Trivia / Castle Perilous

• Post-Script Season: Bride of the Castle very much feels like this. Aside from the somewhat lengthy publishing gap, Castle Spellbound had ended with Gene and Linda declaring their love (and consummating it), then putting plans in order for their wedding; all the characters showed up together in good condition after the latest disaster; and the final paragraph of the book actually played Happily Ever After straight. Flash-forward to the next book where the Idiosyncratic Chapter Naming has been dispensed with, new characters are introduced whose stories have nothing to do with the rest of the book or characters (and one, due to being from an Alternate Universe, never will), the seeming happiness of Castle Spellbound devolves into the same old The Casanova behavior from Gene to make sure Status Quo Is God, and everything (but particularly the newest wrinkle in the Love Triangle) is left up in the air. With all these changes and unsatisfying elements, the fact DeChancie seemed to have stopped caring, and the fact that eighteen years later there has still been no resolution to the Cliffhanger/No Ending, fans could be forgiven for wishing the series had ended with Castle Spellbound.
• Technology Marches On: The scene with Linda and Melanie on the Internet (or Cybernet) at the start of Castle Murders is quite clearly dated; not only does Melanie express shock at the idea that a reply to her on a bulletin board could appear instantly instead of taking days or weeks (even suggesting the only way Linda could have replied instantly was if she was on another computer on campus), and specifically notes it is not a direct-communication system, but the ability to send messages directly to Melanie's computer for a real-time chat is portrayed as something only Jeremy's magical hacking can accomplish. In DeChancie's defense, the book was written in the 90s when the Internet (or at least, its modern, public version) was first in its infancy, but it still reads as amusingly quaint.

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