Making Vampires Scary

 I feel certain that I’ve written something like this before, but for the life of me I can’t remember, and instead of searching my Google Drive for it, I can just write it anyway. After all, it is on my mind after finishing Blood and Wine and rereading Cabinet of Curiosities and looking at all the stuff del Toro did for Blade II in his notebooks.

Also, I realized that I did not sing myself the vampire killing song as I played Blood and Wine as much as I really would have expected.

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Making Vampires Scary

I want to be clear: I don’t think vampires need to be scary for a story to work. I’m not someone who thinks that vampires belong to horror and only horror--they’re a fine addition to other genres and subgenres, particularly fantasy. So everything I’m talking about in this Note isn’t me saying “this is what authors need to do.” In any case, writing’s a creative endeavor and people can do whatever they want with their fantasy monsters as long as it makes sense and tells a good story.

But all that being said: you ever notice how few vampires in fiction are actually scary?

Part of the reason for that is that in a world of oversaturation of the fantasy genre (not that I mind), they’ve become just another fantasy creature or race. Yeah, they’re a species that’s dangerous because it sucks blood--unless they’re one of the variations that only drains emotions, which for some reason some authors depict as not as big a deal but that’s for another time--but they’re just another fantasy race. Sometimes they just get by with animal blood, it’s fine.

For me, sometimes this is gotten around by making vampires explicitly demonic. I find that a far more intimidating take on the creature. But this doesn’t always work. Buffy the Vampire Slayer has the vampires as a sort of type of demon spirit that possesses human bodies, but then it goes and defines ‘demon’ as basically any supernatural creature of non-terrestrial dimensions. Sort of like aliens, but supernatural. Which basically makes them another in the long line of creatures, and not a particularly threatening one. The show makes up for it by making other monsters the Big Bads of the seasons, and also lots of drama.

Going through Cabinet of Curiosities (which is the book that shows Guillermo del Toro’s collections and notebooks), the section on Blade II reminded me why the Reavers in that movie were so freaky. I wouldn’t say I found them terrifying, but they were definitely unsettling, and not just because their jaws opened up in this weird, freaky way. I mean that helps--that when revealed, their true form is just so wrong to human sensibilities.

But more to the point it’s how the Reavers act in the story. They’re not just vampires, they’re vampires that aren’t hurt by anything but sunlight--and indoors, or at night, you’re just plain screwed when they show up. And even other vampires are terrified of them, because they’re stronger and can infect them as well. It’s not just that it’s a vampire, it’s that it’s a monster that seems unstoppable by any human means.

If it starts coming for you, you’re dead. Or a vampire too, I guess. No one is safe from it.

I’ve also been playing The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, specifically the Blood and Wine expansion lately, and it’s got vampires out the wazoo (which is great, because the main game was sort of lacking in that regard). And most of the vampires you come across are just a type of monster with a taste for blood and a general batlike shape. Others are…

...the bruxae are scary, okay? Not just that they appear as these weird, pale, corpse-like women that turn invisible as they bat you around. But the fact is that when you encounter them in the wild, they’re disguised like normal women in hooded cloaks. And in the city of Beauclair, there are tons of these women just walking around. Are they all vampires? I don’t know! But they could be! There could be vampires all over the darn city!

And the Higher Vampires are worse, when they get ready for battle they get these elongated faces that remind me of rodents or bats, and two-foot-long claws. And worst? They can’t be killed. Higher Vampires can only be permanently killed by another Higher Vampire, which means when you fight Detlaff at best you’re only going to be able to put him down for a bit. Which is a bit anxiety-inducing because Dettlaff is always on edge. Regis keeps telling you he’s not a bad guy, deep down, but because of the circumstances he’s about to explode at any moment, and you know there’s not much you can do about it. At the end of his final boss fight, Geralt slices him in half and his body starts pulling itself back together.

