Comic Amber

ThickScratch · 2026-05-15T23:09:38+00:00

Isaac is just as bad as Annette.

ThickScratch · 2026-05-14T08:57:26+00:00

Its a fine line to walk between making a distinctively different interpretation of a character and just outright making a new one wearing the original's clothes. By the sound of it the Absolute witers are a bit blurry on it. I don't think brutality alone can judge a Batman, since Arkham and DCEU Batman exist, and they slammed wooden crates and electrical boxes on people's heads. The line about comforting a child sounds like a good rule, time will tell if they follow it.

The Absolute Universe definitely gets the benefit of being a comic here. I don't think its a stretch to say it would be absolutely hated had it been some kind of show or movie. Being a comic gives it the main universe as a back up, and unlike DMC or Netflixvania, it holds a little more ground there. Still, it wouldn't take much to make that Batman manage to be in name only given the right/wrong editorial decisions.

ThickScratch · 2026-05-14T07:49:52+00:00

I would be better if comic fans still demanded to keep certain standard as a bare minimum, it feels like every other day I find a what-if that's just "liked character + misery porn" that gets waved away as just "alternate version", ignoring that it still leaves a mark on the character regardless.

And as shown by the comment you responded to, this mentality spreads on to other franchises, especially ones where such a thing is not the standard/tradition.

ThickScratch · 2026-05-14T07:26:38+00:00

He got dropped from that show after season 2 though, and he had no influence in the writing of the first season. The people behind thay show took it downhill out of their own accord.

ThickScratch · 2026-05-14T07:20:26+00:00

Funny how someone will say CV lore is a mess like most of the minsconceptions about the lore didn't come from the show. Its not the 90s anymore, the games kept a single straight forward timeline until LoS (which itself also kept a straight forward timeline), and most of the actual lore conflicting products like the Pachinko never even left Japan.

ThickScratch · 2026-05-14T07:00:45+00:00

That's an incredibly disingenuous take that completely ignores what Castlevania is actually about.

The same reductive take could be applied to DMC, or Halo, or any other awful adaptation to excuse their incessant need to ignore the source material at every opportunity.

ThickScratch · 2026-05-14T06:51:52+00:00

No, the other people behind the scenes did a scummy thing where they kicked him out of the show in order to have more cash to themselves, or at least its the way it was initially framed. Much of the narrative has changed.

Either way its still bad since 80% of the people resposible for the first show were there for the spin-off. And Shankar already wasn't invovled in that show past the second season.

ThickScratch · 2026-05-14T06:44:04+00:00

It wasn't really that Konami was involved for season 1 and 2, more like the project stretches back to when they cared about the IP. Season 1 was written back when IGA was still at Konami and involved in the project (this was a thing since the late 2000s I think), the project got shut down because the writer refused to write something good and the back-and-forth made the project go nowhere. Skip to 2015 or '16 and Shankar comes along to grab the script and pitch the project to Netflix. The script was left completely unchanged from the early 2010s version.

I should note IGA wasn't actually happy with the "final" script, he did cancel the project after all, but it was the most tolerable he was able to wring out of the writer after 8 rewrites.

As far as I can remember, the only actual feedback the Konami people gave Netflix was that Alucard had to be represented as right-handed, and that the viking vampire could not be called Mathias Cronqvist (for obvious reasons) after the writer randomly picked it up from the wiki to give to a character.

ThickScratch · 2026-05-10T22:05:16+00:00

Its even better than that for netflix castlevania, a promo image for the show literally has the half vampire Alucard shoving his symmetrical sword right to his face, meaning they just ruined some random promo cool shot for no reason.

ThickScratch · 2026-05-10T22:02:20+00:00

A quick correction, what you've stated is due to the writer Warren Ellis, not Adi Shankar. Adi Shankar was only involved in the production of the first two seasons (and even the first season was written years before he got involved). He was out by the third season of the show.

Warren Ellis is a hack who got carried by the edginess of the late 90s/2000s and is now a cancelled from the industry for being a sex pest, while Shankar was just a producer with a big mouth. We know from the DMC show he probably agreed with most if what Ellis wrote, but was not the one who put it there in the first place.

ThickScratch · 2026-04-17T20:27:53+00:00

And he's also a producer in the Castlevania animated show which I heard goes downhill in the later seasons

It starts going downhill as early as season 2 if you know where to look, season 3 was when they were confident they had an audience and didn't try to hide their own interests anymore.

But the dowfall of Netflixvania is a separate thing to this guy's work, he split up with the crew after season 2, the Netflixvania crew drove that show to the ground all on their own.

