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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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It's an interesting take but I think it's a combination of a particular Japanese insistence on quality, and also doing a novel take on something familiar - for all that Castlevania is obviously derivative of western tropes, it's really very different in practice to any existing version of the Dracula story.

There could be something to that. I recall being told by some Bloodborne lore hound that the blood communion religion of Yharnam in that game had all the imagery of Christianity, but the structure of the religion was based on Shintoism or some other East Asian religion, which is an extra twist on the "what if it turned out that the church was evil?" cliche.

I actually don't know the Castlevania game stories well, but that's certainly another Western-culture inspired game made by East Asians which has seemed to capture Western audiences. I did watch the Netflix cartoon, which was made by a Western studio, but in a style meant to emulate anime (itself a style meant to emulate Disney), adapting an Eastern dev-made video game that itself was an adaptation of a Western-made story. Which could have turned out interesting, for seeing all the twists and turns such layers of adaptation and copying styles introduced, but it ended up turning everything into slop designed for Modern Audiences, which is why I stopped watching it.