#They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character

[themattress]

The Problem with King Magnifico

King Magnifico is the best part of Disney's Wish. He's got a sleek design, the most fun animation, and Chris Pine does a fantastic job hamming it up as a classic-style Disney villain.

With that said, he's a good villain, but fails to be a great one.

At first, I thought this was mainly because of all the Member Berries; as the movie goes on he increasingly starts aping past Disney villains which kind of makes him lose his unique identity. However, I've now realized that there's a deeper reason, which lies in comparison to Dreamworks' superior Wishing Star movie, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and its villains:

For some reason, the writers of Wish tried to push King Magnifico into all three categories, and it just doesn't work. It is possible for a Sympathetic Villain to develop into a Serious, Scary Villain or for an Unsympathetic Villain to develop into a Serious, Scary Villain. But it is exceedingly difficult, if not downright impossible, to blend or have a transition with a Sympathetic Villain and an Unsympathetic Villain, because that creates way too much of a dissonance. This is where Magnifico was fumbled: before his turn to a Serious, Scary Villain they try to have it both ways, setting him up as sympathetic due to his backstory, seemingly genuine desire to do right by his kingdom even if the way he does it is misguided, and the love he shares with his wife, only to also have him unsympathetic by depicting him as a petty, petulant, thick-headed narcissistic douchebag. This results in confusion in his motivation for why he is doing what he does during the first half of the movie or why he turns to the forbidden magic that drives him mad with power, and also makes it unclear whether we are supposed to see his final fate as a tragedy or a case of him getting what he deserves.

It's very obvious from The Art of Wish that King Magnifico got changed in development. The earliest drafts clearly had him as a humanized villain who starts off sympathetic but goes off the deep end into irredeemable evil; his initial altruistic goals having given way to him just wanting to play God. There's no indication that the forbidden magic was originally going to have any effect on his mental state at all; the fact that he would even use it was simply meant to be his crossing of the Moral Event Horizon, showing that he would rather destroy his kingdom than let anyone or anything other than him have control over it. But the perceived need for Member Berries took a toll on the character, and thus he ended up undercooked.

...Still better cooked than anyone else in the film, though! Go see it for him, people!

[ultraericthered]

Disney's Most Hated Villain 10 Years Later

Now when I say "Disney's most hated villain", I don't mean he's the Disney villain that most people hate most, I literally mean he seems to be the villain most hated by Disney themselves. The shots taken at him in Big Hero 6, Frozen Fever, Kingdom Hearts III, Frozen II, and even recently in Once Upon A Studio all seem to suggest that there are some people high up at Disney who just really did not care for this guy, like they blame the ascendance of "twist villains" in Disney movies on him and want to take it out on him, despite how massively successful and popular the movie he was the villain of was and still is. It's just the most preculiar thing. A whole 10 years later and we've finally get another traditional, openly and bombastically evil villain in King Magnifico of Wish, and given how utterly polarizing that movie is turning out to be among all the earliest critics and audience viewers, I have to wonder if he'll now become Disney new punching bag for setting this new course! I swear, there's no pleasing folks these days!

But this post is for some thoughts on him and why I feel a lot of people online still get Hans wrong. He's not the most competently executed and well defined case of a twist villain, nor is he the worst, most bullshit twist villain ever who needed to be excised from the film so Elsa could keep the Big Bad spot. Taking him as he is, Hans is a B grade or C grade Disney villain at most, with lots of character potential even if it doesn't fully come together in the movie itself.

By far the most common and greatest misconception about Hans as a character is the idea that the moment of the reveal that he was an evil villain the entire time, and the very nature of re-establishing and re-contextualizing his character as a villain, is meant to cast him as some devious, manipulative mastermind who was pulling strings for the film's whole present day plot and had ill intent behind his every word and deed, even if that seems contradictory to the character we'd been watching up to that point. This is false. Hans has never mastered the chessboard, only played on it. He had a firmly set goal from the moment he showed up in Arendelle - become its ruler - but he did not have any solid plan on how he was going to make this ambition a reality. So he was winging it the whole movie. I mean, he basically says as much to Anna in that scene yet so many viewers were too distracted by reeling from either shock or confusion over the outing of Hans as the bad guy that they seemed to miss that.

