Tropes Media Browse Indexes Forums Videos Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Tools
Cut List New Edits Edit Reasons Launches Images List Crowner Activity Un-typed Pages Recent Page Type Changes Changelog
Tips
Creating New Redirects Cross Wicking Tips for Editing Text Formatting Rules Glossary Edit Reasons Handling Spoilers Word Cruft Administrivia FAQ
Tropes HQ
About Us Contact Us Advertise DMCA Notice Privacy Policy Report Bug
Go Ad-Free Changelog
  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Highlight Links
 

Follow TV Tropes

Following

Web Video / Vampire Reviews

Go To

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/40669604.jpg
"Good eeeevening! I am ze Maven of ze Eventide, und velcome... to Vampire Reviews!"

Vampire Reviews is a Video Review Show covering vampire-related movies, TV shows, books, wine, perfume —anything with a vampiric bent, presented by the Maven of the Eventide, a brooding, gothic figure possessed of the dark, romantic, hypnotic allure of the classical vampire.

Or so she'd like to imagine, anyway. Maven is really Elisa of Team NChick indulging her Vampire Vannabe fantasies. When she forgets to stay in character, a ditzy Valley Girl emerges through the corsets and dark eye shadow, and any time she tries to impose her vampire fetishism outside her bedroom full of candles, roses and skulls, she gets knocked back by the real world, mostly represented by her roommate Lindsay Ellis (formerly The Nostalgia Chick), who is flatly unimpressed by her antics and keeps telling her to get a job and start paying her share of the rent. Also refusing to play along are Team NChick's Nella, Kyle "Oancitizen" Kallgren of Brows Held High and occasionally Todd in the Shadows. Also, her other roommate Dan Roth, but no-one ever remembers him.

The series began when the popularity of The Twilight Saga prompted Elisa (Hansen, the real Elisa) to take a deeper look at vampires in fiction. Like The Nostalgia Chick, Vampire Reviews takes a non-chronological approach to reviewing, interspersed with sketches for greater illustration and entertainment. Incidentally, Elisa started her own saga of books featuring vampires (amongst other things) with The Immortal Journey in 2019.

    Vampire Media Maven has done videos on 

Vampire Reviews:

This web series provides examples of:

