I made this post almost a year ago on my !vampires@lemmy.zip community but now I have another community where it’s relevant! Cross-posted!

I guess this just shows how much I wish I could like this series. I like vampires, I like dark fantasy pirates, a series about vampire pirates should be perfect for me. But as I said a year ago, this book is written for middle schoolers (not even YA) and I just can’t get into it.

Now that it’s a year later, I will say that I listened to the first two books as audiobooks. I just couldn’t go any further though. The vampires are “good” vampires that are just misunderstood (they only drink blood from people who consent), and the main characters are kids who are never really in any danger. But the part that made me put down the entire series was in book two when the main characters go to “pirate school”. Even as a kid, I hated stories that took place in schools. I don’t care if it’s wizarding school, pirate school, or video gaming school, I’m not interested in stories where kids are at school. And as an adult, I care even less for stories that take place in school. That isn’t the series’ fault of course (I’m not the target audience) but I won’t be reading it any further.

So while I can still dream about a mature story with vampire pirates attacking in the dead of night, this series definitely does not scratch that itch. Maybe things become more epic and intense as the series goes on, but it’s still targeted towards younger kids so the story can’t go that dark. Oh well, maybe someday I’ll get that mature vampire pirate story…

I’ve never heard of this game, thanks! Creating this community is already paying off!

Ha, you got me. Yes, Vampirates has everything I’m looking for, I just wish it wasn’t at a middle school reading level. The vampires are all nice guys and just misunderstood, it’s a shame. I listened to the first two books as audiobooks but I just couldn’t keep going. Book two was all about the kids going to a “pirate school” and it was too annoying for me.

If there was a grown-up version of Vampirates where they were actually monsters attacking at night I would love it.

This looks awesome, thanks for posting it! I’ll admit I don’t know anything about TTRPGs, but I didn’t realize Vampire: The Masquerade had a sibling series where you play as vampire hunters. Neat!

Oh absolutely, I’ll get there. I was able to come up with ~7 works that I want to post to this community and Pirates of Dark Water is one of them. I just don’t want to make all 7 posts within an hour and then leave this community to wither. My plan is to post one thing a day (for almost a week!) and then be done.

I’ve been thinking about creating this community for awhile (I made that asklemmy post 7 months ago) and I actually re-watched Pirates of Dark Water recently. While I was hoping to define this genre as “takes place during the golden age of piracy”, Pirates of Dark Water takes place on another planet (or fantasy world or whatever). And while the main characters call themselves pirates, they’re really just sailors (and a prince trying to save the world). So while the title “Pirates of Dark Water” sounds exactly like what I’m looking for, it actually fails at the only two criteria I’ve defined for this genre. Woops. Anyway, I still think it fits the “vibe” I’m looking for and I’ll absolutely include it.

Thanks for the recommendation though! Welcome!

It’s so weird for Wild Wild West to be the biggest steampunk movie when it takes place in the Wild West period of American history and the only real steam-powered device is that giant spider (I guess trains are also steam-powered but those are real so they don’t count!). Again, Wild Wild West is totally unrelated to the steampunk world the DIY community makes with their cosplay so it’s weird for it to be the most popular (most successful?) steampunk movie.

That Leviathan anime did get released on Netflix. But is it primarily steampunk? I would’ve thought it was a mix of biopunk and dieselpunk. Maybe I just have too narrow of a definition of steampunk and that’s my problem.

It looks more like a twin-stick shooter to me. I don’t think it’s a rogulite at all. I guess we’ll find out though…

Oops. I was so excited to post this, I forgot to link to the Steam page…

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3574750/The_Dark_West/

Thanks for bringing this to my attention! I agree there’s a good chance it will be cringe but this looks right up my alley. The effects actually look pretty good (even if low-budget) and its got Stephen Dorff and the girl who played the sister in Altered Carbon. I’m now looking forward to this movie, although the trailer ends with “exclusively in theaters” and I’m thinking that probably won’t be the case… 😅

Dang, I can’t believe I didn’t notice this post 2 months ago… I’m sorry about that.

