The latest attempt to launch a multimedia franchise off the back of a videogame, Dota: Dragon’s Blood faces a few more obstacles than most.
Firstly, the game it’s based on, DOTA 2 by Valve, is itself a revision of a game mod for a completely separate game, Defense of the Ancients (DOTA), which was initially a custom game mod for Blizzard’s Warcraft 3. Secondly, as a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) type game, DOTA 2 boasts 120 playable heroes, all with their own unique designs and backstories. While this may seem like a boon to any would be screenwriter, many of these characters were not designed with long term narrative storytelling in mind outside the shared play space of the game. Some characters are updates to models from Warcraft 3, while others were just cool new things that the developers or players wanted to see.
This is why you can play as a giant spider, or a sniper, as the Monkey King from Chinese classic Journey to the West, or a guy in a steampunk helicopter, or a um… Sand King in the game.
Despite the heady prologue of Dragon’s Blood that only goes back as far as the beginning of time and the division in two of primordial thought, no ancients are actually defended in this Studio Mir produced fantasy anime. Instead, a lot of the wilder elements, and characters, and designs of DOTA are ignored in favour of a cod-medieval fantasy tale of honorable knights, mighty dragons, dastardly demons, and mysterious elves, where the main message seem to be “can’t we all just get along?”
Only after finishing the series and this, more confusing than helpful, primer on the lore, did I realize that this is a prequel to the game, rather than taking place within, or alongside, it.
A Knight’s Tale
DOTA: Dragon’s Blood primarily focuses on the in-game heroes of Davion (Yuri Lowenthal), the Dark Moon acolytes Princess Mirana (Lara Pulver) and Luna (Kari Wahlgren), how Davion became the Dragon Knight, and what all of that means. The Invoker (Troy Baker) and the God Selemene (Alix Wilton Regan) are integral to the later plot, and Terrorblade (JB Blanc) is introduced as an early antagonist before disappearing for most of the series. If those names mean nothing to you now, then they’ll mean even less to you after finishing the series.
That lore video listed above promises a world where fundamental elements and forces are represented by people and creatures, but none of this really comes across in the show, apart from a single God and a gang of elemental dragons being present. This is a world where Selemene is an actual, if extremely petty, God with the power to call in orbital laser strikes at will apparently, but with no other Gods arrayed against her, the series raises more questions than it answers. Why hasn’t she rampaged over the planet already? How come forced conversions still net her power? Her petty games with her higher level followers are also so transparent it’s a wonder the usurper hasn’t been usurped herself before now.
The main problem with DOTA: Dragons Blood, however, is that all the characters are basically iterations of the same trope.
Things Can Only Get better?
Davion is a dragon hating Dragon Knight who discovers that dragons might not be so bad after all.
Princess Minara tries to retrieve her goddess’ tokens of power but finds out her goddess might not be all that she seems.
Femryn (Freya Tingley) is an Elf who hates the Dark Moon Order, and tries to resurrect her own goddess to bring about the apocalypse, but finds out other people aren’t so bad as she thought.
Luna, a former warlord in service to Selemene finds herself falling back on her old, violent ways as she discovers her goddess might not be all that she seems.
Characters are introduced without any hints as to who they are or even their names being spoken out loud. So much so that I had to start relying on the subtitles to determine who was who. One of the most intriguing characters, Minara’s petite, nonverbal bodyguard Marci, has absolutely incredible strength but it is never explained why?
By the end of this eight episode season not much has happened apart from moving the characters around like rearranging furniture. It all feels so inessential.
The animation looks nice enough overall, despite resorting to static images a few times. There are some impressive action scenes, but it’s nothing astounding. Which also sums up the overall feel of the series.
Speaking In Tongues
I don’t know if the voice actors were being true to the game or not, but the mishmash of accents comes off as jarring. While the leads usually speak in standard Americanised English, random Scottish goddesses, Irish bar lasses, and vaguely European sounding thugs detract rather than help any real feeling of place. I have no clue where Luna is supposed to be from, but her accent seems to veer into a variety of bad Irish ones as she speaks.
On the flip-side, it is a nice, if unusual, touch to have all of Femryn’s elf family from Coedwig speak in Australian accents. Tony Todd is also great as a dragon. Of course.
Despite it’s over 18 tag, DOTA: Dragon’s Blood adheres to the Torchwood school of adult drama, in that it will throw in an utterly incongruous “fuck” now and then, along with some weirdly chaste sex scenes. “He’s Davion, the fucking Dragon Knight what killed a fucking dragon… this fucking dragon,” may be the best use of language I’ve heard this year.
Salaciously gesturing at the fact that elves have multiple partners and have orgies to worship their gods feels weird when the leads are all so sexless. More so when no one feels like a functioning adult.
Occasional bouts of incredibly bloody violence barely mixes with the tone of the rest of the show.
Move Along, Nothing To See Here
DOTA: Dragon’s Blood is the kind of show where two separate characters will spend time rehearsing what they are going to say to their respective goddesses (in one case literally, and figuratively in the other) in two consecutive scenes.
With such an amazing cast, and designs of game characters to pull from, its disappointing that DOTA: Dragon’s Blood focuses on a bunch of stupid humans, and human looking elves, and gods wandering about trying to do each other over for the pettiest of reasons. The dragons do look impressive, but by that point it’s hard to care.
It’s difficult to see much here for fans of the games or otherwise. By the end of the series no ancients have turned up (apart from maybe that red rock in that cave?), none of them needed defending, and I felt neither the need to try out the game, nor watch any more.
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