Not to mention in the story mission titled ‘Night of Long Fangs’ we see him calling down a vampire apocalypse on Beauclair. It’s messy. There are people running and screaming, bodies and blood throughout the streets, demonic bats circling the spires, buildings all around are wrecked or on fire, and the city guard and local knights, all trained and experienced fighters, can’t do jack except hole up in the bank building. Geralt has to convince them to retreat to the castle because there’s nothing they can do but regroup while he tries to fix this by meeting the vampire’s demands, or appealing to a higher authority.

I think what I’m getting at here is that a truly scary vampire is not a creature in the story that’s stronger and faster than humans, or drinks blood. It’s that it’s a predator. It’s our predator. And sometimes this is played with in a less than literal sense--The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires very much plays the vampire as a molester and suburban predator, using his privilege and the bigotry of the time to get away with everything he does. 

And that is scary, though that’s not exactly what I was going for. A scary vampire for me is one  that’s something obviously higher up than us on the food chain. A creature that is built for preying upon humans, and in a straight fight there’s not much we can do. You can’t fight it, you can only hope to not be the next target.

Unless, of course, you’re a half-vampire undead-slaying machine like Blade. Or a witcher. Or whatever. But even then, it’s a close fight.

[Let me tell you, Dettlaff kicked my can several times in that boss fight.]

It’s a monster you can only run from. 

And I suppose that makes any good monster, vampire or not.

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Onyx Equinox Review

 So today in history, according to the Appendices of The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf was chasing the Balrog up a mountain.

So there ya go.

It’s been a weird week, but I did a lot of reading and finished The Return of the King so expect that in the Book Diary soon.

Anyway, I don’t know what to write about but this has been in my head for about a week so let’s go with it.

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Onyx Equinox Season 1 Review

For reasons that escape me, I get ads for Crunchyroll on Facebook. I don’t watch a lot of anime, so I don’t know why this would come up--maybe because I watch RWBY, and that’s on Crunchyroll? Whatever. Most of the ads I ignore because they’re for shows that don’t interest me, but this one caught my eye because I’m a sucker for Aztec mythology and an animated series based on it sounded like my jam.

So!

Onyx Equinox is an animated Crunchyroll original show (those are apparently a thing they’re trying out right now) set in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. The god of the underworld, Mictlancuhutli, decides that because there’s a slight shortage of blood sacrifices he’s going to invade the land of the living and start taking that sweet, sweet blood. The other gods aren’t thrilled with this development, as it will lead to less blood sacrifices for them, and divine douchebag Tezcatlipoca goes so far as to suggest destroying humanity (again).

Quetzalcoatl comes up with a different solution: shut all the gates of the underworld, and then the gods of the underworld will be starved of blood sacrifices. The other gods aren’t thrilled with this plan, but since Quetzalcoatl’s twin brother Xolotl is one of the gods of the underworld, they think that if he’s willing to go that far it must be serious. The problem is that the gates are made of obsidian, the one substance the gods cannot touch, so he has to get a human to do it. Quetz makes a bet with Tezcatlipoca--basically, that the human champion, who will be chosen out of the lowest of the low, will be able to close the gates. Tezcatlipoca bets against. Whoever wins gets the other’s blood sacrifices. And to make sure that he doesn’t cheat, Tez sends his most loyal emissary, Yaotl, a giant god jaguar thing, to tag along on the quest.

With me so far?

So Quetz picks Izel, a young slave boy who no one cares about except his older sister, and his older sister is sacrificed in an attempt to placate the god of the underworld. So he goes with this grumpy spirit jaguar and he picks up some friends, and they go around Mesoamerica to Olmec ruins closing the gates of the underworld to stop the world from being destroyed.

Okay you can probably tell that the god stuff is what interested me most.

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This series has been compared to Avatar: The Last Airbender in its animation style, and its mythic quest. But this isn’t a children’s show. There is blood. Oh fudge, there is soooooooo much blood. Buckets of the stuff. Think the animated Castlevania and in you’re in the right ballpark. And of course, being based off of Mexica mythology, that makes sense. I mean, it’s a belief system that says the gods need blood and hearts torn out to function and keep the universe running. 

But soooo much guts.

