overall this season was pretty decent. i have some thots whats new so im gonna share them below the cut if anyone’s interested :)
so!! first off i’ll say that there were a lot of things i did really enjoy from season 4!
the action was super fun as always!! i loved all the crazy enemies and callbacks! the skeleton fight and all those little goblins they kept killing throughout were a nice touch ;) sypha’s use of her powers is INSANE her ice-chainsaw?? her WALL of fire?? electric balls?? come on. and the animation was NICE. i really wanna know who did most of the fight scenes bcuz the style is so different and it just POPS but in a really good way?
my favorite fight has to be ofc when everyone is REUNITED yes im basic. but the THEME song going off and well, im a whore for sotn references and i CAME when i saw the leap stone ref w the winged cape or when alucard turned into a hoard of batss AND THEN HIS WOLF FORM OOOOHH BABY!!! actually episode 9 is just a straight banger.
STRIGAAA. STRIGA. oh mama i was sweating during that fight. mad kudos to her va for them growlsss
carmilla vs isaac was a lot of fun and i loved the visuals but my hype was instantly ruined when i saw her kill herself 😭but thats smth i’ll complain about later.
not all the lines were bangers, some of sypha’s swearing seemed even a bit too much at times, and it was especially jarring to be having a face-to-face death-math with literal Death and hes acting like a naughty little 5 year old thats just learnt to swear. maybe cut back on the fuck-isms? just a bit? BUT when they hit they did GOOD. “the fuck what now?” yes
ISAAC. you weren’t in this season as much but man do u still shine through. i loved his introduction back in the town where he has his night creatures digging graves and rebuilding the city 😭 and then the conversation he shares w his flyman?? obsessed.
Hector chopping his finger off and giving lenore and carmilla a good ol FUCK YOU!! as he helps isaac. we love to see it
Trevor and Sypha’s “I love you!” “I know.” <3
oh! alucard actually having a story & purpose in the plot? :) luv it love to see it. that being said... the Plot.
its... ok? it’s kind of split up into 3/4 parts, as the story progresses, one eventually merges with several of the others kind of? cohesively? while leaving the other to sort itself out.
now, i didnt have too many qualms with it, it was pretty straight forward. dracula is going to be resurrected and we have sypha and trevor looking in on it, while alucard helps the nearby village and hector and isaac go on about bringing on their inevitable showdown. however, the way the story was paced and some of the decisions they made... werent so great.
st. germain for example, brought the ENTIRE momentum from the last few episodes to a halt. you have sypha and trevor fighting through heaps and heaps of monsters only to find themselves back in Targoviste where they meet the mysterious Zamfir!! and Alucard!! he’s been asked to help save this village!! all jam-packed with crazy action and animation that leaves you fired up!! and then episode 5 comes to a screeching halt and we spend nearly the entire thing on st. germain’s backstory and explaining his motives for the rest of the season
like. imma be real with you chief: he didnt need to be here lol. you could have just left varney as the main vamp in charge of bringing back big daddy drac and he could reveal to his.. idk henchmen or something that he’s death. but u gotta fill them ten 20 minute slots somehow!! he just fell so flat and unfortunately, a lot of the side-characters suffer from this this season.
i enjoyed great and zamfir, i love their desgins esp, but they really could have been fleshed out more. zamfir is shown as nothing but a spoiled brat the majority of the time she’s on screen but they wait till she’s about to die to try and turn her character around? huh? greta is given a bit more screentime but this sudden confession of feelings in the last episode felt so... huh?? why couldnt she just be dedicated to her people and show that u can love someone w/out necessarily being their partnr? i thot that was her whole thing; taking care of her people. it’s like. where did this come from. they cant have known each other more than a week at most dog 😭
it sucks they dedicated to much time to scenes that didnt really need to be there where we could have gotten this proper development, like maybe have a scene zamfir and sypha connect over struggles they’ve dealt with in the past and that has her open up about how traumatizing dracula’s attack on her city was. u could have expanded upon her role in the court and WHY she worshipped the monarchy so much instead of making it a throwaway gag about her being “crazy”. but why have that when we could instead spend the first 5 minutes of said episode watching a monotonous back-and-forth b/w varney and that big burly russian vampire who’s name im sure mor than 98% of the audience cant even remember?
just a lot of fat that needed to be trimmed so that the actual MEAT of the story could be slow cooked to perfection. people really arent kidding when they say less is more.
another big problem i had was there... i dont even know what to call it, re-humanization? redemption? of Lenore. like lmk if im wrong but she manipulated hector, yeah? coerced sex to slip on that ring that binds him to her?? orr whatever weird shit warren’s into. but the way they interacted, ESPECIALLY in their first major scene together was sooo uncomfortable to watch lol at first i thought perhaps hector was only playing along because well. hes enslaved to do her and carmilla’s bidding. but no, he actually LIKES her. he spares her when isaac comes around, he says that he wants to keep her as his own. and in the meantime, lenore finds time to complain to a man that’s been beaten and enslaved how upset it makes her that carmilla got angry at her 😭 or says thats she tired of isaac keeping tabs on her and wants to escape this ‘cage’. to aman thats literally been imprisoned since youve known him 😭her death is seen as peaceful, calm, they even try and tug at ur heartstrings by swelling this sad, dramatic music as the sun rises. really? LENORE?
and carmilla’s death happened WAYY too early imo. she was the villain for practically 3 seasons and this is how she goes? isaac couldnt get more than a stab at her? his night creatures couldnt take a nibble? HECTOR couldnt even be given a chance to do somethng like come on
the resolution was... strange? it was cute!! and happy!! but i dunno if they really needed to have lisa and vlad coming back, but, like i said; it was cute! definitely not the ending i was expecting.
i’m glad that they put their focus back on what made the show so much fun and that was the FIGHTS. they definitely helped add some much needed spice to things when scenes started to drag, but im a gal that really luvs a good story and even though reviews were raving that this season helped closed the lid on all the themes theyd been exploring, i just didnt really see that. which isnt necessarily a BAD thing, i knew i wasnt gonna find some deep introspective themes in this hack n slash horror-fantasy, its just what can turn somethng like this from an ok show to a GREAT one.
in the end, im glad they stopped at this one and im curious to see if they really DO go ahead on making spin-offs. bcuz unfortunately, i will always be down for som new castlevania content
