#Looking Glass Ruins

[mdhwrites]

The Forbidden Stacks of the library in TOH puts me in throes. The books inside aren't even preserved if a zombie mouse can have a full-on buffet with them (going slightly off the rails "echo mouse" is a stupid name for something that doesn't absorb sound, I refuse to call it that). What's the point? What other history is lost because you'll let zombie-mice into the section versus employees/volunteers that aren't just gonna float around for the sake of being spooky? Why are they even forbidden when the section is smack-dab in the middle of the library and access-cards are evidently universal, you're just working off an honor system that people won't abuse accessibility? I guess that explains the zombie-mice. Or was it just more important for the writers to have a quick set-up for Lumity no matter how horribly applied the rules are?

The Forbidden Stacks could EASILY be improved if the writers had Amity work the section as a kind of promotion since she already has access, I could see a full burst of character development if her role was to ensure no one gets access to Philip's journal by orders of Belos himself, make her question why the journal itself is forbidden and if blindly following Belos' regime is worth being left in the dark. It would as be GREAT Lumity fuel if both sides had to choose between pleasing the other or preserving their own goals.

Now I've put myself in throes on how quickly all that could be adjusted. A devil's advocate should have been hired for the writing team LMAO.

So the forbidden section of a library in most fantasy media is a pretty common trope. Harry Potter wasn't the first to have something like it and The Owl House won't be the last. But... Well, I actually never gave it that much thought because it very much so does the job of the trope, give characters a place they're not supposed to with clear intentions on forbidden knowledge, but... I think this post very easily explains why the vibe of The Owl House is wrong for a fantasy show. I talked about this in general as of late but let's interrogate your complaints. Not to say your complaints aren't valid but it's the sort of thing that as a content creator is important to do. When someone tells you they'd rather have seen X thing be done in Y way, what are they really asking for? Tears of the Kingdom's fuse mechanic is a great showing of this as it fixed the breakable weapons for a lot of people while still allowing weaponry and the like to be a reward for exploration and combat, something that just removing the system would have lost. Instead, they made it so you can personalize your arsenal and it's MUCH harder to end a fight with simply a worse inventory than when you began (amongst a BILLION other great things about the fuse mechanic).

So what are the complaints here? A lot of them are what most would consider nitpicks. A story is allowed contrivances so as to FUNCTION and that's where suspension of disbelief comes into play. Something about the forbidden section broke your suspension of disbelief though. What was it?

Well, looking at them, my personal conclusion would be simple: It doesn't feel forbidden. It has a huge ass door that dominates one of the libraries walls, it comes across from how it looks to be SEVERAL times larger than the base library seeing as the base library only has like two floors, and yeah, it's not exactly hard to reach. Lumity go in in BROAD DAYLIGHT. There are also no traps, no detection systems, or... Anything to stop someone who has slipped inside from doing as they please, including animals. Like... While Amity is being scolded, is there just NOTHING watching the forbidden knowledge and only a weak magical lock? That doesn't really give the feeling of it being forbidden, does it?

And this isn't a new problem for The Owl House. They'll present a fantasy trope and then so half ass it that it barely feels like the trope. In fact, just tropes in general, hence the common complaint that Lumity is NOT enemies to lovers despite the setup because they spend almost no time being enemies. That's discarded for what is necessary for the plot point of Lumity.

But some people might yell at me about the Shortening, despite this being S2A which probably got minimal changes due to how production works, so could this have been done better without significant time changes?

...Yes. By making them physically act like they're in a place they're not supposed to be. You don't even really have to change the substance of what the two are talking about (which is hardly about the forbidden section). The two spend almost all their time there just laying or standing around. They effectively seem to be just in a library with bad lighting judging by their actions, posture, etc. like that, not helped by the two mostly focusing on each other than anything to do with the library. This de-emphasizes the library and the danger which is VERY common in The Owl House and is part of why it's such a shit adventure show.

Tweak their tones of voice so that they sound more like they're trying not to focus on how they're breaking the rules. Make their conversation travel while Amity points at places on the floor or the wall and both respectively either avoid or seek out those places. You don't even need to really up the animation here except for having them move at all because you don't need to show the magic traps and the like so long as you get the vibe right.

Better yet, this movement could also allow for more environmental storytelling and foreshadowing. They could pass by archived creatures, kept their for study and school project purposes but too dangerous to have just anyone interacting with, and one cage is broken open. Or the lid is slipped off and a sleeping echo mouse is sleeping within it. That way, the mouse didn't just slip in, it probably broke out recently and you just have to suspend disbelief that it chose the journal for its first meal.