There’s also swearing, and that threw me off a bit, because it only comes about three or four episodes in and feels very modern in a way that I didn’t quite like. It felt so out of place. Considering that the theme song is done in Mayan, I would think the makers of the show had the resources to find Mayan curses instead, or mix the two like what Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey does, switching both modern and ancient Greek curses. You get used to it after a while, but at first it was pretty jarring.

The fight scenes also need a lot of work. There are so many times where it seems like, despite there being several characters and monsters, they’re all so disconnected. What should be massive battles where chaos is going everywhere and instead there are separate little duels happening one at a time.

By far though, the biggest weakness of the series is that it’s lead, Izel, is useless. I’ve seen a lot of defenses for his supposed “whininess,” that he’s a guy who has been through a lot. The only person who cared he existed got sacrificed in front of him and now he’s got to save the world while running from monsters. Cool, fine. I don’t have an issue with that. The problem is that the guy’s useless in all the conflicts that come up until the very end. I’m not saying I want every protagonist to be a hardcore warrior type, but he’s not a strategist, not an inventory, not a trapper, not a hunter, not an agile speedster. He’s just… a kid that (understandably) freaks out when monsters attack, and has to not die while his friends take care of it.

That’s not a great protagonist. Especially when all of his friends are interesting and complex AND good in a fight: the twin athletes Yun and K’in who find themselves dragged on this quest; Zyanya, the warrior who survived her city being destroyed by the forces of the underworld; Xanastaku, the healer girl with wings; and Yaotl, the divine emissary that finds himself questioning the gods as the story goes on. I like where Izel ends up, I just wish he didn’t take so long to get there, or spend the entire time screaming and flailing.

If this show is to survive a second season, it needs to clean up its fight scenes and work on its protagonist.

All of that being said: there are some things that are really cool in this series. The design of the show is straight out of Mesoamerica. As this Tumblr post points out, much of the art and architecture is lifted from archaeological sites and artifacts. I remember being a bit weirded out by the some of the designs of the gods too, and while liberties are taken in a couple of cases, a lot of the details in those characters’ designs are taken identifiable in Mexica art. And given how rare it is to see depictions of Mesoamerican deities on the screen, I thought it was super cool.

The gods also sometimes possess people? And as they do we see some traits come out. When Quetzalcoatl possesses a body, it gets snakelike eyes, and starts being covered in feathers as he remains in the body. Tezcatlipoca gets a stripe under his eyes, smoke from his nostrils, and one of his legs wrecked. And if you know your mythology and Aztec art you know exactly what these traits are referring to!

And I like the depiction of their characters! The series doesn’t exactly have a positive view of the gods, but it does give them complex motivations and relationships, which is more than you usually expect from anything featuring Mesoamerican myth.

Finally, it’s good to see a fantasy story in this setting. The only other one I can think of off the top of my head is Obsidian and Blood (which is very good and you should read it). The aesthetics are completely different. The different kinds of magic are different and cool and I like it a lot?

For instance, Izel has this little dagger with a face on it? And when it gets exposed to blood, it grows into a much longer sword-like blade. You don’t see any swords, but there are a lot of knives, axes, and spears. The twins Yun and K’in are very obviously supposed to bring to mind the Hero Twins of Maya myth. And there’s a teleporting axolotl and it’s adorable?

Basically, it’s not great, it’s got problems, but I’m a sucker for Mesoamerican myth so I enjoyed it very much anyway. I find it sticking in my head for that alone. I realize that’s probably not enough for most people, but it was enough for me.

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Uncharted 4 Review

 Currently reading The Path of Daggers, which I’m almost finished with, and I like it a lot better than I remember. And this weekend I’ll get to play a bit more The Witcher 3: Blood & Wine, which means I’ll be killing some vampires, WOOT!

I finished the story of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End! Anyway let’s talk about it.

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Uncharted 4 Review

This is both a technically and narratively ambitious game and it mostly succeeds in what it sets out to do. That’s the gist of this review.

Some slight spoilers ahead.