The crux of Hans as an antagonist in the film is that he is a broken soul who grew up miserable and with an absence of love in his life, and it warped him into a high functioning sociopath who can easily detach himself from his heart and emotions, becoming whatever the current circumstance or person he's presently interacting with best requires him to be in the ways that best advance his own interests. He's like the worst possible outcome of what Anna or Elsa could've grown up to be had their childhoods taken an even worse turn. And above all, he is a man of many masks, rarely ever showing his true face. The mask is hollow and flexible, serving as a mirror to whoever Hans is in contact with (His nice, adorkable, and worried moods perfectly match Anna's, his angry and confrontational moods perfectly match Weselton's, his saddened and sympathetic moods perfectly match Elsa's - absolutely none of it is authentic). There's only a select few times we see the mask pulled back and get to see Hans' true face, those times being these moments and shots here:

The first shot is him lowering the phony Prince Charming mask and visibly expressing that he was genuinely charmed to meet Anna. No, he doesn't have any "love at first sight" feelings for her, nor is he at the point where he plans on getting close to her and asking for her hand in marriage - it's simply an amused fondness for this quirky, clumsy Arendelle girl he just conversed with.

This next shot is him looking towards the mountain and realizing Elsa is there. In animation, there's even the briefest hint of a grin as he turns and gives orders afterwards, 'cause he wants to seize and exploit this opportunity to play the big hero for Arendelle. Also worth mentioning is that while Hans has no one he loves, he does treat his horse Sitron well. It's pretty much his only friend.

The infamous split second shot where Hans' eyes dart up towards the chandelier before he jumps to action and turns the soldier's crossbow away from Elsa and to the candelier that drops on Elsa. This is Hans as a Xanatos Speed Chess player shown in practice.

That smarmy, mean-spirited grin that comes over his face as he says the infamous, ever memetic line that reveals his villainy.

The shot when he sees Elsa has broken out of her prison cell. Again, the good guy mask is lowered to show he's not pleased.

THIS SHOT. This is Hans fully unmasked and fully unrestrained.

The last we see of him before he's thrown out of the story.

So what's with all the Hans hate, from Disney fans and Disney itself? TV Tropes' page of Character Perception Evolution states this:

I'm not sure how entirely accurate this is since from what I recall, Hans and the twist of his villainy was getting shit on from very early on. I have to disagree that the twist was not properly foreshadowed or at least not in a way that was substantial enough (aside from those "lowering the mask" parts, all of Hans' lyrics in "Love Is An Open Door" put his intentions and the angle he was playing in plain sight, he immediately flip-flops his position when Anna charges him with looking over Arendelle in the sisters' absence, and right before the reveal he straight up lies by omission to Elsa's face by not telling her that he's currently the leading authority in Arendelle and thus has the power to grant her leniency rather than "persaude the other nobles" to do so), but the execution of the reveal with his sudden shift into a totally different character than the one we'd been watching for the previous two thirds of the film absolutely should've been handled better in execution; he needed to slow it down a bit in between saying that notorious line and snuffing out all the lit fires in the room while expositing in a villainous monologue sort of way. The idea that Elsa should've been the villain rather than Hans and Hans should've been the male love interest instead of Kristoph are simply opinions, and I'm not exactly in agreement with them, more on that in a bit.

I've said it plenty of times before and will repeat: to me, the most crippling weakness of Hans as the villain of this film is that the way he's been designed, the very nature of his sociopathic character who always wears masks, mirrors other characters, and comes up with new moves to advance his interests, rendered it very difficult for us to get a good grasp on who he truly is and feel like we'd really gotten to know him by the time the movie was over. And you could make the argument this isn't a flaw so much as it is a necessary evil in order to make Hans' role in the story work as best as it could...but I feel that argument falls flat when Disney/Pixar later gave us a similar twist villain who did what Hans did but better and even more effectively as a full-fledged character in a much shorter amount of screentime.

