I’m an idiot and I liked Dungeons and Dragons.

I watched dungeons and dragons this evening. I tried to turn on subtitles. There was a glitch so I tried again. Another glitch. I went into the settings, and, thinking I was turning on subtitles, turned on the descriptive audio for blind people.

I didn’t realize I’d done it, I assumed the movie was narrated, like a dungeon master describing what was going on, and that the subtitles issue wasn’t a glitch, but rather that it had something to do with the movie being narrated. I thought it was an interesting choice, if a little insensitive for people hard of hearing. I know that doesn’t make sense, but I didn’t think too much about it. The subtitles were mostly for my wife, and I figured she’d be on her phone or Switch, anyway.

I watched that whole movie with the visual description audio track.I grew to love the narration. I kept thinking that the movie had great visuals, but the narration added a different element and made really good use of the dialogue breaks in the action scenes.

At one point my partner, playing on her Switch, listening to the movie, but hardly glancing at the screen, literally said, “This would be a good movie for blind people.”

I swear to god, sometimes the narrator would describe things a few seconds before or after they visually occurred on screen and I was consciously trying to analyze it from a storytelling perspective and determine why they described some things in advance and some things after they’d already happened.

At the end of the movie I kept waiting for there to be something cute in the credits about the voice actress for the dungeon master narrator, but there wasn’t.

After the credits I got on IMDB to read trivia, expecting there to be something about the filmmaker’s unconventional choice to have an omnipresent dungeon master narrator relay what was happening on screen. There was no trivia mentioning the narrator.

I went back and realized what I’d done. I turned off the descriptive track and watched a bit, I was really disappointed. It’s still a good movie, but the narration made it so much better.

If you liked the movie and we’re planning a rewatch, or if you are watching it for the first time, consider turning on the audio description. I really believe it made the movie better.

Submitted June 01, 2023 at 11:48AM by Roldylane https://ift.tt/WL5bTSg