the whole prophecy thing in Amphibia was so half-baked. it had the potential to be a really interesting plot points, but not only was it only revealed like two episodes before the finale, it was also so sloppily explained.
Mother Olm says that Anne, Sasha and Marcy were given the power of the calamity stones in order to save Amphibia from becoming its worst version. that's all fine and dandy, but why these three girls specifically?
what do three teenagers have that other people don't? especially considering how two of them were extremely selfish at first and wanted to use the stones for their own interest.
Sasha even tried to kill the frogs in s1 and take over Amphibia in s2. how is that a person worthy of the calamity powers? sure, she redeemed herself later but the prophecy couldn't predict that. for all they know, Sasha could have chosen to stay evil and hurt the people of Amphibia even more.
prophecies tend to be vague but usually there's some sort of explanation for why a person is chosen by that prophecy. maybe it's a hereditary thing, or perhaps they've proven themselves capable of being a hero, there's usually some line of logic.
not to mention, the part about Anne potentially dying was shoehorned into the second to last episode (if i remember correctly). it was clearly setting up for a temporary death that only served as shock value.
i can't believe people still actually bought Anne's death and didn't immediately realize how cheap of a plot point it was. instead of seeing Sasha and Marcy actually do something useful with their powers, we get like five seconds of them showing off their powers and then Anne taking over and doing the important stuff.
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Feeling very violent rn so here's a very controversial opinion:
Everything after season one of Young Justice sucked.
Look, I know I'm obsessed with the show but that doesn't mean it's good, it means that I'm too deep into it at this point to get out. There are good moments within the other seasons but in general? They were not good.
I'm sorry. I understand that they wanted to be creative and have a neat narrative and deep lore and all that. And they do! The narrative and lore is extremely deep.
But the plot? The characters??
Season one was an actual functional show that balanced character development, plot and dialogue with world building, lore and messaging.
The other seasons do not do that.
Season two bounced back and forth between like 16 characters. We got some development for some characters but even that was minimal compared to the character development in S1. And this isn't me complaining that the og group wasn't in S2 enough. That's not my issue. I would've loved to focus on a new group and I think that Jaime, Bart, Ed and Gar would've been super cool to focus on. I loved what character development they did have and I craved more.
But the problem? The problem is when you have 16 fucking characters that you are trying to develop and shove into a coherent plot and have actual meaningful scenes. There just wasn't enough focus on S2. Imo, S2 was meh because the characters got left by the wayside. The plot, dialogue, world building, lore and messaging was fine, there just seemed to be a lack of heart/warmth in the show because of the characters. It's hard to get invested.
Then holy shit. S3 introduced more characters. And the plot got more contrived and 'big picture' to the point that it started to abstract. It felt like nothing mattered. There were no stakes, you were just watching things happen. There was 50 fucking things happening an episode and 80% of it was lore/world building. It felt like I was studying for a fictional history exam.
I'm pretty sure the main character in S3 was earth 16. Just the entire universe. Because goddamn. We checked in on almost every living being and EVERYTHING was a plot point. Most of it wasn't even relevant to anything happening in the season. Man it was.... it was bad.
And at that point it just wasn't enjoyable at all to watch. I probably should've stopped watching but at that point the sunk cost fallacy had already kicked in. I knew it could be good. Maybe it could be good again. And people were constantly praising it as cinematic genius so I was like 'okay well maybe I'm missing the point? Maybe you aren't supposed to enjoy shows? Maybe this is fine?'
But season four broke me.
The creators heard that people were frustrated by the lack of character focus and the episodes following 72 characters and the episodes switching between 50 different subplots every episode and their solution? Their solution was to take allllllll the different unconnected plots and, instead of evenly spreading them throughout the season, jam them all into 'arcs'. So you had a bunch of mini seasons consisting of 3-5 episodes dedicated to a cast of ~5-8 characters (some of them new). And each of these episodes had unconnected a plots, b plots and c plots.
THAT IS NOT A SOLUTION
Holy shit that is not a solution.
Not to mention the overarching plot of the season, in which we had no fucking clue what was happening until the final episodes where everything became a speedrun to wrap everything up. We literally had no idea what the main plot was until it was ending.
Good god it was bad. It's bad writing!
I know people liked it and good for them. You should like what you like and you don't have to justify it. But for me it was insanity. I'm sorry I actually don't want a season long subplot where Beast Boy is depressed and sleeps all day. I would be cool with it if it had anything to do with the larger story but, surprisingly, spending five minutes watching Beast Boy sleep every episode didn't make for compelling storytelling.