Erenesto De La Cruz, like Hans, is first cast in a positive light and set up as a good guy in the story, though we don't meet him in person until the third act of Coco. Like Hans, he's got an amiable personality and fast strikes up a friendly relationship with the main character. Like Hans, he is very evidently not without genuine decent qualities. Like Hans, the reveal of him as a murderous sociopath who is the true villain of the story is a very shocking moment. And like Hans, he's a big factor in the climax and gets dealt a satisfactory karmic comeuppance. But the thing that set Ernesto apart from Hans is that he doesn't wear any masks to conceal he's "secretly evil". He has a public image that conceals this, yes, but for all the time he's on screen and an active agent in the story, he is his authentic self. All of the nicer qualities we see from him aren't made up, they're real parts of who he is...and who he is just also happens to be a vainglorious sociopath devoid of a conscience who will do anything to anyone under any circumstance in order to "seize his moment" and build up a legacy that keeps him the center of attention even long after he's passed away. While he's still under the mistaken belief that Miguel is his great grandson, before he learns he's actually that to Hector, he has him put away and draws a parallel to how he poisoned Hector to death as he does so - he was never at any point in life pretending to be Hector's best friend, "Hector WAS my best friend", as he puts it. And it just ultimately matters less to him than himself and his own self-interested pursuits. That is a truly chilling villainous character who leaves a strong impression after the movie's over despite how little he was on screen. Hans was almost that, but fell short of the mark because we were left with no clear picture of who he was.

Luckily for Hans, he did get other chances to show more character:

In closing, I will still have to defend Hans' position as the story's only true villain. Yes, Disney going all out with Elsa and her powers driven out of control from her fears as the primary antagonist probably would've been the best option, but once they were set on making Elsa much less of a villain than envisioned, someone needed to play the part in order to make the climax happen and it absolutely could not be the Duke of Weselton, a character so comically unpleasant and openly against Elsa and in it for his own interests rather than Arendelle's that there is no way in Frozen Hell that Elsa would ever be convinced by him of anything like Anna being dead from Elsa's own freezing powers. That lie had to come from someone who could convincingly make Elsa believe it because they'd come off so sincere, someone she'd think could have no possible reason to lie to her. It had to be someone like Hans, someone with a heart so frozen cold that he could effortlessly mimic human emotion he didn't really feel. That is a crucial part of the story's climax that, even beyond the danger to Anna's heart, was foreshadowed from the very beginning.

[gritsandbrits]

Fixing that one small mistake in SAATFF

Having watched the show when it came out, I loved it! It had flaws but I enjoyed it. It was nice to see a modern show in the style of the 2000s action cartoons I grew up onm So imagine my shock when the season 2 finale pulled a Disney Twist on one of my favorite characters in the show.

See, back in season 1 Malcom Kane was a reformed gangbanger who got his life together and started working for Jonathan Rook (the series Big Bad) as an honest man. In s2 there was some mystery about a militant techno cult/gang called the Tech Men - everybody's so creative - and the heroes trying to figure out who the leader is. In the penultimate episodes They find out that the leader is... Malcom Kane!

Huh? What?

Given what we're told and shown about Kane this twist doesn't make sense. The Tech Men don't even have a connection to the bigger story. Why would Kane, whose motivation hinged on being good, suddenly decide to remove free will and go back to committing crime? The sudden reveal that he never changed at all undermined his arc as if implying that criminals will never truly repent, will always be evil, there's no room for morally grey backstories. You get the idea.

Basically it was stupid and unnecessary.

I legit HATED that twist! It was such a cop out. So, I decided to change it to something that actually made sense.

Instead, Kane actually a government agent working against Rook. It goes along with his past as a reformed criminal, this time it actually stuck and connects him to the overall mystery.

Like in canon, he knew Rook's true identity for quite some time. However, he needed to gather enough information to put the vile CEO away for good.

What you thought the government wouldn't notice the disappearance of one of their planes carrying their top scientists?

Anyways, Kane got a job working for Rook. It was surprisingly easy, as Rook was impressed by Kane's work ethic and take charge attitude. He was also compliant which meant little risk of being questioned. Kane did everything he could to keep Rook's favor, it was the only way he would be able to crack the case.

Over time, Kane managed to decipher his true involvement in the crash. Unfortunately Rook had a lot of connections that made it nearly impossible to properly charge him. One of those connections included the militant group The Tech Men, whose previous leader Kane helped put away years ago.

Kane visited the leader in prison and offered to reduce his parole if he gave him information about the group. Kane had to play his cards right. He joined the N Men posing as their leader, which in turn led him to more information about Rook's ultimate goal. Kane didn't want teenagers to get involved with the investigation. So he acted the part of the cold no-nonsense lackey to try to push them away.

Kane didn't expect their determination to stay. He didn't think a couple of children had the drive to fight for another day. Deep down he had to admit he was proud of those boys - and girls one he realized who Riya was.

Making Malcolm an agent ahows that he is willing to make morally dubious choices for the greater good. In a way it makes him more of a parallel to rook: both suffered losses and didn't have it all good growing up, but one decided to put good out into the world and the other wants to rule it. And it's better to show that people CAN change for the better than that black&white way of thinking.