I was told that this game was pretty good, and I was not disappointed. See, when I played Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, I was frustrated and annoyed (though not too annoyed, because I had gotten this game for free when the Playstation Store gave it away). I had seen this game win a bunch of awards and I wasn’t having that much fun playing it. It felt like it really wanted to be a movie, which made it fun to watch and see the story play out, but not that much fun to actually play, which made it not that great of a game. At a certain point it felt as if almost every chapter of the story came with some sort of gimmick, like a chase scene with cars, or with boats, or a cruise ship that’s about to sink, or Nate is drugged or dying of thirst or something. It was dramatic, but it made playing a pain in the butt when the camera keeps shaking, or things are fuzzy, or you’re fighting hallucinations that don’t die while both of the above are going on.

The plane scene was one of the most annoying sequences I’ve ever played.

And those weren’t new to that game, but that one just amped them up to eleven.

Uncharted 4 doesn’t do away with big set pieces, but it’s nowhere near as intrusive to the experience. I felt like it managed to both tell a cinematic story and be a game that’s fun to play in almost every sequence, which is a pretty darn impressive thing to do in my opinion. It does have some pitfalls that stuck out to me though.

For starters, this game is big, and I don’t know that it needs to be. There are certain chapters that have you exploring wide open areas, and that sounds great, the kind of thing that every game is aiming to be these days. But given the way Uncharted plays, it feels a bit wasteful. There are wide open spaces to explore, and very often most of that space is filled with nothing but beautiful scenery. Yeah, that sounds nice, but in practice this means I’m wandering around aimlessly expecting everywhere to be something important or find a collectible, and most of this space has nothing there. So I’m just wasting a bunch of time.

I appreciate there being some space to explore, but too much of it, I start getting tired, and basically give up because most of it is useless. There should not be this much useless space in a game, I think.

The combat’s also been reworked a bit from past games. For starters, there’s no way to block. There’s a hit button, a dodge button, and a button to get out of holds. But if someone swings at you, you just get out of there. And since this isn’t really a close combat game, the camera doesn’t always cooperate in a way that lets you move out of the way. Thankfully, you aren’t in a lot of melee combat situations, but the few that the game forces you into are frustrating because of how the combat isn’t particularly smooth.

One of those situations is the final battle, the last boss fight, in which you are dueling… with swords. Nowhere before have swords been a part of the game’s combat, and now you have a sword, he has a sword, and you’re hastily given directions on how to use them. This made no sense to me from a gameplay perspective, and while it was dramatically very cool, and made sense for a movie, for a game to throw that at you in the last few minutes was silly and not as clever as I think the developers hoped it would be.

The game has plenty of good additions to its gameplay though. The grappling hook took some getting used to, but I like it quite a bit. Stealth has been reworked and though it’s nowhere near as good as one of the Arkham or Assassin’s Creed games, it’s a very good step from where we were in the last two games. There are encounters you can complete without open combat, and I love that, even if I’m not very good at it.

Narratively the game is pretty brilliant--I will admit that I am still kind of a sucker for stories about siblings though, and this one focuses very heavily on Nate and his never-before-mentioned brother Sam. Sam’s lack of mention before now doesn’t really jive that well with what we’ve already seen, though they do at least try to explain in-story why that is, in that Nate thought he was dead and is only just now revealed not to be. It’s a retcon, but at least the writers seem to know it and do their best to try to make it less awkward.

I appreciate that.

The gist of the story is that Nate has given up the adventuring/treasure hunting/thieving life, and then his brother appears again and pulls him back into it to help him save his own life by finding Henry Avery’s lost treasure. Nate, of course, lies to his wife about it, because he doesn’t want to get her into trouble, or get into trouble with her. And of course, Rafe, this acquaintance of theirs has been after Avery’s treasure for over a decade and is coming close to finding it, now that he’s got an army of mercenaries led by Nadine.

YMMV on whether or not Sam is a good character. I can almost go either way with him, because I can definitely see why, by the end of the game, players might not like him very much. I liked him mostly because Nate liked him, and I get how siblings are. But there are times when I could totally imagine why someone who wasn’t his sibling wouldn’t feel too kindly towards him--he kind of takes way too many unnecessary risks for this treasure.