This isn't even only doable in animation. You could do this in writing and have their actions and the background be the flavor that's helping punctuate and break up the conversation. In writing though, that WOULD add time and admittedly part of what gives my stuff a more brisk feeling is that unless it's important, I let the background be filled in with a mood and by the reader much more than vivid description. TOH IS animated though so having the backgrounds and the like help with the storytelling, or even just the movements of the characters, is part of how you tell a story in animation.

And yes, animation is expensive. My counterpoint to that is The Ghost and Molly McGee exists and its animation very commonly blows TOH out of the water with how expressive, dynamic, bizarre and HOW MUCH OF IT there is except for TOH's big ticket fights. I cannot believe that they could not do a simple walking sequence with scrolling backgrounds instead of more anime inspired "Okay, stop, freeze, talk, go," moments, especially in order to actually sell the fact that they're in a fantasy story.

There are other, smaller things like making it a smaller, metal door that requires multiple keys to be opened that are kept in the office that Amity normally would need to check out but isn't so that Luz isn't known to go back there. Admittedly, you could also actually make the librarian scary and rude. Make him more serious as to explain why Amity didn't just talk to the librarian because I've talked before about how it trying to be 'clever' (with the same joke its done how many times even by then of "Oh, you're such a fool to think it was actually dangerous or spooky") kind of makes the episode make no sense in retrospect.

And, most importantly, none of these changes would require a lot of time in the episode. Maybe a little more, just to have Amity have a line about a pressure plate or the like, but not much. The real difference is partially the difference between Amphibia and The Owl House because when the sleepover episode happens, the ghosts aren't the only reason that the place feels forbidden. It feels forgotten and creepy and they walk and talk to help show this in the posture the characters, the tones of voice they have, stuff like that. Amphibia enjoys its genre and concepts though while The Owl House CONSTANTLY feels like it would really rather just be a slice of life school series and so doesn't care about the fantasy or adventure elements.

And, well, Looking Glass Ruins is a good episode to highlight that. They murder illusion magic, they make glyphs EXTREMELY OP in it in ways that make no sense and make you wonder why the whole cast isn't adopting them, magical amplification should still ABSOLUTELY affect illusion magic so as to make it bigger or more believable, etc. like that even if it doesn't have a physical effect, etc. like that. But instead, the magic is warped and twisted and simply used for a trope that probably could have been done without the magic.

But like making the forbidden section incredibly boring and mostly just a background more than anything else and an excuse to get Amity in trouble... It all just feels like justification to make the concept they wanted without having to put in the effort.

Without caring. And an audience can feel when a writer doesn't care about something.

[oneshimaru]

Kaveh's building

[riza-hawks-eye]

[shadysadie]

Owl House Episode Name References

[pandoratheprocrasticreator]

we have a full collection!

[cr4ggy]

cinematic parallels </3,,,,,

[zibiscusloon]

Don’t worry.. you always have a way of sneaking into people’s hearts…

[owlhousetarot]

The Moon: Gus Porter

Upright: Illusion, anxiety, intuition, uncertainty, complexity, secrets, the subconscious

Reversed: Release of fear/anxiety, revealing secrets, clarity, self-deception, repressed emotion, misunderstanding, misinterpretation

Who better to fit the Moon’s themes of illusion and secrecy than Gus the Illusion Master himself! The Moon card represents your fears and anxieties from past experiences clouding your understanding of the present and future, making it difficult for you to trust your own intuition. Gus is shown to struggle with false impressions of other people, from his misplaced trust in Mattholomule and in Bria’s gang, to his inability to see past an illusion of Willow, his first and best friend. Gus tends to take people at face-value and give them the benefit of the doubt, but when his trusting nature blinds him to others’ deception, it deals a heavy blow to his self-esteem—especially since a lot of that esteem is based on his talent for illusion magic. His trauma from being taken advantage of by his peers for his academic talents leaves him with such severe anxiety that his subconscious has created a defense response that dredges up other people’s subconscious fears and secrets—a power he eventually learns to weaponize.

We eventually see Gus work through his difficulties with illusions; Through the Looking Glass Ruins challenges but then reaffirms his passion for his illusion magic by forcing him to use it to defeat his deceptive peers, and by allowing him and Matt to resolve their mutual misunderstanding.  In Labyrinth Runners he is able to release his anxiety through Willow’s breathing technique, and to see through Adrian Graye’s illusions. Later he uses his powers to force Belos to reckon with his suppressed guilt by dragging his secrets up out of his subconscious. Because Gus gets a glimpse at these memories, he is allowed a clearer understanding of Belos’s past and Hunter’s status as a grimwalker. In a small moment in For the Future, his guess for what Luz’s palisman will be is the closest, suggesting that his intuition about others’ true natures is maturing.