[figkeele]

My blorbo is dead, i killed him 😭 (aka when your favorite turns out to be a boss)

The urge to write a fix it fic is mighty.

[perenlop]

its amazing how bad ash vs cameron was. literally who thought any of that was a good idea. the only value it has is being the source of that hydreigon secret weapon video

[isfjmel-phleg]

What do I have to do to get a film/TV adaptation of Bart Allen that:

Is actually a young teenager, around fourteen

Is the son of Don Allen and Meloni Thawne

Was raised in VR in the future for most of his life, which is why he's Like That

Currently lives in Manchester, Alabama with his mentor Max Mercury

Struggles to maintain a secret identity while masquerading as an ordinary middle-school student

Also struggles to adjust to a world that can't keep up with either his speed or his unusual way of thinking and processing

Has arcs that deal with not only learning to slow down and think before he acts but also addressing his feelings of alienation and abandonment and how he comes to develop meaningful relationships with family and friends he never had before

Is genuinely a fun and silly little guy but also the Fastest Attitude Alive and "used to feeling alone and apart" and goes through so much

Is actually recognizable as the character from the comics, not a relabeled version of another character or a rehash of the animated YJ's characterization

...why is this so hard for adaptations? There's so much you could do with this!

[dimiclaudeblaigan]

fe heroes stop giving us catria alts and give us characters we don't actually have multiple of challenge

oh well at least there are as many claudes as dimitris again so i can marry my last dimitri to him (also the only reason i accept the stupid amount of claude and dimitri alts is because i'm too busy shipping them to care abt anything. realitsically they should not get a pass and it does annoy ppl, i just am in shipville and it's not like we're getting janaff so i have very little else to distract me).

(also claude actually thematically fits so i have less complaints there. randoms get complaints tho)

[dungeons-and-dictions]

It’s Analysis Friday! My hottest take on Star Wars VII - IX? Kylo Ren was born to be our protagonist. Our broody boy got done dirty!

Kylo is the villain who hesitates and wants to do good. He definitely realized it way too late, but we see it even in tFA. I.E. He’s a believable character who ended up on the wrong side. We don’t have as many of these villains as protagonists as I would like.

Could you imagine not just an homage to the original Star Wars, but a nearly complete inversion by having a BIG somebody from the dark side come to the light, after doing so much bad? His past would chase him in both sins and old comrades. He might have to learn to let go of parts of the Force to protect his new Rebel friends. A switch by gradual amounts of double agent work would be incredible. He could have been be sci-fantasy Zuko, learning how to be good as he gains trust.

But alas, instead we lost a villain unlike any other in Star Wars film.

Also: kissing isn’t redemption, just like saving your son at the last minute after you’ve committed genocides isn’t redemption.

[greencheekconure27]

New Treks crossover idea: Elnor falls through some kind of space-time anomaly [insert technobabble] during his Starfleet cadet training and winds up joining the Discovery crew in the future.For reasons.

[the-loki-that-won]

Jason Aaron: Okay so I’m gonna put loki in my comic- Me, seething with rage and having to be held back by multiple people: you keep your fcking hands off my boy I swear to god-

[spkyscry-a]

There’s an underlying trend in who ends up getting hired to work at places Vera runs. It’s not necessarily if they’re capable, because if they’re not she can MAKE you capable. It all comes to her soft spot for ‘strays’. People outside of their element, confused, and probably more than a little scared. Outcasts, culture-shocked out-of-towners, etc. If you stumble past Vera, she probably has a job for you. 

Now, she won’t word it as sweetly as this, but it is why you’ll find such a wide array of monsters in her positions. She has a soft spot. 

[themattress]

The length had me worried, but turns out it's this person's only video and clearly a passion project so it's not a grifting "outrage merchant" type of video. And honestly, most of their points are spot on, like how Carmen's character arc was botched, how abysmal Zack and Ivy are in every way, the iffyness of Shadow-san that was never properly addressed, the waste of Player's potential by keeping him so ridiculously flat, the fact that separating Chase and Julia for so long did both characters no favor, Gray being one of the better characters despite being misused and ultimately rendered kind of pointless, and the second half of the series and its finale being a letdown that mostly failed in delivering on what the first half had set up.

Wait, it feels like I've heard this story before...

[ultraericthered]

King Magnifico: Reimagining A Good Baddie Into Disney Villain Excellence.