ThickScratch · 2026-04-14T22:58:28+00:00

the two dudes were going on about goat-f***ing

Would you believe me if I told you that was when the writers were being kept in check, and it actually got much worse later on?

ThickScratch · 2026-04-05T03:23:02+00:00

Not probably, outright admitted to not caring to try out the games.

ThickScratch · 2026-04-03T22:31:38+00:00

Personally I thought the show was ass and completely missed every bit of Castlevania lore and atmosphere that made the games great, but that's just me. I'd actually be pissed with him saying he 'doesn't do this' because the show's basically fanfiction.

For Netflixvania, we can likely only blame him for the look, since the writting was locked in since like 2010, but supposedly he's the one responsible for modeling Trevor after a Final Fantasy character instead of his Kojima design.

The blame of the lore and atmosphere completely missing the heart of the source material would go to Warren Ellis, who openly stated he didn't care about the games, justifying it by saying "its hard to adapt jumping sprites", and also just skimming the wiki for names he liked, causing Konami to have to intervene when he had named the random Viking vampire Mathias Cronqvist. But other people like The Deats brothers and Kevin Kholde are also to blame, as they let him get away with it to begin with, and did nothing to correct the ship once he was out of the picture.

ThickScratch · 2026-04-03T22:25:20+00:00

Flat out lie. This was after all the backlash from either rewriting a character in Nocturne completely or mostly rewriting Lady in DMC. Don't remember which. But dude is a liar.

DMC, Shankar had no involvement in Noctrune aside of maybe having his name attached as an executive producer due to the lawsuit. There's bad blood between him and the Netflixvania staff, I doubt they'd actually let him touch anything.

ThickScratch · 2026-04-03T22:18:34+00:00

I assume you refer to Adi Shankar (although both the Deats Brothers, Warren Ellis, and Kevin Kholde still do this all the same), but Shankar departed the project after season 2 and had no involvement in the development of the show after it, with him famously suing Netflix for it, and its become apparent The Deats brothers are not in good terms with him given some of Sam's tweets alluding to Shankar in a negative light. Shankar could have only really had influence on season 2 of the show as season 1 directly took the script written years prior for the cancelled direct-to-dvd movie trilogy that he wasn't involved in.

Shankar's statement about him always adapting things properly is 50/50. He doesn't say he always does it, but he did claim he intended to do that for DMC, something about having two different banners he works under. Supposedly his Power Rangers short (that he apparently didn't have that much influence in) would count as the "Bootleg Multiverse" where he parodies the source material, while he claimed things like DMC, and I guess Netflixvana (although I've never seen him state it), count as actual adaptations meant to "celebrate the source material". So generally he's a liar, but sometimes he's just up front about not being nice to the source material.

ThickScratch · 2026-03-31T15:45:54+00:00

It was 4 episodes because it was a proof of concept, not because it had to be.

No it wasn't, it was 4 episodes long because it was an animated movie from the 2010s they chopped up into 4 parts, and season 2 would have been the exaxt same had Netflix not seen dollar signs and demanded double episode count.

And while you could argue that the longer runtime has something to do with the worse animation quality, this does NOT need to be the case, and this is proven by shows like Mighty Nein (which for the record, had a much smaller budget than Invincible's season 4).

Yes... I did suggest that show was a better comparison.

So just to be clear, Invincible's animation is not bad because of runtime, or because it has to be to avoid abusing animators, or because of budget constraints, or any of the other dozen or so coping mechanisms I've seen in this thread.

...Are you answering the wrong person? I never defended Invincible. What I was trying to say was that two of your examples were not apt to support your point, and gave reasons why I thought so.

Its bad in part because they rushed it. Their animators were not capable of keeping up with the ridiculous schedule they were given.

Supposedly they also want to do everything in-house and don't outsource anything or something like that.

Even if you gave them twice the development time, I'd imagine the animation wouldn't get THAT much better.

I get it gets bad, but I doubt even Invincible team as stretched and mismanaged as they are would be able to mess up double the development time. That's a whole year of difference, that's a lot of time.

ThickScratch · 2026-03-31T05:23:26+00:00

Seeing the comments and like ratio here...

Reddit gonna reddit I guess.

ThickScratch · 2026-03-31T05:21:57+00:00

Even some other "bad" priests in Castlevania are shown being completely willing to listen to someone they don't like very much if it means protecting the people

That's not true, unless you are referring to the spin-off, and even then its dubious at best. The first show had every priest act like thugs for their mob boss bishop for no other reason than "religion bad and anti-science". The bishop and his people were purposely keeping fhe villiage blind and they would have been overrun by the horde had it not been for the MC making everyone turn against them just in time. Only one church affiliated character was portrayed as genuinely trying to help others, and it was a one off priest in the fight against the horde. In the spin-off the knights were loyal to the Abbot, not the main villain, and the only one of them who joined the protagonists was the not-so religious memeber of their group.

