S
Sunseeker
Guest
To be honest, I've never read it.
Well, if you're looking for "that one thing that totally made him go evil last Sunday!" I think that's precisely what they're trying to write out of the story. This isn't Strahd who woke up on Tuesday as a happy-go-lucky lordling and then bumped his head on the tub Friday and woke up an Evil Supervillain on Sunday (he was unconscious for 24+ hours). It's the slow descent into evil this time around. Strahd was a conquerer and his conquests became more and more depraved over time in order to fight off bigger and scarier threats until. Evil by inches. Soon Strahd was making evil pacts for more power to destroy his enemies, to control his people. No, there isn't a "sudden snap" into evil. There's a slow descent and honestly that's much much much better writing. The girl drama should be tangential.
I think, with the better writing, you're supposed to see that Strahd still had a "soft spot" for friends and family, that's why after all the evil things he'd done, his friends and family were still alive and that the "final moment" is him losing that last little shred of humanity. Which is GREAT writing. The whole time Strahd knows he probably should just kill his brother and force Tatyana to love him at sword-point, but he wants her to want him. And that sort of obsession with "true love" both drives him forward into evil and insanity and it's the realization that he can't have it that is what totally breaks him.
I'm saying it happens to everything. Ravenloft was not the most well-written story, it was a very baseline representation of "gothic horror" at the time. What we remember of old Ravenloft (the AD&D module) is more that we liked it and less its actual quality. It's actual writing quality was low. It's biggest offering was a low-magic, Victorian-set gothic horror game in a system that was typically about mid-level magical fnatasy with elves and dragons and that sort of stuff.
Much like the other things you've referenced, Romeo and Juliet is widely regarded in literary circles as poorly written. It is considered a classic in Western Literature partly because of its age, who wrote it, the fact that the English thought they were soooo superior, and that much of the literature it was stolen from (Ancient Greece/Rome) was lost or hidden away at the time. Star Wars is much the same, it's NOT well written, but its regarded as a classic because there was so little like it at the time.
I'm in the middle of reading Dracula, for example. It's a good book, but its fairly shallow. The plot is pretty obvious, it's not particularly campy but it's not exactly thrilling either. The same is true of Tolkein, he's a great storyteller, but his writing leaves much to be desired. This is basically a truism of Ravenloft as well, the story, the concept, the themes are all good, but the actual writing of that story is not. Rewriting the story, retelling it with some elements added, some removed, some changed isn't a bad thing. It's a good thing. It shows that we've learned and grown and now we're better equipped to make a better story!
But this is all very much a matter of perspective. I enjoy "living" stories. Stories that each time they're told they grow a little bit, change a little bit. Some people don't. You sound like you don't like that. That's fine. I don't think there's a whole lot more to discuss here though. I like the changes (they're not perfect, but they're IMO, an improvement); you don't, okay.