I did not plan on doing another post about King Magnifico but dammit, the man just compells me. Since I recently drafted a revision treatment for the story of Wish, dubbed The Fully Fulfilled Edition, and it got me thinking more about Magnifico and the iteration of the character that I envisioned for my version of Disney's sentimental centennial tale. I've covered the troubles with the finalized official Disney character enough times already; I feel like the handling of his character and execution of his role as the story's villain was like a basketball wobbling along the rim before falling through the basket rather than a straight slam dunk. He's easily the most well-realized, enticing, entertaining, and developed character of the whole picture, the only one who comes close to being three-dimensional. But even he could've been better. If all the kinks were to have been ironed out in him, what might that actually end up looking like in practice?

Note that for this undertaking, I did not want to super drastically alter Magnifico's character to the point where he'd become completely divorced from what we got in the film and just be Magnifico in name only. I make just enough expansions, alterations, and fixes necessary to turn what I find good enough into what I'd consider truly great.

For starters, his tragic origin story being told to us upfront right out the gate helps to clear the air early into the picture, when we've not yet met King Magnifico but are given the background information of the man who became King Magnifico, wed Queen Amaya, and built the kingdom of Rosas. In my take on the backstory, the young would be-King Magnifico's family lived in a harbor town, working slavishly on what's implied to be export and trade. It's said that one day the young man, wanting his family to be happier and have more time for him, made a wish upon a totem for his family's burdens to be lifted. Well, that ended up being a vague wish that in a way did come true, as the town was soon attacked by a band of greedy marauders. In the storybook images the town would be shown going up in green flames as young Magnifico takes a boat to survival. Unfortunately, the boat ended up getting wrecked landing on a desert island, and the story would tell us that the youth lost everything he had in the wreck...even though he'd clearly be holding onto something in the accompanying picture. It is then said that Magnifico understood well the value and the danger a wish can hold, which inspired him to learn the arts of sorcery and magic that can extract a heart's deepest and most precious wish as a tangible substance held within a magic orb. Eventually he and the loyal wife he'd married built a great kingdom on that very island Magnifico had landed on, the kingdom of Rosas, where the citizens wishes are given, protected, and granted in the benign rule of Magnifico and Amaya, the "long lived" king and queen.

With that backstory and the reasons for why Magnifico founded Rosas and created the wish giving system established, the first in-universe look at the king we're given is in statues, in murals, in his face painted in various locations, even in the cookies Dahlia bakes. The face looks very kind, dignified, wisened, majestic, and above all gorgeously handsome. His presence is also subtly felt in what we'd be shown of the average Rosas citizens - some who are overly happy and enthused in a very cult-like manner and some who are only half-awake and half-heartedly trying to stay into it. This is heavily implicit as being a result of the system and society in Rosas, where the happier people are the ones who've had their wishes granted or have such good standing with the royals that they feel they're likely to have their wishes granted in the near future, while the lethargic ones are those who've given their wishes away, cannot remember what they even were to start with, and have been tirelessly waiting for when the time comes for Magnifico to grant them in a wish ceremony.

So then when we’re properly introduced to King Magnifico after all the build-up, it'd be immediately striking how the appearance of the man himself doesn't quite measure up to what we'd seen depicted in the kingdom's arts and crafts. We were told he's beloved by all, yet the man we meet here would come off very...Stephen Strange-ish. He'd be very smarmy, disgrunted, and patronizing towards Asha, visibly or verbally condescending to her and treating her like a silly, hapless child who he doesn’t believe will attain the apprenticeship. However, he is coming off of another interview that ended poorly, so we think maybe he's just in a mood and we shouldn't immediately assume too badly of him. If we hold onto hope for his better nature to win out, it seems to pay off when he appears to empathize with Asha after she's told him of her deceased father and all the ways in which he'd inspired her to dream big and to love Rosas; it's almost like the king sees some of his younger self in Asha, and through that, he recognizes that she could be a good fit for the job of working for him as his apprentice, someone he can shape into being more like him and following his ways. He'd do the "I too suffered great loss at a young age due to the selfish wishes and actions of greedy thieves and built Rosas as a place where that would not happen" thing like in the movie, but not only do we understand that more due to having been given the whole backstory, it'd also be more noticeable just how...calculated it feels. Like, Magnifico might as well say "I'm so sorry to hear about your loss. Y'know, my late son, Beau..."., y'know those shows of pseudo-empathy that political leaders love to do.