  • Adaptational Dumbass: Johnny Depp's version of Barnabas from Dark Shadows. The original Barnabas was a fiendishly intelligent Manipulative Bastard, while Tim Burton and Johnny Depp went so far out of their way to depict him as an innocent, gullible Nice Guy (who can't lie to save his life and falls for the paper-thin manipulations of the true obvious villain) that he just comes off as a bit of a dumbass.
  • Adaptational Heroism: Not against this trope in principle, but usually not impressed with how directors handle it. Classic vampires like Carmilla, Dracula, and Barnabas were deeply flawed to villainous, so adaptations that keep their villainous actions but try to frame them as romantic heroes tend to make them Designated Heroes at best, the Draco in Leather Pants trope at worst.
  • Adaptational Villainy: The worst thing Eric Northman does is in the books is sexually harass Sookie (and even then, it's strongly implied she's secretly into it but won't admit it), while the show has him kidnap, torture, and murder people in his torture cell under his club, explicitly trick Sookie into drinking his blood so she'll become attracted to him against her will (and mind rapes her with sex fantasies) after she made it clear she couldn't stand him. Yet, he's still Elisa's second all-time favorite vampire character after Lestat.
  • Adaptation Overdosedinvoked: Dracula. Just... Dracula.
    As we've discussed before, there are more iterations of Dracula than any other character in the history of anything, ever.
  • Adaptation Personality Change: Snarks at Kindred: The Embraced for changing the shticks of each clan.
    • While the Ventrue are still Blue Blood, in the show they're more The Godfather-esque (sympathetic) mafia crime lords than Dracula-style modern aristocrats.
    • The Brujah are changed from bad boy rebels, bikers, rockers, and street youth to brutish, suit-wearing mafia thugs.
    • The Gangrel are changed from animalistic loners to the "bad boy bikers" rather than the Brujah. Maven snarks that the Brujah and Gangrel are at war because the latter stole the former's look.
    • While the Toreador are technically sensitive, passionate, artistic souls, the only Toreador we see in the show are women, so it comes off more as Women Are Delicate/Hysterical Woman than passionate, beauty-appreciating souls like the (mostly male-led) Anne Rice vampires.
    • The Nosferatu are changed from grotesque Nosferatu-looking monsters to humans with bald heads and big ears.
  • All Girls Want Bad Boys: Sees Lestat, Spike, and Eric Northman's appeal as this.
  • Alter-Ego Acting: Even in-universe, Maven is really just Elisa's character indulging her pretentious vampire fangirl side. Welshy even asked her "What facet of your character am I talking to?"
  • Alternate Character Interpretation: Invoked.
    • Has this view of Sesame Street's the Count. She believes he's actually trying to avoid killing his friends by focusing his thirst for blood into a less harmful need.
    • Treats the antagonist of True Blood season 2 as actually a deep character attempting to unleash the repressed sexual desires of a small town.
    • Maven's reading of Guy Maddin's Dracula film makes it chockful of alternate character interpretation: Jonathan and Lucy's suitors are jealous of their respective love interests' interest in the foreigner (Dracula); Van Helsing is a Dirty Old Man who reads Lucy's private diary and sniffs women's undergarments, etc.
  • Always Someone Better: Claims Polidori had this relationship with Lord Byron. Polidori was Byron's close friend and physician, but he secretly hated the man and resented how much more famous he was. Polidori wrote "The Vampyre" hoping to become even more famous than Byron, but the short story was accidentally published under Byron's name, which was the literal opposite of what Polidori wanted. While reading "The Vampyre," Maven even twists the knife by constantly pointing out how Lord Byron would have written certain passages better.
  • Anti-Hero: She extensively talks about how the fact a vampire has to be this by default. It's brought up in her Kindred: The Embraced review that Julian Luna is too nice a vampire to have any real tragedy about him so he's just a straight up hero (and boring).
  • The Artifact: Maven's reviews are the only part of the Nostalgia Chick canon to still be running after Lindsay ended her series in 2015 and later deleted her older videos completely.
  • Artistic License – Linguistics: When discussing Vlad the Impaler, she refers to him as Vlad Țepeș, as though that were his full name. "Vlad Țepeș" is Romanian for Vlad the Impaler; his proper title was Vlad III Drăculea, meaning son of Dracul.
  • Audible Sharpness: Noted and parodied in her review of Underworld (2003), ending with a bunny mooing.
  • The Baby Trap: Referenced in her review of Interview with the Vampire, as she tells Lestat that vamping Claudia to keep Louis around was a naughty idea.
  • Bait-and-Switch: After she started talking about her book, Elisa started to end some of her videos discussing the publishing progress, book signing and con appearances. Come the ending of her video on The Breed…
    Elisa: Speaking of The Breed… Look what I made! (holds up new baby) You thought I was gonna talk about my book again, didn’t you?
    • Which becomes a Brick Joke at the end of her Daybreakers video.
      Elisa: (holding baby) You may notice that I have a little something special out tonight… It’s my book!
  • Beauty Equals Goodness: Not looked at in great detail, but one of her theories for Seth in From Dusk Till Dawn being seen as likable despite all he's done is that, well, he looks like George Clooney.
    • One of the main reasons that Carmilla is able to dupe Laura into trusting her for so long (despite all the obvious red flags) is because Carmilla is so pretty, and Laura refuses to believe that someone so beautiful could possibly be a bad person, or have ulterior motives.
  • Berserk Button:
    • Don't say anything good about werewolves when she's present.
    • Elisa loses a lot of her friendliness and good humor whenever stories are either dismissive to women, anti-sex, or homophobic.
    • More mundanely, she gets frequently annoyed when people insist that Dracula was really based off Vlad the Impaler, or that Bram Stoker's intention was to parallel the two.
  • Best Friends-in-Law: With Lindsay Ellis, her long time collaborator and former roommate who is married to Elisa's brother, Nick.
  • Better by a Different Name: According to her, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was more enjoyable when they took out the demons and called it Clueless.
  • Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: She can be sweet and lovable when she wants to, but she selfishly ruined the Chick's computer with a virus, has admitted to doing horrible (though mostly just very annoying) things and beats on Dan with Lindsay just because he drank some beer that didn't belong to him. She seems to be a Non-Malicious Monster example with a mix of Obliviously Evil, Skewed Priorities, being a spoiled gir who has at least some sort of conscience.
  • Boyfriend in Canada: Claims to have a vampire boyfriend in Canada.
    "Our love is pure!"
  • By "No", I Mean "Yes": Discussed and Played for Drama. In her Carmilla Read-Through, Maven notes that many readers like to interpret Laura as secretly into Carmilla's homoerotic come-ons, but Elisa doesn't see it that way since Laura often makes it clear that she is horrified and repulsed by them.
  • Brainwashing for the Greater Good: But it turns out that not even hypnotic powers can get the Nostalgia Chick to stop thinking about Todd.
  • Broken Aesop: invoked
    • Maven suspects the moral of the first Hotel Transylvania is supposed to be "don't be controlling and don't be racist," but feels it comes across more as "being controlling isn't that bad as long as you're nice about it; and racism is over!"
    • Maven also has this view of Hotel Transylvania 2, since Dracula spends the whole film aggressively pushing for his grandson to be a vampire and never really learns to grow out of it. Then, after he gets his wish, he has the gall to say Denis is "perfect no matter what."
    • The film version of The Little Vampire seems to be you should accept your friend's differences, but unlike in the books, the family vampires are all shown to be not only completely friendly to and loving of humans, but they want to become humans, so there are no "differences" to overcome. They don't even drink human blood, but cow's blood!
  • Bullet Time: Parodied in her review of Blade (1998). She brags that she just invented "garlic time".
  • Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Maven may be a pretentious, melodramatic Vampire Vannabe, but she's still a very intelligent and analytic reviewer.
  • The Cameo:
  • Character Catchphrase: "GOOD EEEEEVENING! I am ze Maven of ze Eventide, and velcome to Vampire Reviewwwws..."
  • Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Averted for Kindred: The Embraced, which she argues works against the show. The entire premise is vampire clans with wildly different aesthetics, goals, and personalities clashing with each other, yet in the show you can't tell any of the clans apart on sight (apart from the bald Nosferatu), yet clan rivalries and hierarchies are still central to the plot, so it gets real confusing real fast.
  • Compassionate Critic: She complains because she loves vampires, and even that's sprinkled amidst the fangirling.
  • Crossover: Reviews the Count Chocula cereal with The Nostalgia Critic.
  • invokedCry for the Devil:
    • She feels sorry for Richard in From Dusk Till Dawn, thinking that hating him would be like hating a puppy because he was obviously ill and should have been institutionalized instead.invoked
    • Believes this is the point of What We Do in the Shadows despite being a parody of vampires. The protagonists are all Villain Protagonist monsters who kill innocents with no real remorse but they're Tragic Monster characters who the audience is expected to sympathize with regardless.
  • Clueless Aesop: The Carmilla stage play plays changes Spielsdorf's niece to a sexual abuse victim whom Carmilla empowered to free herself from her abuse... by convincing her to commit suicide. Yeah, suicide does not equal empowerment. The playwrites also turn Spielsdorf into a Nazi but kept Carmilla a Serial Killer, making it impossible to tell who the audience is supposed to root for.
  • Cultural Translation: One of the things she finds effective about Bram Stoker's Dracula is how the sequence with Vampire!Lucy is changed around; in the book she becomes Hotter and Sexier and the men are repulsed by this, as Victorian readers would find this creepy. A 90s audience however wouldn't be repulsed by sexuality, so instead they have Lucy's seduction work...while having her vampire alter ego look more monstrous to create a sense of dissonance.
    "It's not canon accurate but it is effective."
  • Damned By a Fool's Praise:
    • In her Fright Night (1985) review, she states that nerds are cool. She knows, because her mom told her so.
    • When she announces she will be reviewing Hotel Transylvania 2 at the start of said review, her toddler cheers.
  • Damned by Faint Praise:
