons?


• And here is where the body horror tags come in! Yaaaaaay no wait, the other thing. But you see what I mean about the way that the Archbishop is handled!


• You know who we haven't seen yet? The douchecanoe that started this mess.


• The rooves are running red with blood and he torched the cathedral from the inside out. Dracula gives no fucks about holy ground. ... Oh, wait, no, I remember the explanation for this in episode four! Put a mental pin in this Susan, come back and yell about it with context later.


• "And what do you do? You celebrate the day that you murdered my wife."


• Aaaaaaaaaand here's the gore I warned you about, because this entire sequence is people getting GRUESOMELY MURDERED. Including the mayor, but not including the character that would have actually provided some catharsis! THANKS I HATE IT.


• The image of him built out of smoke and ravens is very cool.


• Seriously though he wants to kill everyone in Wallachia. Not just the people who harmed his wife, but EVERYONE. The people who had nothing to do with it, the people she wanted to teach and heal, the people who never knew that Lisa Tepes ever existed. Because apparently destroying everything she worked for is what he thinks is the correct response to her death.


• And now for something completely different: Trevor Belmont!


• "I'd know if my goat was in love with you." And there we go, there's the goat-fucking!


• Like, this is my understanding of Warren Ellis' work. Here is something dramatic and thematic! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand here's an entire segment about goat-fucking or scat jokes or dodgy sex practices, because he can't let us assume that he writes serious shit.


• (You can write serious shit with scat jokes, and in fact Warren Ellis HAS, but there is SO MUCH. SO. MUCH.)


• Kob has heard this story so many times before he can do all of the beats.


• I do not understand how you can have Richard Armitage doing voices and not get him to do the voice he did in Ocean's 8. I'm just saying.


• I was trying to work out who Piter's VA might be but my brain has just completely replaced everything he said he "Zoinks, Scoob!" and now I don't care anymore.


• Man, how do you think that you're gonna fare when the demons get here if even the cities are fucked?! You're like three houses and a field of sheep!


• Shovel Man: We should have killed all the Belmonts.
  Trevor Belmont, wearing the Belmont family crest: ... Shit.

Comments

[squeemu]

SUSAN I AM GOING TO BED BUT I JUST HAD TO SAY:

I JUST WANT A) ALL OF THE LISA LIVES AUS, AND B) ALL OF THE DOMESTIC FIC WHERE LISA AND DRACULA ARE A FAMILY AND DRACULA SPENDS A LOT OF TIME GOING "?????????" AT EVERYTHING.

YES YES THIS A THOUSAND TIMES THIS

I hate so much that my experience of Castlevania was mostly just, "I am here for Dracula being a sad mopey vampire who loved one (1) human" but there it is, that's the truth and the only reason I am not looking up clips of him speaking and being mopey right now is because I'm afraid of spoilers.

[thebaconfat]

Oh my god Dracula's character arc is LITERALLY "I have known this woman for five minutes but if anything happens to her I will kill everyone in this country and then myself." That's it. That's LITERALLY THE PLOT OF THIS SHOW

LMAOoooo oh, bless