Nate lying to his wife is dumb, but not out of character. And in the end, a thing that I really liked about this game is that it showed that going out and having adventures isn’t a bad thing--in the end, Nate and Elena decide that they do enjoy this life, and avoiding it isn’t good for them. But they need to handle it more responsibly. Searching for the unknown is fine, when you’re not unnecessarily risking your life for thrills.

Also Nate and Elena are kind of an awesome couple? And at no point in the series is their relationship really overly sexualized, like you’d expect in an action story of this kind if it ever hit theaters or television?

Just food for thought.

She has something to do in this game, which is much more than she did in the previous entry, in which she had a couple of sequences before just… not being in the story. Which kind of made sense, but also was a bummer because she’s a good character.

And speaking of old characters coming back and being treated well, Sully’s back of course, and despite being ancient and smoking he’s in great shape. And the voice of reason--telling Nate when he’s being stupid, but sticking around to support him and make sure he doesn’t die.

There’s this running thing with Henry Avery constantly using the imagery of Saint Dismas, the Good Thief, the one who repented at the Crucifixion, and Nate wonders in his journal, “What is Avery’s deal with Saint Dismas?” and I practically shouted, “It’s thematic! The thief who gave up his sin!” And I’m sure that’s intentional, but it’s also because of the whole “Today you will join me in Paradise” thing, and Avery’s own pirate paradise and how that turned out.

In some ways, this feels like the darkest of the Uncharted games, with a sense of finality and the darkness and also there are skeletons all over. This game really gets into just how terrible people can be. But it’s also in some ways one of the most optimistic games in the series? Because despite the darkness that exists in people, they can overcome it, and become better. This game serves as a grand finale to the saga, and shows our characters leaving it much better than when they started.

And I like that.

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People in the Past Weren't Dumb

 I am not obligated to talk about current events, and this will not be a post about politics, but I do want to say: I have seen quite a lot of commentary on both sides of the rift (certainly not an aisle at this point) and most of it is bad. But as I said on Tumblr: I would be a lot more sympathetic to a group of protestors storming the Capitol Building and demanding Congress be held accountable if they weren’t marching on the orders of a madman they worship demanding that he remain in power.

Anyway I read 1634: The Baltic Wars and I have Thoughts.

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People in the Past Weren’t Dumb

I have some issues with 1634: The Baltic Wars, mostly related to Ann Catherine and Oliver Cromwell, but overall I like this story and I like the Plot and I like the optimism of it. The author set out to tell a story that he thought was optimistic about the human condition, despite starting off in what was one of the worst wars in history.

One thing I especially like about this series is that the author is strongly of the opinion that people in the past weren’t stupid.

Let me rewind and explain a bit. The first book in the series is 1632, in which in the year 2000, a small West Virginia town named Grantville is transported to what would become Germany in the year 1632 by what they call the Ring of Fire, an event that has not been, nor is ever likely to be, explained. If you know your history, you’ll know that in that year they’re in the middle of the Thirty Years War, a vicious conflict which all-around sucked.

Of course the Americans, once they get their bearings, have the tactical advantage--they have better guns, for starters, and vehicles, and electric power. And once they start making alliances and enemies they’re happy to start sharing their knowledge with the people they’re friends with in this time. Once the United States of Europe gets rolling, technology starts spreading. It’s not all 21st century at first, because they don’t all have the means for that, but it’s moving a lot fast than 17th century.

Of course, Cardinal Richlieu has thoughts about this little town popping up, and he starts doing his best to learn this new technology and new historical information. He gets his spies on that ASAP, and before anyone can do anything about it, there are copies of the history and science books from Grantville’s libraries circulating around Europe.

And as 1634 shows, the people of 17th century Europe are starting to learn a few things. No, they don’t have airplanes yet (though one French officer realizes how good it would be for them start making them), but the French have worked out how to make percussion caps by studying the science books. And the Danish start working out how to counter the ironclads that the Americans are starting to build. They don’t quite get there, but only because they don’t have enough time yet to build all the mines and torpedoes that they want. But given the opportunity, they would have.