I'm still not over how we didn't even know who the main villain was until the end of the season. And then all of a sudden he does a villain monologue to tell everyone his evil plan and his motives. Super cool actually. I love it when I have no idea what the stakes are for the majority of a show. It's incredibly good storytelling when you leave the audience in the dark about a major player in the plot for all of the plot. And then doing an info dump evil monologue in the final episodes to rush through the explanation??? Fucking fantastic and not a sign of terrible pacing at all.
I'm just so frustrated. The show isn't about being a show anymore. The show is an entire cinematic universe shoved into 20 something episodes. It's desperate to tell every single story at once, audience, pacing and good writing be damned.
I'm so tired of the constant praising of Greg. His whole 'i don't write endings because life doesn't have endings' and 'i don't write cliffhangers, I just leave things open ended' thing is pretentious bullshit. I'm tired of pretending it's not. A good story has an ending. Stories are not life! Some of the best shows I've ever watched had planned endings. And oh my god. The cliffhanger thing... that's just semantics my guy. Greg you write cliffhangers. You can insist they aren't but I'm going to call a spade a spade.
It's also.... I'm fine with explaining things, in fact I love it because it's an excuse to talk about the stuff I love, and I have a fairly decent knowledge of comic book lore. So, I could not only understand what was happening in the show but I was also super enthusiastic about explaining it to people. But hey Greg? Hey buddy? If 90% of your audience doesn't know what the fuck is going on and needs to be familiar with super specific obscure comic characters from the 70's then you might have a problem.
I think I realized halfway through s4 that the most enjoyment I got from an episode was when an obscure comic character would cameo in it. But then I realized that a) they generally weren't explained at all and b) 50% of the time they weren't just hanging out in the background and they were vital to the plot. So to understand who the fuck they were and what the fuck was happening you had to be familiar with... well all of DC comics actually.
Anyway this rant is getting long and unhinged and I don't think there's a point so I'm going to cut myself off even though I have so much more to say on the topic. I think my general point is just that I didn't enjoy watching the later seasons and it's chill if you did and we should all respect each other's opinions ✌️
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Taking aside whether everything we've seen is fully true or not (though I subtly doubt that since the writers have mentioned they will revisit a lot of the previous past scenes in season 2), the way Louis narrates is limiting on its own for both Lestat and Claudia. Omitting entire years' worth of time and only giving Daniel (and us) the barebones information through vital moments still leaves me with a lot of questions regarding Claudia in particular. Because sure, Daniel HAS the diaries, but who's to say they haven't been tampered with more than Louis even lets on? And specifically, when it comes to the 10 years overall after Claudia comes back, we see no diary in Daniel's vicinity. The only time we do see some is at the end of episode 7, of which one contains Lestat's final words, the other is about their trip to Europe after the murder. That leaves us with only Louis as the main source of information for this time period, but Louis isn't above solely giving Daniel scenarios in order to place Claudia or Lestat in specific roles through how he experienced them in the past.
Case in point, episode 6 has no killings from Claudia. We don't see her hunt, not even to go after a man or stalk him, we definitely don't see her kill, despite all episodes before or after that containing some explicit killings with her. I say this because to Louis, Claudia was his nurse/knight/protector/sister during this particular period of time. And even subconsciously, he ends up painting her as such to the point where we also don't even get much information about Claudia and how she even traveled in episode 5? We only get one piece of information about it with the train scene, but we still get absolutely nothing about how: 1) she even came to reading about vampires, 2) how she managed during her 7 years alone, 3) any basic information about her plans beyond her catching a train for going outside of New Orleans, or even about how she learned languages. The only information we even get specifically is regarding her horrible encounter with Bruce, but again, this later ends up serving more as an apparent parallel to Louis' later situation with Lestat than it is even about Claudia, who suffered through an assault.
I would also argue the same thing in regards to the 6 years they spent alone together, as well. Louis wants Daniel to think of Claudia in a better light, he makes her out to be his savior and the only person that seems to want better for him, yet at the same time leaves out any further details about the years they lived with each other (and not with Lestat) in Rue Royale after he recuperated? Why? And this isn't even to argue that Claudia may not have been as perfect, rather that Louis cuts out so much context as to how they were like with each other after she came back that I end up getting only so much information about Claudia solely when it comes to how it affected or was connected to Louis.
Louis is telling the story here, and even with Claudia's diaries (which Daniel now knows Louis has tampered with), we only end up seeing what Louis wants us to see. This is why I hope season 2 changes some of this because I would really like to just know more about Claudia and her own feelings regarding all the later situations with her and Louis.
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