Once Asha has the job and returns to the castle for her first day of apprenticeship, King Magnifico would show us that oh, this guy might actually be worse than we'd thought he was before. He's now in full Handsome Jack from Borderlands mode, acting more giddy and animated because he just loves his apprentice's first days where he can "dazzle them with all his splendor, and win over their love and devotion and appreciation for all his royal duties." And he just acts completely unkind and insensitive to Asha, making her do all sort of minor chores the way Lady Tremaine would do to Cinderella. He lets Asha into his sanctum of wishes, where he holds, throws, balances and caresses some of the various wishes in a way that seems unsettlingly possessive, much akin to how Mother Gothel stroked Rapunzel’s golden hair, and as he does he sings these words:

If happiness was a tangible thing, it would be you If you'd have told me the feeling you'd bring, I'd think it untrue And people search for a wonder like you all of their lives You still amaze me after all this time You pull me in like some kind of wind Mesmerized by the hold I'm in Leave you here, I don't wanna I wanna promise as one does I, I will protect you at all costs Keep you safe here in my arms I, I will protect you at all costs At all costs

Then the shoe drops. Magnifico reveals that he doesn't just collect these wishes to safeguard them and grant them in ceremonies: he uses the magical blessings cast upon the wishes as means of keeping his own magic powers charged every day, and it's also how he has sustained such slow aging and long living for himself and his wife. Yes, the royals feed off of the souls of their own subjects in order to keep their lifespan going, with the wishes extracted from the beautiful innermost part of those souls serving as convenient battery power for them. Unnerved as this makes poor Asha feel, the subject of a long life span naturally calls her almost 100 year old grandfather to mind, and she makes the dreaded "nepotism favor" request that the king consider granting Sabino’s wish at the ceremony. Magnifico, disappointed but not surprised, declines this request, rationalizing the wish could be too vague and might pose a threat to the kingdom. Asha then realizes Magnifico intends to never grant most of these wishes yet refuses to return the ungrantable wishes to their owners. She openly questions the king, telling him it's unreasonable of him to keep the most beautiful part of his subjects very selves from them if he truly has no inclination to grant them with his magic, and he should return those wishes to their owners so that they'll remember them and gain the drive to at least try to work towards fulfilling them themselves. Magnifico lashes out at her in fury ("I decide what everyone deserves!") and as consequence we get the ceremony where Magnifico pulls the spiteful fake-out with the wish granting just to shame and humiliate Asha, and let her know that her family's wishes will be kept by him forever, never to be granted. Also just barely noticable in the same scene would be that Magnifico reveals the wish of the person he grants it to and how it had been worded, but what he gives is notably a distorted alteration of the original wish. For all his high horsing about "be careful what you wish for, wishes worded too vaguely might go wrong when granted and that's too much of a danger risk", he himself exploits vaguely phrased wishes in order to twist them into something with benefits to the kingdom, his rule, and his image. For years, he's really only been using this system of wishes to make his own wishes come true, and has been routinely dishonest and hypocritical about it as he defrauds his people, committing theft by deception. What a self-obsessed bastard.

After Asha's made her wish to the stars and called Star down to Rosas, Magnifico and Amaya, having witnessed the wave of magic it brought, fear an unknown magic source that might threaten their kingdom and the hold they have on all the magic and wishes, but they find no answers in their books and scrolls to what this strange light might be. Magnifico starts acting furiously paranoid, remarking about how much he hates craven thieves and traitors. Due to how things went over with Asha, she is his primary suspect who he fears is now out to usurp his power and might not even be acting alone. As he starts to be overcome by desperation, Magnifico turns to his tome of forbidden dark magic and goes to unseal it. Fortunately for him, Amaya remains level-headed and is able to talk him out of it, to which he gives a very transparently half-hearted "thanks", followed by the "I am a handsome king" bit when Amaya tells him that, as they cannot baselessly accuse and arrest Asha for treason, they use the people’s love of him as their monarch to get them to reach the truth for them.

Of course, during the briefing with the public, people start asking how and why their wishes might now be in danger, which leads to questions about why Magnifico established the system the way that he did, which leads to deeper questioning such as why everything in Rosas is so tailored towards the king despite his role being to protect and provide for the people - like, why does the king need to have his handsome face plastered everywhere? When everyone feels the next wave of magic from Star’s evolution, it proves definitively what Magnifico told them: that this magic didn’t come from him, and that only creates a sense of disillusionment among the people. A furious Magnifico warns of a traitor within the kingdom conspiring to use this magic to steal all wishes and topple the monarchy, who must be found and punished, and then he shuts the doors back into his castle, frantically pacing about and looking to see if the magic came from somewhere within. Visibly aggitated, Amaya tries to soothe her petulant husband urging him to calm his mind and cheer himself up by gazing at his reflection in the mirrored walls. Which leads to....

