TV/Live action: Interview With the Vampire season 2. I realise the Interview With the Vampire series is to the 1990s movie what the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy is to the OG 1990s PlayStation game. We all wanted it, but we’re a bit mixed on all the extra stuff. Make Louis and Claudia people of colour. Okay, fine. Make Louis and Lestat gay. Okay. I mean, sure, vampires being gay or bisexual isn’t new. And it was kinda implied in the book that they were more than friends, but I got the impression from the book that relationships between vampires (especially maker and thrall) was deeper than a mortal marriage, but the sex was part of the violence, not the relationship. So, I’m a bit mixed on what they did with the TV series. I certainly don’t mind it, but I don’t think it’s better than the movie with Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Kirsten Dunst, and Antonio Banderas (oh, and Christian Slater as the interviewer).

Spoilers for Interview With the Vampire and one related book (not 100% sure which) and Stephen King’s IT in the next paragraph.

Also, ageing Claudia up (she is implied to be 13-14 but the actress is in her 20s) has me worried they’re going to do the thing. So, IT by Stephen King gets a lot of shit for an 11 year old girl pulling a train, letting six boys her age all get a turn. I’m not sure what Anne Rice did was much better. It wasn’t in Interview With the Vampire though. I think it was in The Vampire Armand, but I don’t quite recall (and only read the first two, so, Interview and The Vampire Lestat). I just heard about it. So when Louis and Claudia are in Paris, if you’ve seen the movie, you know the Parisian vampires turn against them and they execute Claudia by forcing her to endure the sunlight (and they try to kill Louis as well). In another book, Claudia goes to Armand and says she wants to have sex, but it wouldn’t work with her body. In the show she’s a teenager, in the movie she was a child, but I think she was a lot younger (like 5-6). That’s when she was turned to a vampire, so she stopped ageing. At one point she laments never being able to bear children because she’s forever a child, though she’s over sixty years old. On one hand, she’ll never have to deal with periods! On the other, she’ll never experience a good and true romance. The only people who will want to be with her are not the kind of person you would want to have around. (In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, there is a child vampire who is a reference to Claudia, and this is basically how she hunts, she lets perverts take her into a dark alley, and then she feeds upon them. When you first enter the Dark Brotherhood, the guild of assassins, she is telling this story and if you stop and listen, you’ll hear the whole thing.) Okay, so anyway, Claudia in this other book. She explains her situation to Armand, who then has a solution for her. He is able to separate her head from her body without killing her (because, vampires), and he can do the same to a grown woman (also a vampire). He will attach her head to the grown woman’s body, and she can go out and get laid properly. Which she does. I don’t know the details, I just know she gets what she wants out of the deal. When she returns, the heads are swapped back, and apparently that’s when she’s put in that well. Anyway, with the Claudia actress being in her 20s, I’m afraid we’re going to get that scene. And I am not here for it, but whatever, the show has been a pretty wild ride.

No more spoilers.

In anime, we’re watching The Apothecary Diaries. It’s a Japanese animated series, set in China, and the animation is gorgeous. The story is kinda boring. It’s very well reviewed though, so I’m sticking with it. I think we’re 7-8 episodes in? Would love to hear from some fans of this show to tell me when it’s going to get better, if it does. The episodic stories are interesting, but I’m just not that interested in the overarching story.

Movies… Recently watched Exit 8. Japanese film, English subtitles available. I feel like this will get an English overdub, especially if Netflix gets it. I don’t like overdubs in live-action, though. I’m fine with anime dubs, because they’re all dubs (ink is silent). Sure, there’s something to be said about the original language, but I never hear about Fullmetal Alchemist, Saga of Tanya the Evil, or SPYxFAMILY fans demanding the German dub (all three are set there). Or The Promised Neverland fans demanding English (it’s supposed to be set in the US or UK. It’s not but that’s what you’re meant to think). Anyway, Exit 8 is fun until you realise the main character is as dumb as a box of rocks. The guy is caught not in a time loop but a spatial loop (train station that loops in on itself). The rules are simple, if you see an anomaly (anything out of the ordinary), you turn around. They tell you this in the trailer, and it’s posted every loop. So we know before the characters do. And it’s easy to spot the anomalies. It’s not one little thing off, it’s usually something scary. (The most subtle one is an upside-down 8. I’ll give them that, I wouldn’t have caught it either. The second-most subtle one is a door with its knob in the middle rather than on the side. I absolutely would have caught that. And the main guy always states the order of the posters. It never changes. The movie wastes your time and it could have been a Black Mirror episode (and even at ~40 minutes, it would have been too long). Reading the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, I feel like Donut would have figured it out immediately. And Donut is a cat.

Rewatched Gravity Falls with my kids, it is a damn shame we didn’t get three whole seasons.