    • She had this attitude towards a number of the lower entries on her list of the Top 10 Female Vampires, particularly Selene from Underworld (2003) at #9 (who she had criticized in her Underworld review)note , using them to highlight how few well-written female vampires there were in fiction, the character type dominated otherwise by one-dimensional temptresses who existed for little more than fanservice. Later, during her review of Blade: The Series, she said that, had she known about that show's female lead Krista Starr when she made that list, Krista would've knocked Selene off of it in a heartbeat.
    • Her "Top 10 actually 4 Positive Things About Twilight" review is all about this trope.
  • Dawson Castinginvoked: She speculates that the titular Lost Boys are supposed to be teenagers, but since they're played by much older actors they all just come across as 20-something man-children.
  • Deadpan Snarker:
    • Maven might be the hammiest of Elisa's characters, but still has her moments.
    • Elisa's snark becomes a lot more biting whenever she's dealing with subject matter that is sexist or homophobic.
      Maven: Because if a man's writing in a female-led genre, of course he's the gold standard.
  • Deconstructive Parody: Loves What We Do in the Shadows because it's this rather than a Shallow Parody.
  • Defanged Horrors: Often discusses how this trope applies to vampires and monster mashes in kids' programming.
  • Defiled Forever: Comes up a lot due to vampirism being used by many storytellers to symbolize sexuality and death, and older media's Madonna-Whore Complex regarding women being "corrupted" and killed by their own sexual awakening—er, vampirism.
  • Depending on the Writer: Discusses how this trope pertains to Lucy Westenra, who has been reinterpreted many ways over the last 120 years due to the story of Dracula being Adaptation Overdosed.
  • Designated Hero:
    • In-universe, this is why she dislikes Selene from Underworld (2003) so much; she kills pretty much every werewolf she sees and doesn't show any remorse for it.
    • She's similarly confused about Barnabas in Tim Burton's Dark Shadows—he's a Villain Protagonist in the original series, but in the movie he's treated like a lovable goof despite murdering numerous people.
    • Elisa feels this way about the protagonist of Once Bitten given the film opens with him deciding to cheat on his girlfriend because he's not getting laid (due to her wanting to wait).
    • She similarly finds Adam Sandler's Dracula to be too much of an elitist bigot and controlling father/grandfather to be sympathetic, even if the movies bend over backwards to portray him as a Nice Guy.
    • Finds Blade to be this in Blade II because, unlike in the first one where he's trying to stop the evil mafia vampire who bit his mom and wants to Take Over the World, in the second film he still wants to kill all vampires even though most of them are only ever shown partying amongst themselves.
    • Invoked and discussed in her Vampire Academy review. The Moroi are supposedly "good" vampires because they refuse to fatally drink human blood, but they're still socially vampiric because they're elitist snobs who use dhampyrs as disposable bodyguards in their political power games, due to the latter's superior strength yet second-class citizen status. She argues that the books explore this, but the film doesn't.
  • Different for Girls: She's surprised to learn that Monster High's Frankie Stein is the main character while Draculaura is a side character, since the vampire is always the central character in a Monster Mash. She then wonders if their gender has anything to do with it, since a male Frankenstein-equivalent would most certainly be a bumbling oaf rather than a Cute Clumsy Girl, while a male Dracula-equivalent would of course be slick and formidable instead of a Ditzy Funny Foreigner.
    Maven: Why is it so different once they're girls?
  • Does This Remind You of Anything?: Explicitly spells out that in Daybreakers (2009), vampires overpopulating and squandering the natural resources they need to survive and being on the verge of self-inflicted extinction unless they change their consumer habits, yet consumers turning a blind eye to it while for-profit corporations actively sabotage reform efforts because the status quo makes them a short-term profit (even knowing long-term it'll spell their species' doom) is exactly like real-life first world humans ignoring climate change.
    • Laura's description of being prayed upon by the vampire Carmilla.
      That's a very orgasmic description, there.
  • Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male: Averted. Chick and Maven beating on Dan (with his face offscreen) might be seen as funny when it would be horrible the other way round, but they've been established as terrible people with issues so they can get away with it.
  • Draco in Leather Pantsinvoked: Gets discussed quite bit on her channel (due to Vampires Are Sex Gods), but Maven is not a fan since she feels a vampire's sympathetic qualities should come from being a Tragic Monster, not a hottie.
  • Drama Queen: Goes into tears at the slightest provocation.
  • Drinking Game: From the end of the "Top Ten Female Vampires" video: "I hope you didn't start taking shots every time I said 'emotional', 'complex', or 'relatable'. *Beat* You know what, I need to stop giving you ideas."
  • Driven to Suicide: Tries staking herself rather than say nice things about Twilight, but "Damn this steel-boned corset!".
  • Emotional Regression: Still prefers this to a static character since the character is still dynamic, even if they don't progress.
    • Likes Blade (1998) the best out of the trilogy because even if it ends on something of a downer for Blade (he's forced to kill his vampire mother, his mentor/father figure is killed, and he rejects The Not-Love Interest 's offer to help him fight vampires, making him more alone than ever), at least his character is dynamic; not the static one he becomes in the sequels and spin-off series.
    • She finds Vlad from What We Do in the Shadows to be a Tragic Monster because, of all the vampire roommates, he's the only one who regresses emotionally over the mockumentary.
  • Empathic Environment: Believing that "Allison "Obscurus Lupa" Pregler's name means she is a werewolf, she call her to ask about them:
    Maven: Call...the she-wolf. [A distant wolf howls.]
  • Epileptic Treesinvoked: She speculates that Count von Count from Sesame Street is obsessed with counting as a way to keep his thirst for blood under control.
  • Everyone Has Standards:
    • She might be a fangirl who loves a bit of Female Gaze, but in Dark Shadows she still dislikes Tim Burton trying too hard to make Barnabas a woobie, failing, and counting on him still being liked simply because Johnny Depp is a hottie.
    • Strongly dislikes a lot of the more sexist and exploitation-based vampire works she reviews.
    • While (in character) she's automatically opposed to werewolves, one of the reasons she dislikes Selene in Underworld (2003) and its sequels is that she goes around killing every werewolf she comes across, regardless of whether they've actually done anything wrong.
  • Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: Invoked Trope. Elisa believes that vampires are metaphors for sex, death, and real-world social issues, whether authors realize/intend it or not. Whether an author is self-aware and utilizes it can make the difference between a memorable work that makes a meaningful commentary about society, the human condition, or both; or if it becomes a confused, forgettable mess.
  • Even the Girls Want Her: She has a girl-crush on Lily Cole.
  • invoked Evil Is Cool: Averted with Maven as she's often disgusted by protagonists who display no redeeming qualities.
  • Expy: The Maven's not too dissimilar to the SNL skit "Goth Talk" character Circe Nightshade as played by Molly Shannon—except more vampire-focused.
  • invoked Fair for Its Day:
    • Elisa has this opinion of Anita Blake as she thinks the series was hugely influential and that she would have loved it in the nineties but elements about it (like Anita being a Holier Than Though Female Misogynist) haven't aged well.
    • Has a similar opinion of The Lair of the White Worm which has a biracial female protagonist but is also shockingly racist in places. Amusingly, she has a similar belief about the surreal 80s movie adaptation which she believes is a parody of Thatcherism.
  • Fanon Discontinuity invoked: She has firmly decided that Underworld: Rise of the Lycans never happened.
  • Fanservice:
    • You'll be seeing a lot of cleavage.
    • Amusingly averted in her reviews as she's basically bored with vampire movies that try to rely on this too much like Dark Shadows or Lifeforce (1985).
  • Fantastic Racism: Suffers a bad case of this with werewolves and it (jokingly) affects her reviews of Underworld (2003) and her interactions with Lupus Obscura. This is, of course, due to the Fur Against Fang trope. Notably, it doesn't really effect her appreciation for the Kitty Norville books, which are so far the only non-vampire centered media she's reviewed (though she still fills the review with backhanded comments about werewolves).
    • Talks about the problems of vampire media that make use of this trope like The Breed (2001). Maven comments on the fact that associating vampires with persecuted minorities is something that real-life racists used to do all the time, even when the characters are a Model Minority.
    • Praises the book Straight Outta Fangton for tackling the issue head on as the protagonist is a Friendly Neighborhood Vampire but all of his efforts to not be evil are hurt by the fact vampires are monsters no matter what. The protagonist, a black man as well as a vampire, is actually offended when people compare racism against one to racism against another.
  • Faux Action Girl: The complaint comes up in Maven's reviews of the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie and Underworld (2003). In the former, she points how Buffy always has to get saved by guys. In the latter, she loses her temper over Selene fainting due to not knowing her limits despite being a centuries-old vampire.
  • Faux Symbolism: invoked
  • Female Gaze: Believes Dark Shadows tried to rely on this and failed. She says it was much more successfully used in Interview with the Vampire.
  • Female Misogynist: Finds Anita Blake to be this due to her insistence that Real Women Don't Wear Dresses and her general contempt for traditionally female traits.
  • First-Person Smartass: In her review of Vampire Academy, she refers to writing first-person narrators as a "quirky voice", with "voice" being a general term for writing style.
  • Fluffy Fashion Feathers: Wears a feather boa in some reviews.
  • Foil: Often discusses how this is used to explore vampirism, and Love Triangles. You've got your brooding, tortured, self-loathing brunette vampires who wish they were human again like Louis, Angel, and Vampire Bill, and then you've got your cheerful, snarky, shamelessly-relishes-being-a-vampire blond bad boys like Lestat, Spike, and Eric Northman.
  • Follow the Leader: invoked She criticizes Byzantium for essentially being a gender flipped retread of Interview with the Vampire (the film of which was, perhaps not coincidentally, made by the same director).