"This Is The Thanks I Get" (Revised version)!

In between the second chorus and the bridge, Magnifico walks in front of the forbidden magic tome and vocalizes that in his years long reign, he has been far too soft on his people, spoiling them into becoming greedy, entitled ingrates who are all no better than thieves, so he needs to harden his heart and exercise more power “for their own good”, to tighten his grip over Rosas and preserve his power. So he unseals the book, opens it up, and gains power from its corruptive influence. And he made sure to do this when his wife wasn't around to stop him from doing so. This was his choice. He wanted this. In his desperation to not let his power over Rosas slip from him, he turned to what he knew as wrong primarily for the convenience of it enabling him to shed anything within himself that was restraining him before, and grant to him more destructive, awesome power to squash all dissent with. This is what takes him from "big jerk" to "true villain."

After being told by Simon that Asha was indeed responsible for Star's summoning and has been plotting against him, Magnifico goes to Asha's family's home and assaulted Sabino and Sakina with magic that’s holding them down when Asha and Star return. Declaring he must arrest the whole family for both high treason and harboring a criminal, Magnifico also takes time to relish some cruelty towards Asha, not only stepping on Sabino's already broken lute in front of her but bringing out Sakina’s wish and using his new dark power to shatter it in his grip, making Sakina reel in agony as the energy from her wish, a sacred part of her soul, gets absorbed into Magnifico’s black magic. Realizing how much power he can claims from wishes delights the vainglorious monarch, who says had he known this, he would've broken wishes ages ago! So now Magnifico has a singular goal: to absorb the magic of both Star and all of Rosas’ wishes in order to become an all-powerful tyrant, motivated purely by pride, spite, desire for retribution and control, and the power high he's on.

Forging his new dark magic scepter, Magnifico addresses the public once more, revealing the traitor to be Asha and Simon to be the one to sell her out under the promise of having his wish granted. But be careful what you wish for, Simon! Magnifico twists the wish once again ("to be one of Rosas' greatest knights"), this time using his new dark magic to bewitch and brainwash him into a magitech knight. He then puts out the reward of another wish granting ceremony for the wish of whichever of his subjects helps the knights capture Asha, with the added threat that the longer it takes for Asha to be captured, the more wishes he will break, which makes the masses errupt into carnage and division between the fearful but still adoring loyalists to the king, and those who see this is not right and want no part in it. To quell this disorder, Magnifico unleashes more magic, desecrating the area and putting lives at risk, prompting Amaya to suggest he reign himself in better. To her surprise, Magnifico points his staff at her, telling her to never again second-guess him or give him orders. So it's pretty clear by now that Magnifico is far gone, and this time the needless "looking for a way to save Magnifico from the thrall of the dark magic only to learn it can't be done" plot point is omitted, as this Amaya knows from the get-go that once you open the book and read from it once, your addiction to the power it grants is unbreakable.

At the climax of the story, King Magnifico ascends the castle’s tower, sucks the life out from every wish that has been released into the night sky through his sanctum's open ceiling, and absorbs it all, sending droves of people in the kingdom into agonizing pain, anguish and despair. With no wishes to charge himself with, he gleefully traps Star in his scepter to act as the new living magical battery for his power. He thanks Star and Asha for how they've challenged his rule, because if they hadn't, he'd not have learned how much more gratifying it was to take all that he wants rather than "pretend to care and lightly snack on the magic of those wishes only in desperate moments". Asha's attempts to stop him are easily overpowered, as he uses his dark magic to block out the sky so that the citizens never again may wish upon stars, then KO's his wife with a magic blast for her betrayal, then creates magical chains from out of the ground that bind all the citizens in place, and when the knights rush to stop their mad king, he not only chains them too, but unleashes waves of dark magic that set Rosas ablaze with green fire, madly declaring that he will oppress the disspirited masses forevermore: "No more hope, no more dreams, no escape, no chance to rise up, no one to tell any tales, and no one to challenge me ever again! And I would gladly much rather see my great kingdom burn and physically crumble to Rosas' soil than give up this awesome power I so majestically wield!"

