Last Castlevania post - that last scene
I’d give s4 a solid 7/10 but this post is just me bitching about the very last scene, lol.
Dracula and Lisa getting brought back, and it ending with their happy possibilities, I… am not a fan of. Like, I guess it brings back a fridged woman and makes sure everyone has a happy ending, but like… no, Dracula’s responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocents and that isn’t even touched on, even when Lisa tried desperately to change her husband and now faces him after her death and his murder spree - it’s not even clear whether she knows? I just. A complex villain - the mad old man, composing “history’s longest suicide note” - isn’t the same thing as sympathetic, and it DEFINITELY doesn’t equal redeemable. I’m personally a big believer and fan of redemption but Dracula destroyed so many lives out of his own pain and that’s horrific, not ~tragic, and I’m not interested in cheering for his manpain being healed.
It’s more annoying because supposedly personal change/reform, and whether it’s fair to ask that of people, was apparently intended as a big theme this season according to one of the creators. And Hector wants to “mend his mistakes”; Isaac talks about how he and Hector lacked agency and needed to grow up; Alucard recovers from his mad mistrust; Trevor and Sypha spend most of the season trying to make up for their mistakes at the end of the last, even though THAT was completely unintentional. Dracula gets to skip any of that.
I’m not enraged as such, I just… sigh. Like Dracula and Lisa would fit perfectly in with The Price (the classic fanvid about manpain) and even when they brought her back that didn’t change! I feel like giving him a happy ending that acts like him being “calmer” is a solution strikes such a weird, jarring note - it isn’t a solution, and the rest of Castlevania doesn’t ignore the human cost of Dracula’s big plans. Like, the show’s gore is clearly a stylistic choice, but particularly this season it also showed the human cost of war, as did the trauma of the townspeople and the discussions of both vampire-soldier characters. So I felt very ???
But idk I’m speaking as someone who hears Alucard’s 100% accurate line about how “this entire catastrophe has just been history’s longest suicide note” and feels a rush of rage about the stupid, vindictive, pointless destruction, but maybe lots of Castlevania fans are happy for Dracula and Lisa. The Mary Sue’s review had this line: “I love the series, and I think that while it is filled with sex, blood, and violence, the core of the series is centered around the tragic love story of Dracula and Lisa Tepes. There is heart at the center of its vampiric corpse.”
I mean. Idk that may well be what the show’s going for but Dracula betrays everything his wife wanted and believed in, and ‘tragic love story’ and ‘heart’ is a weird way to frame classic dickhead manpain. The heart at the centre of it is the reply to Dracula sneering at Alucard that “you couldn’t beat me before”: Alucard replying “I was alone before” with Sypha and Trevor at his side.
Whenever I watch again, I might well just turn off the TV a few minutes early, so it ends on their happy ending. This was originally posted at https://lokifan.dreamwidth.org/385302.html. Comment wherever you like :)
Dracula and Lisa getting brought back, and it ending with their happy possibilities, I… am not a fan of. Like, I guess it brings back a fridged woman and makes sure everyone has a happy ending, but like… no, Dracula’s responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocents and that isn’t even touched on, even when Lisa tried desperately to change her husband and now faces him after her death and his murder spree - it’s not even clear whether she knows? I just. A complex villain - the mad old man, composing “history’s longest suicide note” - isn’t the same thing as sympathetic, and it DEFINITELY doesn’t equal redeemable. I’m personally a big believer and fan of redemption but Dracula destroyed so many lives out of his own pain and that’s horrific, not ~tragic, and I’m not interested in cheering for his manpain being healed.
It’s more annoying because supposedly personal change/reform, and whether it’s fair to ask that of people, was apparently intended as a big theme this season according to one of the creators. And Hector wants to “mend his mistakes”; Isaac talks about how he and Hector lacked agency and needed to grow up; Alucard recovers from his mad mistrust; Trevor and Sypha spend most of the season trying to make up for their mistakes at the end of the last, even though THAT was completely unintentional. Dracula gets to skip any of that.
I’m not enraged as such, I just… sigh. Like Dracula and Lisa would fit perfectly in with The Price (the classic fanvid about manpain) and even when they brought her back that didn’t change! I feel like giving him a happy ending that acts like him being “calmer” is a solution strikes such a weird, jarring note - it isn’t a solution, and the rest of Castlevania doesn’t ignore the human cost of Dracula’s big plans. Like, the show’s gore is clearly a stylistic choice, but particularly this season it also showed the human cost of war, as did the trauma of the townspeople and the discussions of both vampire-soldier characters. So I felt very ???
But idk I’m speaking as someone who hears Alucard’s 100% accurate line about how “this entire catastrophe has just been history’s longest suicide note” and feels a rush of rage about the stupid, vindictive, pointless destruction, but maybe lots of Castlevania fans are happy for Dracula and Lisa. The Mary Sue’s review had this line: “I love the series, and I think that while it is filled with sex, blood, and violence, the core of the series is centered around the tragic love story of Dracula and Lisa Tepes. There is heart at the center of its vampiric corpse.”
I mean. Idk that may well be what the show’s going for but Dracula betrays everything his wife wanted and believed in, and ‘tragic love story’ and ‘heart’ is a weird way to frame classic dickhead manpain. The heart at the centre of it is the reply to Dracula sneering at Alucard that “you couldn’t beat me before”: Alucard replying “I was alone before” with Sypha and Trevor at his side.
Whenever I watch again, I might well just turn off the TV a few minutes early, so it ends on their happy ending. This was originally posted at https://lokifan.dreamwidth.org/385302.html. Comment wherever you like :)