< Previous Card: The Star

> Next Card: The Sun

[saveugoodmadam]

fuuuuuckkkk I can smell the 'so that's what you think of me' moment coming

[icy-watch]

excuse

excuse

[ab4eva]

Day 2: Glasses

@slowsweetlove

[demonlineswhore]

I saw this photo and I was like aww cute. And then I thought San looks so dilf here. And then I malfunctioned.

[incorrectohtweets]

Remember your daily click!

Donate to the Palestine Children Relief Fund!

[quismihiignem]

[xerogravityorange]

[royal-they]

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how both Mattholomule and Gus were bullied very similarly but these acts shaped them as people very differently. 

We get to explore their past with bullying quite a bit in Labyrinth Runners and Through the Looking Glass Ruins:

They’re both familiar with people pretending to be their friends just so they can get ahead. Bria keeps Matt around so she has someone to do her work for her. She makes him help her get the galdor stones but doesn’t let him benefit from it. She knows he won’t try to take the stones from her. He’s learned by now not to challenge her. At Glandus she’s top dog because of this facade she puts on. She’s nice to people she’s not close to so they respect her but exploits and manipulates her “friends.” 

Gus also deals with this in a similar way. He’s the prodigy and he’s younger than everyone so people see him as someone they can easily manipulate. When another kid manipulates him into doing this project for him he makes note of the fact that this is not the first time this has happened. And we see him blame himself, 

Gus doesn’t recognize that it’s other people’s fault that this keeps happening. He leads himself to believe that he’s the one messing something up. He’s the consistent variable, right? So it must be him. He’s the one messing up somehow.

We seem him consistently misread people and get himself into these types of situations. He misreads Bria and is quick to put himself down because of it, 

In reality, Gus isn’t the one messing up and getting himself hurt. It’s not his fault that he gives everyone the benefit of the doubt. This doesn’t change the fact that this is how he sees himself though. 

It’s a small detail, but notice how the Glandus students don’t have faces but Gus does? If they have facial expressions you could more easily determine their personality. But Gus can’t do this. He says that he can’t trust himself, that he let himself get tricked. Not that he can’t trust others or that they tricked him. Because to him he’s, once again the outlier in this equation. 

People keep leading him to believe this as well. They gaslight him over and over into believing that he’s the one who messed up somewhere and that’s what lead him to getting hurt, rather than their own ill-mannered actions. 

Brias facial expression in this shot is one that would lead you to believe she’s saying something helpful or thoughtful. In reality she is absolutely not but her tone really downplays the situation. 

Angmar immediately complies, he doesn’t even question this interaction despite being disturbed. Mattholomule looks back but barely reacts and neither does Gavin. Their all used to this behavior. Gus isn’t and he reacts to it how most of us probably would, being rather concerned. But the people around him treat it normally so he doesn’t question it. 

Mattholomule looks up to Bria at first. Not because she’s an awesome person  - because she’s not lol - but rather because she appears to the world as someone who’s got everything under control and is incredibly powerful. 

Mattholomule is not someone who usually bends to peoples will but Bria is somehow able to make him. He doesn’t react to her tormenting people or making people fight for power. He treats it normally. He says it’s normal. He doesn’t like it, but it’s normal. 

When he comes to Hexide we see him try to be like Bria, 

He pretends to be kind and soft when it helps him out of being exposed by Gus.

But then turns on Luz and Gus when it helps him. 

He’s finally the new Bria, he’s finally in charge of something, finally in control of himself. 

But in Through the Looking Glass Ruins we see him realize he was wrong apologize to Gus, 

When having to face Bria again after being at Hexide for a good while, Mattholomule realizes she’s not actually someone he looks up to anymore. He recognizes her toxic behavior for what it is after seeing an outsider come into their dynamic. 

He’s a lot more friendly with Gus after this, their banter is more lighthearted and he seems much more relaxed. No, they are not friends yet but it seems to be a dynamic that could easily become a strong friendship. 

These two honestly are just so interesting to dissect as characters. Both examples of how the same type of bullying can manifest insecurity in very different ways. Mattholomule reacts to the bullying by trying to continue the cycle where as Gus tries to mold himself to be more compatible with others. In the end neither solution is right and they both find their own environments that work for them. 

They’re both characters I can relate to a lot and it’s fun to see them both in happier healthier enviorments.