Hello everyone, I am in desperate need right now. I am struggling a lot financially due to my spouse being in the hospital. She recently underwent surgery on her esophagus to remove lesions. She was the breadwinner, so with her out of commission. Hours and finances have been super strained where I am skipping meals and selling belongings to make ends meet. So, I am opening up emergency commissions. Above are just some examples of my work.
Here is my artistree.
https://artistree.io/renna.illustrates
If you do not want to commission me but wish to help out with a donation or two. My Current Goal is to get to $600 so I can pay electric, car insurance, internet bills and part of rent.
My Venmo is Rinnisms (6156)
My Cashapp is Rennisms
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Wow, it's been forever since I've been on tumblr. Does anyone even still roleplay here? Also, I've been considering making a blog for my aspiring author/illustrator journey. Should I do it?
While I am not entirely against the changes made to Annette, I would have preferred they brought in Annette's old style in a sense. Yes, she was a plot device. She was Richter's fiancee. But she was a benevolent woman with a heart of gold, she took in Maria when Maria's parents were killed by the attacks by Dracula's army.
Yes. She was kidnapped. And in some routes she gets turned. But Annette had her own strengths. When Dracula threatened to turn her, she put a dagger to her chest and threatened to kill herself before that happens. Despite being frightened. Not every female lead in a show has to be some badass and can fight.
Some female leads can still be feminine and may need saving whilst still being good female leads with other strong qualities. It's really dependent on the writing to achieve that. My grievance with the show is they took Tera and swapped some qualities along with appearance with that of Annette.
Netflixvania also turned Hector into a weaker character than he was in the games. They didn't have Rosalie (Another plot device love interest who Mirrors Lisa in similarities and actions) and they half way paired him with Lenore who did use her power and authority to coerce Hector into intimacy.
Annette if you've played the games is supposed to mirror Sara trantoul. The beloved fiancee of Leon/Richter. Who gets kidnapped by a vampire and threatened with vampirism. In RICHTER route you can save her. Sara couldn't be saved. Some games have it where there are supposed to be parallels with other games.
Friendly Reminder: You don't have to ship Alucard x Maria. But in the games they are implied to be canon. The show is inspired by the games and doesn't have to follow it to a T. But Maria is currently a year younger in the show when she met Alucard in the games. If the show decides to have them be a ship when she herself is an adult that's the shows choice. The show is an adaptation. It doesn't mean it's canon.
Thousands of shows have older vampires end up romancing much younger partners.
Bella Swan was 17 when she began a romantic relationship with Edward while he was 104.
Elena Gilbert was 17 when she met Stefan Salvatore and entered a relationship who was 162.
In the radio drama Maria it's implied that it's been a year since the events and Maria is then legally 18. Therefore she is an adult in our standards, but you have to keep in mind time and eras. Back in the 1700s, people did not live as long as we do now. So they entered relationships sooner.
Anyway. If the show does the romance then cool, so long as she is at least 18+ then I do not have issues with it. Until then I will stick with the games and enjoy the ship. I'm just a little disheartened by all the ship bashing I'm seeing within the fandom and character bashing for how certain characters were written.
Overall I thought Nocturne was better from an art perspective and worse from... basically every other perspective than Season 1 of Castlevania. Which is really quite sad to me, considering it had double the episodes that Castlevania's first season had.
The art style and animation is incredible, and the music was quite good as well. The character design was also amazing, and nearly the entire main cast looked inspired and interesting. Honestly, it felt like the artists and animators were flexing the entire time.
But the pacing, the voice acting, the setting, the story in general, the sheer amount of exposition, and the dialogue were all lacking so badly. The show tried to accomplish way too much in 8 episodes and suffered pretty terribly for it. If they had scaled the story down significantly, they would have had a lot more time to get the audience actually invested in the characters and plot. It's quite hard to pull off the emotional beats that they attempted when the character has been on screen for 5 minutes total, and for me nearly all of them fell flat. It's especially disappointing that the season ended with the characters losing terribly, because it'll probably be a year at least before we get a continuation (if we get one at all).