  • Foreign Fanservice: According to her interpretation of Guy Maddin's stage-to-screen adaptation of the Dracula ballet, Maddin sees Dracula as a symbol for Lucy's sexual awakening, who feels more drawn to the foreigner that to the proper British gentleman pursuing her romantically/sexually. This becomes an Enforced Trope, when revivals of the production cast a person of colour in the role of Dracula, while slotting white actors on the other roles, to highlight Dracula's "foreigness" and "exoticness".
  • invokedFranchise Original Sin: Remarks at the beginning of her True Blood Season 3 review that HBO tends to fall into a... particular pattern. They start each series with a large cast, but manage to keep it Three Lines, Some Waiting. However, due to never writing any characters out of the show but steadily introducing new ones over the series, it inevitably becomes Forty Lines, All Waiting.
  • Fun T-Shirt: Wore loads in the Dracula 2000 review.
  • Fur Against Fang:
  • Gateway Series:invoked
    • One of the things listed in "Top 10 Good Things About Twilight" is that as bad as the series is it did provide a gateway drug to not only other vampire fiction, but reading in general. Especially since it'll often lead to way better stories.
    • While Maven doesn't personally care for the Anita Blake series due to its Real Women Don't Wear Dresses and Questionable Consent themes, she deeply appreciates how it single-handedly defined and launched the (female-led) urban fantasy and paranormal romance genres, and inspired countless future authors and stories that she enjoys much more.
  • invoked Genius Bonus: Believes Sesame Street's the Count being cursed to count things is this as well as well as a simple pun on his name.
  • Genius Ditz: Fairly gullible and flighty, she's still genuinely good at analyzing the crap out of something.
  • Genre Shift: She half-complains, half-praises From Dusk Till Dawn for starting out as a tense thriller and then morphing into a campy vampire gorefest.
  • Girl on Girl Is Hot: When The Nostalgia Chick reviewed Cruel Intentions, Maven inserted herself into the review and attempted to recreate the infamous make out scene between Sarah Michelle Gellar and Selma Blair, Elisa even dressing up as SMG's character, under the belief the review needed a gimmick. Lindsay adamantly disagreed.
  • Gory Discretion Shot: We don't see Dan's face getting bashed in, we just see Maven and Chick beating him and the sounds of their punching.
  • Guilty Pleasures: Admits in her True Blood Season 2 review that villainous characters being irresistably drawn to the heroic lead (like Eric Northman to Sookie) is one of her all-time favorite tropes, even knowing its Questionable Consent undertones.
  • Happily Married: To Paw Dugan, complete with two children.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: In Universe, as when reviewing "The Fearless Vampire Killers", she mentions how its director and leading man Roman Polański is a felon who can never come back to America, as he would immediately be arrested after his admission to rape of a 13 year old child, while also detailing how his character, the supposed bumbling Nice Guy hero, having many, many moments of him displaying a hidden perverted nature. That's on top of the death of Pulaski's wife Sharon Tate, the film's leading lady, two years later at the hands of the Manson family while she was eight months pregnant...
    Elisa: But this is a comedy...
    (her smile quickly fades into a wince)
  • Have a Gay Old Time: For ''Carmilla. Though surprisingly not the word "queer." Apparently, "strange" used to be a British slang term for homosexual, and a few chapters in Carmilla describe a "strange love" and "strange agony." That, when combined with Carmilla's heavily implied lesbianism and her feeding on Laura having heavily erotic undertones, and Maven is pretty sure this was intentional on Le Fanu's part.
  • Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today?: Maven shuts down the Fanon theory that Laura was secretly into Carmilla but too far in the closet to realize it, since Laura herself often mentally goes out of her way to explain to the reader that she is not attracted to Carmilla that way at all. Laura even muses at one point that if Carmilla were secretly a boy disguised as a girl to get close to her, then she'd be thrilled. But if Carmilla really is a girl then she is horrified, repulsed, and can only explain her "queer" come-ons as insanity.
  • He Really Can Act:invoked Says this of Jim Carrey in Once Bitten. Before this film, he was mostly known for his impressions, and earlier script drafts called for more gags, but his acting proved so good that they weren't needed, and the film pretty much launched his acting career.
  • He Panned It, Now He Sucks!: Occasionally Invoked when she's reviewing a work with the Nostalgia Filter on. Notably, she asked Dungeons&Dragons fans to take off their "blood-colored glasses" when she reviewed I, Strahd.
  • Hoist by His Own Petard: Happens at the end of her 30 Days of Night review. During the review, she chases Linkara (who's attracted because 30 Days of Night was originally a comic) claiming that she doesn't need his expertise, which leads to the following scene: Maven boasts that she can review anything with vampires in it. Linkara challenges her to do Twilight (which she hates). When she says that it's been reviewed enough already and that she'd just be repeating what they said, he challenges her to give a positive review. She's boxed in by her statement that she could review anything with vampires in it (and Linkara prodding her along), so she does a top ten list of good things in Twilight (which is reduced to four).
  • Hollywood Homely:invoked In her Kindred: The Embraced review she snarks about how the show acts like the Nosferatu clan are all deformed monsters (like the Nosferatu they're based on), but they just look like regular humans with bald heads and big ears.
  • Honor-Related Abuse: Sees Lucy from Bram Stoker's Dracula being killed by her three repressed boyfriends and Van Helsing as this. While in-universe they're trying to keep her from feasting on children or creating other vampires, killing her for becoming a "wanton" and "voluptuous" vampire to restore her "innocence" and "purity" and rescue her immortal soul so she can get into Heaven, feels uncomfortably similar to three men murdering a woman for becoming sexually promiscuous.
  • Hipster: According to Elisa (the real one), Maven wears the clothes she does because she thinks they're cool, when really their OTT nature is supposed to be silly.
  • Hypocritical Humor: While reviewing Straight Outta Fangton, she comments on the fact that the protagonist is an enormous nerd for researching fictional vampires so studiously.
  • Idiot Plot: invoked Maven blasts the plot of the original Carmilla for hinging on Laura being too painfully sheltered, naive, clueless, and dumb to see the obvious threat Carmilla poses to her until days after Carmilla is killed.
    • Notes how "The Vampyre" hinges on the human protagonist Aubrey being too dim to see that the titular vampyre he has an obvious man crush on is bad news, then staying in the scary woods after dark against the local villagers' warnings.
  • I Knew It!invoked: In her playthrough of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, she cops quite soon that Jeannette and Therese are one person with dissociative personality disorder.
  • Info Dump: States this to be the Fatal Flaw of Vampire Academy film, despite being so loyal to the book. The book has a lot of lore too, but cleverly and interestingly weaves it into the plot. The film... doesn't.
  • Informed Attribute:
    • Notes in her Blade II review that while vampires are supposedly Always Chaotic Evil monsters and a threat to humanity, in both movies we only ever see them wanting to party amongst themselves or find a niche place in the fringes of human society (whether organized crime like the mafia vampires in the first film, or the wild party scene in the second film), and some even show more emotional depth and attachments to each other than Blade ever shows for anyone, so she fails to see why they all deserve to be killed.
    • Skewers Once Bitten for positing that teenagers are supposedly having sex younger instead of waiting for marriage like they used to back in the good old days, so it's so hard for the Countess to find an 18-year-old virgin to drink from... even though teens used to get married much younger... and the five main human characters are all 18-year-old virgins...
    Maven: Yeaaah, this doesn't hold up to scrutiny at all...
    • In her Anita Blake review, Maven discusses how Laurell K. Hamilton wanted to write a female character who got to do all the morally questionable things that male characters got to do: drink, smoke, curse, have casual sex, and even kill without feeling guilty. Maven notes that aside from the vampire-slaying, Anita doesn't do any of these things. (At least, not in the first book.) Far from it, she's chaste, faithful, prays over meals, and judges people who do these things (especially other women, ironically), making her come across as more of a self-righteous goody-goody.
    • Aubrey from "The Vampyre" is described as an Idle Rich Upper-Class Twit with no skills or talents, but he's later shown to be multilingual, a good amateur archeologist, and a decent sketch artist.
    • "Laura is a very smart girl," which the narrator tells us at the beginning, but we see no evidence of since Laura keeps dismissing or ignoring all the obvious red flags that Carmilla displays.
  • Informed Wrongness: invoked Notes that Polidori expects readers of "The Vampyre" to take the titular vampyre's womanizing and gambling as signs that he's pure evil. Except that, apart from being a literal blood-drinking monster, the only two things he does "wrong" before The Reveal is cause women he comes into contact with to "act slutty" (which comes off as Slut-Shaming by today's standards), and while he robs people blind at the card table, Maven notes there's no evidence that he forced them to gamble their entire fortunes in the first place. (Though, given that Polidori drank and gambled himself into an early grave because he blamed Lord Byron for his life's problems, it could be projecting on Polidori's part...)
  • Inherent in the System: In Daybreakers, vampires have over-converted humanity so there aren't physically enough humans to produce enough blood to sustain the global vampire population, and large corporations put the onus on consumers to ration blood during the crisis. But this isn't a sustainable solution because drinking too little blood causes vampires to degenerate into feral, animalistic, ravenous monsters that have to be put down. The film makes it clear they have to change the system from the ground up, but this is easier said than done because it's too easy for consumers to turn a blind eye to how their blood is aquired, and for large-scale corporations to sabotage attempts to revitalize humanity.
  • Innocent Fanservice Girl: She doesn't realize the appeal of spy catsuits, opera gloves, low cut dresses and corsets. Elisa in real life, of course, knows exactly how they affect her audience.
  • Internalized Categorism:
    • Discusses how brooding, tortured, self-loathing, brunette heartthrobs who wish to be human again like Louis, Angel, and Vampire Bill can make them sympathetic to the audience due to being Pro-Human Transhuman, since vampires have always symbolized outcasts and many audience members personally relate to vampires for being "different," seeing a self-loathing outcast desperately wish to be "normal" can feel like a bummer.
