Literal Vampire Potbelly Goblin

I’m going to say something controversial on the website tumblr dot com, but I don’t think anyone involved with the CW needs to stand even close to this property. We do not need the director from Pretty Little Liars doing a Re-Animator. We do not need the cast filled with what I can only describe as the lowest-budget pretty people a studio can afford to hire. I do not see why Herbert West, who is meant to be unsettling and almost childlike in the story and unhinged if you’re going the movie route, needs to be brooding or played by someone from The Vampire Diaries. I don’t care that the narrator character is being portrayed by a woman, but I don’t think they need to have any romantic interaction, and I cannot see that being avoided in the slightest.

The first audiobook with its terrible Patrick Warburton impression was genuinely the worst audiobook experience I’ve ever had. Even beyond that, it’s just not for me: I don’t like isekais and nothing about having video game and streaming rules lobbed at me with the density of a mobile game with too many features is appealing. I also an vehemently opposed to having pop culture references chucked at me like rawhide to appease a restless dog. It doesn’t feel like competent writing, it feels like a way to say “I was too lazy to write something good or interesting on my own, maybe you’d like a callback to the ninja turtles, instead?”

No see, there is a huge difference between liking video games and having tutorials and loot crate stats being explained to me in a narrative setting that is not an actual video game experience. I love video games! I’ve been playing video games for much longer than you have been alive. That being said, I want to play them, not read a description of them.

The problem with the assumption that this is taking place in the modern day and those pop culture references being a character’s points of connection to his previous life are that it severely dates the book, and shows a character with little depth or humanity. On top of that, when your points of reference are specific preexisting properties, it shows an author that chooses not to generate a world or descriptions that are their own, but are all wholesale ripped from other properties. Hitchhiker’s Guide managed it with so few modern pop culture references that it reads as more timeless. I genuinely thought it was written in the 90s when I read it, as opposed to the 70s.