The people that lived in the past weren’t stupid. They don’t have all the resources we do right now, but that’s not because they were stupid, it was because the times were different. One of the things that bothers me with a lot of speculative fiction, mostly fantasy, is that we see people or creatures that are used to the past are utterly overwhelmed when it comes to thinking outside of their own times. I absolutely hated this aspect of Salvation War--the angels and demons attacking Earth don’t have a clue about how to actually fight humans, using Bronze Age tactics and being completely off guard when that doesn’t work. Heck, Uriel’s psychic attacks that are supposed to kill thousands are shrugged off by equipping everyone with tinfoil hats.

To be clear, there are thematic, and in-universe reasons for this, but it still feels really, really silly and dumb, when the only angelic character that knows anything about modern warfare is Michael, who is sabatoging his own side for his own benefit. There are no studies of human weapons, there are no figuring out ways to counter them. There is just throwing more force, and hoping that it works this time. And the audience cheers because the good guys are humanity, of course, but it’s still a rather boring antagonistic force if it doesn’t understand anything but sheer force and is baffled when that doesn’t work.

[Again, there are thematic reasons which might work for some audiences, but the more I think about it the more it bothers me. That and other things.]

Compare this to Dresden Files. Yeah, the supernatural beings have some trouble with humans, but they understand human nature, and they understand strategy. Maybe they don’t have guns, but they can hire humans or other beings that do, and will happily use them. One of the most horrifying bits in the series is when Harry meets up with his fellow wizards who have just escaped a battle, only to find that the vampires had hired mercenaries to gas the hospital that they’d been recovering in.

The supernatural beings who don’t care about things like guns and bombs are the ones who wouldn’t be bothered by them anyway. The skinwalker in Turn Coat is pretty hard to kill by anything less than an actual nuclear blast, and in Battle Ground the Last Titan takes several gunshots, explosions, and cuts, and just keeps going.

But going back to humans: yes, I think people in the past would be scared and bewildered by modern technology. At first. But soon they’d start to realize how it works, even if they don’t know all the details. After all, do you know exactly how all the components of your computer or phone work? Probably not. But once you get a handle on it, you can get pretty far.

There’s a season finale of the Spanish television series Ministerio del Tiempo in which King Philip II of Spain, upon finding out about what happens to his country in the future, and about time travel, takes some people with him and then proceeds to conquer all of the world and also history. Not to mention that Alonso, one of the main team members, adapts pretty quickly to modern semiautomatic firearms, despite being from a time period when muskets were the common guns.

People (or non people, if you’re writing fantasy/science-fiction) who aren’t up to date with modern technology would start working out how to use it, and how to match it. The people of France in 1632 don’t know how modern firearms work, but at the Cardinal’s urging they immediately start working on how to protect themselves from it, study how they work, and find ways to counter them. Because that’s how humans think. They work out how to adapt and survive, and fight back. Just because they don’t know as much about the science of how modern things work, doesn’t mean they aren’t willing to learn, or to logically work out how to deal with it.

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Teen Titans Was Amazing

 Today is my parents’ anniversary, so there’s that going on. Pro tip if you get married: pick a day you know you can remember so that you never forget your anniversary.

Anyway I am a bit out of it because I had two short work weeks in a row. And that’s cool! But it means that work on Monday is going to be the biggest pain--I might get a burger for lunch that day to make myself feel better. 

I considered doing a ‘Things I’m Glad I Did in 2020!’ Note, but I don’t know if anyone cares, and also I thought of that at the next to last minute (unlike this one, which I thought of at the last minute), and I would want to give that one a bit more time to think of what to put on the list.

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The 2003 Teen Titans Was Great

So I got a month long free trial of HBO Max on the Kindle Fire because of some promotion going on or another, and after watching Primal and a few other things I decided I’d watch a few episodes of Teen Titans. Do you remember that show? Started in 2003? It was very silly at times, but occasionally it was very serious, and had likable characters. A bunch of people mocked/criticized it for being a cartoon with heavy anime influences, which is downright hilarious to consider if you look at the state of 2D animation in the US right now.