    • Averted with the Kitty Norville series. While one of Kitty's defining characteristics is hating her werewolfism, allying with werewolf hunters, and blaming her werewolfism for ruining her "normal" life, Maven has no issue with it and deems it one of the few werewolf series she can actually enjoy.
  • Intoxication Ensues: The entire point of the Vampire Wine and Vampire Beverages reviews. Part of the humor is when Elisa and Nella get at least a little intoxicated for real. It's much-much funnier than the scripted faux intoxication scene later.
  • Ironic Echo: Critic's arrival in Monster Mash to his entrance in The Wiz two years earlier. Same con, same room, same being confused with the Nerd. Only difference being instead of happy obliviousness to the last thing, he killed a little girl for it.
  • Irony: Elisa blasts Tim Burton and Johnny Depp for making their version of Barnabas into an unrepentent murderer, yet expect audiences to forgive him because of how nice he is about it. Yet, she does the same thing in a different review when she gushes about how Viago from What We Do in the Shadows is an unrepentent, blood-sucking murderer, but he's just so nice about it that she can't help but forgive him.
  • It's Personal: Her review of Hotel Transylvania 2, since Elisa became a mother between her review of the first movie and the second one. She takes personal umbrage with a family film glorifying an elitist bigot of a grandpa who undermines his daughter's parenting and pushes his grandson to be what he wants him to be and gets rewarded for it at the end.
  • Large Ham: Deliberately done when she is in full Maven mode.
  • Lesbian Vampire: Has an interesting relationship with this trope as she's quite fond of the Carmilla series and when this trope is used for serious relationships. She's very bored and uninterested in it when it is used as an excuse for Fanservice.
  • Let's Play: At the request of Patreon backers, she does a LP of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines with Paw riding shotgun.
  • Life Imitates Art: invoked Tragically, Elisa argues this to be the case for 2009's Daybreakers In-universe, by 2019 vampires have quickly taken over the world, forced "native" humans to assimilate or be arrested, imprisoned, and harvested as factory-farmed blood donors to feed the rich. But rampant mass-consumption has caused vampires to quickly squander the very natural resources they need to survive and are on the verge of self-inflicted extinction. But rather than address this hard reality, vampire consumers remain willfully ignorant of their destructive lifestyle, and large-scale corporations actively sabotage reform efforts and place the onus on consumers to ration the blood they buy so they themselves can turn a short-term profit by price-gouging an ever-dwindling resource even knowing in the long-term it'll spell their species doom. Now, in the real 2019, are we talking about vampires? Or the immigration/refugee crisis, the widening gap between rich and poor, horrific factory-farming and humans rights violations in vegetarian farming, and—oh yeah—climate change??
  • Loser Protagonist: Maven is a melodramatic, unemployed vampire wannabe who bums off her roommate Lindsey. Need we say more?
  • Lost Aesop:
    • Maven can't tell whether Hotel Transylvania 2 humans are the "norm" and monsters are the "other," or whether monsters are the privileged elite and humans are the undesirable "other," and since it keeps flip-flopping so much over whether Denis would be part of the shunned minority if he was a human or a vampire, by the time he's revealed to be fully vampire she has no idea what the audience is supposed to take away from it.
    • Happens again for The '80s film Once Bitten. The film sometimes virgin-shames the male lead (played by Jim Carrey) for being such a loser that he can't get laid, but sometimes slut-shames and "punishes" him for trying to lose his virginity with a sexy vampire lady. So when movie's conflict is resolved by Jim Carrey and his formerly reluctant girlfriend doing it, Maven has no idea what to take away from it.
      Maven: Which is it, movie? Are you sex-positive or not?!
    • She discusses a stage play adaptation of Carmilla where the enemies are made into Nazis but they keep Carmilla as a murderous vampire. As such, she has no one idea what to make of it as both sides are Evil Versus Evil but the play expects you to side with the heroine.
  • Loved I Not Honor More: Was interested in a minor character detail of Straight Outta Fangton that a character cursed to never love or be loved is actually uninteresting to vampires. The Kiss of the Vampire is so tied to sex and love in the book that it means he's not suitable as food.
  • Mad Libs Catchphrase: Her Signing Off Catchphrase always ends with "I am ze Maven of ze Eventide, and..." followed by parting thoughts or gags pertaining to the episode.
  • Madonna-Whore Complex: Irritably points out that numerous Dracula adaptations do this to Mina and Lucy, when the original novel didn't. The 30s version makes Lucy into a proto-Goth with a fondness for dark things, while Mina becomes a conservative Distressed Damsel. The 70s Frank Langella does the opposite - with Lucy as the Shrinking Violet and Mina as the outspoken sexually liberated one (which she points out is at least a bit more progressive). Bram Stoker's Dracula meanwhile makes Mina more of an obvious Final Girl, and Lucy into a Really Gets Around flirt. She backtracks on the latter when reviewing the film proper, offering an interpretation that Mina envies Lucy for being more sexually liberated.
  • Male Gaze:
    • She's a little confused as to why Salma Hayek needed to do a sexy bikini dance when all the humans were trapped in the bar already.
    • The Hunger. Maven is very disappointed that an otherwise progressive portrayal of two bisexual women engaging in consensual intercourse filmed in The '80s is undermined by the sex scene itself.
      Maven: If the camera would just let us see these fabulous actors' faces... But those damn curtains are in the way, because apparently the film thought the audience wanted to feel like Peeping Toms instead of connecting to the characters' feelings.
  • Manchild: How she sees Adam Sandler's characters, and the young vampire men in The Lost Boys.
  • Meaningful Name:
    • Maven means "a trusted expert in a particular field, who seeks to pass knowledge on to others." In this case, that field is vampires.
    • Also Morty (her travel skull). Mort is French for dead (and the root word for words such as mortician).
    • Maven snarks about this for The Lost Boys review, since most of the names are so subtle they'll hit you like a hammer.
  • Men Are the Expendable Gender: Discussed in her Vlog of Underworld: Awakening; she theorizes that the main character is supposed to be sympathetic and ass-kicking because she kills only men, and not other women.
  • Misplaced Retribution: In her Lucy Westenra review, she is horrified by the 2014 BBC Dracula show for having Dracula find out that Jonathan Harker cheated on Mina with her best friend, but instead of being enraged with him for his betrayal, his first reaction is "That bitch!" and a rush to punish Lucy (who is also lesbian in this version, and deeply regrets her actions soon after). Elisa is glad the series was never revived for a second season.
  • Monster Mash: Absolutely adores these, and discusses them in her Hotel Transylvania and Monster Mash reviews.
  • Ms. Fanservice:
    • Albeit one who doesn't know that the clothes she wears are sexy. Her persona is this in general to suitably inclined geeks with her Perky Goth persona, corsets, redhair, and dazzling smile.
    • Elisa also complains of the omnipresence of this regarding vampires while doing a list of female ones, stating that they're mostly only used for cleavage instead of horror.
  • Newer Than They Think: In her "Read-Through" of "The Vampyre," she snarks that in a lot of vampire literature local peasant character will claim they have these ancient folk beliefs about vampires, and then describe new vampire features that the author just made up for the book. If the story is enduring, then through Pop Culture Osmosis future audiences end up believing the described vampire features really were "ancient" folk beliefs when in Real Life, they weren't. (See Polidori writing vampires as pale aristocratic types rather than ruddy peasants, or ''Nosferatu burning up in the sun...)
  • Nightmare Fetishist: Her obsession for vampires is why she's doing the show in the first place.
  • No Name Given: Rips into Once Bitten for not even giving "The Countess" a name despite propping her up as Ms Fan Service.
  • Not Distracted by the Sexy: Blood: The Last Vampire's gorgeous animation isn't enough to distract Maven from the fact that it lacks any kind of story, plot, or characterization.
  • The Not-Love Interest: Kind of loves that the filmmakers didn't make Karen into Blade's Love Interest, since so few Hollywood movies refrain from shoehorning the lead male and female heroes together.
  • Not a Morning Person: Being a wannabe vampire and all, she's almost totally nocturnal.
  • "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: She doesn't particularly relish having to say she's serious when she notes that film!Buffy had period pains as a spidey sense.
  • Of Corsets Sexy: She wears some nice corsets.
  • Once per Episode: Her viewers always begin with her opening catchphrase and some kind of gag, then the opening theme song. Similarly, each episode ends with her Signing Off Catchphrase, followed by last-minute thoughts or gags regarding the episode, then the closing credits.
  • Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping:
    • Speaks in florid Vampire Vords when she remembers to, but she can never keep it up for long. Elisa says Maven wishes she had Bidialectical Disorder.
    • Exaggerated in her Hellsing vampire review, where she does the opening greeting in Japanese with a Vampire Vords accent. Based on the YouTube comments, most viewers will thank her never to do that again.
  • Out-of-Character Moment: Rips into Once Bitten for basing its entire movie off this.
    Robin: I can't believe you're willing to throw away our relationship on a chauffer and a butler and a slut who eats buttons!
    Maven: I can't believe it either. Nothing in Mark's character shows me that he would do that, buuut it's the entire premise of the film, so it's gotta happen. And Jim Carrey's sweet sinerety hurts more than helps in this case. If he's just so nice, and innocent, and clueless, then why is this the first time in four years that he'd make a mistake like this? It doesn't add up.
  • O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Maven usually puts on a very hammy, melodramatic affect. In her Daybreakers review, she keeps the affect to a minimum (due to the serious reality subtext the film is dealing with) and implores the viewer to please go out and vote to stop climate change before we're all doomed.
  • Orgasmically Delicious: Maven enjoys her Count Chocula cereal but doesn't go overboard. Critic, on the other hand, flutters his eyes and practically commits oral on his spoon. As you might expect, the camera focuses on him more.
