u/BaronOfMelons

A while ago, I did a little rant on how the use of profanity in the Netflix Castlevania series worked for and against the portrayal of certain characters in it. With its continuation in Castlevania: Nocturne, the subsequent Devil May Cry show coming out, the rise of "written by Vivziepop" jokes, and more coming since then, the weird linguistic overanalysis itch has really come back to me.

Profanity specifically is a really weird and fascinating tool in dialogue for how easily it makes or breaks a line. Take it out in one place, and the line loses a great deal of its emotional bite and impact. Use it too liberally, and, conversely, it quickly becomes hard to take seriously. So, as is always the case with word choice, curses should in theory be placed deliberately throughout a script to serve the specific tone of the story that's being told. But, of course, I wouldn't be making this post if there weren't plenty of media examples that worked to decidedly mixed effect (read: caused a lot of discourse that I find really funny). Let's dig into some specific FUCKING examples and how, in my opinion, they work or don't work:

- Castlevania: Nocturne: Surprisingly, I think they took a bit of criticism from this show's predecessor and dialed the cussing back. I find it noticeably less common and mostly specific to certain characters, which is for sure better than the cast collectively needing to hit a Fucks Per Minute (FPM) quota. In turn, though, the delivery and placement got a bit worse. Even as the troglodyte who glazes Netflixvania, Richter's "I was going to say something witty, and cutting, and brutal, but fuck it" line is very groan-worthy. But, at any rate, I don't think Nocturne is eligible for "written by Vivziepop" slander - the tone remains fairly consistent with the previous series. More thoughts on the OG series in the aforementioned post I made.

- Netflix's Devil May Cry: I don't think a few F-bombs here or there would've ruined the show; they're not really used in the games but wouldn't be horribly out of place tonally. If they'd just given Dante one comedic "ah, fuck" or somesuch, we'd be fine. Where they went hilariously wrong is by injecting one character alone with a lethal dose of fuck-serum - yes, Lady. Her dialogue becomes so distracting (and so funny for the wrong reasons) so quickly because she curses so disproportionately frequently with such strange over-emphasized delivery. When the show acts as disinterested in its protagonist, Dante, as it does here and Lady is given so much screentime with which to stiltedly say FUCK, it feels agonizingly forced. It's almost like an "added my OC, can you notice them?" edit.

- The Boys: ...I'm sure you're sick of hearing about this one by now. This is an example of a show where vulgar dialogue is perfectly tone-appropriate - none of the main characters are good upstanding people, and in controlled doses the vulgarity works to really enhance the mockery and derision of the real-world topics covered. What is worthy of critique is when the cast as a whole starts to speak excessively in sexual metaphors and gross-out verbal gymnastics, and imo it reaches critical mass in Season 5. I don't think it's a problem distractingly specific to Kimiko; it kind of affects the show in general. The writers lost their sense of when to ease off the gas that they had in previous seasons - it's more difficult to take the stakes of the ongoing narrative seriously when the whole gang's speaking in cockringtwatcunteryslimypussycumball limerick.

- Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: A very well-done example for a change. It's been said before that the characters of E33 speak and act largely like real adults, and I think the use of profanity here reflects how real people talk pretty well. Key example: Gustave's "Fuck the mission!" is such a satisfying and well-executed line because, well, yeah, that's exactly how a real person as panicked and frustrated as Gustave is in that scene would speak. Throughout the rest of the game as well it's really only in these moments of intense emotion that "fuck" is used, and because it's used with this precision, it amplifies said emotional impact.

- Dorohedoro (I need to stfu about Dorohedoro): Using this as an opportunity to touch on a weird pet peeve I have. What I find more obnoxious than characters spamming "fuck" constantly is the forced overuse of PG-13 level language. Anime English dubs are unfortunately plagued by this; dialogue in this genre already asks a lot of suspension of disbelief out of you, but when characters say "damn bastards!!1" like it's going out of style in the classic over-delivered anime inflection it just becomes laughable. It's like the stories I wrote in my notebook when I was in middle school and wanted to add some "edge," but refused to say "fuck" for fear of getting found out by my mom. I bring up Dorohedoro specifically because the official VIZ English manga is hilariously vulgar and perhaps leans too heavily on "fuck," whereas the anime badly overuses words like "bastard" in stark contrast. I understand that there's different standards of what's acceptable between the two mediums, but come on, if there's any anime/manga where I think an absurd Black Lagoon-style English profanity injection would be appropriate, it's one as wacky and grimy as this one. It's a peculiar case where the lack of "fuck" becomes more distracting than its abundance. The dubs of Chainsaw Man and Dandadan are, in my opinion, good counterexamples where they both understood the tone of the source material and weren't too afraid to break convention. Lines like Denji's "YEE HAW, MOTHERFUCKERS" and Turbo Granny calling Momo a "TACKY LITTLE BITCH" are priceless.

Bottom line is that I think it's important to consider the tone of a piece of media and how exactly profanity is used within it before slapping the "edgy vivziepop writing lmao" label on it. If you have any more examples to touch on or want to call me a moron, please throw them in the comments. Ironically, I haven't actually watched Helluva Boss or Hazbin Hotel, so I can't speak accurately to how their notoriously high FPM level impacts the dialogue.