Huge spoilers under the cut:
Getting to see Alucard at the end was exciting, but it didn't feel like quite the right time. We're just starting to know these characters, so throwing the arguably Most Beloved Castlevania Character into the mix doesn't seem like a particularly good way to get people invested in the rest of the cast. I guess it'll depend on if they can fix the pacing and dialogue issues, but I'm not keeping my hopes up. Either way, glad I got to see his SotN Kojima-style design animated, even if it looks a little divorced from the OG design.
The Castlevania franchise feels like it's getting more and more divided since Netflixvania started and it's getting really bloody frustrating to the point that while watching Nocturne I've felt disquieted, and I think I've realised why that is.
It's the fucking DmC:Devil May Cry white hair fiasco all over again.
For those that don't know, when the DmC reboot was revealed people had a lot of criticism, including turning Dante from a cool but likeable hero into a foul mouthed smoker, the dumbing down of the gameplay, the antagonism towards the fanbase, and turning his iconic white hair black. Of all these criticism, only the hair colour change was given any attention, painting the fan base in a very negative light and side stepping the real issues people had by only focusing on the cherry rather than the whole sundae.
All this attention directed towards something that in the grand scheme of things is very minor but it gets all the attention while the bigger stuff is ignore.
Yes, there are people mad about the show for racist reasons and they shouldn't be listened to, but there are genuine complaints that are being swept up with that.
The character changes have a sort of domino effect on everything. Maria being a serious revolutionary is interesting, but I saw someone put it best that what made her special was the fact that she was a little girl in a world of classic horror that believed she was in a fairy tale and had the power to force that reality on everyone else. Netflix Maria is good, but lacks the charm of Maria.
The second example is Juste. When I saw him I was very excited, but that was mainly because it was acknowledgement of the original canon than anything else. His magical prowess, the thing that makes him stand out among the Belmont linage, is mentioned and then brushed aside, and the worst ending of his game is what is taken as canon. And once Richter gets his magic back, Juste is gone. He feels like a plot point rather than the character. I sympathise with people who's favourite game was Harmony of Dissonance.
Annette was a compelling character with a well developed story, but anyone that says her original characterisation would never work are being disingenuous because they literally did that, except that did so with Tera. The connections to Richter and Maria, the damsel elements, the fact she gets turned into a vampire, all from Annette. Swapping them around wouldn't work for multiple reasons and I'm not going to say I can do better than people you get paid to write when I don't, but I feel I can say that if they had wanted to they could have done something closer to the original while still touching on the themes and narratives they wanted to.
Olrox... honestly the only criticism I can really think of is the removal of any reference to Count Orlock.
There's an elitism with both sides of the fanbase here. On the Netflix side, there's the feeling that since theirs is more popular that any criticism is because people are just nostalgic, and game fans feel that since theirs is the original foundation that anyone that doesn't agree with them is just a new fair-weather fan. And honestly, I'm more sympathetic to the game fans.
I've seen Netflixvania fans look at people complaining that the character have changed and go "yeah well the version you like sucks so you should just grow up" As if that's going to make everything better. And all the people complaining about the race changes or posting "WOKE?!?!?!" have poisoned the well for any actual discussion about this, not helped by the social media accounts deliberately stoking the flames in the mistaken belief that all publicity is good publicity, which raised the ire of nexflixvania creators. Unfortunately marketing can often be removed from the intentions of the creators.
Yes, Netflixvania is a great show, with beautiful animation and great storytelling, but it's not perfect and as an adaptation is leaves a lot to be desired. And that's the crux of it! The show is good, really good! But it doesn't feel like an adaptation of Castlevania. It's just a bunch of little details that pile up to make it less of what the game fans liked about the series. It's more grimdark horror than classic horror. It's more crude than it is philosophical. It's more hopeless than it is hopeful. And regardless of what you individually think, that's what people have liked about Castlevania for almost 40 years.
Ultimately I just have to ask, why do people seem to assume that you can't make a faithful adaptation while also making it interesting? They're not mutually exclusive.