  • ...Or So I Heard:
    • Todd said that Nu Metal fans probably moved into Fall Out Boy. Maven agrees before going "...not that I would know that."
    • In the Once Bitten episode she briefly touches on the Vampire Vannabe...not that she has any experience with that.
  • Our Vampires Are Different: Invoked in her Kindred: The Embraced review and points at the show's lack of clear distinction between the different clans, one of the things that made the original tabletop succeed in the first place, as one of the reasons why the show failed (Apparently, her vampires are green, only drink the bood of millionaires—symbolizing the inherent vampirism of classism—and they're immune to crosses, but weak against credit cards... so deep...)
  • Out with a Bang: Comes up a lot in her reviews since a lot of vampire media uses vampirism to symbolize sexual awakenings, promiscuity, (or, more darkly, rape), and the "corrupted" mortal (usually a woman) often being killed off for it.
  • Perky Goth: Maven is this to a T. She is cheerful, happy, vampire-obsessed, Goth obsessed, and just so enthusiastic about the undead. She's also a great mother (who wants her child to appreciate Interview with the Vampire at age 1).
  • Pet-Peeve Trope: The trope she really seems to loathe is the All-Loving Hero / Messianic Archetype.
  • Pride: Rejects Linkara's offer of a crossover and tells him that she's perfectly able to review "anything about vampires, in any way" by herself. To her distress, she walks right into a challenge to review Twilight in a positive way.
  • Pro-Human Transhuman: Discusses the ups and downs of this trope in a number of reviews, especially True Blood and The Little Vampire movie. On the one hand, it can make vampires tragic and sympathetic since they still like humans after becoming creatures that feed on them. On the other hand, it can carry some Unfortunate Implications since vampires have always been coded after outcasts, so the implication is that it's okay to be different only as long as you're self-loathing and wish you were normal.
  • Questionable Consent: Believes True Blood Season 2 is all about exploring this trope. The maenad removes Bon Temps' inhibitions so they commit acts of sexual indulgence and violence in a geas. Eric Northman manipulates Sookie into drinking his blood so she'll become attracted to him against her will. Arlene at one point worries that she forced herself on Terry (she didn't, but it's still discussed). Barry the Bellhop discusses the inherent power imbalance in any human and vampire relationship, forcing Sookie to question just how consensual her relationship with Vampire Bill is and if its' really any better than her Mind Game Ship with Eric Northman, etc.
  • invokedReality Subtext:
    • Argues that what makes Fright Night (1985) memorable (if instantly dated) is how it served as a meta commentary on the changing state of the horror and vampire genres in the The '80s. Dracula-style vampires in dusty Gothic castles were cheesy and old-fashioned, while modern suburban slasher and psychological thrillers were in. Therefore, the story centers around a fan of and a washed up old actor for classic Gothic vampire genre having to adapt their vampire knowledge to combat a new kind of vampire threat who blends in with modern suburbia as "the serial killer next door"... much like how the filmmakers had to adapt classic vampire tropes for then-modern suburban sensibilities.
    • Due to being stuck in Development Hell for 9 years, What We Do in the Shadows had to incorporate changing social attitudes about vampires into the script, due to the rise of The Twilight Saga, the Vampires Are Sex Gods craze it sparked, its backlash, and vampire burnout society experienced between 2005 and 2014. She argues that it makes the film stronger since the post-Twilight vampire craze gave it so many more popular tropes to satirize and comment on, and a much more poignant Deconstructive Parody about how vampirism would not be as glamorous as people think. She concludes that the vampires themselves are as burned out from their own hype as society was by the time of the film's release.
    • Bunnicula was written by a closeted gay man and his Jewish wife, who both felt like outsiders their whole lives, and who subconsciously wrote a humorous children's story about a vampire bunny who is adopted by a "normal" white suburban family and is suspected of being dangerous at first, but is accepted by the end.
    • In her The Vampire Lestat reviews, Elisa discusses how Anne Rice's emotional struggles unintentionally showed through in her writing. While writing Interview with the Vampire, she was subconsciously working through the grief of losing her young daughter, and grappling with her deeply Catholic upbringing. Likewise, she wrote The Vampire Lestat during a period in her life where she rejected Catholocism, returned to it, then rejected it again, as Lestat grapples with philosophical and existential debates about "What is goodness and meaning without God?"
    • Daybreakers came out during the then-topical fossil fuel shortage in the US that had many people talk about switching to alternative fuel sources, and being sore with Big Oil companies for sabotaging this in favor of keeping people dependent on fossil fuels so they can turn a short-term profit. (Much like how in the movie, vampires are running out of human blood to sustain themselves and large corporations actively sabotage efforts to reverse this because the status quo makes them a short-term profit). Unfortunately, now it can be seen as applicable to climate change, and First World humans' continued refusal to meaningfully combat it.
    • "The Vampyre": According to Maven, Polidori was Lord Byron's physician and "frienemy," trailing on his coattails yet hating his guts and resenting his fame. So, Polidori decided to write a short story that, in his mind, would expose Byron's sinful character to high society and be so successful that Polidori would surpass him in fame. The story is about a young noble who becomes the companion of the titular vampyre (who is sooo not Lord Byron), becomes disillusioned when he learns what an evil cad he is, then is slowly driven mad from his inability to warn high society of the The Vampyre's true nature and dies tragically young after the Vampyre destroys his life. Polidori himself couldn't get over his own perceived inability to "reveal" how wicked Lord Byron really was to high society (they knew, they just didn't care), and was so depressed that he could never surpass Lord Byron that Polidori drank himself into an early grave at age 25.
  • Real Women Don't Wear Dresses:
  • Red Shirt: So, let's say you're trying to adapt a classic vampire story (especially Bram Stoker's Dracula, Carmilla, or Barnabas) and you want to make the vampire a romantic hero this time, while still keeping their Serial Killer tendencies from the original story. How to make them sympathetic? Why, just have them kill off a bunch of characters the audience doesn't personally know or care about! That'll keep them sympathetic.
  • Reluctant Vampire: Discusses the trope by name when discussing Dracula's Daughter and Carmilla in her "Top Ten Female Vampires" review.
  • Rich Bitch/The Scrooge: She's a snob who owns diamond necklaces, pretty dresses, and High-Class Gloves, but complains when the Chick demands rent money. Although the implication seems to be that she doesn't actually have a lot of money, she just wastes it on this stuff instead of important things. (She's still saving up for a coffin to sleep in.)
  • Romanticism Versus Enlightenment: Claims Louis and Lestat share this dynamic in The Vampire Chronicles (especially the first two books), with Lestat as the rational and godless Enlightenment to Louis' deeply Catholic Romantic.
  • Pseudo-Romantic Friendship: Not a fan of this trope when used for Queerbaiting, but loves when it genuinely explores deep, platonic bonds between female characters.
    • Loves the campy live-action remake of Blood: The Last Vampire better than the original OVA because it centers around Saya's budding friendship with the human girl Alice, and too few vampire stories feature strong friendships between women at all, let alone the emotional focus of the story.
  • Rooting for the Empire: In-Universe. While reading JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, she admitted she found Dio Brando the most sympathetic character due to his upbringing and revolutionary ideals, and was disappointed he became a Card-Carrying Villain after becoming a vampire.
  • Rule-Abiding Rebel: Snarks in her Kindred: The Embraced review that the Gangrels in the show are supposedly biker bad boys (rather than the Brujah), but the only ones we see are all loyal and obediant lap dogs to the Ventrue.
  • Rule of Cool: Maven admits that Hellsing and The Lost Boys pretty much run on this trope. Not that it hurts their enjoyability whatsoever. She feels this trope was less effective for Underworld (2003), though.
  • Rule of Symbolism: Maven admits that The Moth Diaries throws every bit of symbolism into scenes they can, but they enjoy themselves so much so she didn't get annoyed with it.
  • Running Gag: During her Carmilla Read-Through, Maven chirps, "Laura is a very smart girl," every time Laura ignores or dismisses an obvious red flag of Carmilla's true nature.
  • Sex Is Evil: NOT a fan of this trope, and tends to come down hard on vampire media that plays it straight.
  • Shallow Parody: invoked
  • Shared Universe: Because of the cameos, Maven's part of the Reviewaverse.
  • Ship Tease: Maven asks herself in “Monster Mash” why she keeps going over to Moarte's crypt.
  • Show, Don't Tell: Maven’s review of Underworld (2003) praises the convoluted Backstory of centuries of drama, passion, betrayal and murder, but notes it only comes up in exposition.
  • The Slacker: She owes the Chick a lot of rent, but doesn't want to find a job because nothing hires at night. Which in New York City is a Blatant Lie.
  • Slobs vs. Snobs: How the Fur Against Fang debate is depicted in Underworld (2003). Vampires party in a Decadent Court while "Lycans" enjoy drinking cheap booze and pit fighting in a filthy sewer.
  • Slut-Shaming: Not a fan of vampire media that uses vampirism to symbolically "punish" sexually liberated characters, particularly female characters.
  • Something about a Rose:
    • Maven holds a red rose in the Underworld review to make herself look all mysterious and cool.
    • She also gives Todd a black rose in Queen of the Damned.
  • Speak of the Devil: In her Count Chocula review, saying "Nostalgia" three times summons The Nostalgia Critic, a la Beetlejuice.
  • Spell My Name with a "The": "Good eeeevening. I am ze Maven of ze Eventide, velcome."
  • Spoiled Sweet: Her description of Lucy from the Dracula mythos, even comparing her to the trope picture Charlotte "Lottie" LaBouff. She describes how Lucy is a beautiful and wealthy aristocrat, yet rather than being a Rich Bitch and a Spoiled Brat she's a very sweet, caring, and loyal friend to the middle class Mina and equally caring to all of her suitors.
  • Spotlight-Stealing Squad: Finds Adam Sandler's Dracula to be this in the Hotel Transylvania movie series.
  • Status Quo Is God: Notes that Blade is never allowed to change or grow in any of the sequels or spin-offs. The second film even brings his mentor/father figure back from the dead so Blade can continue business as usual.
