I was also excited. But then you watch it and you have to sit through cringe like "Imagine an empire ruled by four women! Vampires, sisters, we have a scheme!".
Pity.
You could look past this if their story was at least compelling. IF. But what we got was some side story with uninteresting cliche characters that didn't drive the plot or character development. Throughout all of season 3 I couldn't figure out what was the point of the Styria scenes. + Show Spoiler +
beyond enslaving Hector. Which does not require an entire season.
Season 2 started to go off the rails, season 3 felt like watching the resulting train crash.
the betrayal of alucard made ZERO sense. i could see it coming and hoped i was wrong, but the motivation they gave made NO SENSE. the castle can't move. so the kids think he's lying and kill him? WTF????? i guess theyre trying to turn him into a villain in season 4
Just finished it. The only storyline that felt worth watching was Isaac's. I didn't -hate- Sypha / Trevor but certainly a lot more could be done with them as characters. Styria line was fairly clichee and boring, and the Alucard line was completely terrible. Like... his visitors have what could be an interesting backstory, but none of them have a believable motivation for anything that they do. I feel like I understand Alucard dramatically less than I did heading into the season, and not in a way that makes me want to understand his motivations more.
On March 12 2020 15:22 Fleetfeet wrote: Just finished it. The only storyline that felt worth watching was Isaac's. I didn't -hate- Sypha / Trevor but certainly a lot more could be done with them as characters. Styria line was fairly clichee and boring, and the Alucard line was completely terrible. Like... his visitors have what could be an interesting backstory, but none of them have a believable motivation for anything that they do. I feel like I understand Alucard dramatically less than I did heading into the season, and not in a way that makes me want to understand his motivations more.
Totally agree with all of this. The whole Alucard plotline felt really forced. I like him enough as a character where I'm still okay watching it play out, hopefully it will pay off in season 4
I like the Trevor and Sypha stuff, and I liked the thought of the Alucard stuff, though Im not sure if I think the reversal was done with enough build up given what actually happened.
The vampire sisters were a predictable and boring story line and I mostly dont care what they do so long as one of the aforementioned Trevor, Sypha, or Alucards make them go boom in a violently spectacular violent haze of blood.
Id be sort of okay with a season JUST being the Trevor and Sypha stuff, the end of their story was well placed in my opinion, the sort of thing I super didnt see coming and definitely "got me" insofar as that sort of thing can really get me.
Binged it all. A nice conclusion, and fairly good pacing throughout with the exception of one or two episodes. Overall, I'd say it's definitely better than Season 3, and probably better than Season 1. Not sure if it's better than Season 2, though. Had some weird technical problems (e.g. audio mixing, some bad VA recordings, some frame-y animation) that I'll chalk up to the pandemic, but nothing too bad. A few odd macro level script choices. Some spoiler thoughts below:
Everyone living happily ever after is a nice change of pace. And yes, Lenore dying is Hector's happily ever after, she's a monster and this season was too kind to her. Did I miss Isaac in that last ep or was he only mentioned by Hector? While I enjoyed the vampire sister storyline for giving Isaac a finale, it felt a bit too separated from the main trio's story for me. I guess Hector gave some runes to Germaine? Kind of baffled me the entire Saint Germaine bad reveal was IMMEDIATELY after he met Alucard. Can't help but think in another draft of the script the final bits were after they reached the castle. Worked alright, but still just a weird choice.
Very good final season to a very good show. Icing on the cake for me was when they mentioned stuff from Peter Watts' book Blindsight with some vampire scientific explanations.