I just stumbled upon this game myself and was thinking it might fit here. The main characters are robots and the trailer shows a satellite dish at one point but it otherwise looks like the wild west and you fight skeletons. That’s close enough for me.

Also, this game is made by the guy who made Pumpkin Jack, which was a fantastic spooky game inspired by the PS1 game MediEvil. I’ll definitely be keeping my eye on Far Far West.

Thank you for doing this. It’s been a wild ride and I never realized how much time passes over the course of the novel. Thanks for keeping up with it for months!

Thanks for posting here when the movies are about vampires! I don’t think the posts usually gets many comments but it is appreciated.

Interesting! This is a great find!

First of all, thank you for spending so much time and effort thinking about such a nonsense topic. I agree with everything you said but it got me thinking even more.

Pirate movies are definitely more cost-prohibitive than Westerns, but I wonder if that also led into a feedback loop of keeping Westerns in the public consciousness. Since Westerns kept being made, it kept people thinking about Westerns, which kept the desire for more Westerns alive. I also think there’s an aspect of the Hays Code at play where you were able to make righteous characters in Westerns (those boring John Wayne movies I can’t sit through) yet you can’t really make a “righteous pirate” character. So pirates were always delegated to the role of “bad guys”, if they were present at all. There just wasn’t a demand for pirate movies to expand into supernatural elements.

And yet none of that explains the lack of supernatural pirate stories in literature (or video games) where your imagination is the main limiting factor. Even if we ignore movies, there are very few dark fantasy pirate stories prior to PotC. And I guess this just comes down to my own lack of awareness to, I guess I’ll say ‘the zeitgeist’ even though that makes me sound pretentious. In my mind, I lump together gunslingers, pirates, and hackers as “outlaws glorified for living by their own code”. And yet it seems one of them is drastically less popular than the others. I never really thought about how few people actually care about pirates. Weird West and Cyberpunk are both niche genre fiction, yet dark fantasy pirate stories don’t even have a label. That’s a weird realization for me.

The modern POTC series literally invented pirate dark fantasy film genre.

See, this is crazy to me. I can’t believe that the Weird West genre has been around since the 1950s and yet an equivalent “weird pirates” genre wasn’t created until 2003 by Disney! But I can’t think of a single work prior to that which fits the description. I know Weird West isn’t a huge genre, but I was able to come up with at least 50 posts for !weirdwest@lemmy.zip . It’s so weird for an equivalent pirate genre to have what, 5 entries? I feel like there must be more out there and I just can’t find them. This isn’t like, say, the creation of cyberpunk, which couldn’t really be created until after computers existed; pirates and zombie stories have been around for centuries and yet they were never brought together??

Sorry, I’m not disagreeing with anything you’re saying, I just wanted to go on a rant of disbelief. I made this post because I felt like I was missing something but you just confirmed I really wasn’t.

Exactly, One Piece and Peter Pan are perfect examples of “pirate fantasy” but are missing that lawless aspect which (in my opinion) drives the romantic view of pirates (and the Wild West). Or maybe not “lawlessness” but the “living by their own code” aspect of it.

It’s strange how dark/light fantasy shouldn’t have any impact on whether the lawlessness of pirates is glorified, yet it seems to work out that way.

Well now that’s interesting… I never really considered how well point & click adventure games would work on mobile devices. That’s a good idea.

For example, there’s a book series called Liveship Traders which I guess has pirates and magical living ships but it’s all “high fantasy”. At least, that’s my understanding (I haven’t read them). I’m also not looking for steampunk/airship pirates, which you could consider fantasy.

I guess I’m broadly looking for more “horror themed” fantasy elements, if that makes sense. I agree that most pirate settings would lean more towards horror elements, but it isn’t a guarantee. I mean, there’s a Tinkerbell movie called The Pirate Fairy. Not interested.

I guess I really missed out on the Monkey Island games, they seem to be getting mentioned here a lot.

Is it OK to start with Return or do I need to play the older games first?

Awesome, thank you! You’re right, that description sounds perfect!