  • Sturgeon's Law: Maven fully admits that most vampire fiction is schlock, so when it comes to quality she'll take what she can get.
  • Take That!: Has one with Todd in the Shadows at the entire genre of Nu Metal. Basically, their review of Queen of the Damned devotes a considerable amount of time to the fact that Lestat's world changing musical persona is undercut by the fact that he's playing in a genre which they consider faddish at best, and was already going out of fashion when the movie was released (Todd even believes that 2002 was the last year it could have been released). They also point out that Anne Rice set it up so Lestat's musical persona was based on rock legend Jim Morrison so the switch to using Korn is a big step down. Which isn't even necessarily an insult to Korn so much as Big Shoes to Fill.
  • There Was a Door: Variation in her review of Underworld, when Selene shoots her way through the floor to catch up with her love interest, who's taken the elevator. Maven points out she could have just taken the stairs.
    Maven: Selene? Th-there was a door to the stairs right there, and it's only one flight down, and those are silver bullets too! Do you know how soft those are?"
  • They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: Remarks that the original Fright Night (1985) is effective because it moved the horror of vampires away from the B-Movie aesthetic that had dominated (and stagnated) the genre before it, and made Jerry into "the serial killer next door." Affable, ordinary-looking, and the last person anyone would believe is a vampire.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: In-Universe, she feels this way about Mavis from the Hotel Transylvania movies, especially Hotel Transylvania 2 where the story shifts from the Monster Mash premise into a private family matter. But rather than exploring Mavis' feelings of wanting to see the world, falling in love with a human, being in a mixed marriage, or raising her biracial son (all against her father's wishes), the movies focus on giving Adam Sandler and his buddies big fat paychecks.
    • She also feels this way about Max the head vampire from The Lost Boys. Two of her favorites tropes are the Tragic Monster who struggles with morality, and the Villainous Crush on a main character, so both would have been perfect to explore here. However, Maven notes that he's just kind of there and doesn't seem that into Lucy apart from seeing her as a potential mother for his boys, then gets killed off shortly after The Reveal, so it was all wasted potential.
    • She feels that Blade as a character is pretty underdeveloped and under-explored franchise-wide, due to the writers wanting him to remain strictly a Rule of Cool Brooding Loner Escapist Character, rather than a flawed and dynamic character who learns, grows, and changes over installments.
  • invokedThey Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
    • This is her assessment of Hotel Transylvania, particularly for having No Antagonist.
    • She felt Blade II had the potential to explore the vampire's POV since Blade teams up with a group of them, and even challenge Blade's belief that they're Always Chaotic Evil since his Love Interest hints that he's their boogie man and is sympathetic herself—but nope! Everyone's a Flat Character except Blade, all the vampire characters are killed off, and Blade continues his one-man war against all vampires without any character growth or insight.
  • Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: invoked One of her main criticisms of Modern Vampires is that, other than the protagonist Dallas who's ultimately presented as powerless to change the system, everybody in the movie, both human and vampire alike, is a monster.
  • Too Dumb to Live: Laura from the original Carmilla, whom Maven states was so dim she doesn't make the connection that the vampire who killed Spielsdorf's niece, drains local peasant women, and causes her own anemia could possibly be her friend - against all evidence - until after Carmilla's death.
    Maven: In order to keep up Laura's serious case of the "Not-Gays," the novel has to lay it on reeeally thick with her naivete. Spielsdorf tells his whole story about his niece dying that's almost exactly the same with what's happening with Laura, but Laura is so clueless that she doesn't connect it to Carmilla. Even when she sees Carmilla act all vampire-y at the end and disappears, she still doesn't get it. The author makes Laura sooo dumb to try to keep the reader in suspense and worry that Laura remains in danger of falling prey to her cluelessness.
    • Aubrey from "The Vampyre," showing 19th century Gothic Horror protagonists have always been this way. He similarly refuses to believe local folklore about vampires, promises to at least return from the scary woods before nightfall, doesn't, and is predictably attacked by a vampire. (She argues even if he didn't believe local "superstition," staying out in a forest after dark isn't a good idea anyway.)
  • Top Ten List:
    • One of them of positive things about Twilight... which is reduced to just 4 as Elisa isn't that generous.
    • She later does one with female vampires. Which limited to both one per franchise "because two would dominate" and visual media (which hurt Carmilla due to inferior adaptations).
  • Tragic Monster: This is Elisa's favorite type of vampire.
    • She points out it's why she loves What We Do in the Shadows because while the protagonists are all evil, they're still cursed and humanized people suffering under a dreadful curse.
    • She notes this is a largely unexplored element of Hellsing as while Alucard is the embodiment of Rule of Cool mixed with an Escapist Character, he is also a figure who is suffering from a curse that makes him a Death Seeker.
    • She finds the original Carmilla the most tragic and complex version, since she is repulsed by death and yet her very nature requires her to take others' lives to further her own existence, and she tries so desperately to rationalize it, fails, and is eternally miserable as a result.
    • Subverted by Dark Shadows in that she doesn't find Barnabus or his situation tragic at all despite the film playing him that way.
  • Transhuman: Dark Shadows gives her the power of hypnotism. It doesn't work on Chick the first time (for reasons you can guess), but it does the second until she gets hit on the head with a beer bottle.
  • True Blue Femininity: Notes in her list of top female vampires, that it's refreshing to see that trope once in a while.
  • Two Decades Behind: She and Todd go on that the book of Queen of the Damned, it made sense for Lestat becoming a rock star considering how influential the genre was in The '80s. Not so much in 2002, especially using Nu Metal like the movie did.
  • Unbuilt Trope: Discussed in her Top Ten Female Vampires list: Carmilla from The Vampire Lovers is a complex and interesting character, but the film fetishizes her status as a Lesbian Vampire, which helped lead to future female vampires being portrayed little more than murderous sex fiends. Also on the list is Countess Marya Zaleska from Dracula's Daughter, a well-rounded and less sexualized character from all the way back in 1936.
    • Discussed again in her read-through of Polidori's "The Vampyre," as while it was the Trope Codifier for the modern vampire as we know it (pale aristocratic types rather than ruddy peasants), it also predates a lot of the common vampire tropes we've come to expect, so you see things like vampires leaving teeth marks but not having fangs, going out into daylight without problem, apparently being able to be killed from a regular bullet wound to the shoulder (where there are no organs), and vampires being able to take on fake identities that aren't just anagrams of their birth names (like Carmilla and Dracula do).
    • Notes that Interview with the Vampire was the first urban fantasy as we know it. It depicted this idea that there's a secret underworld of vampires (and other folk creatures) who always hid in plain sight among humans well into our modern world, but have their own secret laws and societies that uphold the masquerade from the shadows. While the Victorian Gothic genre had vampires fitting in and preying upon polite society (Polidori's The Vampyre, Le Fanu's Carmilla, and Bram Stoker's Dracula), those vampires were depicted as solitary creatures or clans who didn't bother to hide their existence from peasants (whom they fed on), and who blended in with upper class society as a means to an end (to hunt the nobility) and the British upper crust were too proud to believe these silly folk superstitions were real; not because the vampires were part of an underground society who actively hid their existence from humans while hiding among them in plain sight. She further notes that Interview is much more literary than the more casual popular fiction genre as we know it, since the Anita Blake series defined the genre as we know it today.
  • Uncanny Valley Make Up: If her amount of eyeshadow gets any bigger it'll have its own credit.
  • invoked Uncertain Audience: Has discussed how this has hurt vampire media's critical success more than once.
    • Kindred: The Embraced: Tried too hard to appeal to mainstream 90s audiences and thus alienated the Vampire: The Masquerade fanbase it was based on. Then it played up the macho "mafia vs cops" aesthetic that scared off female viewers, yet included too much schmaltzy Soap Opera stories (and vampire stuff) to interest adult male audiences. Maven notes the showrunners seemed to realize this and quickly switched the Audience Surrogate character to a female reporter rather than the male detective of the pilot, but it was too litle, too late and the series was unceremoniously canceled after just eight episodes.
    • Fright Night (2011): Notes that the remake came out in the midst of the Twilight backlash and was meant to harken back to the classic 1980s horror vampire that the anti-Twilight crowd yearned for. Yet, the film's marketing sold it as another soft, sensitive Twilight knock-off. The result was that the Twilight-hating crowd avoided it in disgust, while the few Twilight fans who went to see it were rightly ticked by the Bait-and-Switch.
  • Unfortunate Implications: invoked
    • Discussed in her review of Let the Right One In, given that the seemingly female Eli is revealed to be a boy whose genitals were mutilated by his sire and forced to pass as a girl. Maven tries to give the author credit for probably not doing this intentionally, but it nonetheless encourages the harmful "trans women are just gay men in dresses out to trick straight men into having sex with them" stereotype; not helped by Eli being a literal blood-sucking monster who ravages the victims she tricks into trusting her.
    • In her Blade II review, she remarks that vampires in both movies are never really seen hurting humanity at large (first movie vampire mafia antics aside, but even then they were working alongside human crime lords), but just partying amongst themselves. The second movie especially plays down their violent-to-humans antics but plays up their "debaucerous" lifestyle (drug rave parties, fetishes, tattoos, etc.) which implies that they deserve to die because "they're all slutty and wild."