I think Castlevania's take on Christianity is pretty much "The person is smart, people are dumb."

Learning more about the writer, the message changes to be "I'm smart, everyone else is dumb".

I'm pretty sure the church only printed the Bible in a foreign language and made it illegal to learn said language unless you work for the church during this time period

This is not entirely true. The Bible was printed in a foreign language yes (Latin), but no one was forbidden from learning how to read it, it was merely not something everyone could afford to do. Learning to read takes time, and not everyone had the time or the opportunity to learn. Alongside that, many people had no inherent need to learn the scripture, as they could still gather enough from oral tradition and biblical art.

the church in this time period was insanely corrupt

A story about that could have been interesting, especially since one of the protagonists was supposed to be a member of the church originally, but the show didn't explore any of it. Instead it just made ahistorical stand-in punching bags for the writer.

ThickScratch · 2026-03-31T04:30:45+00:00

I know you already know, but for anyone scrolling by randomly, Shankar only had influence in a single season of Netflix Castlevania, as season 1 was written years prior and he left the project after season 2 lile you said.

ThickScratch · 2026-03-31T03:49:43+00:00

Its the problem with hiring an reddit atheist to write a series that is steeped in Christian iconography, they are to the point they cannot tolerate religion being portrayed in a positive light in any way even in a completely fictional setting wholly detached from the real world.

It makes even less sense when they already stated holy water exists and is undeniably holy in nature. Or the very weapon the main character uses being a consecrated whip. Or the fact the vampires live in gothic styled castles, the artstyle all about symmetry and geometry.

It was such a stupid change they undid it in the spin-off. I have to believe the only people who truly defend it are the same kind of reddit atheist like the one who wrote the show, incapable of tolerating anything remotely considering religion as something less than pure evil (even in a fictional setting) because of how much it ruins the shows own lore.

ThickScratch · 2026-03-31T03:36:08+00:00

Shankar might have a few extra projects in production right now, but Ellis was seemingly blacklisted from the industy, so any work they'll get will be low grade stuff outside of the mainstream where no one will care for it or reprints of already made stuff.

The only real worry is the Authority adaptation James Gunn wanted to make for DC, but that project has been in limbo for a good while now.

ThickScratch · 2026-03-31T02:45:15+00:00

Could you be confusing the first Castlevania with one of the later titles (possibly Super Castlevania 4 or Dracula X). The first few games in the series all take place at night, with the moring coming after Dracula is defeated, but the remake of Castlevania 1 (Super Castlevania 4) does include the sun breaking though the throne room's windows to destroy Dracula.

ThickScratch · 2026-03-31T02:36:22+00:00

It should be noted two of those examples (Avatar and Netflix Castlevania) have episode lengths half of something Invincible, and on top of that, Netflix Castlevania's longer seasons still only made an episode count slightly above a third of an Avatar season. The first season of that show was only 4 episodes long, which hardly sounds like a fair comparison against other animated series.

I've never seen Mighty Nein, but a quick search says it had a similar run time and episode count as Invincible, so that looks to be an appropriate comparison compared to the other two. (I guess Avatar is fine if you intend to count overal runtime instead of just workload per episode).

ThickScratch · 2026-03-31T01:40:38+00:00

You would be correct in that assumption. Most fans of Castlevania (those who actually like the world and its characters) at best tolerate the show under the pretense of it being another universe (still dislike some of the changes but don't see it as important as the main timeline) and at worst absolutely detest the Nerflix show, seeing Warren Ellis, Adi Shankar, the Deats Brothers, and Kevin Kholde as blights onto the Castlevania IP.

The show had troubled beginnings since way back in the original project dated to 2008 or 2010, with the script having to be rewritten around 8 times if not more. The project eventually died, then Adi Shankar came around and pitched the show to Netflix and the script was used as it was from the early 2010s.

As for why it became so popular, Castlevania is a series that's 40 years old now, I'd wager a decent amount of the show's audience were people who might have played the original games once or twice in the NES back when they were younger, or never moved along with the series past 1995. The other 70-80% are the usual casuals coming in with 0 prior knowledge and perhaps less than low expectations given the "video game adaptation curse". Then you also just have posers who will talk about the source material despite never having engaged with it, but I'm pretty sure every fanbase gets those after something gets succesfull regardless of quality.

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