Oh, and also - with the usual delay of several years, I watched the first season of the netflix Castlevania show and I'm not sure I'd call it "good" but I'm thoroughly entertained, which is far more important. And the landscapes/backgrounds are just gorgeous.
(I considered turning on subtitles but the only English ones available are closed captions. Which are great and important! But they also distract me too much, so I just put up with the mumbling.)
what do you mean by entertaining but not good? That's a distinction I get about some things but not others and I'm interested in your thoughts in this case!
I've been trying to put my finger on it, and I think it mostly boils down to the part where the writing is kind of over the top in a specific way that's not unexpected from Castlevania but that makes it hard for me to take it seriously.
Like, the sort of writing that seems to think that saying shit/fuck/balls a bunch and showing a mountain of corpses/evil evil priests/baby-eating demons makes it Mature and Deep? I get the impression that the show tries to strike a balance between that and then having moments of not taking itself that seriously that just doesn't entirely work for me.
(Which I find frustrating because so much of the aesthetic is appealing to me.) Making that a statement of quality (good/bad) is probably not the best way to go about it, admittedly, it's just a lot shorter than this rambling mess of an explanation.
Meanwhile, one thing I do really like in these first four episodes are the character interactions. Even the short scene with Dracula and Lisa(? I keep forgetting her name) at the very beginning made me think "yeah, I guess I can see what he sees in her" and Trevor's interacting with basically every major character are delightful.
Yeah, I think that comes pretty close. (and then of course it gets complicated again because even within the seemingly objective measurement of "well/poorly crafted" there's a degree of subjectivity.)
case in point: this plurk. Watching stuff is not the only thing I do on a delay; noticing I'm doing that exact thing that I said in my one new year's resolution I would try to do less also apparently happens roughly an hour after I do it. Again.
Why is this habit so hard to break. (I mean, I know why. Same reason the whole "I'm [fandom/pairing/character] trash" thing exists; it's easier to dunk on yourself or a thing you enjoy than waiting for someone else to potentially come along and judge you for liking it, even if the people you're talking to wouldn't do that.)
(I'm sorry if I made anyone's morning worse by being negative about a thing they like. I know how annoying it is (ironically people do it all the time with the game series from my first plurk today and I roll my eyes at that a lot) and while I'm having a hard time kicking that habit, it's no excuse to make others feel bad in the meantime.)
Watching stuff is not the only thing I do on a delay; noticing I'm doing that exact thing that I said in my one new year's resolution I would try to do less also apparently happens roughly an hour after I do it. Again.
(I mean, I know why. Same reason the whole "I'm [fandom/pairing/character] trash" thing exists; it's easier to dunk on yourself or a thing you enjoy than waiting for someone else to potentially come along and judge you for liking it, even if the people you're talking to wouldn't do that.)