What happens next...well, you all probably know that by now.

So that's Magnifico's progression as the villain in my revision of Wish, but there's one last tiny yet hugely significant touch I'd add to fully bring his character together. A little before the big climax, Amaya would make reference to the fact that sealing the forbidden black magic inside “that heirloom” was among the first fundamental cornerstones of Rosas, but Magnifico has now totally backtracked on that and betrayed his oath to his people and their wishes. Hearing the book called an "heirloom" and then looking back at the storybook images of Magnifico's origin story at the start of the film makes the two pieces click together. That tome of forbidden magic belonged to Magnifico's family, the marauders sought it out and opened it up, which is what actually set the town ablaze, Magnifico took it with him as he fled to the boat, and it was the only thing he had that survived the boat's wreckage onto the shores of what would become Rosas. Throughout the story, Magnifico would have lines expressing his disdain for "thieves", "traitors", "cowards", "ingrates", and "weaklings". ...But this did not really come from just his trauma with the thieves. It's because he felt as though he himself, as a youth, was all of those things. He was a thief who stole his family's book, he was a traitor for making that vague wish that brought the marauders there, he was a coward and an ingrate for fleeing and leaving his family to burn, and he was a weakling for lacking the power to stop any of that from occurring and get things under control. To us on the outside looking in, it's easy to see how irrational it is for Magnifico to blame himself like that and have such self-loathing for boyhood mistakes and things beyond his control that were not really his fault. But tragically, no one ever told him this, not even Amaya. So what drove Magnifico forward in life was a pathological need to change his self image, to become someone greater and more powerful than that thieving little coward, to assert himself as the height of perfection, someone who could be loved and who could love himself in turn. He needed to be a king, for back in the day, a king was considered the only flesh and blood mortal human on Earth close to or secondary in power to the divinity of God Himself, for they had "the divine right to rule", the mandate of Heaven. So not only could Magnifico be that, but his magical power, the extension of his life via the wishes, and the system for taking the secret hopes, dreams, and prayers of the commonfolk to protect and decide which among them to grant, could put him that much closer to being a god among men. That is the core of what King Magnifico wanted; to feel like he was God, so as to erase his own inner pain over the fallability of being human. He was for years perpetually feeding his own power and ego, and yet it was never going to be enough. And he became so enthralled in his own God-and-Savior Complex, in playing at being the highest power in all the land, that he became a greedy, immoral, disruptive and destabilizing individual who brings suffering to the lives and wishes of others, like he'd once been the victim of; he became the very threat to Rosas that he’d been so wary of. And so, he got rewarded as such a threat deserves.

Dammit, now I'm low-key pissed at Disney! Say the line, Peridot!

[gritsandbrits]

Shrek 3 slander again

The movie would've been better if it had been like a family vacation where shrek and fiona are sent to camelot as ambassadors, with their kids, meanwhile charming is trying to look for his own kingdom and ends up in camelot seeing it doesn't have a king.

There's a tournament to determine who the new king is and Artie wants to participate. However his team are a bunch of outcasts (yes even Lancelot whose vanity puts people off) so Shrek becomes their coach.

The subplot is royals from multiple kingdoms are visiting Camelot for the tournament. That's when Fiona reunites with The Princesses, her childhood friends who at the tower (which was actually a prep school which explains why Fiona knows how to fight). But to her dismay her friends aren't as active as they used too since they've been out of the game so long. Fiona finds her own apprentice in a strange squire who turns out to be Guinevere. She wants to be in the jousting games but can't because of her gender so Fiona encourages her to fight for her happiness.

Especially when tournament/sports movies were pretty big at the time Shrek 3 could've capitalized on that trend. I felt like an entire movie set in Camelot could've been interesting instead of the generic college we ended up with.

[troutfur]

Here comes the star of the show!

[inavagrant-a]

@knightshonour said:

flicks a pebble towards to test reaction time. for the hell of it.

Such a fruitless endeavor with an equally hollow reason attached to it. It's probably expected but Tetsuya doesn't just step out of the trajectory of the pebble but he's so bold as to catch it as well. He looks at it sitting on his palm with distaste. What a waste.

There's clear annoyance in his gaze, his attention turning towards the bulky man who flicked it at him. "Can't find anything better to do with your life?" That makes two of them, and not like he's interested. Tetsuya returns the favor and flicks the pebble back towards the man.