Netflixvania Tw - Tumblr Posts

the changes towards juste belmont that i’m most angry about:

-his fashion is shit ugly

-his house is shit ugly

you’re going to adapt the most fashionable belmont and the belmont most inclined towards interior design AND MAKE HIM UGLY AND TASTELESS???? i can forgive turning him into a nihilistic edgy grandpa, but taking away the traits that made him fun and memorable? that’s a sin i cannot forgive

also y’all took away the belmont that the gayest subtext ever and killed his boyfriend. yeesh.

"kill yourself" is basic. "i hope your favorite video game series gets turned into a serviceable to bad netflix adaptation that gets super popular and everyone thinks its better than the games" is real. its haunting. its happened to me and countless others

I bet none of these people could name a game they’ve played that wasn’t somehow inspired by the Castlevania series. And yeah it’s not nearly as popular now as it once was, but holy shit it’d be easier to list off games that WEREN’T directly or indirectly inspired by these games. Especially indie games. You would not believe how many times I’ve played a game, heard some chord progressions, and immediately been reminded of Castlevania. Shovel Knight is practically a love letter to a lot of older platformers, but the Castlevania influence bleeds from this game; they even made Specter Knight’s boss battle very obviously based on Death!

And Metroid came out first, but without Simon’s Quest we wouldn’t have the Metroidvania genre as we know it. Heck, we wouldn’t have a lot of genres. Soulsborne style is heavily inspired by that game down to the map progression and atmosphere, just in a 3D format. I’ve run into multiple people who call Simon’s Quest both a proto-soulsborne and proto-metroidvania as well as a precursor to the modern psychological and survival horror genres. Hell it was one of the first series to put multiple endings into a platforming game, that was usually reserved for text based or RPGs. And that’s only the second game in the whole series!

Hell, I’d even say that for years before the Netflix series came out the series was considered on the same level as other classic, respected franchises. I’d see entries from it in lists of like “games you should play before you die” alongside Legend of Zelda and Halo or something. All those early 2000s gamer collages with logos from famous series would have Castlevania in it somewhere. If anything I’ve seen LESS people talking about the game since the show has been out unless it’s to dog on it for the reason of “teehee I have a popular ‘unpopular’ opinion and will make some people mad and most people agree with me”

Man, I don’t know, it’s just infuriating and sad. :(

i already know most nfcv fans dont respect the games but i feel like ive been punched in the gut

You know that joke about how the voltron reboot feels like it was written by people who hate giant robots? Netflixvania feels like it was written by people who hate any monsters that aren’t vampires. And also shonen. It feels like the writers wanted to do the vampire chronicles instead or something.

Shdksskksk I only have second hand knowledge of the trainwreck that was voltron but man

And yea! The vampire favoritism is huge, considering how we're supposed to feel pity for them despite their atrocities w no redeeming qualities. They dont write them as nuanced monsters with some trying to coexist despite their nature, they're basically amoral fanged elves who are mistreated by those simple minded hunters :( (ignore the atrocities they commited on screen 5 minutes ago). And with this ask i do realize they placed other game's bosses to the sideline. My memories of the show are blurry but i don't remember any non vampires being part of Dracula's generals or having mayor roles (aside from uhh, Legion and Abel?)

And this truly shines in the way both Alucard and Death (and the belmonts) were rewritten, the former went from a tortured soul who sealed himself to stop his cursed blood, to someone who considers vampires his kin and defend them from the belmontd in the face of their implied child murders; and the latter who went from a spawn of Chaos with the purpose to serve the Dark Lord into an special soul sucking vampire who speaks like a league of legends player

It just feels like it tries to tell a gritty grimdark story, which doesnt works with castlevania ( cv is a silly monster smasher! And with optimistic tones! It's part of its charm),and it doesn't works on it's own ( the writing doesnt has the maturity and it doesnt takes itself seriously, not with the gratuitous vulgarity and oversimplification of nuanced subjects). And its pretty sad bc a shonen esque tone would suit Richter n Maria's story so well (the RoB cutscenes my fellas!)

Like i said tho, my memories of the show are a bit diffuse ( thank the gods) so i apologies if i have gotten things wrong and such

honestly it's just a shame i am positive a good chunk of netflix fans might actually really like the games. whose spreading rumours that theres "no story no characterization" it's right there. like admittedly sometimes you do gotta dig into it to really find the meat but it's definitely like right there

Rules of Castlevania games fandom:

1. For the love of gods never go in Castlevania tag

2. Have fun and choose your N1 special guy who you toss at the ceiling like a rubber ball in hopes it breaks the ceiling and they get stuck

whether or not you like a show is another thing entirely but its weird to call something a "good adaptation" if its not actually adapting the story of its source material and just using some of the character names. like thats not even really an adaptation of a story at that point thats just ip. methinks

every day it is always so shocking for me to realise that somewhere, someplace, there is a castlevania fan whose first thought upon hearing the word castlevania is not an incredibly influential, sprawling videogame franchise that perhaps once revolutionised gaming itself, but instead of a netflix tv show that doesnt really adapt anything from the games it leeches off rather than parade its rotten corpses around because it has no body of its own it can use

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(_ _ )

can we like, have adaptations made by people who care about the thing they're adapting