Review Review: Class Review: Gorinich's Completely Normal Girl With Too Much Blood

 

Still from Dracula (1931) featuring Frances Dade as Lucy Westenra and Count Dracula as himself

Fulfilling my own prompt, reviewing another's blogpost, for Glaugust 2026. I actually found it difficult to find the right sort of post to respond to, since there's many great posts in the glog scene that I just have unvarnished appreciation for, and so there's little engaging in my review of it. Vivanter's December 2024 review of a class by Zmia Garina, the Completely Normal Girl With Too Much Blood, is actually interesting in itself, and certainly worthy of comment, even at a remove of over a year. 

It takes a certain amount of bravery to turn a legitimate analytical lens to someone else's blogpost. This is someone you know in the remote-yet-personal way of being fellow netizens of a discord server. You might play games with them or chew the fat, and any criticism seen as being negative feels way more personal than reviewing a movie by some famous director you'll never meet.

And yet even the most casual blogpost engaging with the hobby can be engaged as art or as rhetoric, and there's something satisfying in taking an engaging OSR post and "taking it seriously," laying out how you think it works and what it has to say. This is what Vivanter's review is taking up, which is all the more impressive because unlike his other class reviews he is grappling with the topic of playing "a girl who by her very nature (biological and mystical) attracts the violence of male strangers", and fair enough. If I was writing such a review, I would definitely be nervous that if I didn't write it perfectly, my acquaintance would think I was calling them an abuse apologist or something.

Is Vivanter's review written perfectly? I don't know, it's well-considered and well-written, but the achievement isn't in making it impossible to be misunderstood but trusting that if you write carefully and with good intentions, people you care about will take it in its intended spirit. In this wild world, that trust is never guaranteed to be fulfilled. A dragon is something which is hard to kill, and yet you must try.

Notably, the acquaintance of the reviewer and the reviewed here facilitates the author to respond. If you follow the link to Zmia Garina's original review, you'll see that a sentence has been crossed out and a note added accepting one of the main points of Vivanter's review. This isn't the sort of thing that we typically consider when we think about critical review. The artifact being analyzed doesn't usually textually change as a result of review. Yet in the world of DIY RPGs of the OSR, it's NBD to not only incorporate suggestions and points of contentions in later posts, but to edit the original piece.

With preliminary discussion of the context around the review covered, I move now to reviewing the review itself.

Vivanter's immediate consideration with the Completely Normal Girl With Too Much Blood is a very sensible one. He notes that the class, with abilities like "Object of Desire" and "Can I Fix Him?" is engaging directly with the fraught tropes and attitudes around girlhood, toxic romance, and essentially the sexual horror/horrific sexualism of the vampire story. His review does not preclude the suitability for such themes at the table, but observes that such themes might be a surprise to the incautious DM. The class is written with a light-hearted tone and makes jocular references to tumblr memes, and while it has a couple warning notes about keeping things comfortable for the table, Vivanter says that you "should have a plan for working through these themes with your table that exceeds a simple safety conversation".

This is such a reasonable suggestion and it is based in such a reasonable concern that I surprise myself a little bit by reflexively disagreeing. The extent to which these themes would benefit from extra discussion above and beyond the basic will obviously vary group to group, so the first thing I imagine is adding this class to a game with the people I usually play with and expecting no issues. I would definitely want to establish a consensus about where our lines are for themes of abuse, interpersonal dynamics, and blood-letting, but isn't that sort of the simple safety conversation-- coming to consensus on subject matter?

On the face of it, I would say yes. But discussions of subject matter are sort of bald without discussion of tone and genre, and it's in those determinations that I think a lot of the tension of Vivanter's review lies. The difference between a relationship that's "fascinatingly complex" and one that's "concerningly abusive" often lies in questions of genre.

The way Vivanter writes his review, I would say he is totally aware of the significance of this distinction, but I would have wanted to see the topic treated more broadly and more explicitly. He mentions that Tiqqun's Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl can be "usefully applied" alongside sources like Twilight, but mixing your condiments in this way is what I would caution people to think twice about and discuss with their table above and beyond normal conversational aids. There's a stance towards "fucked up" romances popular among the same tumblr set that produced the memes which inspired this class that claims some agency for the Completely Normal Girl. 

 What does it mean to say "i could make him worse"? It's a term I only hear used for fictional characters, whose bad traits can be safely enjoyed from the remove of being totally outside the context of their existence. The speaker can ignore or disengage in the medium the character exists in, or personally rewrite it. Suffering caused by a "toxic" character can be romanticized, limited, and controlled-- the paramour can be abusive, but can't abuse the reader or the author. To say "i could make him worse" is to put oneself in the role of the Completely Normal Girl, but maintaining some of that authorial stance which affords the invulnerability of framing, which allows the player of the Completely Normal Girl whatever they get out of participating in a story about dating a devoted yet bloodthirsty vampire without the potential for real-life harm. It's a view of fictional abuse that allows it to be problematic (and we all love to grapple with interesting fictional problems) without itself being a problem, such as would necessitate the end of the relationship dynamic.

 This complexity, through which the same relationship trope is either light-hearted or deeply challenging depending on tone and genre, is why I think Vivanter says Zmia Garina "leads the class with a note that it 'touches on themes of romance and sexuality,' but the text doesn't directly contain mechanisms for either, so we must conclude that the rest of the class takes this relationship dynamic as subtext." And since that subtext may drastically differ depending on the background familiarity and buy-in of the players, I have talked myself into agreeing with Vivanter's point about the need to go over things with the players extra-well before introducing the class to the average game. I just wish he had spoken more to this point, so I could see if we were thinking along the same lines or if my reasoning is totally alternate to his.

At least half of the review covers this interesting thematic topic in this extensive way, to the point where the review of the actual mechanics the class uses feels like a secondary matter. I am falling into the same pattern. His description of Vitae, the defining resource of the class, skips over a couple of points that I think bear mentioning. The amount of Vitae a Completely Normal Girl With Too Much Blood generates is actually quite a lot, and managing it is likely to be a big deal for the first two levels, when it's going to fill (one supposes) 3d6 inventory slots per day if not quickly spent. The most potent ability the class gets is at the C template, when Vitae no longer fills inventory slots. There's something to be said also about the idea that this is a class where advancement largely comes from a succession of realizations about oneself, as opposed to improvement to become worthy, a classic gendered storytelling distinction.

Vivanter's advice about the potential upside of more guidance on the introduction of vampires is a straightforward good point. I think there's something really neat in how the class imagines a progression of randomly encountered monsters being converted into hirelings and then retainers. The procedure feels like it would slot satisfyingly into a standard dungeon adventure game, and yet I feel like if I ran this I would make a simple generator for romance-ready gothic monsters just so I have something to go off of when designing what would eventually become dozens of potential suitors. 

The review has a few more thoughts about the class features, but I don't feel the need to comment on those comments individually. They're well-considered, and where I might disagree nevertheless I'm glad to read them and try them on. It's a rare compliment to see someone thinks about your glog class with this degree of care, and I appreciate that Vivanter's review embraces the concerns and considerations useful to playing a glog class off of someone's blog. Ultimately, while I'm not a partisan for constantly reviewing everything and making the blogosphere a more "serious" realm for "critique," where it appears I wouldn't object if it held as a goal Vivanter's approach.