It’s kind of annoying how popular this show got, though, because every other iteration of the team or these characters is stacked up against the show, even though the show isn’t a particularly faithful adaptation of the comics it’s named after. And it’s not meant to be! So when the first trailer for Titans dropped, so many people were laughing about how DC was stupid in trying to make Teen Titans dark, when in truth the original comics were very dark. That doesn’t negate all criticisms of Titans, of course, but let’s not forget that one of the key members was essentially Satan’s daughter!

I talked a bit more about that whole thing here, but basically: complaining that the comics or other adaptations aren’t like the show is like wondering why the character of Quartermain in King Solomon’s Mines the novel isn’t like Connery’s character in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie.

So I watched a season one episode, “Apprentice, Part 1” and something stuck out to me:

This twenty-two minute long episode has a whopping FIVE fight scenes in it. The episode opens with a dream in which Robin is fighting Slade. When the Titans track down what they think is Slade’s base, Robin fights a bunch of Sladebots. He gets dragged off by Cinderblock and fights him while the rest of the team chases and fights the bot driving the boat with the bomb. And when Robin tracks down Slade, they fight for the rest of the episode.

Look, I don’t think that any of the Netflix Defenders shows are this action-packed. And I get it, it’s aimed at a younger audience, they’ve got to have action to make sure to hold kids’ attention, but HOLY POPE that’s a lot of action. And the handful of episodes I watched this past week all consistently had a bunch of fight scenes. Not usually that many. Even a lot of the silly episodes had a lot of them. They tend to be well-animated, fun to watch, dramatic… 

...we did not deserve this quality of action cartoon in our youth, but we got it anyway.

To be clear, this show was not that good at drama. Which it didn’t usually try to do either. But while there are character arcs and development, and it’s good, most of it isn’t that complex, and it’s not really handled in the silly episodes at all. The season-long story arcs were usually only four episodes or so: the one early on that established the story arc, one in the middle of the season to develop it a bit more and remind you it still existed, and the two part finale. They were good, but it wasn’t as if complex Plot was woven throughout a season.

The exception to this is the fifth season, which had huge chunks of the season with the Titans going around the world recruiting.

And continuity wasn’t a strong suite, though it wasn’t that bad either. A lot better than a lot of children’s cartoons of the time. It wasn’t the DC Animated Universe--very few shows can be, as Justice League: Unlimited had a Plot Point that was built off of something that happened in an episode of Superman: The Animated Series a decade previously. Main cast members in the Teen Titans would sometimes suffer trauma and then it’s only referenced once or twice afterward.

I’m also not sure how much time is meant to have passed over the course of the series? Aside from a couple of holidays, and a birthday or two, we don’t really see the passage of time. Which isn’t weird considering it’s an animated show for kids, but by the end of the show, it seems like it’s supposed to have been years that have passed, and it’s not as if anyone has visibly aged at all. 

But you know what? This was the early 2000’s. Television in general was not as heavy on things like continuity or telling episodic stories. I think if we looked at a bunch of shows, both animated and otherwise, from the same time period, there wouldn’t be that much difference in the approach to episodic storytelling.

It was a different time, I guess. Teen Titans existed in this weird spot in the evolution of animation and comic book shows. It has heavy story arcs but also a bunch of humor and silly episodes. It was obviously influenced by anime at a time when that wasn’t really the norm in action cartoons. It wasn’t quite comfortable fully tackling serious issues like racism or puberty, but did make not-so-subtle references to them. It made allusions to the comics but it didn’t care that much about making a faithful adaptation because most of its audience hadn’t read them and barely any of us had realized that we could look up these characters on Wikipedia.

And it was great. Maybe it’s the nostalgia talking--I don’t know if someone who has never seen this show before would watch it and still have as much fun as I did rewatching it. But I’d like to think that it would still very much appeal to kids. Aside from meta stuff, I don’t think there’s anything in the show that aged badly.

It’s definitely worth revisiting, if you manage to find the series somewhere, or get a free trial for HBO Max like we did.

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