    • Likewise, discusses how Blade: The Series reduces Blade, one of mainstream media's few black characters, into a flat side character and gives all the drama, conflict, and story to two white characters (his fledgling and the series' Big Bad).
    • Discussed in her Lucy Westenra review. No matter how you slice it, tons of Dracula adaptations having two named female characters who serve as foils for each other, where one dies early on and the other becomes the Final Girl, says a lot about what type of girl "deserves" to survive. (Especially since the Final Girl always embodies feminine traits her society approves of, while the Lucy character always embodies less socially acceptable traits for a woman of her time.) Especially since the original book didn't paint either as being more deserving to survive; as she points out, book Lucy's death is the ultimate tragedy because of what a Nice Girl she is, and merely symbolizes the fading of the aristocracy.
    • Probably goes without saying that Carmilla is very lesbophobic by today's standards. To slip a Lesbian Vampire story past the Moral Guardians, LeFanu had to depict Carmilla's love for Laura as toxic, predatory, and destructive, and kill her off for it. Laura, in turn, was given a strong case of Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today? and constantly internally insists she sees Carmilla as Just Friends.
  • invoked Unintentionally Sympathetic: Believes this about the villain of The Lair of the White Worm where she is given all the best lines, a sympathetic backstory, and is just fabulous in all ways—except for being a murderous psychopathic rapist.
  • invoked Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
    • Has this opinion of Barnabus Collins in Dark Shadows where she indicates despite his The Woobie status being invoked, he's actually an enormous prick who murders innocent people left and right while expecting the audience's sympathy.
    • The protagonist of Once Bitten is a cheating asshole who is pressuring his girlfriend into sex, yet he's the protagonist?
    • Finds Blade in Blade II to be not so different from the supposed Always Chaotic Evil vampires of his setting, but since they're only ever shown wanting to party amongst themselves while he wants to hunt them to extinction just by virtue of their race... well.
    • Finds Laura from the original Carmilla novella to be Too Dumb to Live, let alone to find sympathetic or relatable.
    • Finds Carmilla from the stage play to be this (despite Spielsdorf being changed to a literal pedophilic Nazi) because she is still a Serial Killer of human girls, but now without her Reluctant Monster anguish from the novella.
    • Notes how Polidori tries to show how evil the titular vampyre is by having him allow card-sharps to win while robbing "good" gamblers blind at the card table, and expects the reader to sympathize with all the poor men who gambled their entire fortunes and estates away and now they and their children are destitute. She notes that the vampyre didn't force any of them to bet anything.
      Maven: Never gamble anything you aren't prepared to lose.
  • Unintentional Period Piece:invoked In her words, The Lost Boys, Fright Night (1985), and Once Bitten are "sooo 80's."
  • Unsportsmanlike Gloating: invoked Vampires are more popular than werewolves, and she won't let werewolf fans forget it.
  • Values Dissonance: invoked There've been about two centuries of mainstream vampire media to review (not counting centuries of drooling corpses in Eastern European folklore before Polidori's "The Vampyre" in 1819), and a number of Vampire Trope Codifiers were developed in Victorian Britain literature and early 20th century Hollywood cinema, so you'd better believe this trope comes up a lot.
    • In her Vampire Read-Through of Carmilla, Elisa has a field day snarking at all the outdated Victorian British values: The belief that servants don't really count as people, the Scary Black Woman trope, the "foreign and exotic = scary and dangerous" trope, the firm belief that Beauty Equals Goodness, Carmilla being portrayed as a Psycho Lesbian, the human characters all being Too Dumb to Live yet the reader is still supposed to identify with and root for them... The straight white male characters all slaughtering a woman for the crime of being gay and hitting on their women...
  • Values Resonance:invoked Despite being a children's book written in The '70s, Bunnicula has an enduring message. Chester the cat assumes the titular bunny is a literal vampire and thus a threat to everyone. You expect The Reveal to be that Bunnicula isn't a vampire and Chester should feel ashamed of assuming he is based on his appearance, right? Actually, no: Bunnicula is a vampire, but harmless since he only sucks the juice from vegetables. The lesson is not "Don't assume someone who looks different is different," but rather "Just because someone is different doesn't mean they're dangerous or deserve to be shunned." It's definitely a value that resonates (and needs to be stated) more in The New '10s than the The '70s...
    • Daybreakers, which doubles as a case of Life Imitates Art. 20MinutesIntoTheFuture of 2019, The Beautiful Elite vampires have taken over the world, forced humans to "assimilate" to vampirism, and those who resisted assimilation are arrested, imprisoned, and farmed for their blood to sustain the wealthy. However, vampires have squandered the very natural resources they need to survive and are on the verge of self-inflicted extinction, but rather than confront this grim reality, consumers turn a blind eye to how their blood is aquired, and large for-profit corporations place the onus on consumers to ration the blood they buy so they themselves can turn a short-term profit by price-gouging the rising demand for an ever-decreasing resource, even knowing in the long run it'll doom the species. Maven points out how in 2009 audiences thought the movie was about the then-fossil fuel shortage, but in 2019 one can easily draw parrallels to climate change, and first world humanity's continued refusal to do anything about it.
  • Vampires Are Sex Gods: Frequently Discussed as she mentions vampires are characters which can be used to tackle issues of sexism, homophobia, and the status of outsiders while also being used against those kind of individuals.
  • Vampire Vannabe: Her entire schtick. Taken to the next level in the Vampire Wine review.
  • Vampire Vords: Lapsed into and out of, but always used in her intro:
    "Good eeeevenink! I am ze Maven of ze Eventide, and velcome to Vampire Reviewz! ...bleh!"
  • Villainous Crush: Admits in The Lost Boys and True Blood Season 2 review that this is one of her all-time favorite tropes. Especially when a "villainous" vampire becomes irresistably attracted to a "good" human, like Eric Northman to Sookie in True Blood.
  • War Is Hell: Argues that Blood: The Last Vampire and its many spinoffs use vampirism to explore this theme.
  • Weak-Willed: She's incredibly gullible when it comes to what heroes (or anti-heroes) do in movies, always trying them in real life.
  • Werewolf Theme Naming: Assumes this (incorrectly) about Lupa.
  • What Do You Mean, It's Not Didactic?: Invoked. Maven makes good on her promise that she'll make From Dusk Till Dawn blow your mind.
  • invoked What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?:
    • Averted. Elisa does a lot of material which is related to classist, feminist, racial, and otherwise political topics related to vampirism.
    • Discusses the political underpinnings of both the book and movie version of The Lair of the White Worm. Basically, that the rich nobility are literally feeding off the poor in order to sustain themselves and their evil god.
  • What Measure Is a Mook?:
    • Suspects this to be the reason Selene is supposed to be sympathetic in all Film/Underworld films. She slaughters dozens without remorse in every fight scene, but they're just disposable video game fodder, so who cares?!
    • Takes a moment to wonder if the dozens and dozens of mooks Saya drops in every fight scene in the live-action Blood: The Last Vampire have any friends, family, loved ones, hopes, dreams, or reservations about their job since the Big Bad sent them out as disposable fodder, how they might feel seeing dozens and dozens of their friends die in front of htem as they pursue Saya and—oh wait, they're dead. Never mind.
  • What Measure Is a Non-Human?:
  • Where da White Women At?: Still carrying a torch for Blacula.
  • Wish-Fulfillment: Often discusses how vampires serve as some degree of wish-fulfillment for the audience (since vampires get to live forever and enjoy all the social and moral freedoms denied by society), although their lifestyle is often treated as repulsive by in-universe characters to appease Moral Guardians.
    • Argues that the original Carmilla and Dracula including sexually suggestive female vampires coming onto the proper English characters would have been very titilating for repressed Victorian readers, but the in-universe characters treat the vampire's sexual liberation as horrifying.
    • Likewise, argues that 80's vampire movies like The Lost Boys and Once Bitten clearly depict the vampires and their lifestyle as cool, hip, exciting, and carefree (and include an out by revealing "half-vampires" can return to normal after they have sex or kill the head vampire) that it led to the mainstream Vampire Vannabe, yet in-universe characters only ever treat vampires and their lifestyle as repulsive and horrifying.
    • Although, she comes down hard on The Little Vampire movie for being nothing but a bare-faced wish-fulfillment fantasy for kids, since the Audience Surrogate main kid gets to befriend a "cool" vampire, have some adventures, get even with his bullies, then return to normal life once the fun is over. She wouldn't mind so much if the film didn't include some Unfortunate Implicationsinvoked about discrimination or be so mean-spirited about its Revenge Fantasy.
  • Word of God:invoked Often invokes this to provide metatextual analysis of vampire media.
  • Write What You Know: invoked Elisa admits in a number of her promotional videos for her book The Company Of Death that she based a number of characters off real life friends and experiences.
  • You Keep Using That Word: While discussing The Vampire Lestate she mentions that she'd frequently seen critics of the The Vampire Chronicles series take First Installment Wins to the point of calling the rest of the series "the autor writing fan-fiction about her own characters". What they think 'fan-fiction' means is anyone's guess.
  • Yuri Fan: Oh yeah!
    • She believed Marceline and Princess Bubblegum of Adventure Time were exes long before the official reveal.
    • She is quite excited about Louis and Lestat's relationship dynamics in Interview with the Vampire.
    • She's also giddy about the Sub Text that David has an obsessive crush on Michael in The Lost Boys.
    • She interprets Aubrey's interest in "The Vampyre" as an obvious bisexual romantic crush.
    • She mentions her wish of a sequel to 1930s Dracula, in which a Vamp Lucy, who was never killed off like in most adaptations, reunites with Mina, adding in a gleeful "Yes Please!" when thinking about it.

Previous

Index

Next

  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Wide Load

Important Links

Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Go Ad Free!
Crucial Browsing
Resources
Top